It's really unlikely that you would see that kind of talk in California 40 years ago, much less today. It just wasn't common in factories I worked at back then. And I seriously doubt it suddenly started up.
But more importantly, I question the product today's law schools are putting out. California did not have Jim Crow laws, or a Jim Crow 'era' whatever that's supposed to be.
These are temp workers, who apparently didn't get picked up, and are assuming it's due to their skin color. The law firm is most likely looking for a quick, cheap payday and found some clients.
It is unusual that a factory in a California urban area would have that kind of language. I would have been shocked to hear that kind of thing in Los Angeles in the 1970s and I was in a very ethnic neighborhood. Once you get outside the urban areas of California, you do hear racial slurs. I lived in Bakersfield for a short while after high school and I heard some racial terms about Hispanics I had never heard and I grew up in East Los Angeles.
The rural California culture is very different from Los Angeles and the Bay Area (the Bay Area and LA are very different cultures too, but both share a high tolerance for differences). California never had Jim Crow laws, but it did have racial discrimination laws. Asians were not allowed to own property in California at one time and there was a landmark US Supreme Court case about whether an Asian born in California was an American citizen or not. During WW II the internment of Japanese in California was very popular and some Japanese families had their property stolen with no real world recourse.
California also has a lot of people living there who originated in other states. And some of those people may have brought their cultural biases with them.
I would not be surprised if a lot of people working at the Fremont factory live 40+ miles away on the edges of the San Joaquin Valley. Many of the poorer workers in the Bay Area live in the Valley and commute long distances. Some of those people are certainly racist whites.
The political culture in the US right now has given permission for racists to become visible again. They have been there. Back in 2008 when Barack Obama got elected, I had a friend who was a bar tender in a blue collar, almost exclusively white bar around here. This is the conservative part of Portland, but even this county went for Barack Obama twice, but there were enough racists that when they felt they were with their "kind" they spoke up about their views of the new president saying some things that would probably get me banned if I repeated them here.
I found it kind of shocking at the time. Those attitudes had been culturally unpopular enough for long enough that those still holding them had learned to hold their tongues. In recent months there was a racist who killed one and badly injured another on Portland's light rail, though the two hurt/killed were white people coming to the defense of two non-white women who were being harassed. The majority of whites around here hold little or no racism, but there are enough to have some racist violence.
I would expect the Bay Area to be similar. Especially in a workplace that is drawing a fairly large number of people from the Valley where attitudes are less inclusive.
@wdolson we should call you Talon of Swooping Bird, for you swoop in and kill the buttershrimp joke premise with sharp knowledge of truth.
Sorry didn't mean to be quite so factual...
