The taunts started in the first days of Andre Pryce’s new job, camouflaged as joking. During the nine months of 2019 spent working as a drill rig hand, mostly in the woods in western Pennsylvania, for a contractor that also performs much construction-related drilling, he said coworkers filled his ears with racist insults.

A coworker who wanted to pass him near the door of a temporary tool storage structure, called a doghouse, told him to move and added the N-word to the command. “I didn’t move because that’s not my name,” Pryce said later. But as weeks went by, the coworker kept using the epithet, as well as calling him “boy” almost daily.