A bank worker who won a £490,000 payout after being sacked for using the N-word at an anti-racist seminar says the whole sorry experience wouldn’t have occured if he wasn’t cursed with being a middle-aged white man.
Carl Borg-Neal, 59, raised a question during an anti-racism session being put on for staff at Lloyds Bank – saying the N-word as he did so. The woman running the exercise was so “badly distressed” she needed a week off to recover.
Borg-Neal was sacked for gross misconduct after the incident – but an employment tribunal ruled that Lloyds had unfairly dismissed him and discriminated against him on account of his dyslexia, which leads him to “spurt things out before he loses his train of thought”. Which I had no clue was a dyslexia symptom, but I guess it can affect everyone differently.
The former Lloyds worker told The Telegraph: “I feel very discriminated against. I often wonder if I wasn’t a white middle-aged male would I have had to go through everything I went through. There is no way of telling. But when I talk to my friends – and as you can imagine a good many are white, middle-aged and male – we all agree that is the worst thing you can be right now. You are bottom of everything.”
It was about an hour into the online training session – attended virtually by about 100 Lloyds managers – that Mr Borg-Neal asked how to handle a situation where someone from an ethnic minority uses a word that would be offensive if used by someone not of the same ethnicity. When the trainer did not appear to understand the question, Mr Borg-Neal explained: “The most common example being [N word] in the black community.”
Unfortunately, Borg-Neal used the actual word itself, and the trainer was left very shaken by it. According to one attendant, Borg-Neal was ”very much reprimanded in front of us all and when [he] tried to apologise or explain he was threatened with ‘you will be thrown off the course’”.
At first, Lloyds said they were appealing the payout as they have a zero-tolerance policy on racist language in any context, but it seems they later conceded defeat and will actually have to fork out closer to £1 million after legal fees and court costs are taken into account.
It’s actually such a ridiculous story that I had to double-check it was written in the Telegraph and I hadn’t been tricked by some kind of fake website. There’s just so many hilarious aspects to it:
– The banker who said the N-word during an anti-racism seminar and blamed it on his dyslexia.
– The anti-racism speaker who took a week off work due to distress from hearing the N-word.
– The judge who awarded a man £490k for being fired for sayin the N-word.
It just seems so improbable, but it absolutely happened. Hey, fair play to Carl Borg-Neal. Apparently what he really wanted was his job back, but he managed to get £490k instead which isn’t such a bad consolation at all.
For unbelievable footage of a teacher telling his students that he thinks the white race is superior, click HERE. Yikes.
