Janet was always frail and nervous and confused about what to do. She had been transferred to my department on the first floor of the regional library due to conflicts with staff in her former department. I asked her to create a display for Hispanic Heritage Month. She proceeded to scour the catalog and write down call numbers excitedly and ran back and forth to the shelves arranging the books and videos in the display area.
One of my employees, Roberto, a Cuban born Anti-Castro activist who came to Miami as part of the Peter Pan Operations, came out of the office, and took inventory of the display. He saw it before I did. He began grabbing the books and screaming “this does not represent my people!” very loudly.
She had gathered materials about Nicaraguan contras, Colombian rebels, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and the Mexican cartel. She did not include books about Frida Kahl, Pablo Picasso or Pablo Neruda, Jose Marti or South American travel and description or the flamingo dance or the merengue or Celia Cruz or any other successful, beautiful contributions from Latin culture. The covers of the books she chose had images of dark-skinned rebels engaging in warfare or dealing drugs or staring into the camera with a mask on and an ak47 strapped to their back with a red background. Always a red background.
As I realized what had happened, I asked Janet to change the display. “How?” she responded, completely perplexed. “I wasn’t finished!” she exclaimed.
I told her to “make it positive.”
“Like what?” she asked.
I said “art, literature, poetry, landscape, travel, inventors.”
Roberto had already gone above my head to the branch manager to complain. My supervisor marched over and said, “Fix it!”
“It was a misunderstanding,” I said. Janet began “fixing it.”
“I’m fixing it, I’m fixing it!” she repeated nervously.
I started naming artists and poets, since she appreciated the arts and humanities. Janet apologized to Roberto, and he said, “Let me help you.”
“I’m sorry!” she repeated, “but that’s what I see on the news!”
I didn’t know what news she watched but I reluctantly accepted her explanation. Roberto helped her pick out different books about famous poets, artists, and writers from South and Central America and Spain with vibrant covers along with travel books that displayed the seaside of Chile and the mountains of Peru and the architecture of Buenos Aires.
Later I explained an anecdote to Roberto that I had heard at a diversity training. The County trainer told a story about when a supervisor kept saying things that were a little inappropriate about race, gender or ethnicity and they set up a code so when the supervisor made a mistake, his coworker/ friend would pull him aside and say, “excuse me, you have something in your teeth.” And that would signal he had said something politically incorrect rather than embarrassing him in front of others. Roberto listened and said “You have something in your teeth? I can do that. I’ll take care of it.”
This approach caught on in our department at work and Roberto tried it on everyone, every chance he got. After all it was the early twenty-first century and political correctness was at its height. I would hear Roberto’s direct supervisor joke with him on the way out at night saying “just brush your teeth really well before you come in and I will too, and we should be ok.”
Or sometimes Roberto would say “did you brush your teeth before you came to the desk?”
We were all trying to be as culturally sensitive as possible while still having a little humor and kindness.
