February 14, 2024
America was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal.”
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So how did whites end up at the bottom of a new hierarchy of races? Why are lawsuits by whites alleging “reverse discrimination” -– racism of another kind -– on the rise?
Conservative writer Christopher Caldwell says it all began in the 1960s. The decade marked a radical change in how America –- especially official America -– viewed itself. In The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, his objective, incisive analysis of the process, Caldwell writes:
Today slavery is at the center of Americans’ official history, with race the central concept in the country’s self-understanding. Never before the 1960s was this the case.
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Until then, racial conflict in America was always seen against the larger story -– of building a constitutional republic.
But after the 1960s, he writes, “the constitutional republic was sometimes discussed as if it were a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human lives.”
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) -– which Caldwell describes as “less a judicial argument than a judicial order” -– and the Civil Rights Act (1964) ended up casting a “rival Constitution” incompatible with the original and bypassing the democratic process.
The ostensible aim -– to level an unequal social order -– was achieved through a tyrannical regime of laws and bureaucracies raising civil rights to a de facto state religion.
As Caldwell notes,
Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted.
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) -– which the Yale Law Journal once characterized as a “private attorney general” -– contributed by staging and scripting events and lawsuits. It chose skilled plaintiffs, projecting them to gain maximum public sympathy.
The ground was thus prepared for radical activism and divisive Critical Race Theory (CRT) to take root. CRT posits that whites are privileged oppressors, raceless and of inferior status; people of color are victims; and inequality is always the result of discrimination. A racial industrial complex of leftists, anarchists, and NGOs has created an ecosystem that has chilled speech and association, ratcheted up interracial hostility, and relegated whites to the lowest rung of the new, politically correct social order.
The fightback was primed to occur. Naturally, the worst cases have been from places where the radical left has had a free run, cities like Seattle, which radio host and author Jason Rantz describes as given over to the radicals.
My previous article dealt with a lawsuit filed by Tamara Weitzman, an oncology social worker in Seattle.
This one, also from Seattle, is about a lawsuit brought in November 2022 by Joshua Diemert against his employer, the City of Seattle, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Seattle.
Diemert worked in the city’s Human Services Department from January 2013 to September 2021. He was subjected to discriminatory treatment, passed over for promotion, condemned as a “white supremacist,” and had colleagues talking about getting “a guy to swing by when Josh is in the restroom and beat him bloody.”
Unable to further endure such indignities, and having exhausted all avenues of administrative redress, he quit. His lawsuit, filed with help from the pro bono Pacific Legal Foundation, seeks $300,000 in damages and a ruling that the city’s “anti-racist” policies violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act, and the Washington Law Against Discrimination. The trial is scheduled to begin on April 29, 2024.
Seattle launched racial-equity initiatives in the 1990s, when Mayor Greg Nickels decided to confront “institutional and structural racism.” The city’s Human Services Department put its 900 employees through ‘Undoing Racism,’ a training program conducted by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISB).
The program’s premise: racism is woven into the very founding principles of the United States. And the way to extirpate racism? Making participants analyze how they contribute to maintaining the status quo of disparate racial outcomes. If you are white, you are privileged and guilty of racism.
In 2004, Seattle established the Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI), the first municipal program of its kind in the country to embed “racial equity” and promote “social justice” in day-to-day business. Attendance was made mandatory. RSJI was co-designed by Robin DiAngelo, infamous author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, who derides “white supremacy culture” and its emphasis on individualism, politeness, timeliness, merit, and written communication.
Such was the environment in which Diemert joined the city’s Human Services Department. Despite his stellar performance –- he even received a prestigious accolade -– he suffered years of harassment and racial discrimination as an “inferior” white male.
At training programs, he was accosted for his “white privilege.” At an El Centro De La Raza program titled ‘Undoing Institutional Racism,’ he heard facilitators declare that white people are “like the devil,” “like cannibals,” and genetically racist. At RSJI sessions, employees were divided into two groups: Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and White Folks, the latter treated with disdain.
Lunchroom talk, official conversations, department meetings, emails -– the workplace was charged with racist messaging. A co-worker asked Diemert, “What could a straight white male possibly offer our department?” He was also told to step down from a lead position because he was blocking a promotion opportunity for a person of color. He alleges less favorable treatment in work assignments, and having to report to a superior who would get in his face, accuse him of complicity in slavery, and once chest-bumped him forcefully.
When Diemert opposed race-segregated meetings as “blatantly racist” and objected to the hostility and abuse, he was condemned as a “white supremacist.” The stress affected his health, and a physician recommended he be excused from training sessions. But the department refused. His distress was attributed to “white privilege,” a categorically false assumption given Diemert’s background.
Far from “advantaged” or idyllic, his “lived experience” -– to use a term prized by DEI disciples -– was dysfunctional. His father was a drug user who, although separated from his mother, lived on a different floor of the same house. Diemert dropped out of school, hung out on the streets, and was jailed several times as a teen. While he was living with his girlfriend’s family, her drug-addicted mother killed one of her own children, an eight-year-old girl.
Diemert turned his life around, however, thanks to his reading in prison -– the Bible, Norman Vincent Peale, Booker T. Washington, Thomas Sowell -– and an epiphany about personal responsibility: his girlfriend’s mother, speaking to him on phone from jail, blamed everyone but herself for the murder. He completed college, married, and saved enough to buy a small house. As a city worker, he had hoped to help struggling residents get their lives back on track. But the city administration would not let him do that because of the color of his skin.
“Reverse discrimination” is a given now. A 2022 survey of 1,000 hiring managers by ResumeBuilder found that 52% say it is used against white applicants. Sixteen percent said they were told to deprioritize white men, 48% said they were told to consider diversity over qualifications, and 53% were afraid of being fired for not hiring enough diverse employees.
This is racism, plain and simple. Meeting diversity goals on the backs of white men is not only unconstitutional, it amounts to blatant discrimination. It must be stopped in its tracks.
As the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the landmark Adarand Constructors v. Pena: “To pursue the concept of racial entitlement -– even for the most admirable and benign of purposes -– is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.”
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
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