REAL MEN DONT QUIT THEY GET FIRED DRIVER

Read: Brands have nothing real to say about racism “It was the first time in my life where I wasn’t living check to check.” “I was very proud of my position,” Cafferty told me. But his new job was set to change all that. For most of his life, he had trouble making ends meet. “If I was a white supremacist,” he told me, “I would literally have to hate 75 percent of myself.”Īfter finishing high school, Cafferty bounced from one physically demanding and poorly paid job to another. On his father’s side, he has both Irish and Mexican ancestors. By the following Monday, he was out of a job.Ĭ afferty is a big, calm, muscular man in his 40s who was born and raised in a diverse working-class community on the south side of San Diego. By the end of the day, his colleagues had come by his house to pick up the company truck. (Likely unbeknownst to most Americans, the alt-right has appropriated a version of the “okay” symbol for their own purposes because it looks like the initials for “white power” this is the symbol the man accused Cafferty of making when his hand was dangling out of his truck.) Dozens of people were now calling the company to demand Cafferty’s dismissal.īy the end of the call, Cafferty had been suspended without pay. Two hours later, Cafferty got a call from his supervisor, who told him that somebody had seen Cafferty making a white-supremacist hand gesture, and had posted photographic evidence on Twitter. The man appeared to take a video, or perhaps a photo.

REAL MEN DONT QUIT THEY GET FIRED DRIVER

Unsure what to do, Cafferty copied the gesture the other driver kept making. When the light turned green, Cafferty drove off, hoping to put an end to the disconcerting encounter.īut when Cafferty reached another red light, the man, now holding a cellphone camera, was there again. He flashed what looked to Cafferty like an “okay” hand gesture and started cussing him out. Then, Cafferty told me a few days ago, the other driver began to act even more strangely. When he came to a halt at a traffic light, another driver flipped him off.

At the end of a long shift mapping underground utility lines, he was on his way home, his left hand casually hanging out the window of the white pickup truck issued to him by the San Diego Gas & Electric company. What happened to Emmanuel Cafferty is an especially egregious example. This emphasis on appearing rather than being virtuous has already resulted in the mistreatment of innocent people-not all of them public figures or well-connected individuals with wealth to cushion their fall.

A s companies and organizations of all sorts have scrambled to institute a zero-tolerance policy on racism over the past few weeks, some of them have turned out to be more interested in signaling their good intentions than punishing actual culprits.

Real men dont quit they get fired