I Sued the Fancy Gym I Worked At For Racial Discrimination. I Won.

This essay is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

Let’s call it The Club. It was beautiful. Luxurious. I really, really wanted to work there. It had and still has a reputation for being the absolute best. They provided their trainers with a ton of in-house education. I’d been in the fitness industry since 2006; this is where I wanted to be.

I was hired as a junior manager in downtown Manhattan in 2018. Within three weeks I received a promotion, an $11,000 raise, and a transfer to a club on the Upper East Side. It wasn’t that surprising because I had a lot of experience, and I had the numbers to back it up. But the same day I transferred, the outgoing manager—a Black woman I’ll call N—issued a warning after only a tiny amount of small talk. She told me that K, the junior manager to whom I’d be a supervisor, had a thing for young Black women. “I see you coming in as a young, vibrant Black woman, and I don’t want you to struggle in the way that I did,” N said. “If I were you, I would set a boundary early on so you can get him to do work.”

I remember thinking, “Okay, that is a red flag.” But I wasn’t about to quit. I started working at the club and it turns out N was right. K made every effort to talk to me about Black women he had dated, Black women he was crushing on, Black women at the gym who he thought had great tits. “Look at her ass,” all that bullshit. That’s inappropriate talk for anyone at work, let alone your supervisor. At the same time, though, he went out of his way to let me know that he didn't think I was qualified for the job, that I should have “started from the bottom and worked my way up.” He told the staff I didn't understand The Club’s culture, and therefore they didn’t need to listen to me.

I don't like when people are interested in me simply because I'm a Black face attached to a vagina. I don't stand for it. But to do that and also be incapable of showing Black women any respect, particularly to your supervisor, is disgusting to me. Those two things would be reprehensible separately. Together, they made me sick.

K was also disparaging about our Black employees. He would constantly call them lazy. We hired a guy who was Black and so excited to be there, just a sponge for knowledge. He would show up early and stay late, would do everything in his power to prove that he was dedicated to working at The Club. But K would say, “You know, he’s is a really nice guy, but I don't think he's going to make it as a trainer. I don't think he has what it takes.” You're telling me you’re happy to let him clean the gym and pick up food for the staff meeting, but you’re unwilling to support him in the role we actually hired him to do?

I’ve never experienced that kind of direct, entitled, open racism—certainly not in the workplace.

I started witnessing racism and sexism almost daily. I didn’t go to human resources about every single thing—I didn’t want to put a target on my back—but I felt I had to report the more egregious incidents. Typically, HR would address the problem. But then immediately after, I would be written up for being late. It was retaliation and it wasn't subtle. Literally the day after I would call HR about something, I would get called into the office and my job would be threatened.

One day, a membership advisor called me and told me a man had just signed up for a membership and wanted to work with a trainer. “A white male trainer,” she specified. I tried to clarify: “Is he describing someone he saw during his tour or something?” She double-checked with him: “No, just any white male.”

I told her, “First of all, I highly recommend never calling a Black woman ever again to say that someone is requesting to work with no one of their gender or race. That's offensive. But more than that, I can't grant that request. It would be a liability for the company if employees learned that they did not receive work on the basis of their race and gender.” She insisted she was just trying to make sure we were providing good customer service to our members. I responded that racism is not customer service.

I've dealt with racism my whole life; most Black people will say that they have. But I’ve never experienced that kind of direct, entitled, open racism—certainly not in the workplace. I called the general manager right away and let him know exactly what happened. The next afternoon, I sent him and HR an email detailing the incident. That same day, the general manager informed me that he was writing me up for being late. He also let me know that my job was on the line: If I got written up again, he said, I was going to be fired.

Was I technically late? Yes. But everyone knew that managers’ arrival times were never meant to be hard directives. The culture at The Club was that every single manager was late a lot of the time, and no managers at this location were ever written up for being late. Even K was shocked that I was being written up.

In large, coastal, urban cities, the majority of staff at gyms are people of color.

Later, I found out my general manager went behind my back and granted the new client’s request. He told K I was unwilling to provide customer service to our members, so would he pair the man up with one of the only two white male trainers? Context is important here: In large, coastal, urban cities, the majority of staff at gyms are people of color. Personal training is a career where, without a college degree, you can get certified and make hundreds of dollars an hour and have health insurance. Health and financial stability are hard to secure in underserved communities.

In the end, HR wrote up the general manager and the membership advisor. But the two of them kept their jobs. Management allowed the new member who’d made the discriminatory request to keep his membership, and to continue training with whichever white male trainer he preferred. 

Three months after this incident, I was fired.

My first thought was that I was going to lose my health insurance. I had struggled with an eating disorder for years, and the stress at work had made it much worse. It was the first time I’d had to seek clinical treatment, and if I lost this job I wouldn't be able to afford it. So I begged them to let me stay. Just give me another job at another location so I can keep my health insurance. It didn’t work. They still fired me.

Eventually, I went to a lawyer, who referred me to a litigation firm. The lawyers were incredible and supportive from the beginning. We sued The Club for subjecting me to a hostile work environment and for firing me because of my race. The jury believed me. I won.

A lot came to light during my trial. There were texts and emails with racist inside jokes. There was the time K called a Black woman “autistic” in a meeting. It turned out that the general manager who wrote me up for being late was late himself 57 percent of the time—even more than me. Yet most people named in my case still work at The Club. K has a better title now and makes more money. So does the man who hired me.

Still, I’m glad I did it. The jury agreed on a landmark award which was primarily punitive damages, but the money was never really the point. Part of it is because I knew what happened to me was wrong. Part of it was because I was leaving behind a staff of people of color who I feared would continue to be subjected to this if I didn't say anything. And part of it was because of my grandmother, the one on my dad’s side. She immigrated here in 1966, during the civil rights movement, to seek a better life for herself and my father. She came here with a Master's degree and had been a teacher and a nurse in Guyana. Here, she was put in ESL classes, even though Guyana is an English-speaking country. When she started working as a nurse, they put her in the lowest roles. They acted like she was incompetent. She dealt with the same shit I did. 

So when I told her what happened to me, her immediate response was, “I didn't come here in 1966 for you to lay down and let someone do this.” She always made it clear that it was my moral and social responsibility to speak up, because we have to protect the people we can.