Ask Code Switch: The racial politics of washing dishes?

I hate washing dishes. In my house, my partner's chores include dishes each night, while mine willingly involve quite literally anything and everything else. But this week on Ask Code Switch , we're answering a question from listener Shaquille Stewart who wants to know – who's supposed to wash the dishes? This isn't an issue of gender roles or shirking responsibility.

This is a question about the expectations of additional unpaid labor in the workplace. When no one is "technically" the "dishwasher" at work..

.who's supposed to wash the dishes and why? ..

. Dear Code Switch, My name is Shaquille Stewart. I wrote to the podcast because about a year ago, I had a dispute with my employer at the time over the most trivial thing – who's supposed to wash the dishes? See, I took the job in part to get a foot in the door in the theater industry.

I started as an intern and worked there for five years total. While washing everybody's dishes and cleaning the kitchen wasn't really in my job description – I did it. But as my workload increased, suddenly, it started to become an issue that I wasn't clearing out the dishwasher, even if I didn't use any dishes.

Obvie, I'm Black as hell. So when a higher up and my supervisor approached me about this issue by bringing me into a storage closet..

.I felt a bit slavish. And I told them so.

Still, to preserve my job, I sucked it up and emptied the dishwasher. ..

. Shaq doesn't work there anymore, but he still finds himself wondering, who really s.