u/lexilovestofit

Hi everyone. I have been working at my company for about 4 year. In the past year, a new CEO was appointed. He smokes cigarettes a lot and is often standing outside of the front door huffing them down. His secretary is often outside with him, taking notes, as he smokes a cig almost every hour. She doesn’t smoke, but is the type to do whatever he says and bend over backwards to do anything he ask. Anyways… I arrived at work on Monday and CEO and his secretary were out front as usual. On my way in, I greeted them and asked how their weekends were. The secretary asked me about mine, and I was very excited because we adopted a kitten. Immediately after saying this, the new CEO said “what did you say… kitten?“ He starts making fun of the way I said this, then said in these exact words: “This is the problem with your generation, you learned to speak from the black community. Say Biden?” Then he asked me to say other words just to continue to berate me. The secretary of course, just asked like it was a joke and laughed. I was incredibly uncomfortable. While I am white appearing, my dad is Dominican and appears to most people to be African American. I have had to deal with a lot of racism in my life growing up in the south and having a mixed race family. This comment has stuck with me and the way he treated me is making me feel really unwanted and I‘m afraid to even say anything around him. Also, the fact he wanted me to say Biden was weird as hell. I did email HR, resulting in a meeting with the director of HR. Of course nothing was done, just an acknowledgement of my feelings. Now I just feel even worse for even going to HR. He’s the CEO, it’s not like they can fire him. The whole situation has made everyday I go to work seem way more stressful, so much so I have been considering a new job. Am I overreacting?