Single Incidences that Create a Hostile and Offensive Work Environment

Normally for an employee to claim they were the victim of a hostile and offensive work environment, the employee must prove that they have been the victim of repeated incidences of mistreatment and abuse in the workplace. The incidences must be severe enough to change the conditions of the employee’s status and must be pervasive and disruptive enough that it is hard or impossible for the employee to do their job.

But, there are single incidences that are legally recognized as immediately being vile enough to rise to the level of creating a hostile and offensive work environment for an African American employee. Therefore, it would only take one occurrence to create a workplace situation that would require immediate action from a supervisor or other member of authority within a company. Two examples of single incidences that can immediately create a hostile and offensive work environment are:

1. The use of a noose or burning cross in the workplace, which is used to intimidate and to create a hostile environment. (It can be an actual or depicted noose or burning cross (or any other manifestation of an actual or threatened racially motivated physical assault); or

2. The use of the n-word in the workplace, which is used to demean, degrade, intimidate, and to create a hostile work environment.

Here’s what was included in several legal decisions:

Nooses and burning crosses:

Williams v. New York City Housing Auth., 154 F. Supp. 2d 820, 824-25 (S.D.N.Y. 2001) (“Indeed, the noose is among the most repugnant of all racist symbols, because it is itself an instrument of violence. It is impossible to appreciate the impact of the display of a noose without understanding this nation’s opprobrious legacy of violence against African-Americans.”); cf. Jackson v. Flint Ink North Am. Corp., 379 F.3d 791, 795 (8th Cir. 2004) (in racial discrimination case involving graffiti depicting a burning cross, court noted that because “its symbolism is potentially more hostile and intimidating than the racial slurs[,]…)

The N-word:

Cf. Spriggs, 242 F.3d at 185 (“Far more than a mere offensive utterance,” the N-word is “pure anathema to African Americans. Perhaps no single act can more quickly alter the conditions of employment and create an abusive working environment than the use of an unambiguously racial epithet such as ‘n-----’ by a supervisor in the presence of his subordinates.”) (citation and quotation marks omitted).

If there is one incident of racist behavior that has a clear historical context of violence and intimidation, a Black employee can rightly complain about race-based abuse and can contact their supervisor, manager or their HR department to seek a remedy for the mistreatment.

Remember, once is enough, when it comes to symbols and language that are widely known to be racist, intimidating, and demeaning.

Source: http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/race-color.html#N_129_