Taking pole position in this week’s, woke weird, or what, race, a telecommunications company in the United Kingdom has been forced to pay a Latino employee £14,000, after the company’s diversity officer told her she was oppressed.
Jane Bradbury, an engineer, and former inclusion advocate is to be compensated by Sky In-Home Service, in response to her white colleague, Rosemary Cook, stereotyping Bradbury as a victim of systemic racism.
Adopted, and raised by white British parents, Bradbury was consulted by Cook in mid-2020 to discuss a presentation on inclusion and diversity.
The 45-to-60-minute exchange took place around the time Black Lives Matter Inc was capitalising on the tragic George Floyd incident.
The tribunal recorded how Bradbury had disagreed with some of Cook’s slides promoting “a message against prejudice against people of ethnic minorities or in fact anybody from a diverse group.”
Bradbury’s disagreement appears to have resulted in Cook making the assumptions in order to get her on side.
A PDF copy of the Tribunal’s decision quotes Bradbury testifying in an email that she was told, “I should understand [systemic racism] as I had suffered oppression.”
To which Bradbury ‘forcefully’ responded: “I have never felt oppressed in my life and I think it is wrong for this person to assume because of the colour of my skin I have, without even knowing anything of my background ethnicity or upbringing.”
HR magazine recounted that although Cook’s intentions were acknowledged by the tribunal as “innocent,” Cook, had openly discriminated against Bradbury.
The tribunal concluded: “We did not consider that Ms Cook deliberately used offensive language, nor did she deliberately seek to cause harm.”
However, they said: “Ms Cook appears to have assumed that as the claimant’s skin colour is not white that she must have suffered oppression, which is a form of stereotyping.” (Page 63).
In other words, Cook inadvertently applied the “white privilege” lens, and its correlating intersectionality rubric of oppressor vs. oppressed, wrongly assuming details about Bradbury’s life, solely on the basis of her skin colour, and Latino ethnicity.
Leaning on comments from U.K workplace lawyer, Adam Lambert, HR said, ‘the case highlighted that motive isn’t a factor when it comes to discrimination cases.’
Lambert explained to HR that motive is irrelevant.
“The colleague may have had the best of intentions, but her comment nonetheless was hurtful to the claimant and the employer paid the price […] This case highlights the dangers of stereotyping without any background knowledge or information,” he said.
Following the incident, Bradbury took up to seven days leave saying she felt “self-conscious about her skin colour, and was distressed at what she saw as racist terms being used in relation to her, sexism, and victimisation.”
Bradbury’s sexism and unfair dismissal claims attached to the grievance were dismissed.
The 50-year-old was fired in late 2020 after managers were alerted to her allegedly breaching the company’s COVID Safe protocols.
Sky In-Home Service booted the 10-year veteran employee after an investigation concluded: (1) she had lied about not knowing she had to self-isolate after returning from a trip to Spain; and (2) By doing so, Bradbury had ‘put the health and safety of customers at risk over a six-day period.’
Commenting on the wacky wokeness of the case, author, and The Spectator writer extraordinaire, Douglas Murray quipped, ‘the snake continues to eat its tail.’
Murray’s point is poke at woke oppression. In what can be tracked back to Barrack Obama’s second term, there has been a behavioural conditioning of Westerners to see themselves as “white oppressors.”
The cost of Cook seeing oppression where oppression doesn’t exist, is a warning to those following Leftists down the woke road of melanin over merit.
