Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 832.0

524US2

Unit: U100

[09-15-00 14:43:08] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 524 U. S. 775 (1998)

787

Opinion of the Court

just as we have also followed the lead of such cases in at-
tempting to deﬁne the severity of the offensive conditions
necessary to constitute actionable sex discrimination under
the statute. See, e. g., Rogers, supra, at 238 (“[M]ere utter-
ance of an ethnic or racial epithet which engenders offensive
feelings in an employee” would not sufﬁciently alter terms
and conditions of employment to violate Title VII).1 See
also Daniels v. Essex Group, Inc., 937 F. 2d 1264, 1271–1272
(CA7 1991); Davis v. Monsanto Chemical Co., 858 F. 2d 345,
349 (CA6 1988), cert. denied, 490 U. S. 1110 (1989); Snell v.
Suffolk County, 782 F. 2d 1094, 1103 (CA2 1986); 1 B. Linde-
mann & P. Grossman, Employment Discrimination Law 349,
and nn. 36–37 (3d ed. 1996) (hereinafter Lindemann & Gross-
man) (citing cases instructing that “[d]iscourtesy or rudeness
should not be confused with racial harassment” and that “a
lack of racial sensitivity does not, alone, amount to action-
able harassment”).

So, in Harris, we explained that in order to be actionable
under the statute, a sexually objectionable environment
must be both objectively and subjectively offensive, one that
a reasonable person would ﬁnd hostile or abusive, and one
that the victim in fact did perceive to be so.
510 U. S., at
21–22. We directed courts to determine whether an envi-
ronment is sufﬁciently hostile or abusive by “looking at all
the circumstances,” including the “frequency of the discrimi-
natory conduct; its severity; whether it is physically threat-

1 Similarly, Courts of Appeals in sexual harassment cases have properly
drawn on standards developed in cases involving racial harassment. See,
e. g., Carrero v. New York City Housing Auth., 890 F. 2d 569, 577 (CA2
1989) (citing Lopez v. S. B. Thomas, Inc., 831 F. 2d 1184, 1189 (CA2 1987),
a case of racial harassment, for the proposition that incidents of environ-
mental sexual harassment “must be more than episodic; they must be suf-
ﬁciently continuous and concerted in order to be deemed pervasive”). Al-
though racial and sexual harassment will often take different forms, and
standards may not be entirely interchangeable, we think there is good
sense in seeking generally to harmonize the standards of what amounts to
actionable harassment.