AppleOne hired him to drive a cherry picker at Cardinal for $14 an hour, but he found Black workers were largely kept off the vehicles.
Those jobs were given to less experienced Latino workers, even when licensed Black workers were first in line, he said. Instead, Simmons, in his mid-50s, was given a harder floor picker job for $12 an hour, on his feet loading boxes headed for Kaiser Permanente hospitals.
Temperatures inside the warehouse often rose past 90 degrees, he said. It was six days a week, 14 to 16 hours a day, including mandatory overtime. He saw Latino workers clocking out after eight to 10 hours, but when Black workers asked to leave after 14 hours, they were often threatened with termination, Simmons said.
A Latino supervisor “would make me clean up the trash while everybody else was sent home.” After three months of complaining, Simmons was allowed to drive a cherry picker, but his pay remained at $12 an hour, he said, lower than that of non-Black drivers.
He grew angry and despondent: “They’d write stuff on the bathroom walls — 'gorillas, go back to Africa.’ The Black workers would cross it out. Two days later, it would be right back.” Simmons complained to AppleOne and Cardinal managers, he said. “But nobody investigated. Nobody cared.” His Latina supervisor said, “If you’re up here complaining, the orders are not getting picked.” Cardinal officials testified they received complaints about racial slurs, including graffiti with the N-word, but some emails documenting complaints and their responses were erased due to an auto deletion policy, even after EEOC charges were filed.
Black workers who complained "started disappearing one by one," Simmons said. "We'd find out they were fired." After 11 months, he too was told “your assignment is over.” No reason was given, he said. By then, Simmons had started going to a psychologist. During visits, “I’d start shaking and crying,” he said.
He was put on antidepressants. Simmons got another job as a security guard but had to quit. The racism at Cardinal, he said, “messed me up. Something popped in my head. I was still having night terrors — waking up screaming.” Today, diagnosed with PTSD, Simmons is on disability. Anti-Black prejudice in Latino-dominated workplaces comes as no surprise to scholars of race relations. Tensions between Latinos and Black Americans have ebbed and flowed in Southern California over decades. Researchers point to a shared legacy of slavery in the U.S. and Latin America.
An estimated 15 times more enslaved Africans were taken to Spanish and Portuguese colonies than to North America. Latino attitudes toward Black Americans can be “tied not only to racism but to colorism," said Pew Research Center analyst Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, an issue that also arises among other races. “It goes back to colonial history’s caste system. White Spaniards were at the top. Blacks and Indigenous at the bottom. And racial mixtures in between.”
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In California's largest race bias cases, Latino workers are accused of abusing Black colleagues