
Quoting
Taxing Matters
When that employee is the only person of that race in the department or company and he or she gets canned that’s just asking for an illegal discrimination claim if the employer cannot show that race was not the reason for the termination. A jury is allowed to infer that race is the reason when the employer’s defense effectively is “well, we didn't fire him because of his race but we can't really explain why we fired him.”
An employee who had been performing satisfactorily and then gets fired all of the sudden for a claimed performance issue with no documentation at all to back that up — no warnings, no discussions of the problem, no efforts at giving him a chance to improve, etc. — is a problem because it may well appear to a jury that the claimed performance problem that the company didn’t bother to document or try to fix wasn’t the real reason for termination, and that will then lead the jury to think that race may have been the real reason if it doesn’t believe the reason the company offered.