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  • 2020-10-14 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Amy Coney Barrett Say 'Being Called the N-Word Does Not Constitute a Hostile Work Environment'? (en)
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  • In October 2020, as the U.S. Senate began confirmation hearings for U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the Supreme Court opening created after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, social media users began circulating a bit of text purportedly reproducing a quotation from Barrett in which she declared that Being called the N-word does not constitute a hostile work environment: Although this statement is directly related to an opinion Barrett wrote while sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2019, it is not a direct quotation from what she wrote. In addition, it simplifies more complex reasoning from a legal case in a way that is potentially misleading. In Smith v. Illinois Department of Transportation, plaintiff Terry Smith, a Black Illinois transportation employee, brought a workplace discrimination lawsuit charging that the department had subjected him to a hostile work environment and fired him in retaliation for his complaints about racial discrimination. Smith lost his case in district court and appealed to the circuit court on which Barrett sat, where a three-judge panel (including Barrett) unanimously upheld the district court's ruling: One of incidents Smith included in his case as evidence of his allegedly being subjected to race-based harassment that created a hostile work environment was his claim that a former supervisor named Lloyd Colbert called him the N-word. Barrett dismissed that claim in her opinion, but not by flatly stating that Being called the n-word does not constitute a hostile work environment. Barrett's point was much more nuanced. According to Barrett, at the time Smith said he was called stupid ass n****** by a former supervisor, his relationship with his supervisors had long since become a contentious one for a multitude of reasons, and that single incident was not sufficient to support a claim of a racially-hostile work environment: Thus, Barrett's reasoning might be more accurately paraphrased as, Being called the N-word does not necessarily in itself constitute a hostile work environment. The Associated Press noted that one of Barrett's likely soon-to-be colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, had reasoned quite differently several years earlier: (en)
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