"Is Your Sister a Prostitute?", Asked My Supervisor at Work

In 1986, I was in my first full-time permanent employment, working at a Massachusettes lumber yard called Grossman's that has since gone out of business. One of my supervisors, a tall white assistant manager, often spoke to me in a feigned Nazi accent, asked me if my sister (a medical doctor) was a prostitute, and made constant color-aroused and antagonistic statements to me.

I was twenty-two years old. At the time, I had not yet been to law school and had not yet been trained at the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to recognize illegal workplace discrimination or to know how to file a complaint about it. The store manager was Black (Cape Verdean) and never would have tolerated these comments, had I told her about them.

However, I was young, unassertive, had low self-esteem, and I couldn't distinguish between the verbal onslaughts that were mostly lawful (such as those to which I had become accustomed from my twin brother) and those that were unlawful, such as when a supervisor at work makes negative references to my skin color group. I didn't complain to my Cape Verdean female boss, and I didn't file a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Instead, I told this supervisor that if he couldn't speak to me without those color-aroused antagonistic references than I would prefer that he not speak with me at all. That worked and the comments stopped.

In retrospect, this supervisor needed to be taught a stiffer lesson in the statutes and regulations that covered his behavior, but I failed to offer him that lesson and I regret it.