In the last year alone, a court awarded
a victim of sexual harassment a record payout ($95 million), the Supreme Court
dismissed the biggest civil rights class action suit in U.S. history, and people called discrimination on everything from
HIV status to a
peanut allergy.
The number of workplace discrimination claims concerning race and
ethnicity has been increasing along a straight line for the last decade,
and total claims
grazed a record 100,000 in 2010, the last year for which data is available.
As we observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day, that’s sobering to consider.
“We haven’t achieved anything like the racially just and equal society that MLK envisioned,” says
Ralph Richard Banks,
a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in African American
issues. But that increase might also be due to more willingness to
report incidents, as opposed to shrugging off bigotry, as well more
awareness of what amounts to discrimination.
“But at a minimum,” says
Derek Avery,
a leading scholar in workplace discrimination at the Fox School of
Business at Temple University, “those numbers suggest that we’re not
heading in the direction that one would anticipate, as we approach 50
years after the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
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