On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal filed by a Black dancer in Houston, Texas, who claims she has been discriminated against by several Houston clubs that place limits on how many Black women they will hire to perform.
According to The Hill, professional dancer Chanel Nicholson filed her lawsuit in August 2021, claiming the clubs listed as defendants violated a federal law against racial discrimination in making and enforcing contracts by limiting the number of Black dancers who could work the same shift as a matter of policy. For example, 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.”
Now, off the top, anyone who has been paying attention to the way the conservative-leaning Supreme Court has treated discrimination cases recently might assume Nicholson’s suit was dismissed for one (or both) of two reasons: she’s a Black woman who is a dancer — so the courts are simply not taking her seriously for reasons rooted in systemic misogynoir — or she’s not a white person filing a suit over a DEI policy, as that’s pretty much what one has to be to get a federal anti-discrimination claim to shake their way under the current administration.
Both of these might have been the real reason the plaintiff’s case was dismissed, but the reason a district court gave was that the statute of limitations was up — despite the appearance that it wasn’t.
From the Hill:
Nicholson said she was denied work repeatedly due to the quota, including in 2014, 2017 and 2021. However, her case was dismissed by a district court that concluded the applicable statute of limitations clock began ticking in 2014;…
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