Introduction: The Cumulative Harm Courts Fail to See
In Knox v. CRC Management Co., LLC, the Second Circuit reinstated a hostile work environment claim brought by Natasha Knox, a Black woman of Jamaican descent who alleged near-daily racial harassment while working in three Bronx laundromats. While the decision was correct to vacate summary judgment, it also highlights a deeper judicial and institutional failure: the persistent refusal to credit the cumulative nature of racialized harm—especially when that harm is narrated by a disenfranchised individual standing alone.
Too often, courts and investigators fail to recognize hostile work environments not because the law is unclear but because they cannot relate to the persons complaining about the harm. Lived experience is filtered through unfamiliar lenses. A white male judge may not perceive that being called “ghetto” by one’s supervisor carries racialized undertones. An HR investigator may not appreciate the humiliation embedded in accent-mocking or cultural belittlement. A legal framework premised on “reasonableness” fails when those judging reasonableness are far removed from the social realities of the complainant.
Knox’s case—and the Supreme Court’s decision in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, 601 U.S. ___ (2024)—demonstrate why our legal understanding of hostile environments must evolve. Harassment is rarely spectacular. It is habitual. And if the law only sees violence, epithets, or extreme vulgarity, it will continue to miss the sum of indignities that define the working lives of the most vulnerable.
I. From Microaggressions to Structural Violence: What Knox Reveals
The factual record in Knox is a blueprint of cumulative harm. Over months, Natasha Knox endured racialized insults from two successive supervisors: that she was “too hood and ghetto” to work at Clean Rite; that “the Yankee in her” made her timid; that she “looked like Aunt Jemima”; that she should not speak “Jamaican” when upset.
These were not isolated incidents. They formed a daily narrative of racial exclusion and disrespect—directed by those with authority over her and unchecked by those above them. Yet the district court found these comments insufficiently “severe or pervasive” to constitute a hostile work environment—a conclusion that reflects not legal rigor but a failure of recognition. It reveals how courts often interpret racial harm through a lens of unfamiliarity, dismissing what they do not understand—or do not want to.
The “reasonable person” standard, central to hostile environment doctrine, assumes a shared baseline of perception. But that assumption collapses when judges and investigators are not proximate to the lived experience of low-wage Black women in service-sector jobs. They do not hear the insults the same way. They do not recognize HR’s silence as betrayal. And so, they do not see what is there.
This disconnect is not neutral. It is structural. As I’ve argued in Disbelieving the Disenfranchised, plaintiffs like Knox are routinely held to evidentiary standards that presume exaggeration. Their sworn declarations are dismissed as “self-serving.” Their recollections are scrutinized for vagueness. Their credibility is questioned in ways that institutional affidavits are not. This is not just evidentiary bias—it is a failure to relate.
II. The Investigative Discount and the Illusion of Objectivity
This failure of recognition is not confined to the courtroom. It is mirrored in the institutional responses that precede litigation—particularly in internal investigations. When conducted at all, such inquiries are often superficial, structured to protect liability rather than uncover harm. In Knox, management did not substantively address her repeated reports of racial harassment. They ignored her request for a lifting accommodation after a documented injury. They dismissed her complaint of wage theft. Within a month of raising these concerns, she was terminated.
This is not an outlier. It is a pattern. Investigators—whether embedded in HR, contracted as outside counsel, or working within administrative agencies—frequently misapprehend how power operates in the workplace. They focus on isolated events. They demand contemporaneous documentation. They disregard repetition as anecdotal. But racial and gender-based harassment often manifests not in singular, headline-worthy incidents but in the steady drumbeat of exclusion: who is mocked, who is silenced, who is believed.
Identity, again, is central. Investigators who do not share, understand, or even recognize the cultural context in which microaggressions and bias occur may fail to see them. This is not necessarily malice—it is misalignment. The law asks whether a “reasonable person” would find the conduct abusive but rarely interrogates who that person is and what world they inhabit. The gap between what is felt and what is recognized becomes the gap between survival and redress.
In Rasmy v. Marriott Int’l, Inc., 952 F.3d 379 (2d Cir. 2020), the Second Circuit emphasized that courts must evaluate hostile work environment claims based on the totality of the circumstances, including the plaintiff’s lived experience. But too often, courts default to their vantage point—disregarding cumulative harm because they cannot conceive of it as injurious. Courts and investigators cease to be neutral arbiters when that perspective dominates. They become enforcers of disbelief. But the law is beginning to shift—albeit quietly.
III. Muldrow’s Impact: Disrupting the “Ultimate Harm” Doctrine
While Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, 601 U.S. __, 2024 WL 1642826 (2024), was not expressly cited in Knox, its reasoning should have permeated both the district court’s and the Second Circuit’s analyses. Indeed, the Second Circuit’s analysis in Knox mirrored the post-Muldrow understanding of harm—focusing on the impact of discriminatory treatment rather than its magnitude. This implicit embrace of Muldrow signals that the doctrinal tide is shifting, even when courts are not yet naming the current. In Muldrow, the Supreme Court clarified a foundational tenet of Title VII: a plaintiff need not demonstrate an “ultimate” employment action—like termination, demotion, or pay cut—to prevail. It is enough to show that discriminatory conduct affected “a term, condition, or privilege” of employment and caused some harm, even if that harm is subtle, reputational, or difficult to quantify.
This clarification reshapes how courts must assess hostile work environment claims rarely defined by singular events. Instead, they are built from cumulative indignities—covert marginalization, interpersonal erosion, and the repeated denial of respect or redress. Under Muldrow, these injuries are not peripheral to the statutory scheme; they are central. The law is not reserved for catastrophic ruptures. It is designed to redress the ordinary degradations that signal who matters and does not in the workplace.
In Knox, those degradations were constant. Her supervisors did not merely fail to protect her—they participated in the denigration. She was called “too hood and ghetto,” told she “looked like Aunt Jemima,” and mocked for “talking Jamaican” when upset. When she sought a modest medical accommodation after a documented injury, she was told she shouldn’t have the job. When she reported wage theft, she was ignored. When she stood up, she was fired.
These were not isolated incidents. They formed a racialized ecosystem of disrespect—a workplace environment that conveyed, daily, that she was disposable. The district court dismissed this as insufficiently “severe or pervasive,” failing to grasp the doctrinal shift Muldrow represents. Under Muldrow, the question is not whether the harm was dramatic but whether it was real. Emotional distress, workplace humiliation, and the silencing of complaints are actionable harms under Title VII.
Knox thus operates as a case study in what Muldrow demands: that courts take seriously the granular harms of discrimination, particularly when they are delivered not through singular violations but through patterned exclusion. Muldrow teaches us that hostile work environments do not require spectacle. They require recognition. And that the law must reach what shocks the conscience and slowly corrodes it.
IV. Judicial and Investigative Myopia Is a Structural Barrier to Justice
The sum of indignities Knox endured is not only morally indefensible—it is legally actionable. Yet, for far too many plaintiffs, those indignities remain invisible to those in power precisely because the people in power do not share their experience. Judges, investigators, and defense attorneys often interpret facts through a lens shaped by institutional proximity. Bias is invisible to courts and investigators not because it is absent but embedded—in their frameworks, vantage points, and assumptions about whose story deserves belief. They are fluent in risk management, compliance procedures, and liability containment. But they are far less fluent in the lived reality of those who experience discrimination from below the line of authority.
They often do not understand what it means to show up to a job where your accent is treated as a defect, where your cultural identity becomes a punchline. Where the refusal to accommodate a doctor’s instruction is not a misunderstanding, but a message—that your pain is inconvenient, and your assertion of rights, unwelcome. The systems meant to protect you are silent not because they lack awareness but because silence is embedded in the design.
And so, they minimize. They call declarations “unsubstantiated.” They treat the absence of witnesses as dispositive. They characterize emotional specificity as overstatement. The judiciary’s commitment to neutrality too often becomes a conduit for disbelief—not because judges act in bad faith, but because they interpret through unfamiliarity. And in doing so, they hollow out the promise of hostile work environment law—turning it into an abstract standard unreachable by those most in need of its protection.
Conclusion: From Disbelief to Disqualification
Singular acts of outrage rarely mark hostile work environments. They are formed through accumulation—of slights, silences, indignities, and denials. The Second Circuit’s decision in Knox moves toward recognizing this truth. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Muldrow provides the doctrinal scaffolding to support it. But if those decisions are to matter in practice, the legal system must confront the deeper impediment to justice: institutional bias disguised as neutrality.
Disbelief is not passive. It is not an innocent failure of understanding. It is a structured choice that reflects which voices are deemed credible, which harms are legible, and which lives are worth protecting. Courts and investigators do not merely “miss” cumulative harm; they often minimize it because it comes from the mouths of those whose lived experience lies outside their own. The result is not just evidentiary asymmetry—it is exclusion.
To call a plaintiff’s sworn declaration “self-serving” while accepting an employer’s boilerplate affidavit as neutral is not mere error. It is a failure of imagination rooted in power. It reflects a system that validates harm only when presented in dominant institutions’ language, cadence, and framing. For low-wage workers, women of color, immigrants, and those living at the intersection of marginalization, that standard makes the courtroom not a place of refuge but a site of re-traumatization.
Knox demands more than a legal citation. It calls for a change in posture. The judiciary and those investigating workplace discrimination must stop interpreting from above and begin listening from below—from the ground level of harm, where dignity is eroded not by one act but by the sum of many.
If discrimination law means anything, it must mean this: that truth, when sworn and lived, is enough to be believed. That justice does not depend on proximity to power. And that the stories of the disenfranchised are not anecdotal—they are constitutional.