On her second day at work at the Beacon of Hope House, an operating division of Catholic Charities Community Services on New York’s Staten Island, Joyce Asabor, a Nigerian-born black nurse, claimed that someone hung a decomposing bird on the back of her office door. Asabor complained that from the outset her coworkers openly discussed plans to sabotage her job, especially a secretary of one of her supervisors. The secretary, Asabor said, failed to give her business-related messages, repeatedly called her “an African bitch,” and directed her to “go back to the jungle.” Two of her superiors were present on some of the occasions when coworkers made such remarks and did nothing about it. Within...