St. Louis CofCC Blog

Buffalo News:

Mark Pasternak said he lost his state job helping troubled youths because he couldn’t stand working under a black boss who called him racist names like “cracker,” “polack” and “stupid white boy.”

Pasternak was dismissed from his position as a youth worker with the state Office of Children and Family Services in 1999. But today, he feels some relief and vindication.

After a rare reverse racial discrimination trial in Buffalo’s federal court, a jury Tuesday awarded Pasternak $150,000. Jurors found that his former boss, Tommy E. Baines, discriminated against him racially and created a hostile working environment.

Federal court officials said they could not recall any reverse discrimination case in Buffalo resulting in a larger monetary verdict. Most such cases wind up being settled or dismissed before they ever go to trial.

“I’m elated and overwhelmed,” the 48-year-old South Buffalo man said in an interview Wednesday. “I feel like I’ve been to hell and back. . . . After all these years, the best feeling is, the jury heard his story and mine, and they believed me.”

(snip)

Pasternak was subjected to three years of cruel abuse from Baines, a veteran supervisor with the agency formerly known as the state Division for Youth, according to Pasternak’s attorney, David J. Seeger.

The abuse came in the form of race-based slurs, job sabotage and crude insults that Baines made about Pasternak in front of co-workers, according to court papers and testimony.

“You’re a white boy, and I don’t like white boys,” Pasternak quoted Baines as telling him. “Handle it.”

“He said that to me more than once, and he said many other things like that over the years I worked for him,” Pasternak told The Buffalo News. “He called me cracker, polack, Paster-rat and stupid white boy. . . . I was sick to my stomach.”

Pasternak said his boss also harassed him by removing documents from his desk and changing the locks on doors and filing cabinets that Pasternak needed access to.

The state conducted an internal investigation into Pasternak’s allegations in 1998, court records show, and the investigation resulted in a $2,000 fine against Baines. But he was allowed to continue working as a supervisor.

(snip)

Pasternak has since obtained a railroad job, but “working with troubled youths was his passion,” Seeger said.

While I am glad for Mr. Pasternak, and for the greater cause for which this verdict stands, anyone whose passion is working with “troubled youths” (i.e. black juvenile members of the FFA, the Future Felons of America), such that he would take a job with a state agency, being mindful of the fact that many governmental offices and departments are nothing more than affirmative action hiring agencies, with affirmative action in promotions on top of that, one can’t help but think that he brought a slight bit of the bigotry directed at him from his affirmative action supervisor on himself. Put another way, anyone whose “passion” is “troubled youths” probably wouldn’t vote for Theodore Bilbo versus your typical New York State liberal Democrat or Rockefeller Republican.

Otherwise, the real scandal here is not the bigoted harassment on the part of the black boss, it’s the fact that he wasn’t fired for it. A white boss that would call a black worker over which he had supervisory authority even one racial slur would have been dismissed instantly.