WWOZ employee files EEOC lawsuit. But there's more...

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A woman who previously described New Orleans’ beloved radio station WWOZ as a hostile workplace filed a federal lawsuit Friday (Oct. 19), accusing station managers of gender, disability and racial discrimination and retaliation. Tabitha Pearl Ricks, the station’s former outreach coordinator, seeks unspecified damages in the lawsuit.

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Ricks’ lawsuit says her direct supervisor at the station, Marcel McGee, referred to her as “black woman” despite requests to use her name instead, and made other comments about her physical appearance, including requests that she wear heels and dresses. In the lawsuit, Ricks also claims McGee said African-American women who date non-African-Americans are “sell outs.” The suit also says McGee made comments about Ricks “natural hair,” including that women who wear theirs in that way “have more attitude.”

Both Ricks and McGee are African-American.

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Ricks has been diagnosed with bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorder, and she says in the lawsuit that her experience at WWOZ heightened her anxiety, and that managers refused to accommodate her request to work from the station’s second office as a means of managing her symptoms. Ricks’ experience at WWOZ was “so onerous, abusive, and intolerable for (her) that no black, African American individual in (her) shoes would have been expected to continue working under such conditions,” and she resigned, the lawsuit says, because Ricks “felt extremely humiliated, degraded, victimized, embarrassed and emotionally distressed.”

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