Remember the recent decision exonerating Southwest Airlines from liability because one of its employees said “Eenie Meenie Minie Moe”? This related tale arrived in today’s email, and the basic facts check out against what I can glean from newspaper accounts:
Dear Professor Bernstein,The editor of the Catholic Missourian passed on to me your editorial, “Keeping Racism Alive,” regarding the Southwest Airlines “Eeny Meeny Miny Moe” case, and I read it with great personal interest.
One year ago today, I lost my job over Eeny Meeny Miny Moe. Although my case didn’t
receive much national press that I know of, it was widely discussed in the St. Louis media in November 2002. What didn’t make it to the news was the final denouement: that I ended up having to leave my job with a settlement that didn’t come close to covering the undeserved damage to my professional and personal reputation. I hope Jennifer Cundiff is counting her blessings that her employer stood behind her. Mine didn’t. You may be interested in adding this example to your next book or treatise (or just shaking your head in disbelief).Here’s the story (short version): I was the Public Relations Director for a St. Louis-area racially-mixed municipality. Part of my job was to assemble an annual event calendar that is mailed to residents and businesses. The city’s Arts & Letters Commission sponsors an annual photo show, and from those entries, the commission chooses 13 photos to be printed in the next year’s calendar. The process is very thoughtful and democratic. As a council-appointed commission, Arts & Letters is charged with making decisions on matters of art, and their decisions are final. For the 2003 Calendar, they chose a cover photo showing the feet of several children in a circle with their toes touching. The title of the photo was “Eeny Meeny Miny Moe.”
The photos were chosen in April and the calendar production process did not begin until fall, at which time the photos were sent to the printer for scanning. Meanwhile, I designed the publication with a desktop publishing program, leaving blank boxes for the photos. The titles and photographers’ names were placed below the boxes. The original photos and titles were rarely seen together until final insertion of the scanned images by the printer. As I entered, checked and rechecked the titles and names, my main concern was spelling and correct typeface and color. “Eeny Meeny Miney Moe” was simply a one-line title like the 12 others.
More than a week after the printed calendars were sent to the mailing company and distributed to employees, I got an anonymous call from a woman who professed to be a resident. She said she had received her calendar and was offended by the cover photo and title. It wasn’t until she asked me how the rhyme ended that I made any connection to the racist version of this centuries-old celtic nursery rhyme. Her claim that she was a resident was my confirmation that the calendars were already being delivered to residents’ homes and that nothing could be done to change it. When a publication is “on the streets” and there’s a mistake, the only thing a PR
person (or newspaper or magazine editor) can do is explain how the mistake happened and apologize, which I did.A couple days later a few employees complained and refused to accept my explanation and apology, accusing me of doing it deliberately. Upon checking, we determined that the mailing actually had just been processed by the Post Office and we were able to stop it before any calendars reached residents. Yes, the anonymous caller was an employee recruited by some other employees to stir up trouble. Although the mailing had already been stopped, by that weekend, my name was being slandered by a “civil rights activist” on two gospel radio stations. He urged his followers (and they obliged) to picket City Hall and jam the phone lines for three days until I was fired. He even urged them to picket my house, which thankfully, they did not. The story appeared on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis American (the black weekly), ran on all the local TV stations and was discussed on the mainstream talk radio stations. The city manager, who was out of town on vacation, issued a weak statement taking full responsibility for the error. After assuring me no one would be fired and that I had broken no city work rules, he ordered a bogus “investigation,” then he proceeded to “take full responsibility” by giving me an extremely severe punishment unlike any the recently retired personnel director had seen in 37 years on the job. That punishment was relayed to the activist before I had been told of it myself and it was posted on the city’s website!
Needless to say, I was not going to take a pay cut, a demotion, a five-day unpaid suspension, an editorial board appointed over all my publications and a sensitivity training class nor write an apology to the four employees who complained (one of whom was on the 3-member “investigation” board….) I immediately got a lawyer, who appealed the punishment to the city’s Civil Service Board and showed the city manager the error of his ways (thanks in part to a tape of the radio broadcastswhich showed the activist referring to me repeatedly as a “so-called Jew” and making derogatory statements about Jews and their feelings about the Holocaust). Over the next 2 1/2 months, we negotiated a settlement, which unfortunately I am not at liberty to describe in detail. Suffice it to say, I could have gotten much more, judging by the public reaction to the case and just a few weeks later, to the Southwest case, had I taken it to the Civil Service hearing and on to a trial. However, I did not want to spend one more minute working in such an atmosphere. So I offered to leave in exchange for compensation for the fact that my professional reputation had been so damaged that I would be unable to find a job in public relations, not to mention the mental anguish and physical distress that led to a dangerous hike of my blood pressure.
By the way, the photographer, who also titled the photo, is a 42-year-old black woman who is an investigator with the St. Louis Public Defender’s office. She shot the photo of her own kids playing tag with two other children in a park. I was in touch with her during the whole controversy. She voluntarily came forward and appeared on television and spoke to print reporters to say she had no racist intent whatsoever. She was outraged that her innocent art was being twisted into something ugly, and she said so. But the protestors still found a way to turn it on me and the heat intensified, with some accusing me of “shifting the blame to that black woman.” The president of Arts & Letters also came forward to describe the process (which was a blind judging procedure with the titles and photographer’s names on the backs of photos to avoid bias in judging) and assured the public that there was no racist intent by anyone.
I think you’ll agree that this is another extreme case of “You Can’t Say That.” The offensive word wasn’t substituted or implied, let alone used, and certainly not by me. The irony is, there are plenty of red-necked racists in that City Hall, but I am not one of them. It’s a shame that some of these activists do not spend their energy fighting real racism in housing, employment, education and health care, rather than attacking a fellow equal-rights believer over a slur thatdidn’t even happen.
Like Jennifer Cundiff and Joseph Groh I was too busy doing my impossible job of trying to please everybody while meeting relentless deadlines to think about perpetrating some racist act.
Thanks for speaking out on this subject and for your continued study of it.
Eileen Duggan, Scapegoat
St. Louis, Missouri
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