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Proyecto Visión 21

Why they automatically find me guilty for things I don’t do?

Francisco Miraval

I am sure I am not the only one who finds himself/herself blamed for thing (unimportant, insignificant things) before anybody takes the time to sort out what is actually happening and to see if I have anything to do with the problem. And this “tendency” is really testing my patience.

Recently, for example, somebody (a person with a high position in a certain organization) called me to tell me people were calling this person’s private phone to ask questions in Spanish, a language this person doesn’t speak.

Because I do some consulting work for that organization, the person assumed I was sharing a private phone number with the whole community, even knowing that number should not be shared and that there would be a language discrepancy. Almost immediately, I received other messages from the same organization questioning my professionalism (or lack of thereof.)

I replied saying I never requested any private phone number and I was never given any private number and, therefore, it wasn’t me who was sharing that number. Perhaps, I said, it was an involuntary mistake made by somebody else, perhaps when somebody was forwarding calls.

Several hours later, I received yet one more message saying that, as I suggested, there was a problem with the automatic system to forward calls and the private number was never shared with anybody. Obviously, it was easier to blame me than to find out the origin of the problem. And it was easier to blame me than to apologize. (The affected person did apologized, but nobody else did.)

Another example. I was recently asked to write a story about a certain social problem impacting negatively a large number of Latino children in a certain area of Colorado. I thought it could be a nice story to promote positive community action, so I accepted the suggestion and I called several persons to gather information about the issue.

Then, I received a message from somebody I never met before accusing me of promoting an “anti-social” and “discriminatory” attitude against the Latino children affected by the problem.

Using very direct words, this person (connected to the organization that suggested the story) accused me of not knowing the problem and of writing a story with the only purpose of perpetuating discrimination against a vulnerable sector of the population. And this person sent the same message to several local elected officials.

There was, however, a small problem: the story that offended this person was not written by me but by another reporter. Yet, because the story was in Spanish, this person thought I wrote it and, therefore, it was proper to accuse me and to do it in writing, cc’ing several others. After I clarified the situation, I got an “I thought that…” answer (no copies to anybody, of course.)
I wonder if my age, my weight, my name, my nationality, my language, my deodorant, or the color of my shirt lead people to automatically assume I am guilty even for things I don’t do.

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