As a young black woman starting out as a producer for the prestigious Charlie Rose show, I had to gauge every day whether to respond to casual racism or sexually predatory behavior.
I spoke out about racialized or micro-aggressive racism and was punished for it. The predatory behavior was ignored or accepted or laughed off -- it was inherent to our daily culture.
There was no infrastructure for learning the job (I was a first-time producer) let alone a place or person to report such things. We were embedded in the massive Bloomberg offices, but there was no sense that our issues were relevant overall.
And so for media asking me to talk about Charlie and my experience w the show and my thoughts on these allegations -- I'm not coming w/o thoughts on structural racism too.
And if you then don't include that in your coverage, that's on you.
Charlie regularly made me feel like I should be grateful for the job, like it was a handout, and wd then castigate me for not excelling at it.
Charlie is from Henderson, NC where the KKK has a white page listing. He boasted friendships w black folks in the same way he boasted his "respect" for women.
Which obviously in and of itself does not make him a racist. But there wasn't a single day that went by during my experience working w him that I believed he thought black people were his equals. Watch all the way to the end.
