In Damptey v. Truist Bank, No. 6:26-CV-00050, 2026 WL 1358740 (W.D. Va. May 14, 2026), the court granted defendant’s motion to dismiss plaintiff’s complaint alleging a race-based hostile work environment in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This decision illustrates the context-specific analysis required in these types of cases. From the decision:
A hostile work environment claim fails unless “the workplace is permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult that is sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment.” Id.; see also Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc., 510 U.S. 17, 21 (1993)). A hostile-work-environment claim almost always “involves repeated conduct,” Nat’l R.R. Passenger Corp. v. Morgan, 536 U.S. 101, 115 (2002); however, a single incident of harassment can constitute a hostile work environment if it is “extremely serious” so as to “Boyer-Liberto v. Fontainebleau Corp., 786 F.3d 264, 277 (4th Cir. 2015). The ultimate inquiry, though, is whether the conduct is so “extreme” as to “amount to a change in the terms and conditions of employment.” Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775, 788 (1998).
In prior cases, courts have found that a single utterance of the n-word or other racial slurs can create a racially hostile work environment. E.g., Boyer-Liberto, 786 F.3d at 280; Adams v. Austal, U.S.A., L.L.C., 754 F.3d 1240, 1253-54 (11th Cir. 2014); Ayissi-Etoh v. Fannie Mae, 712 F.3d 572, 577 (D.C. Cir. 2013); Rodgers v. W.-S. Life Ins. Co., 12 F.3d 668, 675 (7th Cir. 1993). Those cases, however, look to two factors: (i) the long, unpleasant history behind the specific slurs, and (ii) the workplace role of person using them. Spriggs v. Diamond Auto Glass, 242 F.3d 179, 185 (4th Cir. 2001) (finding hostile work environment where supervisor used racial slur). Put simply, where a supervisor uses a racial slur, courts have been willing to infer a racially hostile work environment and impute liability to the employer.
Damptey alleges her supervisor used the term “cotton picking.” Dkt. 1 at 4. The term “cotton picking” has a complex history. See Reed v. Franciscan All., Inc., 2026 WL 622404, at *3 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 4, 2026). The phrase “originates in the American South as a reference to the difficult agricultural labor performed by Black enslaved people and sharecroppers and is therefore seen to be belittling of that labor.” Id. However, the term also has a non-racial meaning and was once widely used as an alternative to “damn.” Id.; see also https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/cotton-picking. Given this alternative, non-racial use of the term, Damptey needed to allege some facts showing that her supervisor used the term in a racial manner. Without additional context, the Court cannot say that Damptey has pled extreme harassment that altered her conditions of employment.4
Moreover, Damptey has not alleged how often her supervisor used the term, that her supervisor used the term against her, or that her supervisor is not in the protected class. For example, if her supervisor is a member of the same protected class, the Court is less likely to infer racial animus. Cf. Coggins v. Goverment of D.C., 173 F.3d 424 (4th Cir. 1999) (“The fact that both Krull and Gibbons are both Caucasian makes any anti-Caucasian bias unlikely.”).
The court concluded that, given these pleading deficiencies, plaintiff has not adequately pleaded a hostile work environment.