Georgette Sherman v. Douglas A. Collins, Secretary, United States Department of Veterans Affairs

United States Court of Appeals
For the Eighth Circuit
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No. 24-2295
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Georgette Sherman
lllllllllllllllllllllPlaintiff - Appellant
v.
Douglas A. Collins, Secretary, United States Department of Veterans Affairs
lllllllllllllllllllllDefendant - Appellee
United States of America
lllllllllllllllllllllDefendant
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Appeal from United States District Court
for the Western District of Missouri - Kansas City
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Submitted: September 16, 2025
Filed: November 6, 2025
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Before SMITH, ARNOLD, and SHEPHERD, Circuit Judges.
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ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.
While Georgette Sherman was working at the Veteran’s Administration in
Kansas City, Missouri, she and her supervisor, Angela Frey, did not get along. After
Sherman left its employ, she sued the KCVA under Title VII, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e–1
to –17, claiming that Frey had discriminated against her because she is black,
retaliated against her for complaining of racial discrimination, created a racially
hostile work environment, and constructively discharged her. The district court1
granted summary judgment to the KCVA, and Sherman appeals. Reviewing the
district court’s decision de novo, see Woods v. Collins, 150 F.4th 967, 971 (8th Cir.
2025), we affirm.
At the time relevant to her lawsuit, Sherman was the Supervisory Medical
Support Assistant in the KCVA’s Office of Community Care. A few months after
Sherman began working there, Frey was hired as the office’s supervisor. Sherman
asserts in her brief on appeal that Frey harassed her “[f]rom the very beginning.”
Sherman was eventually assigned, or temporarily transferred, to a job outside the
Office of Community Care. Over a year after her new job had begun, she retired from
the KCVA.
The essential question in this case is why Frey treated Sherman the way she
allegedly did. We start with the principle that the law does not authorize courts to sit
as super-personnel departments reviewing the wisdom or general fairness of an
employer’s actions against an employee. See Beasley v. Warren Unilube, Inc., 933
F.3d 932, 939 (8th Cir. 2019); Main v. Ozark Health, Inc., 959 F.3d 319, 325 (8th Cir.
2020). Title VII does not impose “a general civility code for the American
workplace.” See Sellars v. CRST Expedited, Inc., 13 F.4th 681, 701 (8th Cir. 2021).
1The Honorable David Gregory Kays, United States District Judge for the
Western District of Missouri.
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That means that courts are not the place to sort out office conflicts to determine who
might be to blame. While courts generally stay out of workplace imbroglios, there are
nevertheless situations in which employees can bring complaints about an employer’s
actions before a court and get relief. Under Title VII, for example, employers are
prohibited from discriminating against an employee with respect to compensation and
terms, conditions, or privileges of employment because of the employee’s race. See
42 U.S.C. § 2000e–2(a)(1).
Sherman invokes Title VII by claiming that Frey discriminated against her
because she is black. Since she doesn’t offer direct evidence of discrimination,
Sherman shoulders the initial burden to make out a prima facie case of racial
discrimination, which requires her to show, among other things, a causal connection
between what the law regards as an adverse employment action she suffered and her
race. See Parker v. U.S. Dep’t of Agric., 129 F.4th 1104, 1111 (8th Cir. 2025). At this
stage of the case, Sherman cannot simply rest on the allegations in her complaint, see
Lee v. Collins, 143 F.4th 921, 924 (8th Cir. 2025); she must offer “evidentiary
materials that set out specific facts showing that there is a genuine issue for trial.” See
Torgerson v. City of Rochester, 643 F.3d 1031, 1042 (8th Cir. 2011) (en banc).
From what we can tell, Sherman bases her discrimination claims on three of
Frey’s actions. We will assume that they were adverse employment actions capable
of supporting a discrimination claim. See Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, 601 U.S. 346,
354–55 (2024). The difficulty for Sherman is that she doesn’t offer evidence that her
race had anything to do with them.
Sherman says the first adverse action occurred when Frey denied Sherman
training opportunities relating to a new federal law that the office needed to
implement. The district court rejected Sherman’s contention that the denials were
racially motivated because it concluded that the allegations were too “vague,
conclusory, and unsupported.” We agree. According to Sherman, she requested
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certain training, her requests were denied (presumably by Frey), and other employees
were allowed to attend. She says that Frey once rejected her request to use her own
leave time to attend training in Wichita and that Frey took some nurses and medical
support assistants to Florida for training but Sherman wasn’t allowed to join them.
With only this limited information to go on, no reasonable jury could conclude that
Sherman’s race had anything to do with Frey’s denial of Sherman’s requests for
training. We do not know what these training sessions were about and whether they
were designed to reach people in Sherman’s position. We also do not know when the
trainings were offered, whether alternatives to training existed, why certain other
employees were allowed to participate, whether other black employees were allowed
to attend, or whether employees of other races were prohibited from attending. In
short, Sherman hasn’t come forward with sufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to
find a Title VII violation.
The second adverse action Sherman uses to support a discrimination claim has
to do with Frey giving her a failing performance review, which she says led Frey to
assign her to a menial position. The district court determined that Sherman had not
been reassigned because of her performance review but because she was under
investigation for misconduct. Sherman takes issue with that determination on appeal.
But even if we assume that the review led to her temporary reassignment, Sherman
has offered no evidence suggesting that her race played any part in her performance
review or her temporary reassignment. She resorts to speculation and bald assertions
of discrimination, and so a reasonable jury could not find in her favor on this record.
The third act of discrimination, Sherman says, occurred when Frey interfered
with Sherman’s effort to obtain a job with the VA in Florida. As the district court
correctly observed, however, Sherman’s suspicions stem from a conversation she had
with a KCVA employee she identified merely as “Tracy” who told Sherman that some
unidentified person had said that Frey had said something to the hiring authorities in
Florida. The district court rejected Sherman’s claim because it was “based upon a
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dizzying amount of inadmissible hearsay.” As we have said, “inadmissible hearsay
evidence cannot be used to defeat summary judgment.” See Brunsting v. Lutsen
Mountains Corp., 601 F.3d 813, 817 (8th Cir. 2010). On appeal Sherman says that her
conversation with Tracy isn’t hearsay because she didn’t offer it to advance the truth
of the matters asserted, see Fed. R. Evid. 801(c)(2), but “to establish her state of mind
about retirement.” We disagree. Sherman was asking the court to accept as true what
others told Tracy—that Frey had interfered with Sherman’s pursuit of a job. The
district court correctly concluded that Sherman cannot rely on these (multiple layers
of) hearsay statements to defeat summary judgment.
Sherman resists the conclusion that she hasn’t offered evidence that Frey acted
with discriminatory intent. She contends that Frey “talked down to her,” corrected her
speech, and told her that “she did not like the manner in which [Sherman] spoke.”
Frey also allegedly belittled Sherman and yelled at her in front of staff and cut her off
during meetings. She asserts in her brief that Frey treated her “as if she were
dumb—talking down to her and in front of others.” But none of this raises a
reasonable inference that racial considerations were at play: On its face, this kind of
treatment is race-neutral. Sherman also says that Frey “treated Ms. Sherman as if she
were a ‘little black girl’ and an angry black woman. All of these are racial
stereotypes.” But the record contains no specific examples of this kind of treatment
or the context in which it occurred. There is no evidence to support Sherman’s
altogether conclusory statements. Sherman points out in addition that two other black
employees said that Frey had a history of discriminating against black employees, but
the reason they believed that is unclear, and Sherman offers no specifics. Though
both these employees supported Sherman’s belief that Frey had not treated her well,
neither explained how Sherman’s race had in any way motivated Frey. Finally,
Sherman notes that at some unspecified point Frey told her that she “like[d] cream in
my coffee, or coffee in my cream,” which Sherman believes reflects discriminatory
intent on Frey’s part. Without any factual context, though, it is unclear what Frey
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meant or that Frey was making a racially derogatory comment. In sum, the district
court did not err in granting summary judgment on Sherman’s discrimination claims.
Having concluded that Sherman’s claims of racial discrimination fail, we turn
to her assertion that Frey committed the same adverse actions that underpin those
claims in retaliation for her complaining of race discrimination. “Title VII prohibits
employers from, among other things, retaliating against employees for opposing
unlawful employment practices, making a charge, or participating in an investigation
under the statute.” Kempf v. Hennepin Cnty., 987 F.3d 1192, 1195 (8th Cir. 2021)
(citing 42 U.S.C. § 2000e–3(a)). It is unclear what protected activity Sherman
engaged in that she claims led the KCVA to retaliate against her. She mentions in her
brief that at some unspecified time she intervened on behalf of the black medical
support assistants because they were allegedly given more work than white
employees. She provides no other information about this event. In her complaint,
Sherman also notes that she filed two administrative complaints in 2020 where she
alleged that she had been discriminated against, and in her brief on appeal she says
that an administrative complaint she filed in 2019 was protected activity too.
Regardless of whether Sherman bases her retaliation claim on one or more of
her formal administrative complaints or on her informal intervention on behalf of
black medical support assistants, the claim fails for a reason much like the one that
led us to reject her discrimination claim: She hasn’t provided sufficient evidence “of
a causal link between the protected conduct and materially adverse action.” See id.
at 1196. She merely speculates that a causal relationship exists without demonstrating
why a reasonable jury could agree. Cf. Martinez-Medina v. Rollins, 144 F.4th 1091,
1098–99 (8th Cir. 2025). In her brief, Sherman argues in passing that the “temporal
proximity” between her protected activities and Frey’s adverse actions raises an
inference of a retaliatory motive. But Sherman hasn’t pointed to specific evidence that
would allow a reasonable jury to conclude that the timing of events suggests an
unlawful motive. For example, Sherman doesn’t specify when she informally
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interceded on behalf of black medical support assistants, so we cannot tell how close
in time that event was to an allegedly retaliatory act. In addition, her temporary
reassignment came about eight months after she filed her first formal administrative
complaint, which is too long to create an inference of an improper motive. See id. at
1099. And it occurred before she filed her second and third formal administrative
complaints, meaning that those complaints could not have caused the reassignment.
The district court did not err in granting summary judgment on Sherman’s retaliation
claim.
Sherman also claims that she was subjected to a racially hostile work
environment and was constructively discharged. She anchors those claims to the
various events already adverted to as well as others, including alleged incidents when
Frey erroneously designated Sherman as absent without leave one day (the matter was
corrected), when coworkers improperly accessed Sherman’s personnel file without
being punished, when Frey directed other employees to draft false reports against
Sherman, and when Frey had security officers escort Sherman from the office
following a dispute over whether Sherman could take her laptop with her while she
was reassigned. Once again, though, Sherman has offered no evidence to suggest
these actions were connected to her race. What is more, to prevail on a claim that she
was subjected to a racially hostile work environment, Sherman had to show that a
reasonable jury could find that the work environment was “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 as viewed objectively by a reasonable person.” See Carpenter v. Con-
Way Cent. Express, Inc., 481 F.3d 611, 618 (8th Cir. 2007). The conduct “must be
extreme in nature and not merely rude or unpleasant”; it must be “so intimidating,
offensive, or hostile that it poisoned the work environment.” See id. The incidents
here fall well short of that high threshold. Cf. Delph v. Dr. Pepper Bottling Co. of
Paragould, Inc., 130 F.3d 349, 352, 359 (8th Cir. 1997). And because Sherman has
failed to show that events were severe enough to constitute a hostile work
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environment, she necessarily has failed to show that conditions were so intolerable
that she was constructively discharged. See O’Brien v. Dep’t of Agric., 532 F.3d 805,
810–11 (8th Cir. 2008).
Affirmed.
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