A former Mixer employee has described his time working for the streaming platform as “the worst I’ve ever had professionally and it’s all due to RACISM.”
On June 21 Milan Lee, who formerly worked in business development for Mixer and its parent company Microsoft, posted a Twitlonger detailing the alleged racism he experienced while working for the streaming platform.
Lee shared four different examples of what he went through when working for Mixer, claiming that “one of the main people calling the shots has zero respect for any partner nor their platform.”
“I was one of the only black people working at Mixer during my tenure. While at a conference I was pulled aside and told that the only reason I was hired is because I am “street smart,” Lee asserted.
“The first thing that popped into my head at the time was affirmative action. I believed I was only hired to meet a diversity goal because I was black. Anyways I decided to brush it off and let it go.”
The “street smart” comment only seemed to be the tip of the iceberg, as Lee went on to claim that a manager had used an analogy literally comparing partners on the platform to “slaves”.
“My manager decided to give us an analogy, that analogy was ‘I’m in between a rock and a hard place. What I mean is all the partners are my slaves, I own their content. I control their success on our platform. For me I am the slave master, I own partners’,” Lee wrote. “Immediately I got angry, pissed off, and honestly I didn’t want to work at Microsoft/Mixer anymore.”
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Taking up the issue with other management didn’t seem to solve the problem at all, Lee alleged, and it was their inaction on the issue that eventually drove him to leave the company completely.
“I reported my entire experience to a skip level manager, I also included examples when my ideas in meetings were passed on. When said ideas were the exact same from my white colleagues,” Lee claimed.
“The skip level NEVER reported any of the slavery comments to HR. So when I spoke with HR they were surprised and said this has never been communicated. After that meeting, I resigned a few weeks later.”
For the record, it’s NOT @Solice
She is a great person and would never do this
— Milly (@MilanKLee) June 21, 2020
Finally, Lee reported the manager who had allegedly made the slave comments to higher-ups, who assured him an investigation would get to the bottom of things, but the mind-bending response he said he received wasn’t what he had been hoping for.
“I spoke with the legal team to start an investigation with my manager. This investigation would continue even though I decided to terminate my employment. Months go by without a verdict. One day late last year I get a call from the legal team with their final findings. That finding was not guilty!” Lee claimed.
“The reason my manager was not penalized and the reason she still has her job today is because she CANNOT be racist. The reason she CANNOT be racist is because she hired a black person.”
Mixer has yet to respond to Lee’s allegations at the time of writing this article, but we will keep this page updated with any news or response that comes next.