I’ve seen cases like this personally. It’s usually not cut and dry either way. A person can have a pretty difficult attitude to work with, or honestly just not

I’ve seen cases like this personally. It’s usually not cut and dry either way. A person can have a pretty difficult attitude to work with, or honestly just not be a good fit to work with the other people on that team, and that person can have experienced harassment or inappropriate conduct from those people. Working relationships break down across multiple dimensions, so those things usually go hand-in-hand. But no one gets to tell someone else what their internal experience is. If I tell you that I bet you never experienced feeling different, or having a difference denigrated and feeling humiliated by it, or never knowing what it’s like to be in a minority in your life, I bet you’d tell me I was wrong or at least have some negative reaction to me telling you what your life is. It’s the same in this case. If the person says they felt they were denigrated for having an accent, that’s how they felt. Might be wrong, might not have been the other person’s intention, but the impact is the same. I’ve also seen diversity efforts both fail and function well at mid-level companies, and these kinds of conversations are extremely hard to have, and usually bring up difficult feelings for everyone, even if they are interested in advancing diversity at that company. It’s easy to run afoul of everyone’s feelings if that dynamic isn’t taken seriously, that digging into this is like digging into your own psyche in therapy, and you are very likely to dig up some difficult stuff. I don’t know if that happened or is happening here, but it’s so much more nuanced than just “toxic attitude.” Working in this space means dealing with and challenging deep-seeded attitudes that people hold close to their identities. It’s easy to screw up.