Posted on 04/14/2023 6:06:07 PM PDT by nwrep
When Joshua Diemert began his employment with the City of Seattle in 2013, he was looking forward to a fresh start. But as time passed, he began to dread going to work.
Tensions were running high in the office. At one point, a colleague told others they should “get a guy to swing by when Josh is in the restroom and beat him bloody.”
He watched coworkers reject white applicants to City programs because, as one colleague told him, those applicants benefited from “white privilege.”
The problems started when Joshua objected to mandatory training and handouts from the City’s Race and Social Justice Initiative, a program codesigned by Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.
As part of the initiative, city employees were required to attend multi-day workshops where facilitators taught that “racism is in white people’s DNA.” At meetings, employees had to identify themselves by their race. The City instructs all employees to view their work environment as a power struggle, where those with “privilege” and power must be held accountable to those the City has deemed “powerless.” The City also pressures employees to participate in affinity groups or “caucuses,” where membership is premised upon an employee’s race.
Joshua witnessed how the training was encouraging city employees to stereotype everyone, including themselves, by race. He watched coworkers reject white applicants to City programs because, as one colleague told him, those applicants benefited from “white privilege.”
So Joshua pushed back. He declined invitations to meet with the white caucus. He eventually told a senior officer in an email that race-segregated meetings were “blatantly racist.”
“Most people go with the flow,” Joshua says, “even if the flow is wrong. I’ve never done that.”
In response, Joshua’s coworkers called him a “white supremacist” and referred to him as the “reincarnation of the people that shot Native Americans from trains.”
Life as a Seattle City employee was becoming unbearable.
The influence of Robin DiAngelo
In chapter one of her mega-bestseller White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo says that “like most white people raised in the U.S.,” she was taught not to see herself in racial terms or behave as if her race mattered. But that’s wrong, she argues. We need to “sit with the discomfort of being seen racially, of having to proceed as if our race matters (which it does).”
To DiAngelo, “Western culture” is problematic because it values the individual over group identity. Individualism “reinforces the concept that each of us is a unique individual and that our group memberships, such as race, class, or gender, are irrelevant,” she complains. We need to reject our society’s emphasis on individuality and instead “grapple with how and why racial groups matter.”
When the Seattle mayor’s office appointed DiAngelo to codesign the City’s RJSI training, DiAngelo embedded her race-based, anti-individualist ideology into the program.
In fact, DiAngelo says in her Author’s Note, “temporarily suspending individuality to focus on group identity is healthy for white people.”
DiAngelo has built a cottage industry out of this nonsense: She charges $14,000 per speech and reportedly nets over $700,000 per year. Her clients include universities, Fortune 500 companies, public school systems, and—of course—cities.
The City of Seattle was essentially DiAngelo’s first client: Her 2004-2007 partnership with the City predates the publication of White Fragility and the massive fame that came with it. Back then, DiAngelo was a lecturer at the University of Washington with a just-earned Ph.D. in multicultural education; but she was already promoting ideas that would later form the basis of White Fragility. When the Seattle mayor’s office appointed DiAngelo to codesign the City’s RJSI training, DiAngelo embedded her race-based, anti-individualist ideology into the program.
And when Joshua started working for the city in 2013, he and other employees were required to participate in the training.
Speaking up
Joshua found some of the training materials downright baffling.
One handout referred to a “focus on individualism” as a “common pattern of whites.” Another listed “believ[ing] that there is such a thing as objectivity” as a “manifestation of white supremacy culture.” (Also listed: an “emphasis on being polite,” a “focus on timelines,” and “valu[ing] written communications.”)
“I really dug into their material,” Joshua says. “They actually believe that meritocracy is a system of white supremacy.”
The race-segregated meetings also bugged him—why was he receiving invitations to gather with other white people to discuss “whiteness”? If the goal was to defeat racism, wasn’t grouping people by race counterproductive? Instead of encouraging City employees to treat people as individuals, Seattle was teaching that race was what mattered most.
He decided to speak up against the training.
“Good Morning,” Joshua wrote in an email to a union representative.
I have issues with some of the mandatory training we have to attend as an employee of Seattle. Is there a way we can have a meeting? Some of it has to do with the material being taught, which I have found to be extremely racist as it blankets entire groups of people with stereotypes based solely on the quantifier of skin color… In my RSJI classes, a few of the things that the instructors have taught are:
The 13th Amendment is racist and a tool of enslavement Wealth redistribution is the only mechanism to fix the issues at hand Individuality or the want to always better yourself are tenets of white supremacy Looking at the content of character and being colorblind is a tenet of white supremacy The union representative didn’t prove helpful. So Joshua tried other avenues. In an email to a senior officer, Joshua wrote that “all of the Race and Social Justice training, including the affinity caucuses, are blatantly racist, stereotype people based on superficial characteristics and apply negative attributes to entire groups of people based off the color of their skin.” He asked for permission to create his own non-race-based group. The City denied his request.
In another email, to a colleague, Joshua defended his decision to speak out. “I have been taught in my mandated anti-discrimination classes to stand up to racism when I see it, so that is what I am doing,” he wrote. “I am standing up to racism.”
His colleagues did not react well. There were threats, accusations, and whispers. At one point a colleague chest-bumped Joshua, got in his face, and told him he had white privilege.
Pacific Legal Foundation is now representing Joshua in a lawsuit against the City of Seattle for imposing hostile workplace conditions based on race. His lawsuit could change the mandatory training for Seattle’s 10,000 city employees, ensuring others aren’t subjected to race-segregated meetings.
Good. These abusive fools need a good ass-kicking.
“reincarnation of the people that shot Native Americans from trains.”
Excuse me, just a ‘little person’ here from ‘flyover country’ who doesn’t know anything; the people who shot from trains were shooting buffalo, not people.
Ten long years of mandatory ingestion of corporate lies and B.S.
Thank you again, Barack Obama, for all you did to “unite” us.
Sheesh.
“white privilege” — getting rejected for a job due to POC racism.
“reincarnation of the people that shot Native Americans from trains.”
So they are calling Native Americans buffalo now?
I sure do pity the young generation of non-minorities who are seeking white collar careers.
What a future awaits them, until they can retire. Tragic.
Native Americans were no saints. Nothing ever is mentioned about how these savages murdered women, children and scalped their husbands. Not condoning the horrendously poor treatment of them, but let’s get real here.
No legal standing. Dismissed! (by every leftist court in the country)
Excuse me, just a ‘little person’ here from ‘flyover country’ who doesn’t know anything; the people who shot from trains were shooting buffalo, not people.
Is there any chance the Injuns were attacking the trains when this happened?
Sue them broke.
Sue them personally
Sue them professionally
Sue the entities.
Sue them all
Repeatedly
Harass them with lawsuits
This lawsuit better be getting the petitioner a big fat settlement.
That might matter if we weren’t in a post-fact, post-truth, post-rational world.
PLF is wicked smart & persistent
Just a guy, not very special at all.
Washington State
Of course this may not be him, but another person who shares the same name. 🙂
Seattle officials mum on discrimination lawsuit by white former employee
Seattle’s “racial equity” policies create hostile workplace for City employees
I believe these are his attorneys. Taken from link above:
PLF has always won against liberals.
You forgot the Wyoming and Montana Buffalo jumps. People to this day when they find one of these, there are bonanzas of Indian arrowheads and other tools they left behind after running the herds off the jumps. Peaceful, in tune with nature my ample ass. Ever been thru a Rez???
If being polite and meritocratic are “acting white” then Asians out-white the whites. What a load of bovine feces.
Unless the title of the article has been changed since you posted, the actual title of the article is “The City Worker v. Seattle”.
FR protocol is to use the proper title of an article you are linking so that FR’s “Search” function will work and the Forum can avoid duplicate threads.
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