Amicus Brief: Diemert v. City of Seattle

An employee of the City of Seattle, Joshua Diemert, filed a federal lawsuit to end Seattle’s racially biased training and hostile work environment. The challenged policies and practices stem from Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI), a citywide effort to end the city government’s purported “institutional racism” and achieve racial equity. The initiative forces city employees to apply a “Racial Equity Toolkit” derived from critical race theory to every city function imaginable. It’s DEI on steroids. The city’s requirements for on-the-job RSJI training and race-based programming, affinity groups, segregated staff meetings, classifications of employees as either “oppressors” or “oppressed,” and open commitment to racial distinctions (“check your privilege,” “de-center whiteness,” admit “complicity in white supremacy,” etc.) violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Seattle’s creation of a racially hostile work environment also violated Diemert’s Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection rights. 

The district court granted the city summary judgment, treating RSJI as if it were an anodyne program that promotes diversity. Now on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, the Manhattan Institute filed an amicus brief arguing that the district court failed to distinguish between Seattle’s RSJI and the sorts of diversity programs that have been judicially approved. We further argue that the court erred by subjecting Diemert to a higher evidentiary standard for being a member of a majority group, a standard the Supreme Court rejected just last term in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services. Both Title VII and the Equal Protection Clause protect employees of all races equally.

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

Tim Rosenberger is a legal fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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