A former U.S. Bank employee filed a $632,000 lawsuit against her former employer this week, saying she was fired in part because she complained that playing “hangman” as a department game to get prizes was racially insensitive.
Belinda Jackson, who is African American, says she also complained that the timing of the game — during Black History Month in February 2016 — was particularly offensive.
In the following weeks, Jackson believes her supervisors retaliated against her and that her complaints led to her firing as a senior customer services representative in March 2016, according to her lawsuit filed Tuesday in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
A spokesman for U.S. Bank declined comment Friday for the company and for two of its supervisors, Kyle Ingham and Keith Biggs, who also are listed as defendants.
In early to mid-February 2016, the lawsuit says, U.S. Bank asked Jackson to play hangman as a department activity that awarded points toward bonuses and pizza parties for participants.
“I responded to my supervisor, Kyle Ingham, that I did not feel comfortable playing the game of hangman,” Jackson wrote in a complaint she filed with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. “Ingham responded by asking me whether someone else could put the body parts up for me on my behalf and I told him that it made me uncomfortable as a black woman to play the game because of its associations with lynching. The game continued nonetheless.”
The suit doesn’t describe the circumstances of the game — including whether it was played electronically or physically posted somewhere in U.S. Bank offices.
Jackson’s attorney, Talia Stoessel, couldn’t be reached to provide additional details.
On March 1, Jackson was fired, the suit says. U.S. Bank officials told her it was because she had threatened to report the human resources department to state labor regulators about money she thought the company had wrongly deducted from her paycheck, the suit says.
According to the suit, Jackson had emailed the company’s payroll department about two months earlier asking that a $134 deduction from her paycheck be reversed. She asked for the money to be returned a few times over the months and a supervisor told her she’d be paid, but she never was, the suit states.
In addition to her refusal to play hangman, the suit states she also faced retaliation because of her attempts to get paid the $134.
The origins of the game are unclear. Researchers found reference to “hangman” in a 1890s guide of games. Players guess letters of an unrevealed word and then draw an arm, leg, head or torso of a stick figure hanging from gallows for every incorrect guess. If they draw all body parts and the word still hasn’t been spelled out, the players lose.
On internet forums, some commenters have complained that the game is racially insensitive given the nation’s history of increased lynchings of African Americans starting in the late 1800s, after the Civil War. Those complaints, in turn, have created a backlash of criticism by those who complain of political correctness.
Jackson’s lawsuit states that shortly after she refused to play hangman, her supervisor — Ingham — told her that she was “rude” to a colleague during another encounter.
Jackson told Ingham that she wasn’t rude and had just told the colleague what her manager had asked her to say, according to the suit. The suit says Ingham told Jackson she wasn’t in any trouble, but to the contrary, that “incident was listed in her personnel file as a ‘significant event.'”
The suit says Jackson had worked the company for less than a year, from April 2015 to March 2016.
Read the lawsuit here.
— Aimee Green
agreen@oregonian.com
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