A ‘racist’ dog? Job complaint details talk

Cleaner says she was denied work at priest’s Tenn. home

The home of a Catholic priest was the last place LaShundra Allen ever would have expected to be denied work because of her skin color, she said.

Allen, who is black, arrived with her white coworker the morning of May 3 for what was supposed to be her first day cleaning the Rev. Jacek Kowal’s rectory at the Catholic Church of the Incarnation in Collierville, Tennessee. The coworker from the cleaning company who accompanied her, Emily Weaver, was quitting and came along to introduce Allen as her replacement.

But the women wouldn’t get far. The secretary stopped them, Allen told The Washington Post, and said she would have to go ask Kowal if the new arrangement was OK.

The secretary soon informed them it was actually not OK — because of the priest’s “racist” dog.

“I’m sorry,” Kowal’s secretary said, according to a complaint sent to the Catholic Diocese of Memphis last month. “We are not trying to be rude, but the dog doesn’t like black people.”

Allen said she “didn’t really even have words,” baffled at what she just heard.

“They came at me like it was supposed to be a joke,” she said, “but it was not funny. There was nothing funny about it.” Allen and Weaver sent a racial discrimination complaint to the Diocese of Memphis on July 3, seeking a “settlement and compromise.”

But on Aug. 16, the Diocese of Memphis said in a statement that it completed its investigation and found that what happened at the priest’s rectory “simply was not a case of racial discrimination” and that Kowal “did nothing wrong.”

The investigation came in response to the complaint, which was first reported by the Commercial Appeal.

In the church’s version of events, the secretary’s words were, “Father Jacek’s dog is kinda racist” — although in the eyes of the diocese, the statement did not stem from any racial discrimination. The priest and church staff were concerned that the dog, a German shepherd named Ceaser, could attack Allen or both women, based in part on a past incident the dog had with an African American person, according to the letter from Bishop David Talley.

“Although the parish staff member’s choice of words was highly unfortunate and imprecise — they were not motivated by racial animus,” Talley wrote. “Rather, the concern by all involved was the safety of these women, one of whom was a stranger to the dog.”

Talley said the employees’ interpretation that Kowal was “motivated by a desire not to have an African American housekeeper” was “simply not true.”

He had previously employed an African American housekeeper for five years during his last assignment, Talley noted.