Ex-employee sues Hawks for alleged discrimination against white people

A former Atlanta Hawks employee is suing the team for alleged discrimination against her by upper management, including jokes about so-called "white culture," according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Raisa Habersham.

Margo Kline filed the lawsuit Friday asking for punitive damages for what she claims was an exclusionary environment against white employees and the subsequent favoritism of black employees by the team's external affairs director David Lee, a black man.

The Hawks ignored her complaints while encouraging other white employees to ostracize Kline or risk losing their jobs, the lawsuit claims.

After five years with the Hawks as a community development coordinator, Kline was fired in March 2017.

“We take all claims of discrimination seriously and have performed a thorough review of these baseless claims," the team's statement to The Journal-Constitution reads. "The case was quickly dismissed at the (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) level. We deny these claims and will vigorously defend against them.”

The Hawks have been no strangers to controversies relating to race in recent years - but, usually, the dynamic of the offenses have been reversed. In the aftershocks of the Los Angeles Clippers' Donald Sterling fiasco in 2014, then-Hawks owner Bruce Levenson sold the team after self-disclosing an offensive email in which he discussed the team's black fans.

The team's general manager at the time, Danny Ferry, also found himself in hot water after audio from a conference call showed him reading, verbatim, a scouting report on Luol Deng, describing the Sudanese-born swingman as having "a little African in him." Despite a third-party investigation finding that the offensive language wasn't Ferry's by origin, Ferry took an indefinite leave of absence before resigning in 2015.