Hi, I am a 24 year old recent grad in Texas. I started my first corporate job in June at a nonprofit catholic healthcare organization. I was born in Pakistan but have lived in the US my entire life and am Muslim. I am not the only Muslim at the organization, I have seen hijabis around the office. I am not a hijabi nor do I talk about being Muslim at work, except to the 2 guys in my role because we were talking about food restrictions once and they asked why I don’t eat pork. My boss does not know I’m Muslim and she is only in the office once every 2 weeks. One of my coworkers is a 30 year old East Asian who was laid off from the company for 8 months during covid and brought back. He has a masters degree and has expressed multiple times that he is jealous of my role and tries to provoke me, but I ignore him, keep to myself and just keep a friendly smile on my face. My other two coworkers do very basic repetitive work and I was assigned to a project with our bosses boss that taught me many skills and gave me visibility that could really help with growth within the company.
I am extremely professional at work- I do not talk about anything that’s not work related or even joke around with my coworkers or boss. I did extremely well on my first project, to the point where I got an email from my bosses bosses boss, a c level, and that gave me leverage to work from home 2 days a week and my boss agreed to ask if I could get certifications paid for. My other coworkers asked to work from home as well and were denied, most likely because they are not high performers. This triggered my Asian coworker- we went out to lunch with our boss and were discussing embarrassing childhood memories. I said maybe 2 sentences during the entire lunch, all work related. He said loudly at the restaurant with his company badge on, “when I was in fifth grade, I said something really sacrilegious in front of the class post 9/11. I said, ‘what if we blew up the place where Muslim people do hajj’”. Everyone kind of laughed and dismissed his comment, our boss said “you were a kid it’s ok”. I was annoyed but didn’t say anything in the moment. Later, my coworker came up to me and asked “I wanted to know if you have a work from home set up”. I was at my wits end and said loudly, “why are you worried about my work from home setup?” He said, “I just want to make sure you have a work from home set up to work efficiently”. He knew that my husband works from home and that my last job was from home. My husband is also very well off and drives a nice car and we are going on vacation overseas next month, all of which this coworker knows. I said, “you’re not my boss, our boss already asked me about my wfh set up so I’m not sure why you’re worried about it”. Our boss overheard and took us into her office one by one. When it was my turn, she told me that what I said was a “rude outburst” and that my coworker was just concerned I wouldn’t have the necessary equipment and wanted to help me in case I needed anything. I finally told her everything from the beginning -all of the conversations where he tried to provoke me and the fact that I was Muslim and she was dismissive of his comment at lunch and gaslit me into believing it was not a big deal. I told her that she was white so she would not understand why it is a big deal, but she just continued being dismissive of it and took my comment to seem that I was accusing her of being racist and became very defensive.
The day before all of this happened, she had asked me to send her a message in teams chat with the certification information, then later asked me to send it in an email in case she forgot. I sent her the link, and she emailed back that day, “can you please tell me the total cost and give me a brief description of how you plan to use this in your role? I will use this information to request from her bosses name”. I replied, “the total cost is $$$. This certification would help me to master more complex topics that may come up in the role later, such as modeling data directly in powerBI, understanding complex DAX calculations so I can give more meaningful insights about ***, and be able to give more statistical analysis than the basic calculations I have been doing and later train others on these topics.” I should add that no one on my team is focused on any sort of technology or knows much about it. They are all more focused on pharmaceuticals and my boss, her boss, and her bosses boss are all pharmacists, and our department is basically pharmacy analytics and it is new, and I am essentially building it from scratch. She did not ask me for any additional information after this and acknowledged that she had received the email and was going to ask her boss, with whom I have worked directly on a project. After our lunch and the conversation about racism, she replied to the email at 9 pm and her tone changed. She said, “please submit this request to me in a word document as a proposal with a clear justification or business purpose. I will use this to seek approval”. At this point I recognized that she was retaliating and I responded, “It’s ok, I will pay for it myself. Thanks”. I was ready to let it go and move on, but she called me the next day on my cell phone (which she often does with me and my coworkers) and said that she had spoken to someone in HR about how I had felt “discriminated against” (I never used those words) and that someone would reach out to me. I need to know how to move forward with this and what kind of conversation I should be expecting from HR, as well as whether or not the certification conversation is considered retaliation and how I should move forward from here.
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