‘You Can’t Get Away From It’: White Seattle Employee Sues City For Racial Discrimination

Joshua Diemert was an employee of the city of Seattle for nine years. Hired in 2013 as a “program intake representative,” his role was to link up Seattle citizens with the public resources designed to help them. But according to a revealing report from Reason, Diemert became convinced he couldn’t keep working at an office under a regime of endemic racism and discrimination. In November 2022, he filed a lawsuit against the city.

Diemert told Reason, “It’s the culture of the workplace, how people talk to you. You can’t get away from it.”

According to the text of Diemert’s lawsuit,

“He was chastised and punished for combatting racially discriminatory hiring practices by HSD (Human Services Department) colleagues. And he was denied opportunities for advancement by the City based on his racial and ethnic identity. His supervisors and other colleagues continually dismissed his concerns over a period of years and claimed he could not be a victim of racism and discrimination because he possessed ‘white privilege.'”

Mr. Diemert explained in his suit that he had started off very well with the city’s Human Services Department. In his first year, he received the department’s “maximum achievement” award, but “began to understand that his race would negatively impact not only his day-to-day work life but his opportunities for career advancement.” This he stated was because of Seattle’s “Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI).”

As described in the lawsuit, “The RSJI is a city-wide program that requires race-based thinking and decision-making in an effort to end ‘structural racism.’ Paramount within the RSJI are the tenets that white male individuals like Mr. Diemert ‘are bolstered by racism,’ that they ‘internalize it,’ and that ‘individuals, institutions, and communities are often unconsciously and habitually rewarded for supporting white privilege and power.'”

According to the filing, Diemert was “compelled to take a constructive discharge,” from his job. It had become clear that his employers “had no intention of correcting this dysfunctional work environment.” He was risking additional on-the-job retaliation, and his health was suffering as a result.

Most chillingly the suit states, “because of his race, there was no hope of advancement.”

Diemert told Reason,

“The city of Seattle believes that race representation is paramount, and they believe that people should not be judged by their individuality or their individual actions, but should be judged by their collective race.”

“In fact, they say that if you judge people by individuality, that was actually a tool of white supremacy used to oppress people of color,” the suit added.

The outlet reported that documents referring to RSJI can still be found on Seattle’s website.

One thirteen-page document explicitly describes,

“Individualism;” “Value(ing) individual problem-solving;” “Seek(ing) expansion – doing more, serving more– as the goal and value;” “Perfectionism;” “Sense of Urgency;” “‘strong’ writing skills;” and “Believ(ing) that there is such a thing as objectivity” as “Manifestations of White Supremacy Culture.”

As Reason notes, the training is based upon the widely-rejected research of Tema Okun whose work often appears in consultancy projects of the diversity and equity industry. In spite of her being white herself, Okun’s teachings have had an inordinate influence on DEI programs, alongside author Judith Katz, also a white woman, whose theories on so-called “white supremacy culture” were revealed by the National Museum of African American History and Culture before being hastily retracted.

Diemert told the outlet that a supervisor angrily scolded him for his refusal to willingly step down and surrender the job he’d worked for years to reach to a person of color instead of taking leave under the Family Medical and Leave Act to which he is legally entitled.

Diemert said he was asked, “What could a straight white male possibly offer our department?”

He added that he was compelled to participate in RSJI trainings that were insulting in nature and “designed to address his alleged complicity in white supremacy,” according to Reason.

“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 said.

Declining to participate was labeled, “white silence,” which was judged to be a serious violation.

“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 told Reason.

In December 2020 Diemert filed a complaint against the city with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The city’s human resources department, which was the body administrating the RSJI training, investigated. Naturally, the lead investigator found the city had committed no wrong.

This led to Diemert and The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a libertarian public interest law firm representing him, to press the lawsuit.

PLF attorney Andrew Quinio told Reason, “The freedom to be treated with dignity and be treated as an individual regardless of your skin color is something that Pacific Legal Foundation absolutely protects and advocates. And that’s why we took on Joshua’s case.”