Producers of Patriot Act Speak Out Against Toxicity at Workplace
Following the severe police brutalities that took place in May and June this year, hundreds of thousands of people of colour began revealing their abusers and speaking out against harassment and toxic workplace cultures and environments. These include Amal Ahmed, a reporter at the Texas Observer, and Prachi Gupta, a Writers Guild of America award-winning writer who has worked at Cosmopolitan and Jezebel.
I was miserable. I had a hard time waking up in the morning because I dreaded going to work. Still there was a nagging thought: what if I’m the problem? What if something is wrong with me? This was supposed to make my career but it broke me.
— Amal Ahmed (@amalykinz) June 7, 2020
If this story means that certain editors put me on a ban-list of people who are too difficult to work with or rude, so be it. I don’t want to work with you, either.
— Prachi Gupta (@prachigu) June 6, 2020
I’m sharing this to show what happens in progressive feminist spaces all the time & I hope that it’s instructive.
Inspired by Ahmed and Gupta’s Twitter Thread reveals of the abuse they faced at their workplaces, Sheila V Kumar and Nur Ibrahim, News Producers of the show, decided they had had enough and spoke out against the toxicity and racism they faced while working at “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj”, a show run by a person of colour.
Sheila Kumar was previously working as a News Producer with Minhaj’s show. She has worked with the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Guardian, and Bloomberg, and hails from Colorado. On June 8th, she took to Twitter to speak out against the environment saying, “I’ve never been more unhappy than when I was working at Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.”
I’ve been thinking all day about @prachigu and @amalykinz‘s tweets on their former workplaces, and how much courage it must have taken to speak out. So I’d like to join them and say, I’ve never been more unhappy than when I was working at Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.
— Sheila V Kumar (@SheilaVee) June 8, 2020
Nur Ibrahim was previously a News Producer at Patriot Act. She has worked with Al Jazeera, Comedy Central, and on multiple Harvard projects including The Harvard Crimson. She is now working with Snopes, and hails from Lahore, Pakistan. On August 21st, Nur came out with her story against the show’s workplace culture saying, “I wonder if it was worth the mental anguish I went through over my last few months there.”
A lot of people have asked me to talk about Patriot Act. I avoided it because each time I relive the experience of being humiliated and gaslit, targeted and ignored, I sink back into days of depression. Tweeting this will probably not help me or anyone who has suffered.
— nur nasreen (@Nuri_ibrahim) August 20, 2020
Read their stories. This isn’t just another tweet or story, and it is not defamation, not when people’s mental and physical selves are being attacked in a place where they depend on their livelihoods and careers.
Media Quotient Inc. stands against workplace toxicity and condemns racist behaviour. Let’s learn to be tolerant of diverse cultures and people.
Credit: Patriot Act
