*A former diversity recruiter at Google, who said she was fired by the tech giant in September, claimed Monday that her manager told her that her heavy Baltimore accent, was a “disability.”
April Christina Curley, a Black woman, claimed on Twitter she was “repeatedly denied promotions, had my compensation cut, placed on performance improvement plans, denied leadership opportunities, yelled at, [and] intentionally excluded from meetings.”
She also wrote: “My skip-level manager, a white woman, told me VERBATIM that the way I speak (oftentimes with a heavy Baltimore accent) was a disability that I should disclose when meeting with folks internally.”
“Ultimately my last manager, his manager and HR decided that the best way to shut me up was to fire me,” Curley said, according to Business Insider.
Below are some videos about Baltimore’s ueu’nique accent, and it’s not just a Black thing.
Curley said her role at Google focused on increasing hires from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). After starting the job, Curley said she saw tactics by Google “to keep black and brown students out of their pipeline.”
For example, she said students were asked in interviews about the quality of the computer science curriculum that they were studying at the HBCU and criticized for “not meeting the bar” compared to “elite white institutions.”
She tweeted that she frequently called out “shady recruitment practices such as “screening out” resumes of students with “unfamiliar” school/university names.” She said Google engineers who interviewed HBCU candidates would give them insulting feedback and then reject them at the hiring committee stage.
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