Supreme Court's Refusal to Hear Racial Discrimination Case Sparks Forceful Dissent from Justices Jackson and Sotomayor

 

Justices Jackson and Sotomayor Deliver Scathing Dissent After Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Black Dancer’s Discrimination Case

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor delivered a powerful dissent after the Republican-majority Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Chanel Nicholson, a Black dancer who alleged she was repeatedly denied work because of racially discriminatory practices at Houston-area clubs.

This is how you stand on the right side of history.

Nicholson's lawsuit alleged that several Houston clubs enforced an unspoken cap on the number of Black dancers allowed to work during any given shift — a clear violation of federal anti-discrimination laws. She said she was denied opportunities due to this discriminatory quota in 2014, 2017, and again in 2021.

But a district court dismissed the case, ruling that the statute of limitations had expired, starting from the first reported incident in 2014. The conservative-leaning Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal.

Nicholson appealed to the Supreme Court, asking it to decide whether a pattern of ongoing racial discrimination could reset the clock on the statute of limitations. The court, dominated by Republican appointees, declined to take the case.

In her dissent, Justice Jackson — joined by Justice Sotomayor — strongly criticized the lower courts’ interpretation of the law.

“We have long held that ‘[e]ach discrete discriminatory act starts a new clock for filing charges alleging that act,’ regardless of whether similar instances of discrimination have occurred in the past,” Jackson wrote.

She argued that the Fifth Circuit’s decision was “patently erroneous” and that the Supreme Court should have granted Nicholson’s petition and summarily reversed the lower court’s ruling.

Jackson cited two particularly troubling examples from Nicholson’s experience. In 2017, a manager at Cover Girls allegedly told Nicholson she couldn’t work that night because there were “too many Black girls” on shift. After taking a break from dancing, Nicholson was later told by another club manager that they were “not taking any more Black girls.”

“To conclude that Nicholson’s claims are time-barred because there were earlier instances of discriminatory treatment, as the Fifth Circuit did, impermissibly inoculates the clubs’ more recent discriminatory conduct,” Jackson argued.

She warned that allowing sustained discriminatory intent to be treated as mere “continued effects” of past acts would effectively shield ongoing discrimination from accountability.

“If sustained discriminatory motivation is all that is required to transform recent, racially discriminatory acts into the ‘continued effects’ of earlier discriminatory conduct,” Jackson concluded, “then past discrimination could inexplicably prevent recovery for later, similarly unlawful conduct.”