![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Annie's Mailbox: Tattoos in the Worlplace
Dear Annie: The principal of the school where I teach has some big tattoos on her neck. She says they are Chinese symbols for "good fortune." I think they look trashy. I don't mind tattoos, but I don't think large markings on one's hands and neck are appropriate for school. They don't convey authority, and I have a hard time taking orders from her.
The last time she entered my classroom, she pointed to a poster listing class rules and said she didn't like that it had torn edges. I gently said, "I'm sorry, but I've been preoccupied with my students' reading skills, math and grammar, so the torn edges will have to wait a bit." She left the classroom looking uncomfortable.
The school security guards also have tattoos and not simply the names of their girlfriends or boyfriends. They picture playing cards, dice and other motifs that I consider more appropriate for a biker bar. During the last parent-teacher conference, one parent exclaimed, "Did you recruit the security guards from the county jail?"
Why is it acceptable for teachers, court officers and other professionals to tattoo their hands and necks when it makes them look like street thugs? How do they expect kids to listen to them when they look like that? I warn my older pupils that visible tattoos may bar them from certain jobs. Most of them take my advice. The ones who don't are harder to place for summer internships. -- N.Y.
Dear N.Y.: The proliferation of tattoos on the faces, hands and necks of professional sports players and TV reality stars makes this type of artwork seem more mainstream and acceptable. But just as there are dress codes for businesses, there are also dress codes for schools. If the students are not permitted to show such visible tattoos, neither should the administration and security personnel, who presumably set the example. If you believe this undermines the principal's authority, you can register a complaint with the school board.
The last time she entered my classroom, she pointed to a poster listing class rules and said she didn't like that it had torn edges. I gently said, "I'm sorry, but I've been preoccupied with my students' reading skills, math and grammar, so the torn edges will have to wait a bit." She left the classroom looking uncomfortable.
The school security guards also have tattoos and not simply the names of their girlfriends or boyfriends. They picture playing cards, dice and other motifs that I consider more appropriate for a biker bar. During the last parent-teacher conference, one parent exclaimed, "Did you recruit the security guards from the county jail?"
Why is it acceptable for teachers, court officers and other professionals to tattoo their hands and necks when it makes them look like street thugs? How do they expect kids to listen to them when they look like that? I warn my older pupils that visible tattoos may bar them from certain jobs. Most of them take my advice. The ones who don't are harder to place for summer internships. -- N.Y.
Dear N.Y.: The proliferation of tattoos on the faces, hands and necks of professional sports players and TV reality stars makes this type of artwork seem more mainstream and acceptable. But just as there are dress codes for businesses, there are also dress codes for schools. If the students are not permitted to show such visible tattoos, neither should the administration and security personnel, who presumably set the example. If you believe this undermines the principal's authority, you can register a complaint with the school board.
no subject
The Less Serious Response: I am just imagining someone looking at me in one of my Donna Reed dresses, orthopedic Mary Janes, and a turtle tattoo on my wrist, and thinking, "Dear God,a street thug." Whatever one of those is supposed to look like anyway.
no subject
*giggles*
no subject
I'd wager there are a fair few things school employees are allowed to do that students are not. When I was in high school, the principal once made an announcement in assembly about how no, really, we were not allowed to have food and drinks in the hallways. "Some of you may point out that you routinely see your teachers walking in the hallways with cups of coffee," he said, "and point out that this seems to violate the rule against your walking in the hallways with cans of soda. And you're absolutely right. This is what is known as a double standard. Get used to it."
I don't care for the hyperjudgmental tone in this employee's letter. Are these colleagues with tattoos doing their jobs (as she is doing hers rather than focusing on the torn edges of the poster)? Then maybe she could shut the FUCK up and keep her eyes on her own paper? Just a thought.
no subject
I find women who refuse to admit that they are going grey and then overdye with color and no nuance are a little trashy too. But I try not to let that override every other things about those women. Also tattoos or not, she's the LW's boss and at least part of the blame for not being able to be courteous is square on LW's shoulders. Does she judge the kid with threadbare jeans too? I'd be worried that this sort of judgemental attitude leaks out into her teaching as well.
no subject
I don't know that I have anything to add to that.
No, I know. This is reminding me of all of the white parents at my daughter's elementary school who kept lodging complaints about the black principal and refusing to tell other parents (of any race) what was in them. They actually told the rest of us at one meeting that, if we wanted to know the details, we could go the FOIA route and ask the school board for copies because the complaints were public record.
They wouldn't talk about it privately, either.
I was happy just to assume that they were being racist assholes.
no subject
no subject
The school's location meant that there was a large disparity in terms of the poorest families and the wealthiest, and the principal put a lot of energy into support for the families with more limited resources and for students who were lagging behind, something that makes sense to me even if my family wasn't one of those. (The school district as a whole does some of this because the state penalizes school systems that have too large a gap between the test scores of the highest achieving students and the test scores of the lowest achieving students.)
I had a lot more sympathy for the mother who didn't like the principal and who told me why-- The principal's response to a report of this mother's daughter being bullied was 'well, there's no proof.' That's an entirely reasonable cause for being pissed off.
Saying you have grounds but won't tell me because you don't want to? No. That makes me damned certain that it's something really ugly about you.
no subject
You totally know that those parents were going home and saying "we can't tell the other parents because those jerks will call us racist! But we're not! It's just that she's too urban to teach our kids, and not very articulate!" or some such BS.
no subject
I'm sure that the principal made mistakes at times and also reasoned decisions that hurt someone because all of the options would. Those are things people do because we're people. I kind of doubt I'm ever going to meet someone who hasn't and/or won't. I just don't think those parents would have been judging her the same way if she had been white, and that's what they taught their kids, by example even if not by explicit word.
no subject
no subject
I find that most people I know have a really strong investment in denying that small evils committed by normal people are real things. History shows that they are, and people are still people decades, centuries, millennia on, but it's much easier to accept comfort and advantages/privilege if, somehow and abruptly, those old time ways of doing things aren't what underlies now.
Admitting the possibility of small evils also opens the door for terrifying things like wondering which of your friends are really safe with your children. It's very unsettling to have to look at people and understand that you can trust them for X and Y but absolutely not for Z.
And the idea that small evils pile up to be vast horrors... Well, it goes so far beyond terrifying that vast swathes of history have to be not-real to people in much the same way that horror movies are not-real or even more-- in the way that death is not-real in a TV show like Murder She Wrote, cumulative without being fenced off as having started then and ended so long after. Having the definite start and end makes it more like a hurricane or an earthquake than like something that real people-- like me-- did.
I think that I saw this partly because I liked the principal and partly because I'm disabled. My disabilities are largely invisible; I can pass. But it means that I know what passing is from the inside.
I'm lucky to be cis, het, white, and married to someone supportive. I try to be open about my disabilities because I'm in a position for it to be relatively safe for me to be. I wouldn't insist on anyone else revealing invisible disabilities publicly, though, because not everybody is safe doing that.
no subject
Whether or not ink looks unprofessional or trashy depends entirely on your profession, your region, and your class. I don't know if I know any librarians under, say, 55, who don't have at least one tattoo. And for school security guards, there is absolutely nothing unprofessional about tattoos, as long as none of them has "1488" tattooed across their knuckles.
That being said, my general attitude is that pedagogy means that educators and school staff should look professional at a level they would expect from their students. We don't know anything about the dress code of the LW's school, nor do we know anything about the race or class of the LW's students. But while the LW is clearly full of it, that doesn't mean there's anything inherently wrong with expecting educators to meet a standard of professionalism and dress that they expect from students. This LW's wrongness, and Annie's similar judginginess about tattoos, doesn't mean that she is wrong about requirements for professionalism among educators.
(I admit I also flinched at the LW's description of the principal's "Chinese symbols for good fortune".)
no subject
But then, I was born in 1967. I had teachers, growing up, who'd been in one branch or another of the US military and only been able to afford to become teachers because of the GI Bill. My first reaction on tattoos, because of my age and background, is to think military rather than thug.
If that makes sense?
The LW isn't wrong that potential employers will judge based on what they see, though, and getting a tattoo or not is usually one's own decision. (I have a couple of pinprick ones because, when they do radiation treatments for breast cancer, they want everything lined up exactly the same every time and need referents that can't be accidentally washed off.)
no subject
no subject
I suppose this might be a bit too much, even though he's clearly in charge:
This guy clearly doesn't know anything about running a business:
And this man is awful at time management, I can just tell:
But perhaps they get a pass because of their skin color.
Or maybe because of their sex organs.
I mean, she's clearly only into botany for the, ahem, herbal growing:
I could go on, but I think I've made my point.
You're welcome.
no subject
no subject
Also wow, that was an insubordinate response to the principal's comment about the poster. One should really not tell one's boss "I don't care about this thing you care about" to their face, or at least, do so about a much more important issue. (I don't even like calling people's actions 'insubordinate' because it's such an abused term, but this definitely fits.)
ETA AND ANOTHER THINg ... potential employers judge on all sorts of stuff. I have had people tell me I should straighten my hair, change my name, and of course, lose weight, citing potential employers. At a certain point one must be oneself rather than trying to please unknown people according to one's theories of what they may want.
no subject
THAT SAID. If they're doing their job professionally, dressing appropriate to their role and position, and doing the work, then the tattoos should be treated like, IDK, a skin condition that can't be hidden/concealed. (eg. The one where a person has different coloured skins, or a very obvious birthmark.) Will it affect perception? Yes. Will it make things more difficult for the tattooed individual? Absolutely. But there's no need for the LW to add to that with their prejudice and bigotry - and that's most of what I'm getting from this letter, as well as Annie's response.
(Frankly, the thuggish potential of groups of young white men in business suits worry me more, because they can and do get away with assault and battery.)
no subject