Racial harassment still infecting the workplace

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Many of us are marveling at how seemingly far our society has come given a man with an African American heritage is being considered a serious candidate for president. But in the workplace, attitudes toward many black workers are anything but inspiring.

Racial harassment is up to record levels in offices and factories across the country, and we’re not talking just the use of the “N” word. Racist graffiti, Klu Klux Klan propaganda and even physical threats including the display of hangman’s nooses are included among the intimidation tools.

“It is shocking that such egregious and unlawful conduct toward African American employees is still occurring, even increasing, in the 21st century workplace, more than 40 years after enactment of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964,” says David Grinberg, spokesman for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, also known as the EEOC.

Racial harassment cases have more than doubled since the early 1990s, hitting an all-time  high of 6,977 in 2007, according to EEOC data. (Blacks file nine out of 10 race harassment charges.) From fiscal 2000 to 2007, the EEOC received 51,000 racial harassment charge filings nationwide, already over the number received during the entire 1990s.

The big racial harassment payouts tend to get the headlines. Earlier this month, Lockheed Martin Corp. agreed to settle a case and pay $2.5 million to a black electrician who claimed he was harassed on a daily basis. He was threatened with lynching and once told: "If the South had won then this would be a better country."

But cases like this with smaller monetary penalties are numerous, although they may not get as much press coverage.

According to an EEOC lawsuit involving AK Steel settled last February, workers were allegedly subjected to Nazi symbols, nooses, KKK videos, and graffiti with messages to murder blacks. In January 2007, EEOC settled the racial harassment suit against the company for $600,000.

And in July 2006, Home Depot paid a $125,000 settlement in a suit that alleged, according to the EEOC,  "that a black former night crew lumberman/forklift operator was subjected to a racially hostile work environment because management condoned racial remarks by his supervisors who called him ‘black dog,’ ‘black boy.’” One manager even was charged with stating "that the Supreme Court had found black people to be ‘inferior.’"

These over-the-top acts at major corporations, probably have you scratching your head wondering what ever happened to diversity training, the endless videos on race-relations etiquette and human resource departments hell bent on weeding out such behavior.

Despite all these efforts that expanded greatly in the 1990s, hatred and ignorance apparently remain alive and well. There are a host of reasons racial harassment is escalating, according to labor experts, everything from a struggling economy that has caused major job insecurity to more people of color in the workplace, and even some blame violent video games.

"Acts of violence and hate have been glorified in some video games and through the Internet, as well as being perpetuated in the news and entertainment media," says the EEOC’s Grinberg. "Therefore, some people may have become desensitized, almost to the point of becoming immune, to inhumane behavior that leads to racially hostile work environments."

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