<p>Thank you, Hanna. Your concise post #59 communicated what I have intended to convey throughout this entire thread. I apologize for my inarticulate writing style.</p>
<p>Again, my point is that rightly or wrongly, the topic of the book (which is the KKK) obviously offended Sampson’s co-workers, who repeatedly asked him to stop reading it in front of them. He refused, so they complained. When viewed in the context of Indiana’s history of KKK activity, which apparently ran deep enough to be depicted in a historical mural displayed on the University campus, (and apparently continues today) I personally can understand the co-worker’s sensitivity to the topic. Obviously, others on this thread vehemently disagree.</p>
<p>As I stated way back on my first post, to me the sad part about the entire incident is that Sampson did not have the consideration toward his fellow employees to put the book away when they asked him. (And as an aside, there are no facts presented establishing that the book had any relation to any course he was taking at the university.)</p>
<p>Totally irrelevant. Freedom of expression is freedom of expression.</p>
<p>Hanna’s point is not that Sampson was being unreasonable, but that there is no evidence whatsoever that the co-workers asked him to hide the cover of the book. there is no evidence that they objected to the cover as opposed to the book itself.</p>
<p>I think it would be extremely unreasonable to even ask. Either you believe in free speech or you don’t. I do. The dangers of abusing the first amendment are far worse than making someone “uncomfortable.”</p>
<p>Again, freedom of expression is not absolute in the workplace. Next time you are at work, give your boss the finger and see how far that gets you. Call your fellow co-worker a hooker and tack a giant poster of Hitler to the wall above your desk. Its all just “freedom of expression,” right?</p>
<p>I cannot imagine any circumstance in which I would feel comfortable, or even within the bounds of normal human decency, to ask someone to put a cover over a political/historical book, and certainly not to insist that they not even read their book when I am present.</p>
<p>–perhaps in Iran, Somalia or Saudi Arabia, but never ever in the United States. To suggest otherwise is to value ideology over human rights.</p>
<p>Here we value human rights.</p>
<p>Reading a book is a human right.
You do not have a right NOT to be offended in a free country.</p>
<p>In spirit, this is no different than book banning or burning.</p>
<p>“I think it would be extremely unreasonable to even ask. Either you believe in free speech or you don’t.”</p>
<p>As Bay explained, even at a government-run employer like a public university, employees don’t have the kind of free speech rights they have on their own time. For example, it’s protected speech in the public square to walk up to me (peacefully) and call me “dirty Jew kike.” The government cannot prosecute you for that. But if we’re both employees at IU, and you say that to me while I’m on work property, IU is going to fire you, and the First Amendment has no problem with that. Employers have the right to maintain decorum at work, within reasonable limits. You have a Constitutional right to look at hardcore S&M porn, but I don’t think we’d be having this conversation if the book in question had (totally legal) S&M porn images on the cover, because we’d all recognize that employers have a right to limit those kinds of images in the workplace.</p>
<p>I PERSONALLY would never ask my colleague to cover up his book, even if it were disgusting XXX, because I just don’t care. But it’s a de minimis imposition on the book-reader, and I can’t say it would be unreasonable as a matter of LAW to ask someone to cover up an image of Klansmen on the cover of his book when he reads it at work, because it doesn’t interfere with his ability to see and read the cover whenever he wants to. If my co-worker asked me to do that, I would think she was being silly, but I would comply.</p>
<p>But of course, we don’t have evidence that that happened here.</p>
<p>Sampson did not set out to offend his co-workers. They had NO right to ask him not to read his book. </p>
<p>Bay, would you like to draw up a list of books that should not be read in public for fear of offending someone just by the words on the title?
The Rape of Nanjing?
Bad Blood:The Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment?
Child Survivors of the Holocaust?
Within the Barbed Wires (about the Japanese Internment?)
…
There are many many books whose very titles and perhaps even illustrations will remind people of painful episodes.
Two people I know were children of Schindler’s List survivors. Neither of them ever said the film should not have been made or watched because it caused them pain.</p>
<p>Hanna: You would comply, but you would be within your rights not to. I think it was silly of Sampson’s co-workers to object, I think it was disgraceful for Charleton to reprimand him. That Affirmative Action Officer trampled on his rights. And on a university campus to boot.</p>
<p>Perhaps if you would take the time to actually read my posts, you will see that at no time did I ever state that I am offended by the book at hand. Rather, I stated that obviously, the co-workers WERE offended by it, and while I did not opine on whether they were RIGHT to be offended by, I simply understood how they COULD be offended by it.</p>
<p>I also think that reasonable lawyers could argue that Sampson’s bringing the book (including its cover and title) into the break room and looking at it (“reading”) in the presence of Black co-workers who had voiced their offense to it, COULD be deemed conduct rising to the level of workplace harrassment (Civil Rights discrimination). I did not draw a conclusion about that one way or another.</p>
<p>Has anyone said that the AAO in this matter was something other than incompetent, overreaching, etc. etc.? (Honest question, I’m posting between other tasks and may have missed it.)</p>
<p>“COULD be deemed conduct rising to the level of workplace harrassment (Civil Rights discrimination).”</p>
<p>Very, very unlikely. Not by itself. Harassment has to be pervasive and severe to be actionable. I’m not saying that people don’t sue anyway, but I certainly wouldn’t take the case if that was all the plaintiff had. If it’s just one or two occasions, it generally needs to be REALLY bad (like attempted sexual quid pro quo, or a race-based physical threat) to support a successful case. Even the XXX book cover might not cut it.</p>
<p>What drives me nuts about cases like this isn’t what happened to the reader. He’s going to be fine. It’s that incompetent overreaching like this on the part of the AAO is so destructive to workplace civility/inclusion. It makes the news, and it creates the impression that minorities who complain are all getting hysterical over nothing, and diversity personnel are all trying to be the thought police. The net result is that when real discrimination happens, and good personnel step in, people don’t take it seriously.</p>
<p>Here is some relevant language, and although the facts here do not precisely fit the examples given, I think a good lawyer might be able to make a case out of them:</p>
<p>I think you have to stretch the above definition like silly putty to make this case applicable. The only person who was truly harassed was Mr. Sampson. </p>
<p>I completely agree with Hanna in post 74. In fact, it bears repeating:</p>
<p>This was not pervasive or severe. Pictures of Klansmen posted all over the office and emailed to the victim repeatedly? That might be pervasive. One incident of hanging a noose on a black person’s desk with a sign that says “You’re next”? That might be severe. But no one’s winning a lawsuit based on somebody reading a book with a picture on the front unless the defense lawyers screw up really bad.</p>
<p>I was about to cut n paste that quote of Hanna’s to agree completely, but Poetsheart already did.</p>
<p>It really is a shame that cases like this which just about any reasonable person would agree are silly, make the news, and make it harder to argue fro real cases of real harrassment which happen every day.</p>