In a lawsuit filed Friday in California federal court, ex-employee April Curley accuses Google of systemic racial discrimination against Black employees, alleging the tech giant steers them into lower-level positions, pays them less and denies them advancement opportunities because of their race.
According to the complaint, Google maintains a “racially biased corporate culture” that favors white men, where Black people made up only 4.4% of employees in 2021 and 3% of the company’s leadership.
Curley’s lawsuit seeks class-action status and endeavors to recoup compensatory and punitive damages and lost compensation for current and former Black Google employees.
It also aims to restore them to their appropriate positions and seniority.
Curley also alleges that Google subjected Blacks to a hostile work environment and that Black people were “routinely harassed and targeted based on their race” at Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters.
The complaint states that, in a Google intranet document, “Google employees of color shared thousands of ‘microaggressions’ and acts of harassment they faced on a daily basis at Google offices, including being asked to serve their white colleagues or treated as outsiders who did not belong.”
Google hired Curley in 2014 to ostensibly design an outreach program to recruit employees from historically Black colleges.
In the complaint, Curley said her hiring was nothing but a “marketing ploy,” and that her supervisors demeaned her work, stereotyped her as an “angry” Black woman and passed her over for promotions.
After she and her colleagues began to put together a list of company reforms, Curley said she was fired in September 2020.
"While Google claims that they were looking to increase diversity, they were actually undervaluing, underpaying and mistreating their Black employees," Curley's lawyer Ben Crump said in a statement to Reuters.
Crump is a high-profile civil rights lawyer who has represented the families of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.
ABC 7 reports that another former Google employee, Chloe Sledd, made sexual and racial harassment allegations while she was working for the company.
“My first few months at Google were nothing like I imagined they would be, almost immediately it was a nightmare,” Sledd told the station. “A white male on my department floor began to sexually harass me."
Sledd said that Google's human resources department accused her of lying about the alleged harassment and did not get back to her, and that the man harassing her was allowed to keep his job and was not disciplined.
Breitbart reports that Google’s woke corporate culture is well-known among Silicon Valley tech companies, with the Alphabet Inc. imprint reportedly maintaining an entire program dedicated to “machine learning fairness” – a new academic discipline that attempts to merge critical race theory with computer science.
In 2018, Breitbart reported that documents released during another class-action lawsuit brought by ex-Google employees showed that “male and Caucasian employees” were viewed by the company “as less favored than others.”
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