In Bamba v. United States Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, 2025 WL 670188 (2d Cir. 2025), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the lower court’s dismissal of plaintiff’s claim of race-based hostile work environment asserted under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
From the decision:
Bamba’s hostile work environment claim fares no better. To establish a hostile work environment claim under Title VII, “a plaintiff must produce enough evidence to show that 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.” Gorzynski v. JetBlue Airways Corp., 596 F.3d 93, 102 (2d Cir. 2010) (internal quotation marks omitted). The plaintiff must also show that the purported mistreatment occurred because of his protected characteristic. See id. With respect to a claim for race discrimination, a plaintiff can establish such causation by providing “evidence of harassment in such race-specific and derogatory terms as to make it clear that the harasser is motivated by general hostility to the presence of individuals of a particular race in the workplace” or “some circumstantial [evidence] or other basis for inferring that [the] incident[, though] race-neutral on [its] face[,] w[as] in fact discriminatory.” Tassy v. Buttigieg, 51 F.4th 521, 533 (2d Cir. 2022) (alterations accepted).
We agree with the district court that Bamba failed to provide sufficient evidence of a racially hostile workplace. Although Bamba makes much of an altercation that he had with another DHS employee in March 2018 over Bamba’s denial of the employee’s request for funding, he does not challenge the district court’s conclusion that he failed to show that the conduct was racially motivated. That alone is enough to defeat Bamba’s appeal as to his hostile workplace claim. See McCarthy v. Sec. Exch. Comm’n, 406 F.3d 179, 186 (2d Cir. 2005) (“[A]rguments not raised in [the] appellant’s opening brief … are not properly before an appellate court even when the same arguments were raised in the trial court.”). But even on the merits, the record does not include any evidence suggesting that the incident between Bamba and the other DHS employee concerned Bamba’s race. Indeed, Bamba himself conceded that the other employee “never made an offensive statement to [him] about [his] skin color or race during this confrontation or at any other time.” App’x at 237; see Dist. Ct. Doc. No. 84-14 at 99–100. Aside from some vague and conclusory assertions that the other employee had mistreated non-white employees in the past, Bamba failed to point to any evidence that would suggest that his altercation with that employee was motivated by or had anything to do with Bamba’s race.
Based on this, the court was unable to “say that the district court erred in granting summary judgment in favor of DHS on Bamba’s hostile work environment claim.”