NASCAR suit a messy tangle of cultural and legal issues

There has been a run of stories in the past few days about the $225 million lawsuit filed against NASCAR by former Nationwide Series official Mauricia Grant, capped off by Sunday morning’s issue of ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” series on the topic.

Late last week, NASCAR used the media to unleash a campaign to discredit Grant by dredging up some legal issues she faced in years before she was employed by NASCAR. It was a shameful tactic, suggesting that since NASCAR couldn’t go at Grant on the substance of what she claims happened to her while working there the company needed a diversionary tactic.

Let’s deal with that first and move on. Even if we assume that Grant did everything NASCAR says she did to the worst possible degree, that does not change by one molecule the level to which she is protected, by law, against discrimination and harassment on the job. It is not more acceptable to discriminate against or to harass a “bad” person than it is a “good” one, no matter who is drawing the lines between who’s bad and who’s good.

On Friday, then, NASCAR filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York a 29-page document outlining its defense in Grant’s suit. In rough outline, NASCAR says that Grant was habitually tardy for car pools leaving to take her and fellow officials to work at the track.

It says she was fired because of her on-the-job actions and performance and not because she complained about the way she was being treated by the fellow officials she named in her suit. In fact, NASCAR continues to contend that Grant never complained about that treatment to her superiors, as is required by NASCAR’s internal policies.

Then on Sunday morning’s 30-minute “Outside the Lines,” ESPN interviewed Grant along with three men – two of them black and the third from Mexico – as well as two former female employees. They all spoke about the culture that exists inside the garage and about the way women and people of color have to act to survive in that culture.

“I think minorities have adapted to NASCAR,” said Chris Justice, one of the black men interviewed on the ESPN show. “I don’t think NASCAR has adapted to minorities.”

OK, so after all of that where do we stand?

Grant’s lawsuit is a legal issue. The crux of that suit is whether, as her employer, NASCAR treated her fairly within the boundaries of the law and its own policies.

Does NASCAR have a clear policy regarding discrimination and harassment? NASCAR says it does, and I have personally seen documentation that shows that Grant was among the NASCAR officials who attended two training sessions, in January 2006 and January 2007, regarding those matters.

The existence of the policy alone, however, is not enough. It must be enforced and enforced fairly.

Grant says that it took her so long to finally complain about the treatment she was getting because she was afraid that the act of complaining would make her a target for retribution, a fear she contends was eventually realized.

On “Outside the Lines” Sunday morning, others echoed those same fears. The policy is no good if the culture makes it taboo to use it.

So the legal issues are entwined with the cultural ones. It’s hard to separate cleanly the “ways” of the NASCAR garage from the legal ramifications of this issue, and in some ways those two things can never be totally separated. That’s why diversity is so important.

Justice, one of the black men interviewed Sunday by ESPN, said he was working one day when he heard a fellow employee, who was white, refer to the way something was accomplished by using the term “nigger-rigging.” That phrase means to temporarily or haphazardly rig something only to the point where it works, with the inference being that it’s not worth the time or effort (or that the time isn’t available) to do it “right.”

Justice said that when he looked at the person who uttered the phrase, the white employee realized he’d used an offensive term and apologized.

If you have different people from different backgrounds working together side-by-side, eventually the kind of ignorance and prejudice that led to the very existence of that term will break down. But progress on that front can be glacial, and as an employer it is part of your job to make sure that, first, your workplace is diverse enough for the process to begin and, second, that the process takes place in a professional atmosphere.

Look, I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck. I’ve worked in some absolutely toxic environments in my life.

When I was still in high school I spent my summer days defending myself because the “boss” was a friend of the family who’d helped me get the summer job. I was “the boss’s boy” and “college boy” because I planned to get an education.

Because I didn’t yet have a couple of dozen stories of wild sexual escapades to share with my co-workers (who had hundreds of them, true or not), I was called just about every synonym for “gay” that you can think of.

Over the years I’ve been in some conversations that were held in what I felt to be all in good fun that involved jokes and sarcasm about racial and sexual stereotypes. So have a lot of you. So have a lot of people who work in racing.

The existence of that reality, in life as well as in NASCAR, means that whenever this moves from the personal level to a legal level it’s a messy thing.

Part of NASCAR’s defense in the Grant suit is that it was Grant, herself, who came up with the phrase “colored people’s time” to explain away why she was sometimes late for a car pool ride. Instead of laughing at that and perpetuating it, though, what her NASCAR supervisor(s) should have done right then is cut that off and say he or she didn’t want to hear it again, from Grant or anybody else.

Grant’s suit against NASCAR details several instances where fellow employees showed or threatened to show Grant private parts of their anatomy. Some of this allegedly happened away from the track at hotels where NASCAR officials were staying together and sharing meals or other refreshments in each others’ company.

You might argue this was not during “on-the-clock” time, but still. If a situation develops where anybody deems it appropriate to unzip his pants to make his point, somebody needs to step up and question the propriety of the proceedings.

I can say with a great degree of certainty that some NASCAR employees have been treated, are being treated and have treated each other improperly as human beings. But the courts don’t have clear jurisdiction on that. The courts do, however, have a say in how companies treat their employees.

There are laws, there are rules and there are policies that the courts help define and administer.

Mauricia Grant’s lawsuit is about that, and ultimately that’s what will be ruled upon. As for the rest of it, no verdict or no settlement is going to change the fact that people sometimes just don’t treat each other well.

We’ll never fix that, entirely, but surely that doesn’t mean we ought to stop trying.