Opinion ID: 4527882
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Title VII: Overview

Text: On appeal, Brandt accepts the fate of his probation-side claims, but he insists that a reasonable jury could find either that racial stereotypes influenced Landry's decision not to rehire him or that the rejection was pay-back for Brandt's complaints to Commissioner Ponte and the MHRC. For that reason, he asks us to resurrect his claims for race discrimination and retaliation against MDOC under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.6 6 As we noted earlier, Brandt does not appeal the dismissal of his § 1983 claims against Landry in his individual capacity. And remember, only employers like MDOC (or supervisors in their official capacity as agents of the employer) may be sued under Title VII. See Ríos-Colón, 641 F.3d at 4; Fantini, 557 F.3d at 30. - 11 - Thanks to that statute, employers like MDOC may not fail or refuse to hire someone or otherwise . . . discriminate against [him] with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of [his] race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1). As we've repeatedly recognized, those words prohibit all discriminatory practices in whatever form which create inequality in employment opportunity, Thomas v. Eastman Kodak Co., 183 F.3d 38, 59 (1st Cir. 1999) (quoting County of Washington v. Gunther, 452 U.S. 161, 180 (1981)), reaching beyond conscious racism to root out stereotyped thinking and other forms of less conscious bias in employment decisions, id. at 42, 58–61 (citing Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228, 239–58 (1989)); see also Ahmed v. Johnson, 752 F.3d 490, 503 (1st Cir. 2014) (Title VII should 'not be applied in a manner that ignores the sad reality that [discriminatory] animus can all too easily warp an individual's perspective to the point that he or she never considers the member of a protected class the 'best' candidate regardless of that person's credentials' (quoting Bray v. Marriott Hotels, 110 F.3d 986, 993 (3d Cir. 1997)). Title VII also forbids an employer to retaliate against an employee for oppos[ing] any [discriminatory] practice by (for example) filing legal complaints (like Brandt's MHRC charge) or complaining to a supervisor about discrimination (like Brandt did - 12 - in his letter to Ponte). Franchina v. City of Providence, 881 F.3d 32, 45 (1st Cir. 2018) (quoting 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3(a)). But since the parties start with Brandt's status-based (§ 2000e- 2(a)(1)) claim, we will too.