In Cain v. United Mortgage Corp. and Emmanuel Catechis, 21-cv-3325 (BMC), 2025 WL 2932758 (E.D.N.Y. Oct. 15, 2025), the court, inter alia, denied defendants’ motion for summary judgment on plaintiff’s race-based hostile work environment claims asserted under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the New York State Human Rights Law, and the New York City Human Rights Law.
From the decision:
Title VII defines a hostile work environment as one “permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult … that is sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment.” Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc., 510 U.S. 17, 21 (1993) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). The plaintiff must show that “the complained of conduct: (1) is objectively severe or pervasive – that is, … creates an environment that a reasonable person would find hostile or abusive; (2) creates an environment that the plaintiff subjectively perceives as hostile or abusive; and (3) creates such an environment because of the plaintiff’s protected characteristics or protected activity.” Patane v. Clark, 508 F.3d 106, 113 (2d Cir. 2007) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). “Factors that a court might consider in assessing the totality of the circumstances include: (1) the frequency of the discriminatory conduct; (2) its severity; (3) whether it is threatening and humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; and (4) ‘whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance.’ ” Id. (quoting Harris, 510 U.S. at 23).
There is no opprobrium more demeaning when used by a white manager in the workplace towards a black employee than the “n” word. In this instance, Catechis, plaintiff’s manager, repeatedly called plaintiff, “My N—-r Cain”4 and plaintiff’s coworkers followed suit. Although the Supreme Court has suggested that “[m]ere utterance of an ethnic or racial epithet which engenders offensive feelings in an employee would not sufficiently alter terms and conditions of employment to violate Title VII,” Faragher v City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775, 787 (1998) (quoting Rogers v. EEOC, 454 F.2d 234, 238 (5th Cir. 1971)), the cases are rare when that particular epithet, used by a manager, is insufficient. See Rivera v. Rochester Genesee Reg’l Transp. Auth., 743 F.3d 11, 24 (2d Cir. 2014) (“[P]erhaps no single act can more quickly alter the conditions of employment and create an abusive working environment than the use of an unambiguously racial epithet such as ‘n[—e]r’ by a supervisor in the presence of his subordinates.” (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).).
In the instant case, there are a few factors which marginally affect the hostile work environment calculus, because “[f]or racist comments, slurs, and jokes to constitute a hostile work environment, there must be more than a few isolated incidents of racial enmity[.]” Schwapp v. Town of Avon, 118 F.3d 106, 110 (2d Cir. 1997) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). For one, although plaintiff certainly felt demeaned, he understood on his own accord and based on his conversations with Ben-Zvi that the name was used not for the purpose of demeaning him, but rather, as a badly misplaced effort to establish camaraderie. In addition, plaintiff suffered through the sophomoric behavior for two weeks, rather than the term of his employment, and his colleagues stopped when he asked them to.
Notwithstanding, a reasonable jury could find that two weeks of such an obviously unacceptable appellation constitutes “a steady barrage of opprobrious racial comments” as opposed to “a few isolated incidents of racial enmity,” id., and that an employee shouldn’t have to ask to get it to stop. This business was not a loading dock where inappropriate language might be more common. This was a white-collar financial business with a Human Resources Department, in which the most basic kind of training arguably should have absolutely precluded any use of the “n” word, especially by a manager like Catechis.
I will therefore let a jury determine whether what happened to plaintiff was sufficiently “severe” or “pervasive” to constitute a hostile work environment.
And, having found that plaintiff presented sufficient evidence to proceed on his Title VII claim, plaintiff’s claims under the comparatively lenient NYSHRL and NYCHRL may likewise proceed.