‘A conservative’s nightmare’: Lawsuit prompted by Seattle DEI training

We’ve seen a few lawsuits like this already where some form of reverse discrimination seems to have been prompted by corporate DEI concerns. A former Starbucks manager won a $25 million judgment in June after a jury agreed she’d been racially discriminated against by the company.

There was also a lawsuit filed recently by a former Morgan Stanley employee who claimed he’d been replaced by a woman with less experience and questionable qualifications primarily because she was black.

Adding to that list is a lawsuit filed last year by Joshua Diemert against the city of Seattle. Diemert worked for the city for nearly a decade before he finally quit, feeling overwhelmed by the stress of what he saw as a racially hostile work environment.

Seattle’s Human Services Department (HSD) hired Joshua Diemert in 2013 as a program intake representative. He consistently received excellent work evaluations, was in high demand across several city departments, and in just one year, earned a prestigious award recognizing the noticeable difference his performance and efforts made to his colleagues, his department, and those he served.

Despite his hard work, Joshua endured years of harassment and racial discrimination with no escape, no recourse, and no way to shed his employer-prescribed badge of inferiority except to leave the job…

The workplace hostility stems from Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI), a citywide effort that began in 2004 as city council and mayoral directives to end city government’s purported “institutional racism” and to achieve racial equity in the community. Led by the Seattle Office for Civil Rights, the initiative forces city employees to apply a “Racial Equity Toolkit”—derived from critical race theory—to every city function imaginable.

For Joshua’s department, this meant required trainings that aggressively promoted notions such as “white privilege” and collective guilt that white employees must shoulder for societal inequities.

Reason wrote about Diemert’s experiences earlier this year. They described the treatment he was subjected to as “like a conservative’s nightmare.”

The environment Diemert describes is almost too toxic and oppressive to be believed; in his account, Seattle’s RSJI program sounds like a conservative’s nightmare about a progressive workplace—something that would be brutally parodied on South Park or Portlandia. But his complaint is well-supported by hard evidence: actual copies of documents from the bizarre antiracism training that the city uses. Indeed, these documents can still be found on the city’s RSJI website…

According to Diemert, a supervisor berated him for refusing to step down and yield his job to a person of color. He says he was asked, “What could a straight white male possibly offer our department?” And he says he was frequently made to participate in RSJI training, which involved insulting games and activities designed to address his alleged complicity in white supremacy.

“On multiple occasions in the trainings, I was forced to do things like play privilege bingo or stand up in front of everyone and rank myself within a racist continuum,” he says…

“If I disagreed or offered another opinion, I was told I had cognitive dissonance, and my defensiveness was evidence of being a racist white supremacist,” he says.

Diemert filed an EEOC complaint in late 2020. The city investigator, who was part of the RSJI apparatus, found the city had done nothing wrong. He finally resigned in 2021.

His case is being handled by lawyers for the Pacific Legal Foundation. Seattle tried to argue the complaint hadn’t been issued in time but a judge recently ruled in Diemert’s favor.

“What the city was arguing was, you all haven’t presented enough facts for the claims you’re bringing, there’s not enough there,” [PLF’s Laura] D’Agostino explained. “And all you’re complaining about is diversity training. That’s how they tried to characterize this case.”

D’Agostino said the city claimed PLF didn’t file the complaint within the required timeframe.

“If there are any claims that you base it on the facts that are outside of the timeframe, those are dismissed, but otherwise your claims can proceed,” D’Agostino explained. “The court really took the time to not only read our complaint, and to see all of the facts that Diemert brought up. But it rejected the city’s attempt to characterize the complaint into something it wasn’t.”

Diemert’s case should go to trial next year. Corporate DEI was already on notice from the two cases mentioned above. Hopefully, a win for Diemert will put left-leaning cities on notice as well.