Two employees and a question of race

Editor's Note: The names of Jim Williams and Albert Harris have been changed to conceal their identities.

On a Friday afternoon three years ago, Jim Williams, a veteran employee of a University office, tossed some personal items into a University vehicle, and headed out onto a campus road.

But he never reached his destination. As he pulled into a parking space, he heard sirens blaring and saw lights flashing behind him. Williams, who is black, pulled over to allow the car to pass. To his surprise, however, the car also stopped. The blaring sirens and flashing lights, it turned out, were for him.

Next, Williams recalled, one of his white supervisors — who is no longer an employee of the University — stormed over to the vehicle. "You know you're not supposed to use this vehicle for personal business," he remembers the supervisor shouting.

For Williams, the incident represented a painful double standard.

"They use their vehicles to go all sorts of places," he said of his supervisors. "They drive their kids places, they go to the doctor's office, wherever they need to go."

While Princeton employees are not technically allowed to use University vehicles for personal purposes, others corroborate Williams' allegation. "Some people use University vehicles for their personal use all the time," said another veteran employee of the same University office. "It's well known that some people can get away with it and others cannot."

One University official agreed. "It's one of those things where people just kind of look the other way," she said.

Williams believed that race was an inescapable factor in the way he had been treated.

"It seemed that the rules that many white workers have to follow are more lenient than those many black workers had to follow," Williams said of the office where he works.

Williams spent the weekend stewing about the incident. On Monday, he returned to work to find a letter of reprimand from his supervisor in his mailbox. Williams was outraged.

"I wrote a rebuttal," Williams said. "The letter told [my supervisor] that it was not right for him to allow white workers to use vehicles."

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He gave the letter to both his immediate supervisor — the person who had pulled him over the Friday before — and his supervisor's boss, Albert Harris.

Williams said when he presented the letter to Harris, who is also white, Harris tossed it on his desk.

Harris said in an interview that he does not remember specifics about the incident in which Williams was reprimanded for using his University vehicle for personal purposes. But he is sure of one thing: The decision to reprimand Williams had nothing to do with the color of his skin.

"If we receive a report saying that a vehicle is being misused, we follow it up," Harris said. "It doesn't matter who the person is."

Harris also said he has no recollection of being given Williams' letter of rebuttal.

"I doubt that I tossed it aside," Harris said. "I probably put it in his file, but to say I tossed it aside, I doubt that."

And Harris certainly does not believe that he — or anyone — in his office willfully discriminated against any group of workers, including minorities.

"It's altogether possible that some workers get away with using their vehicles for personal use," Harris said. "We just follow up all reports of vehicle misuse that we receive."

It is, of course, impossible to know whether Harris ignored Williams' rebuttal. What is clear, though, is that following their talk, Williams concluded that he was out of options.

So he did what he thought was the most logical thing — he swallowed his pride and kept working. And for a year, he believed his workplace problems were behind him.

They weren't.

Dealing with overt racism is far easier than dealing with cases where race plays a nebulous — and perhaps negligible — role.

Sally Kornegay, a union shop steward and dining services employee, can attest to that.

"A few years ago . . . I overheard a [white manager] talking to another," Kornegay said. "He said, 'When you get one of them angry, they all get angry. And I'm sick of working with arrogant niggers.' "

Kornegay reported the incident to Stu Orefice, director of the Department of Dining Services. A long investigation followed, and Kornegay's story was corroborated.

"Eventually, this manager was relieved of his duties," Orefice said.

But Williams' case was not nearly as cut-and-dried as Kornegay's had been. There were no racial slurs, no obvious signs of racism — just a residue of bad feeling, and a hunch by an employee.

And a year-and-a-half after the first incident, Williams was in trouble again.

This time, Williams was reprimanded for allowing workers he supervises to leave early — something he claims other white workers in his position do on a regular basis. In fact, Williams said, his white predecessor "did the same thing" with no consequences.

Williams allowed workers under his supervision to mark down hours they did not work with the expectation that they would make up these hours at another time. Again, though this practice technically violates Princeton's policies, a University official said supervisors often look the other way when it happens.

This second reprimand came from Harris, the supervisor who Williams said had previously disregarded his letter of rebuttal.

"I was left scratching my head," Williams said of the incident. "I wondered, 'Why did I get in trouble for this when my white colleague got away with it before me?' Something just ain't right."

Harris said Williams' version of the story was inaccurate, and explained that the reprimand had nothing to do with the practice of flexible scheduling.

"[Williams] was not reprimanded because his workers left early," Harris said. "He was reprimanded for things that I can't talk about because they are personal issues. They are confidential."

It is difficult — perhaps impossible — to know whether race is a factor in disputes such as the one between Williams and Harris. But for Williams, the incidents are reflective of a larger divide that he feels exists in his office.

"The minorities have the jobs involving cleaning and manual labor," Williams said. "The whites work in the office doing clerical work and administrative jobs."

It is true that minorities in the office are disproportionately employed in non-office jobs as opposed to office jobs. Indeed, Harris confirmed he has more minorities than whites working outside the office, whereas inside the office, most employees are white.

And these statistics are by no means unusual in the service professions at Princeton — or in the world at large.

On campus, low-skilled jobs in dining services, the housing department, the custodial staff and Public Safety are filled overwhelmingly by minority employees. And by and large, office employees such as managers and secretaries are white.

"We recognize that the minority and cultural mix of our management team does not match the make-up of our hourly staff," Orefice said. "While only about 15 percent of our managers are minorities, about 63 percent of our hourly workers are minorities. This is something we'd like to change."

But it is more than just a difference in employment patterns between white and minority workers that concerns Williams and some of his coworkers. What worries them is their sense that there are different guidelines governing employees in the office — who tend to be white — and non-office employees who tend to be black.

"There are two sets of rules," Williams said. "When they [office workers] do one thing, it might be OK, but when we [non-office workers] do the same thing, it may not be OK."

These differences, according to Williams, are manifested in several ways. For example, Williams believes minorities are more likely to be punished than whites.

"I have a list of nine people who have been reprimanded in the last few years and all of them are black," Williams said. "The sad thing is that I'm sure there are white workers who do the same exact things and nothing happens to them."

Williams also said he believes minorities outside the office are subject to rules that do not apply to the primarily white workers within the office.

For example, each summer, the office hires temporary help to handle the extra workload during the summer months. Certain employees — including Williams — decide who will be hired.

That is, of course, with some restrictions.

"What we say is that you can't have someone working directly for a relative," Harris said.

According to Williams and his co-worker, this rule was enforced more strictly outside the office than within it.

"We were told that we couldn't hire our family members," the co-worker said.

Williams added, "But then we'd walk into the office and see nieces and nephews sitting all over the place. It was like a family reunion in there."

But another administrator who works in the same office disagreed. "We have office employees who hire family members, but they can't directly supervise their family members," he said. "We had employees hire their children or nieces or nephews to work in the office, but the parent, or aunt or uncle, whatever, wouldn't directly supervise."

Williams and his co-worker also said they believe whites are groomed for career advancement in ways that minority employees are not.

"I feel that minorities do not have the same opportunities to be promoted that white workers do," Williams' co-worker said. "We have workers in positions in the office who are only where they are because of favoritism . . . They are favored because they are white."

Here again, administrators see it differently.

"Nobody's treated any differently," Harris responded. "Everybody gets the same training and the same opportunities to be promoted. When we hired a [new supervisor] last year, we interviewed three current employees, two of whom are black. We ended up finding a white person from outside of the University to fill the position, but that doesn't mean there was any discrimination."

Given Williams' preexisting feelings, it is hardly surprising that when he was reprimanded by his white supervisors, he believed racism was at work.

And it can therefore be difficult to differentiate between workplace tension that has nothing to do with race and tension that is truly race-related.

Williams believes that race is at the heart of his conflict with Harris. Harris does not.

"I think [Williams] was called up on things he did against University policy," Harris said. "I don't think [any tension that may have existed between us] had anything to do with race."

The answer lies in the eyes of both beholders. And Harris and Williams do not see eye-to-eye.

The tension between the two did not dissipate after Williams confronted Harris with his feelings — and that tension persists to this day.

Still, they are managing to work together on civil terms.

"I decided to forget everything and let bygones be bygones," Williams said. "That was it. We reached a point where it was stressing me out. And [Harris] and I agreed to forget about everything. But I never thought about quitting."

Harris also said he has put the past behind him.

"[We] didn't make a decision to be [civil to each other]," Harris said. "It's something you just do. I always try to treat people in a civil manner. [Williams and I] have had no further problems."

"I agree with [Williams and his co-worker] that everyone should be treated the same way," Harris added. "There are mechanisms in Human Resources if that's not happening. And if they believe these things are going on, they should take advantage of them."

Though Williams' relations with Harris remain civil, he continues to believe that there is a larger problem among Princeton's employees.

His co-worker, a veteran University employee, agreed. "This University has a glorious way of putting things on paper," he said, his voice rising. "When President Shapiro speaks, I can feel in my heart that this is a person who cares about human beings. There is no time that I've heard him speak when I haven't come away with that feeling. But the people who are supposed to carry out his words are not putting his words into practice."

A University official said it is often difficult to discern exactly what role race plays in specific workplace conflicts. And the case of Williams and Harris has been no exception.

"There's a very fine line between something that's racial and something that's personal," she said. "It can be very hard to tell sometimes, especially when race may be a factor only subtly. A lot of times, it has to do with perceptions."