A car dealership that had to shell out a $10 million settlement for overcharging its Black customers faces a new racial discrimination lawsuit from one of its former employees.
Attorneys for Andre Jennings filed the suit last September against Ed Napleton Elmhurst Imports Inc., an automotive dealer headquartered in Illinois.
The complaint states that Jennings, a Black man, worked at one of the company’s dealerships called Napleton’s Kia of Elmhurst, where he and his Black colleagues were “subjected to an ongoing, racially hostile culture where frequent racial slurs, comments, stereotypes, and jokes saturated the workplace.”
The harassment against Jennings started in April 2019, according to the suit, and was carried out by the dealership’s white managers almost daily.
One of those managers would “casually and openly” call Jennings and his Black colleagues the N-word and in several instances where Jennings would make a sale, that same manager would say, “Take this deal back to finance, my n****r,” the complaint states.
“He was repeatedly using the N-word and called me ‘my n***a,’” Jennings said of his former white supervisor. “I’m talking about repeated occurrences. He thought it was friendly. He even joked about it, used the word ‘shines.’ It just got uncomfortable,” he told Atlanta Black Star.
The suit also alleges that when Black customers voiced dissatisfaction with deals, Jennings’ supervisor would tell him to “go calm your people down” or tell him, “You know how to handle your own kind.” He would refer to Black people as “the blacks” and claimed they were “not as educated as white people.”
White supervisors and colleagues would also often “joke” and make references to “fried chicken” or other harmful tropes and stereotypes directed at Black people.
In addition to the harassment, Jennings claims he and his Black colleagues were subjected to “excessive scrutiny”…
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