recently became a plaintiff in a #discrimination case filed by Cassandra Welch, an 11-year business consultant for Eli Lilly who has now been joined by more than 400 black #employees in the class action lawsuit. Welch says she complained about racism, unfair treatment, and pay disparities between white and black employees and immediately became a target of racial harassment.
“Someone put a dark-skinned doll on my desk and tied a noose around her neck. Then the name-calling started and it was sheer shock to me. I couldn’t believe it, not in the 21st century. I know racism exists, but it is usually more subtle,” she says. “What happened to me was blatant. Prior to speaking up about the unfair treatment, I was a performer and did my job above and beyond what was required. My point was that there should be equal pay and equal merit for equal work. But that is not happening, especially not for black women.”
Ella L.J. Edmonson Bell, associate professor of business administration at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, says black women in today’s workforce feel isolated and alone because they realize early on they are not part of the corporate team and rarely gain the protection of senior executives. “Nobody is out there to look out for black women in the workplace, and that’s why they are filing discrimination suits to begin with,” says Bell, author of Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity. “I am not surprised when any black woman steps up and files a lawsuit. The problem occurs long before that point. I am surprised more black women are not speaking up.”
Brandeis University professor Anita Hill, who declined to be #interviewed by be, was recently forced to revisit the details of her testimony from 16 years ago with the release of Supreme Court #Justice Clarence Thomas’ memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. In his book, Thomas says Hill was a liar and her testimony was politically #motivated. In a recent New York Times Op Ed, Hill offered this #rebuttal: “I stand by my testimony. Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir … but I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.”
It further stated: “He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had ‘given it’ to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.”
Hill went on to write that Thomas hired her twice, once at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And that she is saddened that Thomas is assassinating her character in order to preserve his.
She stated: “I have repeatedly seen this kind of character attack on women who complain of harassment and discrimination in