Chapter Nine

“I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a…militant type thing…I didn’t want it to look like we were trying to overthrow anybody…I suggested we…write a letter…asking [management] if we could just have a meeting and sit down and just kind of go over some things and, as I said, find out.”

“Now I’m getting emotional. I said, ‘Can’t you transfer me? Can I transfer to another…?’ And, he said, ‘Don’t you get it? We don’t want you here.’”

“And one of them said, ‘Mr. [Kelly] you’re…a very intelligent young man and we feel something, something, something,’ I don’t remember what it was, but that kind of threw me for a loop. What does that have to do with anything? What? Am I supposed to be stupid? And then I got, again, I would say this— now I’m getting offended, because am I supposed to be stupid because I’m black? That’s my next thing in my mind. I didn’t say that.”

“After the ‘threat,’ they had me handcuffed, and the thing of it is, I’ve never been arrested in my life. I don’t even have damn parking tickets.”

“There was one particular supervisor who, who made it very clear that she was not going to report to a black woman…She even called me a black ‘B’ [bitch].”

“She came across as not terribly sharp and really kind of cold…Not someone you would warm up to and feel sympathy for. She came across as rigid and sort of bitchy.”

“They had a meeting of all their managers and human resources and another company they brought in. And it was like a little get- together to discuss all of this stuff…The store manager said: ‘Women cry…you know, that women get upset and they cry. Do you know that? Well, men can’t handle that. We can’t have a store manager that gets upset and cries.'”

“You don’t get the $7.4 million dollar jury verdict for someone dropping a couple of M&M’s down your blouse, and you’ve been there forty- five days…I’m not suggesting by any means that what happened to her was appropriate or right or that she didn’t deserve something. That’s not my point. My point is that…I mean, you see cases where people are intentionally mowed down in a car. Quadriplegics— they don’t get that kind of money.”

“I’ve been doing this [defense side employment discrimination litigation] for twenty years and, in sex harassment cases, out of all of the cases I’ve seen throughout the years, I have yet to see a legitimate sex harassment case…What I see are cases that are either [laughing] the office romance gone awry, where everything was going great, and it was all, you know, consensual for three years until they didn’t get the promotion they wanted. Then all of a sudden it’s been coerced the whole time and you go through and you get their diary and you get their notes and it’s just ridiculous. Or you get the hypersensitive claimant, which is very common, where somebody’s really trying to make a harassment claim out of nothing.”

“Then the boss that everybody loved…propositioned me…[This] led to my EEO complaint because, you know, he propositioned me, and then he didn’t talk to me for six months…[He said], “You know you want it…You know we’re going to do it eventually. I do it with everybody…who works for me.”

“So they would say ‘Marla, you gotta go do that, because this girl here, she can’t do it.’ . . . And I would say, ‘Well, if she can’t push these bins, then you better find somebody else to do this job, because I am not going to do this part of her job just because she is white.'”

“No one would step in and say, ‘This guy’s a scientist, you know. We could use scientists. If it doesn’t work out in the permit unit or Jackman doesn’t like it, we could either change his job around so he doesn’t have that much public contact or move him somewhere else.’”

“I asked him to get me [a computer] so that I could speed up what I was doing. I was having to do it manually and didn’t really know what I was doing. And a few of the drivers got a little irate because I was slow at it, and that hurt my feelings since I had been so efficient in my other job. . . . So I did the best I could, but eventually it got to me, and I almost had a nervous breakdown.”

“Her supervisor who made the decision was older than she was, another relevant factor. And it was kind of a mid- level management position where you get, you know, where your productivity is important. It’s not just that you did something wrong or not. It’s how well you were able to perform the job. Are you able to sort of meet the objectives of the position? And part of the criticism of her performance was that she wasn’t getting that done, you know. So that, those were all factors that led us to think that this was you know a reasonable decision.”

“It’s amazing, these characteristics just carry through, and this is a person who, in her correspondence assessment, was kind of haughty— you know, used a lot of sarcasm and that was part of the problem in the case. She treated younger people like they were, you know, below her, younger managers. That was one of the supervisor’s complaints is that she walked around criticizing these people as though they’re just immature kids.”

“Even though it was presented as an age discrimination case, it really was a layoff case. Then you want to know from the plaintiffs if they have any evidence that anybody ever said anything to them regarding their age. And one of the guys who ended up going to trial was in his mid to late forties, like forty-five, forty-eight, or something. The other guy was older.”