‘When I first started my job, my manager told me in one of our first meetings that her family owned plantations in Kenya. For context, she is white South African and I am black British. I questioned why she felt the need to tell me this and felt very uncomfortable. Particularly as, after she told me this, she stared at me, awaiting a reaction. I just responded by saying “OK” and moved the conversation on. Subsequently I had numerous problems in my relationship with this manager, she would switch between appearing overly anxious/frightened in my presence to being very abrupt with me. She would frequently say things to me that were very clear dog whistles such as saying I was aggressive and needed to watch my tone and then would later deny having said these things when I reported them. I requested another manager but was denied and it got to the point where I refused to meet with her unless it was recorded.

Eventually I left the job, and I raised a formal complaint regarding her behaviour, namely gaslighting – the fact she would constantly say things to me and advise me to do things and then completely deny ever doing it which contributed to great difficulty in me doing my job. There were also several other issues in the department. When I went to the hearing for my complaint, the chairperson – a white male – confessed he had not read my complaint in full and so I had to explain again in detail the nature of my complaint and the racialised nature of it. I waited weeks for the outcome. The outcome of the complaint was that there was no evidence to support my claims even though I provided video footage as evidence. The thing that struck me the most was that he commented in a lot of detail about how polite my manager had been in communicating and how she appeared very good at listening and responding to me. This was not the complaint I had raised – it was about gaslighting and there was no evidence that he had paid any attention to what she had actually been saying in the videos and only the fact that she seemed nice as she was saying it.’