When even a liberal federal judge appointed by former President Barack Obama rules that diversity, equity, and inclusion practices can be illegal, it is time to recognize that most DEI regimes by design are invidiously discriminatory.
In a case that received too little attention, Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled this month that former Pennsylvania State University professor Zack De Piero had reasonable grounds to keep alive a lawsuit against the school based on its DEI practices. De Piero said DEI policies at the college essentially forced his resignation, and Beetlestone agreed the professor “plausibly alleged that he was subjected to a race-based hostile work environment.”
On the record as presented in De Piero v. Penn State, Beetlestone wrote, De Piero at least has a reasonable case, the full merits of which remain to be adjudicated, that he suffered “harassment that is ‘sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of [the plaintiff’s] employment and create an abusive working environment.’”
Those conditions were created explicitly by the university’s DEI policies and practices. For example, on five different occasions, the university required De Piero “to attend conferences or trainings that discussed racial issues in essentialist and deterministic terms — ascribing negative traits to white people or white teachers without exception and flowing inevitably from their race.” In one exercise after the Minnesota police killing of counterfeiter George Floyd, the instructor forced “White and non-Black people of color to hold [their breath] just a little longer [than black people] — to feel the pain.”
If literally being forced to feel pain because one is white isn’t racially discriminatory, nothing is. But that was only one example. In another instance, De Piero said the facilitator “condemn[ed] white people for no other reason than they spoke or were simply present while being white.” Meanwhile, he said, university officials specifically told him “to incorporate race into his grading” in a way that would “penalize [white] students academically on the basis of their race.” And it is incontrovertible that Penn State’s DEI director “sent an email to all employees ‘calling on white people’ to ‘feel terrible,’ about their ‘own internalized white supremacy.”
That’s just a sample of the race-based indignities or flat-out discriminatory abuse that De Piero “plausibly” accuses Penn State of meting out.
These practices are facially abusive, and the judge was right to rule they create ample grounds for the lawsuit to proceed. And this, mind you, is not a judge who in theory opposes leftward notions of what “equity” or “inclusion” means. Beetlestone made sure to write that “training on concepts such as ‘white privilege,’ ‘white fragility,’ implicit bias, or critical race theory can contribute positively to nuanced, important conversations about how to form a healthy and inclusive working environment.”
“But,” she wrote, “the way these conversations are carried out in the workplace matters.” And upon the weight of evidence so far, Penn State’s way of enforcing DEI looks legally problematic, to say the least.
Beetlestone is right to keep De Piero’s case alive. What she misses, though, is that almost none of today’s DEI regimes are “nuanced” or remotely “healthy.” By their very nature and design, DEI bureaucracies promote outright hostility to white people, ascribe character traits and attitudes based explicitly on race in a way that is, to use the judge’s word, “deterministic,” and promote disparate treatment to people of different ethnicities or sexual “identities.”
DEI policies do this in colleges and universities across the land. They do it in elementary and secondary schools while also teaching bilge such as that “it is important to disrupt the Western nuclear family dynamics as the best/proper way to have a family.” They do it in museums where the alleged evils of “whiteness” include adherence to the “scientific method,” using “objective, rational linear thinking,” and assuming that “hard work is the key to success.” They do it, too, in government bureaucracies and in office suites of big corporations.
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It is all a big racket that, rather than ameliorating racial tension, instead exacerbates it.
Enough is too much. Courts across the land should recognize that DEI is nothing more than illegally institutionalized racism — and, accordingly, kill it.