In Flaherty v. Lindsey S. Dixon et al, 2023 WL 2051861 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 16, 2023), the court, inter alia, granted defendant’s motion to dismiss plaintiff’s race-based hostile work environment claim.
From the decision:
The PSAC [Proposed Second Amended Complaint]’s allegations to support an inference of race discrimination are almost exclusively that Plaintiff is white and that she had negative interactions with coworkers who are not white. The fact that most of Plaintiff’s coworkers were of a different race, and that they did not get along, does not give rise to an inference of race discrimination. The PSAC alleges one incident in which a coworker allegedly spoke to Plaintiff in Gaelic, apparently making assumptions about Plaintiff’s ethnic background. At most, such a comment is a nonactionable petty slight. [Cleaned up.]
The court further observed that plaintiff’s other allegations – that other employees “treated her a particular way because of her race, and that employees of other races were not treated the same way” were conclusory and, thus, insufficient to state a claim.
In reaching its conclusion, the court cited case law for the proposition that, e.g., the “law does not blindly ascribe to race all personal conflicts between individuals of different races” and that racial bias is not necessarily inferred from the mere fact that the decisionmakers were of a different race than the plaintiff.