Supreme Court rejects Black dancer’s discrimination case

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MIAMI – A Black woman in Houston, Texas claims several clubs discriminated against her by limiting the number of African American females who can perform in their cabarets.

According to News One, Chanel Nicholson filed a lawsuit in 2021, claiming the club owners violated a federal law against discrimination and her civil rights.

However, on May 1, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected her appeal after losing her case in the lower courts.

According to the Hill, Nicholson said a manager at the club Cover Girls told her she could not perform at the venue in November 2017 because there were already “too many Black girls” in the club.

She also claimed that, in August 2021, she was told by the manager at a club called Splendor that the club was “not taking any more Black girls.”

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Justice Sonia Sotomayor determined that the more recent discriminatory acts alleged by Nicholson were not acts that stood on their own, but “continued effects” of past discrimination that are no longer actionable due to the statute.

Justice Brown Jackson wrote in her dissenting opinion that the court’s decision to side with the district court “flouts this Court’s clear precedents.”
“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,” she wrote. “Because the Fifth Circuit’s contrary ruling was patently erroneous, this Court should have granted Nicholson’s petition and summarily reversed the judgment.”