Employment Discrimination

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Leroy S. Poullard v. Robert A. McDonald

Case No.: 15-1962

Officials: WOOD, Chief Judge, and MANION and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Employment Discrimination

Appellant did not suffer any adverse employment actions or allege facts sufficient to support claims for unlawful discrimination retaliation or harassment.

“Only three incidents Poullard described have even a tenuously arguable connection to race: (1) the meeting in October 2008, when Cardinali threw a toy monkey at Poullard and said that management intended to “get the monkeys off the backs of management”; (2) the incident in October 2008 when Mailand referred to Poullard as a “sugar daddy”; and (3) Mai‐ land’s comment in November 2009 that Poullard was a “better person” than before, apparently with reference to an older photograph in which Poullard had an afro hairstyle. On the spectrum of offensive conduct, these statements fall at best on the less severe end. Cf. Cerros v. Steel Technologies, Inc., 288 F.3d 1040, 1047 (7th Cir. 2002) (“an unambiguously racial epithet falls on the ‘more severe’ end of the spectrum”), citing Rodgers v. Western‐Southern Life Insurance Co., 12 F.3d 668, 675 (7th Cir. 1993). The first remark in particular, which could be very troubling out of context, actually referred to a well‐known Harvard Business Review article about the value of delegation, entitled “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?” See William Oncken, Jr. & Donald L. Wass, Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?, Harvard Business Review, Nov.–Dec. 1999, available at https://hbr.org/1999/11/management‐time‐ whos‐got‐the‐monkey (describing article as “one of the publication’s two best‐selling reprints ever”). The other two re‐ marks were at worst mild and ambiguous. They do not sup‐ port a reasonable inference of discriminatory animus, nor are they overtly hostile in any objective sense.”

Affirmed

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