On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a legal battle involving the N-word.
What We Know:
- Robert Collier is a Texas man who submitted an appeal and sued the hospital where he was employed. He claims his supervisors ignored complaints he had over a carving of the N-word in one of the building’s elevators. The debate is whether its utterance in the workplace even one time creates a hostile work environment. The ruling from the 5th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the case in favor of the hospital.
- The Title Vll of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race. Collier is a Black man who initiated the suit after being fired from Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. He’d worked there for seven years and claimed the hospital created a racially hostile environment in violation of Title Vll.
- According to Collier, white nurses referred to him as “boy,” and two swastikas were painted on the wall of a storage room. These things were all ignored despite employees reporting them to hospital management. Collier expressed that he had complained multiple times to supervisors about the hate symbols, but nothing was done about it. He says their presence made the hospital a hostile work environment.
- In Texas, a federal district court found that Collier’s work environment was not sufficiently abusive enough to constitute a hostile environment. However, the court did condemn the N-word and admitted the swastikas could be interpreted as offensive to Collier because of his race. The hospital system stressed that “context matters” and the case “is neither strong nor clear.” Collier’s attorneys note that there was disagreement in the courts over whether the use of the racial term created a hostile environment.
The 7th Circuit Court stated that the defendant must also demonstrate how the use of the word altered the conditions of their employment.
