WASHINGTON (CN) - The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a Black dancer's discrimination case on Monday, prompting a sharp dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who warned the decision allowed entrenched racial bias to go unchallenged.

Chanel Nicholson sued Houston-era nightclubs in 2021 for discriminating against Black dancers, often limiting how many women of color were allowed to work at once. Her complaint was denied. Although she had faced racial discrimination in the past, none of those incidents had been officially documented.

The Supreme Court declined to reverse an appeals court ruling that barred Nicholson's claim, despite objections from Justices Jackson and Sotomayor, appointees of Presidents Biden and Obama, respectively.

Jackson said her colleagues should have granted Nicholson's petition and summarily reversed the erroneous judgment. 

"As this Court has made abundantly clear, '[t]he existence of past acts and the employee's prior knowledge of their occurrence... does not bar employees from filing [claims] about related discrete acts so long as the acts are independently discriminatory.'"  Jackson wrote in a dissent joined by Sotomayor. "Rather, '[e]ach discrete discriminatory act starts a new clock for filing charges alleging that act.'"  

Nicholson started performing at Splendor and Cover Girls in 2016. The pair of Houston, Texas clubs had a reputation for discriminating against Black dancers. Nicholson claimed that the club made employment decisions according to race, limiting the number of Black dancers in an establishment at one time. 

According to Nicholson, the policy of discrimination was so well established that the manager at Cover Girls had his hiring privileges revoked after he hired African American dancers. Managers at the clubs prohibited Nicholson from working three days a week on average because of her race. 

After a four-year hiatus, Nicholson reported the discrimination when she returned to work in 2021. When she filed her lawsuit that same year, the clubs argued that it was too late for the courts to intervene. 

The Fifth Circuit found Nicholson's suit time-barred, ruling that the statute of limitations began in 2016, even though she experienced the same form of discrimination again in 2021.

Jackson said this approach was incorrect. 

"Nicholson's allegations - that, due to her race, she was barred from entering Cover Girls in November 2017 and Splendor in August 2021 - are claims of unlawful discrimination that are actionable on their own terms," Jackson wrote. "The fact that Nicholson allegedly suffered similar acts of race discrimination in the past has no bearing on whether those two claims can proceed." 

Nicholson's race-based exclusion was not surprising considering the club's history, but Jackson said that the predictability of the club's actions does not make the exclusions nondiscriminatory. 

"That last point bears repeating plainly, in light of the Fifth Circuit's obvious confusion: If the discrete act that is the subject of the plaintiff's discrimination complaint is itself discriminatory, and if it allegedly occurred within the statute of limitations period, then that discrimination claim is timely - full stop," Jackson wrote. 

The Supreme Court did not explain its decision to deny Nicholson's petition. 

Source: Courthouse News Service