Things They Should Study: does external racism hinder people's career paths?

Some of my co-workers and I have recently been dealing with an external individual who is less helpful and cooperative than we would like. My own personal interactions with this individual have been notably less unpleasant than those of my colleagues.

This seemed very odd to me. Normally, in life in general, if anyone is going to get an unpleasant response, it's going to be me. I'm not particularly charming or persuasive or authoritative or otherwise able convince people to do what I want them to. All the other people involved here have both better people skills and more authority than I do. And yet somehow I elicited the least unpleasant reaction, the reaction that was nearest to being cooperative.

So I was thinking about why this could be, and one theory that crossed my mind is that the individual in question might be racist. Of all the people involved, I am the only one with a name that sounds English.

Understand, I have no way of knowing if it actually is racism. There are a number of plausible explanations, I have no other hints of racism, and it would be a stupid way for this individual to be racist anyway. But that is an idea that occurred to me, so I started logicking the idea to its natural conclusion.

Let's suppose, for the purpose of this blog post, that this individual is in fact racist and is responding better to me for that reason. A pattern would develop, and people would start to notice that I can consistently get the best response from this individual. And suppose some other racist externals turned up, and also responded better to me for purely racist reasons. This would lead people to believe that I'm good at handling difficult externals. Co-workers might pass difficult externals off to me because I get better results. Racist externals might prefer to and in fact seek out to deal with me. And then if a promotion comes up for a position that involves dealing with externals, I'd end up being the natural choice. Not because I'm objectively better than my co-workers, but because of factors beyond anyone's control.

I wonder to what extent problems like this hinder people's career paths. Even if your employer is completely fair and equitable, if some of your customers or vendors or suppliers are biased against you, you're going to have a harder time doing your job well.

Someone should study this.