Rights of Employees
Race Discrimination
Race discrimination violates the law in both New Jersey and New York. For example, it is unlawful for your company to fire you, demote you, suspend you, deny you a promotion, or taken another adverse employment action against you because of your race.
Whether you are African-American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Arabic, Middle Eastern, Native American, Pacific Islander, Caucasian, or a member of another race, you should not have to experience racism at work.
If you have been the victim of discrimination based on your race at your job in either New Jersey or New York, then you should contact an experienced New Jersey race discrimination lawyer at Rabner Baumgart Ben-Asher & Nirenberg, P.C. to discuss your rights and options. You can reach us at (201) 777-2250 to schedule an initial consultation.
Harassment because of race is legally actionable. Racial harassment is a form of unlawful racial discrimination. Harassment typically occurs when a company engages in a series of relatively small actions that, when considered together, create a hostile work environment. It can include a wide range of negative behavior such as supervisors or managers telling racist jokes, perpetuating racial stereotypes, assigning you menial tasks that are not appropriate for your job, setting you up to fail, giving you unfairly poor performance reviews, excluding you from important meetings or failing to communicate with you.
Harassment also can occur when you are subjected to a few very serious acts of harassment, such as hateful racial epithets, symbols or slurs. For example, one use of one of the most offensive racist terms by a supervisor can be actionable on its own.
As our New Jersey race discrimination attorneys know well, race-based discrimination also can include treating an employee negatively based on his or her physical characteristics or traits that are associated with a specific race. For example, this can include negative treatment based on the texture of your hair, your facial features or your skin color.
It can be unlawful race discrimination to treat an employee worse based on one of these characteristics if it is common to a particular race or if it is stereotypically associated with that race even if many or most members of that race do not share the trait.
Related Claims: Color, National Origin, Ancestry, and Religious DiscriminationRace discrimination is often (but not always) accompanied by other forms of unlawful discrimination. For example, the same individual also might experience discrimination based on his skin color, national origin, ancestry, or religion, each of which violate both New Jersey and New York law. Please see our color discrimination, national origin discrimination, ancestry discrimination and religious discrimination pages for more information about these other forms of unlawful discrimination.
Reverse DiscriminationIt is, of course, far more common for race discrimination to harm minorities, and in particular Black and Hispanic workers. However, laws such as the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination ("NJLAD"), the New York Human Rights Law ("NYHRL") and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also prohibit reverse discrimination. For more information, we recommend the following articles:At Rabner Baumgart Ben-Asher & Nirenberg, P.C., our New Jersey race discrimination lawyers have been involved in numerous significant and precedent-setting cases that have improved the rights of employees in New Jersey. If you have been the victim of discrimination at work based on your race, then please feel free to contact us online or call us at (201) 777-2250 to learn more about how we can help protect your workplace rights. We are dedicated to enforcing employee rights.
Related ArticlesIf you would like to learn more about race discrimination, then we recommend you read one of the following articles from our New Jersey Employment Law Blog: