Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2024 22:59:13 -0400
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Subject: Re: ACLU Accuses Asian Attorney of Using 'Coded' Racism; Fires Her; ACLU Sued by Government
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On 3/25/2024 5:59 PM, shawn wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Mar 2024 19:32:50 +0000, BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:
> 
>> So now expressing fear of one's boss or describing his behavior as
>> "chastising" is racist if the boss is black.
>>
>> And this is the ACLU we're talking about. Anyone who still thinks the ACLU is
>> the constitutional rights advocate that it used to be needs their head
>> examined. It's nothing but a shill for the most extreme and radical woke
>> policies.
>>
>> ---------------------
>>
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/us/politics/aclu-employee-fired-race-bias.html
>>
>> The civil liberties group is defending itself in an unusual case that weighs
>> what kind of language may be evidence of bias against black people.
>>
>> Kate Oh was no one's idea of a get-along-to-go-along employee. During her five
>> years as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, she was an unsparing
>> critic of her superiors, known for sending long, blistering emails to human
>> resources complaining about what she described as a hostile workplace.
>>
>> She considered herself a whistle blower and advocate for other women in the
>> office, drawing unflattering attention to an environment she said was rife
>> with sexism, burdened by unmanageable workloads and stymied by a fear-based
>> culture.
>>
>> Then the tables turned and Ms. Oh was the one slapped with an accusation of
>> serious misconduct. The ACLU said her complaints about several superiors-- all
>> of whom were black-- used "racist stereotypes". She was fired in May 2022.
>>
>> The ACLU acknowledges that Ms. Oh, who is Korean-American, never used any kind
>> of racial slur, but the group says that her use of certain phrases and words
>> demonstrated a pattern of willful anti-black animus.
>>
>> In one instance, according to court documents, she told a black superior that
>> she was "afraid" to talk with him. In another, she told a manager that their
>> conversation was "chastising". And in a meeting, she repeated a satirical
>> phrase likening her bosses' behavior to suffering beatings.
>>
>> Did her language add up to racism? Or was she just speaking harshly about
>> bosses who happened to be black? That question is the subject of an unusual
>> unfair-labor-practice case brought against the ACLU by the National Labor
>> Relations Board, which has accused the organization of retaliating against Ms.
>> Oh. A trial in the case wrapped up this week in Washington, and a judge is
>> expected to decide in the next few months whether the ACLU was justified in
>> terminating her. If the ACLU loses, it could be ordered to reinstate her or
>> pay restitution.
>>
>> The heart of the ACLU's defense-- arguing for an expansive definition of what
>> constitutes racist or racially coded speech-- has struck some labor and
>> free-speech lawyers as peculiar, since the organization has traditionally
>> protected the right to free expression, operating on the principle that it may
>> not like what someone says, but will fight for the right to say it.
>>
>> The case raises some intriguing questions about the wide swath of employee
>> behavior and speech that labor law protects-- and how the nation's pre-eminent
>> civil rights organization finds itself on the opposite side of that law,
>> arguing that those protections should not apply to its former employee.
>>
>> A lawyer representing the ACLU, Ken Margolis, said during a legal proceeding
>> last year that it was irrelevant whether Ms. Oh bore no racist ill will. All
>> that mattered, he said, was that her black colleagues were offended and
>> injured.
> 
> And there is the major issue. It does not matter what she thought but
> only what others thought or at least said they thought. Been there
> done that where I was accused of something similar by someone who
> remained nameless but who I'm sure I know because she was known to be
> a troublemaker. Luckily in my case it wasn't taken as seriously given
> that there was no evidence I did anything, but in Ms Oh's case it
> doesn't matter that she did nothing wrong, but that her complaints
> ended up bothering her colleagues enough that they finally complained.
> 
> So her complaints did not matter but their complaints did. How does
> that happen?
> 
>> "We're not here to prove anything other than the impact of her actions was
>> very real-- that she caused harm," Mr. Margolis said, according to a
>> transcript of his remarks. "She caused serious harm to black members of the
>> ACLU community."
> 
> He doesn't address if her complaints had any basis in reality. If her
> complaints did have a basis does it still matter if the others felt
> she caused them harm?
> 
>> Rick Bialczak, the lawyer who represents Ms. Oh through her union, responded
>> sarcastically, saying he wanted to congratulate Mr. Margolis for making an
>> exhaustive presentation of the ACLU's evidence: three interactions Ms. Oh had
>> with colleagues that were reported to human resources.
>>
>> "I would note, and commend Ken, for spending 40 minutes explaining why three
>> discreet comments over a multi-month period of time constitutes serious harm
>> to the ACLU members, black employees,” he said. "Yes, she had complained about
>> black supervisors, Mr. Bialczak acknowledged, but her direct boss and that
>> boss's boss were black. "Those were her supervisors," he said. "If she has
>> complaints about her supervision, who is she supposed to complain about?"
> 
> Wait, so the complaint is that she complained to HR about her
> supervisors over months, but not to others? How is that even an issue
> that should lead to her firing? Isn't HR's role to help mitigate those
> sorts of interpersonal issues.
> 
>> Ms. Oh declined to comment for this article, citing the ongoing case.
>>
>> The ACLU has a history of representing groups that liberals revile. This week,
>> it argued in the Supreme Court on behalf of the National Rifle Association in
>> a 1st Amendment case, but to critics of the ACLU, Ms. Oh's case is a sign of
>> how far the group has strayed from its core mission-- defending free speech--
>> and has instead aligned itself with a progressive politics that is intensely
>> focused on identity.
>>
>> "Much of our work today," as it explains on its website, "is focused on
>> equality for people of color, women, gay and transgender people, prisoners,
>> immigrants, and people with disabilities."
>>
>> And since the beginning of the Trump administration, the organization has
>> taken up partisan causes it might have avoided in the past, like running an
>> advertisement to support Stacey Abrams' 2018 campaign for governor of
>> Georgia.
>>
>> "They radically expanded and raised so much more money-- hundreds of millions
>> of dollars-- from leftist donors who were desperate to push back on the scary
>> excesses of the Trump administration," said Lara Bazelon, a law professor at
>> the University of San Francisco who has been critical of the ACLU. "And they
>> hired people with a lot of extremely strong views about race and workplace
>> rules and in the process, they themselves veered into a place of excess. I
>> scour the record for any evidence that this Asian woman is a racist and I
>> don't find any."
>>
>> The beginning of the end for Ms. Oh, who worked in the ACLU's political
>> advocacy department, started in late February 2022, according to court papers
>> and interviews with lawyers and others familiar with the case.
>> The ACLU was hosting a virtual organization-wide meeting under heavy
>> circumstances. The national political director, who was black, had suddenly
>> departed following multiple complaints about his abrasive treatment of
>> subordinates. Ms. Oh, who was one of the employees who had complained, spoke
>> up during the meeting to declare herself skeptical that conditions would
>> actually improve.
>>
>> "Why shouldn't we simply expect that 'the beatings will continue until morale
>> improves'," she said in a Zoom group chat, invoking a well-known phrase that
>> is printed and sold on t-shirts, usually accompanied by the skull and
>> crossbones of a pirate flag. She explained that she was being "definitely
>> metaphorical".
> 
> Ah, she made the mistake of saying what she was thinking and so made
> herself a target for more beatings.
> 
>> Soon after, Ms. Oh heard from the ACLU manager overseeing its equity and
>> inclusion efforts, Amber Hikes, who cautioned Ms. Oh about her language. Ms.
>> Oh's comment was "dangerous and damaging", Ms. Hikes warned, because she
>> seemed to suggest the former supervisor physically assaulted her.
> 
> This should have seen the ACLU laughed out of court for suggesting
> such a thing.
> 
>> "Please consider the very real impact of that kind of violent language in the
>> workplace," Ms. Hikes wrote in an email. Ms. Oh acknowledged she had been
>> wrong and apologized. Over the next several weeks, senior managers documented
>> other instances in which they said Ms. Oh mistreated black employees.
>>
>> In early March, Ben Needham, who had succeeded the recently departed national
>> political director, reported that Ms. Oh called her direct supervisor, a black
>> woman, a liar. According to his account, he asked Ms. Oh why she hadn't
>> complained earlier. She responded that she was "afraid to talk to him".
>>
>> "As a black male, language like 'afraid' generally is a code word for me," Mr.
>> Needham wrote in an email to other ACLU managers. "It is triggering for me."
>> Mr. Needham, who is gay and grew up in the Deep South, said in an interview
>> that as a child, "I was taught that I'm a danger." To hear someone say they're
>> afraid of him, he added, is like saying, "These are the people we should be
>> scared of."
> 
> Again a case of someone reading into what was said instead of taking
> it in without asking why she was afraid. Perhaps because of her
> experiences with her previous boss as the report says he was abrasive.
> Instead it appears this new boss took to email to denigrate Ms Oh
> which again leads to a reason she should win this case against the
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