On January 13, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit vacated the lower court’s decision to dismiss an employee’s race discrimination claim. In Wannamaker-Amos v. Purem Novi, Inc., the Fourth Circuit remanded back to the district court for further proceedings and provided important guidance for how a plaintiff-employee can establish sufficient evidence of their satisfactory performance and the employer’s pretextual reasons for their termination in order to bring their discrimination claims to a jury.
Carmen Wannamaker-Amos, the plaintiff, worked for Purem Novi, Inc., a car exhaust manufacturer, as a quality management professional. Ms. Wannamaker-Amos is a Black woman who worked with all white co-workers, nearly all of whom were men. She alleged that a Purem manager, Javad Hosseini, treated her differently than her white, male peers, including complaining about her job performance, treating her with disrespect, blaming her for the mistakes of others, and urging managers to fire her. On one occasion, Mr. Hosseini made an explicitly racist comment, stating that Ms. Wannamaker-Amos was slow at her work because “[y]ou know how these [B]lack people are.” All other supervisors who had worked with Ms. Wannamaker-Amos had praised the quality of her work. When Mr. Hosseini temporarily assumed the role of Ms. Wannamaker-Amos’ supervisor in January 2020, he terminated her employment, citing a list of eight alleged performance issues. Ms. Wannamaker-Amos never previously received performance counseling on any of these cited reasons, and the reasons Purem gave for her termination changed throughout the course of her case. Ms. Wannamaker-Amos’ position was subsequently filled by a white male employee.
Ms. Wannamaker-Amos brought suit under Title VII and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, claiming that she was terminated unlawfully because of her race. The district court initially granted summary judgment in favor of Purem, ruling that Ms. Wannamaker-Amos did not produce sufficient evidence that the reason provided for her termination was pretextual, and thus, that her claim could not proceed to a jury.
On appeal, the Fourth Circuit vacated, and it carefully outlined the types of evidence that a plaintiff can put forth to defeat a defendant’s motion for summary judgment. First, in addressing one of the initial elements of Ms. Wannamaker-Amos’ discrimination claim – that she had been fulfilling her employer’s legitimate expectations at the time of her termination – the Fourth Circuit noted that, in addition to the plaintiff’s evidence that Purem’s eight criticisms were baseless, “Purem itself disavowed all but one of them as ‘not material,’” a significant admission by Purem that the trial court had overlooked. Additionally, the Fourth Circuit found that statements about her performance from the alleged discriminating official alone were insufficient to defeat her case. The court concluded that “[w]here an employer’s allegations of poor performance are inextricably intertwined with the employee’s claims of discrimination, we cannot give greater weight to the alleged discriminating official’s criticisms of the employee’s performance than to the employee’s evidence disputing such criticisms.”
Moreover, the Fourth Circuit determined that Ms. Wannamaker-Amos met her burden to establish that Purem’s reason for terminating her employment was a pretext or cover up for discrimination, in part, because: she cast doubt on the reasons cited for her termination; Purem provided different reasons for her termination at the time of the incident as compared to the reasons it provided to the EEOC and in court documents; she presented evidence that she was held to a higher standard and treated worse than her male colleagues; the company failed to follow its own performance improvement policy prior to her termination; and the key decisionmaker for her termination had previously made a racially discriminatory comment about her work performance. The court found that it was “highly significant” that the speaker of the discriminatory comment was the ultimate decisionmaker for Ms. Wannamaker-Amos’ termination.
The court also weighed in on a factor important to intersectional claims – claims that arise when a plaintiff faces discrimination because of more than one protected trait. Ms. Wannamaker-Amos refused to speculate during her deposition about Mr. Hosseini’s motivation for terminating her, and Purem attempted to use that evidence against her, asserting that she must affirmatively proclaim her race was the reason that her employer terminated her. The court rejected this argument, holding that no such requirement exists. Although Ms. Wannamaker-Amos did not raise an intersectional claim, the court acknowledged that an employee’s uncertainty about the basis for the alleged discrimination does not mean that a plaintiff cannot sustain a discrimination claim, as such a refusal to speculate “may reflect uncertainty about which protected class was the basis for the alleged discrimination rather than whether discrimination occurred at all.”
The court’s ruling in Wannamaker provides vital and clear guidance for how employees’ discrimination claims can survive summary judgment in the Fourth Circuit and be heard by a jury.
Correia & Puth represents employees confronting such discrimination in their workplace. If you have faced discrimination, harassment, or retaliation at your job, please contact us today.
