Jennifer A. Holmes, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has urged the court to take the case, says she hopes the conversations taking place nationally will push the justices in that direction.
Doing so gives the court an “opportunity to show that they’re not insensitive to issues of race,” Holmes said. And courts are all the time confronting workplace discrimination claims involving use of the racial slur, she said. The question for the justices, she said, is just whether someone who experiences an isolated instance of the racial slur can “advance their case beyond the beginning stage.”
Jennifer A. Holmes, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has urged the court to take the case, says she hopes the conversations taking place nationally will push the justices in that direction.
Doing so gives the court an “opportunity to show that they’re not insensitive to issues of race,” Holmes said. And courts are all the time confronting workplace discrimination claims involving use of the racial slur, she said. The question for the justices, she said, is just whether someone who experiences an isolated instance of the racial slur can “advance their case beyond the beginning stage.”
May 13, 2021
The Supreme Court is considering today whether to hear the case of a black man who says he suffered discrimination because the N-word was carved into the wall of the hospital elevator where he worked. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) Robert Collier says that during the seven years he worked as an operating room aide at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, white nurses called him and other black employees “boy.” Management ignored two large swastikas painted on a storage room wall. And for six months, he regularly rode an elevator with the N-word carved into a wall.