Last July, the nation celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The focus rightly was on how far we have come as a society in eliminating discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.
Close on the heels of that celebration, however, recent events provide some distressing reminders that bigotry is not dead.
Campus concerns
Common wisdom identifies the Millennials as the postracial generation. A rash of racist incidents on college campuses has shaken that perception to its core.
Recently, students discovered a noose hanging from a tree on the Durham, North Carolina, campus of Duke University in the same week its men’s basketball team was winning a national championship. A noose also figured prominently in an incident at the University of Mississippi. James Meredith integrated Ole Miss in 1962 with support from armed federal marshals. In 2015, a former student faces a federal hate crime indictment for allegedly wrapping Meredith’s statue in a noose and a Confederate flag.
A shocking YouTube video showed members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma on a bus, singing racist lyrics that referred to lynchings, used the “n” word, and celebrated the fraternity’s all-white membership.
Racist incidents on college campuses are not confined to the South. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, racist messages scrawled on dormitory room doors included the phrase “Kill these [‘n’ word]s.” At the University of Washington, counterprotesting white students called black students who were protesting police killings of young black men “apes.”
Terrible tweets
Something about social media brings out rage toward women that is both vile and frightening. Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling posted a tweet celebrating his daughter’s college admission on a softball scholarship. What he got in response, according to his blog post, was “tweets with the word rape, bloody underwear and pretty much every other vulgar and defiling word you could likely fathom.”
Ashley Judd, a devoted fan of the University of Kentucky men’s basketball team, tweeted a complaint about officiating during a conference tournament and was met by what she described as a “tsunami of gender-based violence and misogyny.”
Evil e-mails
If there are racists and misogynists in the realms of academia and sports, then you can be sure they also are in America’s workplaces. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) certainly found that to be the case in the workplace of the Ferguson, Missouri, police. The DOJ’s March 2015 report found evidence of racial bias in e-mails sent by current Ferguson employees through their official e-mail accounts during work hours. I included and then deleted some examples because they are just too awful to repeat. Yet, the DOJ found that recipients typically forwarded along the e-mails; it found not one instance in which a recipient of an e-mail objected or reported it as inappropriate.
Two weeks after the DOJ report, San Francisco’s police chief acted to fire seven officers who sent and received text messages that were homophobic or spoke of lynching African Americans and burning crosses. San Francisco!
What can you do?
Racists and misogynists are a cancer on your organization. A bigoted employee may be your biggest producer, but the trouble he causes greatly outweighs whatever boost he may give the bottom line.
Take advantage of your policies to ferret out inappropriate e-mails and Internet use. Have your IT department set up routine organizationwide searches for offensive words and phrases. Then take strong discipline against anyone you find using—or forwarding—those words in company e-mails. Use the rights you’ve reserved to monitor Internet usage to bring a stop to cyberbullying or worse conduct on your computers during work time.
We’ve come a long way, but recent events show there is more distance yet to travel.
Dinita L. James, the partner in charge of the Phoenix office of Gonzalez Saggio & Harlan LLP. You may contact her at dinita_james@gshllp.com