Joshua Diemert, a former Seattle city employee, documented 10 separate incidents over five years in which mandatory "diversity" training sessions at the Seattle Human Services Department told him — a white man — that he was part of the problem. Not a hypothetical problem. Not a historical problem. The specific, present-tense, you-are-the-oppressor problem.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just told Seattle that might be illegal.
The ruling in Diemert v. City of Seattle found that the incidents Diemert cited were "sufficiently numerous, frequent, and severe to create a triable issue as to the existence of a racially hostile work environment." That's legal language for: yes, forcing employees to sit through sessions that single them out by race can violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The same law that was written to protect people from racial discrimination at work now applies to the people the DEI industry decided don't count.
Diemert's 27-page lawsuit, filed nearly four years ago, described a workplace saturated with Seattle's Race and Social Justice Initiative — RSJI for short — which embedded race-focused programming into every layer of city employment. The trainings weren't optional. The messaging wasn't subtle. And for half a decade, Diemert was expected to absorb it without complaint.
Laura D'Agostino, Diemert's attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, put it plainly: "Title VII protects every employee from a racially hostile work environment, regardless of race. No one should have to endure years of racial hostility at work."
Regardless of race. Four words the DEI consulting industry has spent the last decade trying to make everyone forget.
The city's response, delivered by Seattle City Attorney's Office communications director Alan Pyke, was the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug: "We are reviewing the decision and discussing potential next steps for the City." No apology. No acknowledgment. Just a note that lawyers are talking to other lawyers.
What makes this ruling land is the court it came from. The 9th Circuit covers the Pacific to the Rockies — the most liberal federal appellate jurisdiction in the country. This isn't a red-state court offering a friendly ruling to a conservative plaintiff. This is the circuit that routinely sides with progressive causes telling a progressive city that its progressive training program may have created the exact kind of racial hostility the Civil Rights Act was designed to prevent.
The lower court judge who initially dismissed Diemert's case, U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead — a Biden nominee — had argued that diversity programs "are not by their very nature discriminatory against whites." The appeals court didn't buy it. The question wasn't whether diversity programs can theoretically be fine. The question was whether these specific sessions, at this specific workplace, crossed the line. The 9th Circuit said a jury should decide.
This isn't the first crack in the wall, either. As Just The News reported, the 2nd Circuit ruled in favor of Leslie Chislett, a white woman who sued the New York City Education Department over a bias training that singled her out for 15 minutes. A similar case brought by Zack De Piero, a white professor, is pending against Penn State Abingdon in the 3rd Circuit.
Three circuits. Three cases. Three employees who sat through mandatory sessions designed to make them feel guilty about their skin color and decided to do something about it.
The DEI industry built a $9-billion-a-year machine on the assumption that nobody would fight back. The 9th Circuit just handed employees the legal framework to do exactly that.
