In Newcomer v. Mom’s Organic Market, Inc., 2026 WL 302537 (D.Md. 2026), the court, inter alia, granted plaintiff’s morion defendant’s motion to dismiss plaintiff’s amended complaint alleging a race-baser hostile work environment.
From the decision:
The Court had originally dismissed this claim because no facts connected May’s racially derogatory conduct generally to Newcomer more particularly, or made clear how May’s assaultive acts were linked to Newcomer’s race. ECF No. 20 at 15. The proposed amended complaint, however, makes plausible that May routinely spoke to people of color in a harsh, belittling manner in contrast to the cordiality May showed White employees. ECF No. 24-2 at ¶¶ 29–30. May was also hypercritical of Black employees and contemporaneously assaulted them. Id. ¶ 31–32. May often placed people of color in “chokeholds” but did not do so with White employees. Id. ¶ 32.
Newcomer, in turn, tried to speak with May about the litany of complaints received from Black and Brown employees, at which point May trained her sights on Newcomer. She called Newcomer one of the “ABWs” (angry Black women) who acted like a “pack of wolves” ready to attack May. ECF No. 24-2 ¶¶ 51–53. On several occasions, May also snuck up behind Newcomer and put her in a chokehold as she did with other people of color. And May did not stop even after Newcomer protested. Id. ¶¶ 31–34, 47–50, 58, 77–78. Nor did management curb May’s abusive behavior once they learned about it. Id. ¶¶ 130–34 (Newcomer complaining to supervisor about May having placed her and other people of color in chokeholds and speaking to them in racially derogatory terms). See also id. ¶¶ 55, 91 (Newcomer complaining about May’s conduct to management). As a result, Newcomer sought therapy to cope with the racially hostile and toxic work environment that May had created. Id. ¶ 70.
From this, the proposed amended complaint makes plausible that Newcomer had been “subjected to a hostile work environment on the basis of race” because MOM’s allowed “May to assault her and other Black and Hispanic Employees and use racist and gendered slurs—while she did not similarly assault White employees.” Id. ¶¶ 160, 185. See also Spriggs, 242 F.3d at 185 (explaining that the n-word is a “pure anathema to African Americans” such that “no single act can more quickly alter the conditions of employment”) (quoting Rodgers v. Western–Southern Life Ins. Co., 12 F.3d 668, 675 (7th Cir. 1993)); see also id. (explaining that “[t]o suggest that a human being’s physical appearance is essentially a caricature of a jungle beast goes far beyond the merely unflattering; it is degrading and humiliating in the extreme,” in response to a supervisor calling a Black employee a “monkey”). May’s conduct was objectively hostile and race-directed, as made plausible by the other Black and Brown employees who found working with May to be uncomfortable, unacceptable, and in one case, so opprobrious that the employee asked not to work with May any longer. ECF No. 24-2 ¶¶ 28, 50.
Theo court concluded that, when viewing the facts most favorably to Newcomer, the hostile work environment claims will proceed.