Racists of Slalom

Stay away. This place is absolutely awful. They have zero talent. You will not learn anything from anyone because nobody will know anything. If you are able to figure stuff out, they will dump more work on your head without any raise or promotion. They will not have your back when clients are being unreasonable or abusive, they will just tell you "the customer is always right". Basically like pimps treat their prostitutes. 

Oh and its racist AF. OMG it is unbelievable that these people are still like this in the 21st century. They will make racial comments and jokes all the time about mugshots, arranged marriages, people drinking "lean", angry Italians, smelly food etc etc. The first time I met this one golden boy consultant he looked at me and said "Wattap mang". I'm not even Mexican and he was white so I didn’t even know how to respond lol. Amazing. 

List of racial shit at slalom. 

I told them during the interview I would need parental leave about two months after my start date. The interviewer immediately said "oh no worries we have amaaazing parental benefits!" I told my assigned people manager this again on my first day. When I put in the leave request in the system, I get an angry call from a higher up berating me for taking off so soon after starting and not telling them otherwise they wouldn’t have put me on this super critical project no one else could handle because the company cant seem to find or retain qualified talent for sh** (I wonder why). 

Her exact words were "did you apply at this company knowing how generous our parental leave benefits are?"

I was shocked into disbelief that a grown a** adult, let alone a senior decision maker at a company, seriously just asked me this. 

Yeah no, I went back in time and impregnated my wife juuuuuust in time to screw over your project and bilk your benefits.  Because you know, us willy minorities are always out to game the system and feed off welfare and sh**.

I told her "uhm…. I told y'all during the INTERVIEW I would need this time off…."

She looks at me blankly, sputters and stumbles, then goes on the offensive. "Maybe there was a break down of communication. You should have reached out to someone senior. Next time please alert me or xyz"

Are you f***ing serious rn? I tell the interviewer. I tell my people manager. I submit a thing in the system. How the f*** am I supposed to know that routine parental leave is such an earth shattering big deal for you that I need to alert the f***ing Pentagon? Wow lol. 

At that first project, a "manager" on the client side seemed to take an irrational and intense dislike to me. She would argue with me needlessly, try to find fault with everything I did, strenuously object to all my ideas, block my access to people and resources, and snarl at me loudly and aggressively in every single standup and retrospective. 

I said nothing to her. I did not respond to her. One day, I started working on a task I wasn’t assigned because it hadn't been done and it was sort of a dependency for my work to go on. Apparently there was a ticket with that task assigned to her (my bad I know I should have memorized the Agile board). 

She flipped out on me on slack and began all caps yelling at me, calling me unprofessional that I have trouble listening etc. I again said nothing. But I did call my own internal company managers and tell them that this type of treatment was unacceptable. Their response was basically "well they're the client and the customer is always right".

No, a**hole. The customer is NOT always right. You never heard of "no shoes no shirt no service"? Or " we reserve the right to deny service"? Even pimps will protect their prostitutes when they are attacked. 

This same angry manager once said "you need to shave that beard it’s a mess". This not three seconds after I just said how my beard is a religious choice. 

During a retrospective, we were asked to play a team building exercise where we tell two truths and a lie. A coworker, south asian, said something about how hes married. Then he explained he wasn’t actually married. One of our internal managers says "oh why you cant find someone your parents approve of" and then begins to put on a mock Indian accent (a bad one at that) and says "oh no son you must bring us a nice indian girl!". 

This is in the conference room of one of the biggest corporations in the world. And then these scumbags had the temerity to lecture me on "professionalism"

Mr. Sing Song Indian Accent was also one of the managers I talked to when Ms. Shave Your Beard started yelling at me in Slack. I was pretty upset at being yelled at, my fault I know since I was supposed to tolerate abuse from the client quietly. 

Mr. Sing Song Indian Accent goes "I think you should calm down Umar I don’t want you to go take it out on your wife now". Because you know, all Muslims abuse their wives. 

I think he was taken aback at a brown person daring to raise his voice in the presence of his betters. I don’t think they were used to that from the looks on their faces. And I guess I haven't lived here long enough to internalize the kind of house servant demeanor they expect from "the coloreds"

The anger I felt in that moment is indescribable. I wanted to scream "that’s why im yelling at you even tho youre my manager asshole, so I don’t go home and take it out on my family. Because I yell at the people who fuck me over, no matter how powerful they think they are."

It will go down as one of my biggest regrets that I kept quiet and said nothing. 

Maybe he was giving me advice? Maybe that’s how he manages his own stress when people are making his life miserable, he takes it out on his wife? Is that the culture here? Sorry fam, not my scene. 

Now let me introduce you to Mr. Campus Crusade. 

Mr. Campus Crusade, a graduate of the venerable University of Alabama, proudly flaunted his involvement with a movement called "Campus Crusade for Christ". 

Now let me take a sidebar and point out that if I tried to start an organization called "Campus Jihad for Muhammad", Id be getting my genitals electrocuted at Guantanamo faster than you can say "violation of due process".

Mr. Campus Crusade, blonde haired blue eyed scion of some illustrious landowning Alabama family gave off the strongest Proud Boy/White Supremacist vibes I have ever felt in my life. I'm not just saying that cos of the blonde hair and blue eyes, Ive met plenty of those and they’ve been lovely people. But this guy in short order proved that those vibes were well founded. 

The very first time I met him in person, his first words to me were "Wassup MANG!"

I was….more perplexed than I was angry. Cos…im…not Mexican? But even if I was….seriously bro did you just say that sh** to me? Is it that all brown people look the same to you and your too stupid to even do racism right? 

I suspect a more insidious goal. I have observed that these elites foster inter-minority racism. They encourage the tendency in some cultures and immigrant communities to internalize white racism, thinking this will gain them entry into the white privilege club(FYI, it wont). These disgusting scumbags appear to be tapping into this and exploiting it. 

So I can't rule out that him calling me "mang" was a way to tell me I was acting like a "bad" brown person and should act more like a "good" brown person, i.e. someone who allows themselves to be exploited and mistreated without complaint. 

One day, during an office wide team meeting, somebody was giving a presentation. The picture of an African colleague cam on the screen. Someone said "that picture looks like a mugshot". Mr. Campus Crusade bursts out laughing and exclaims jubilantly "OMG I was about to say that but I didn’t wanna get shanked". He then did a sideways sweeping glance of the room to see if anyone was pissed at the fact that he was just itching to spew a racial comment and was overjoyed when someone else did for him

Managers and directors would routinely punctuate their conversations with me with the phrase "my friend". Good god what is wrong with these people lol

Some kind of region wide town hall meeting was held at some underground speakeasy in Houston TX. ; 

During a meeting for some client work, we were discussing an upcoming workshop. I suggested we should have this one person on the client side, a DBA or something, address a certain issue. The project manager says, and I quote, "yeah but I don’t want him starting up like an angry Italian". I sh** you not. They don’t even spare other white people lol. Whats next we're gonna start calling Irish people "papist potato eaters"? What century are these arrogant pricks stuck in?

On that same project is where the other manager said "maybe the client wants trained monkeys quoting Shakespeare" not four hours after I posted a quote from Shakespeare on LinkedIn. I made a discrete, polite complaint to my superior to ask him to get the guy to knock it off. I got fired a week later. 

After they fired me for submitting a complaint about #discrimination, I heard they called in a #terrorist threat and closed the office and implied its because of my LinkedIn posts.

I defy anyone to point out how anything I've ever written could be construed as remotely threatening by any reasonable human being. I'm a f***ing lawyer for f***s sake lol

I can confidently defend any statement I have ever made on the internet, because I've had to be mindful since I was a kid you didnt have to do or say much as Muslim to get branded a terrorist. Yet, I insisted on speaking my mind and refused to allow myself to be intimidated into silence. That was the whole point of America, wasnt it?

Trust me, I know how #islamophobes will try to distort the truth to push their warped narratives in furtherance of their bigoted agendas. They arent just trying to paint you as a terrorist, but actually rooting for you to become one so they use it as proof to support their assertion that all Muslims are terrorists and justify bombing and invading our countries to steal our resources and treating