In a recent blog post, on Hamilton & Griffin on Rights, Outten & Golden LLP associate Nina Frank touches on our current cultural backlash against anything seen as politically correct or hypersensitive to the feelings of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ individuals, using the success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as just one example. In this environment, many courts have been misusing the “stray remarks” doctrine to dismiss employment discrimination claims before they get to a jury. Ms. Frank argues that dismissing these implicitly biased comments in the workplace as mere jokes or passing remarks, lionizing those who have the audacity to utter them unapologetically, and classifying those who were harmed by them as overly sensitive, does real damage.
