By Thomas F. Powers
Sunday, December 01, 2024
Conservatives are pushing back against anti-white race
discrimination. Mostly, this takes the form of attacks on affirmative action
and similar policies. But another important battlefront in the war on woke has
opened up against diversity or DEI training and similar initiatives in the
workplace and educational institutions.
There are several lawsuits claiming, very plausibly, that
ham-fisted DEI indoctrination — the sort of thing where Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility is required reading — amounts to
“hostile work environment” race discrimination against whites. That might seem
like a paradox, since diversity training is one answer, created
by the law, to racial and other forms of harassment.
But it is undeniably true that the DEI mind-set today is
often characterized by the denigration of criticism and castigation of members
of this one group for no other reason than their race. That is something civil
rights law must not be permitted to support. Or is civil rights law itself
somehow part of the problem?
Robin Root v. City University of New York (CUNY) is a
lawsuit in state court (in a blue state) that bears watching. Launched in 2020,
it has survived as long or longer, and with better results (surviving a motion to dismiss), than several other similar federal lawsuits that have gained more attention. The discovery phase has ended. It is
possible that this will be the first case in the ballpark of a
diversity-training complaint to get before a jury (the plaintiff indeed seeks a
jury trial).
That would be an excellent development. The Root case
exposes an ugly regime of semiofficial and official anti-white denigration and
paranoid racial animosity at CUNY. Woke faculty members there imposed
“training” efforts on themselves. When that went badly, the administration made
things worse. The institution and its leaders are on trial in the Root case,
one with “smoking gun” evidence of retaliation (a charge that is hard to beat
in employment discrimination law).
The New York attorney general’s office is defending CUNY.
If Letitia James has any sense, she’d be wise to ponder the recent Starbucks employment discrimination case in which a jury
awarded a white defendant more than $25 million. That case didn’t involve
indoctrination efforts. But would anybody be willing to bet that the nutty and
poisonous mind-set of DEI, exposed in detail, will find a sympathetic jury
today?
Root’s claim is strong, and she is a compelling
plaintiff. She has devoted her career (she’s a full professor of anthropology
at Baruch College, one of CUNY’s “senior colleges”) to researching AIDS in
Africa. A lifelong civil rights advocate, she had actually suggested to her colleagues that they all read and discuss White
Fragility.
Root’s tale, available in New York court documents, begins in 2019. A few members of the
sociology and anthropology department formed a Faculty of Color Caucus (“FoCC”
in the case filings) and issued a report calling on the white members of the
department to undergo “white normativity” training. At the top of the reading
list: White Fragility. “Faculty of color” members were to be excused, to
“avoid burdening [them] with invisible labor.”
By itself, one might be tempted to dismiss this as
left-wing college professor high jinks taken a bit further than usual. But then
the college administration swung behind the effort.
Al Romero, dean of the Weissman School of Arts and
Sciences at Baruch College, signed off on the plan and offered to put up
college funds to launch a departmental “White Normativity initiative.” Then
followed a faculty meeting from hell. The (white) department chairman, raising
his copy of White Fragility aloft, “read passages aloud” to his
colleagues. He told department members that “the ‘white faculty had not
addressed their privilege’ and stated that the white faculty who were present
should read and discuss the book White Fragility in order to try and
become ‘better people.’” Accusations of various kinds, between and among the
department’s professors, followed.
In the middle of all this, Root filed a formal complaint
of harassment and discrimination with the college’s chief diversity officer
(CDO). When they met to discuss the matter, the CDO offered “to lend . . . her
personal copy” of — you guessed it — White Fragility. Robin DiAngelo’s
agent should love this case. Later, the New York AG’s office actually defended White
Fragility, without irony or hesitation, as having “entered the cultural
zeitgeist as a literary tool to foster discussion of racism and white
normativity,” a book recommended as “increas[ing] awareness and knowledge about
white privilege.”
Root tried to meet with her dean but was refused. At that
point, her chairman sent an email: “I spoke with Al [the dean], and Robin, you
have to immediately rescind your ‘white racism’ complaint. While I agree that
you have been mis-treated [sic] I don’t think a reverse racism grievance
is going to hold much water.” This is in the ballpark of “smoking gun evidence”
of “retaliation” and one reason Root’s case survived the New York AG’s motion
to dismiss.
With apologies to Professor Root (we are all in her debt
for fighting this fight), it’s hard to resist saying that certain chickens are
coming home to roost here. Very often progressives seem to think that their own
solid Left credentials protect them from being lumped in with the deplorables.
It is striking how many similar cases involve folks fully committed to the
Left’s civil rights politics, people like Jodi Shaw at Smith College and Laura Kipnis at Northwestern (whose excellent book, Unwanted
Advances, should be assigned reading on college campuses).
The most relevant and compelling way to look at the
awfulness of CUNY’s DEI program is through the “lens” of the civil rights
revolution itself. This is not just a slam dunk lawsuit; the case offers an
indictment of what the civil rights revolution has become.
Start with race-based segregation accepted without
protest by Root’s department and the college administration, for instance. A
group of white faculty organizing themselves in this way is unimaginable — as
would be white criticism of, or calls to indoctrinate, members of racial or
ethnic minority groups.
This is clearly “deliberate” and “intentional” race
discrimination. Two groups were manifestly treated differently (“disparate
treatment”) when whites were called upon to undergo the so-called training but
members of the Faculty of Color Caucus were not (and only a sadist or a
masochist would deny that such exemption amounts to “better” treatment).
This was race-based discrimination for its own sake.
White faculty were never given any explanation for why they were singled out.
“No actual conduct, specifics, or details whatsoever were provided as to what
were the culture issues in the Department, nor how any such issues were the
fault of the entirety of the white faculty.”
Whites were selected to receive instruction because they
needed to become “better people,” as the department chairman put it. The
plaintiff’s legal filing speaks of “outlandish accusations at ‘white faculty’
in general” and claims that “white normativity” governed the department and
needed to be combated. The plaintiff “and other white faculty were consistently
accused of ‘white privilege’ and a ‘culture of racism.’”
Both the form of diversity training here (whites only)
and its content (whites are racists who cleverly hide their racism) are
constituted by acts of unsubtle, overt discrimination. This is the denigration
of one race of people based on a very stupid and demeaning “stereotype” about
white people. Amazingly, the New York AG’s office (defending CUNY) cites the need to “break down racial stereotypes” among the
broad “public policy considerations” at stake in this case.
The intention of the effort seems not so much to “train”
or even indoctrinate but to castigate and humiliate and bully into submission —
DEI “lesson-learning” as punishment for group sins.
If segregating people by race and browbeating them about
the evil ways of their race is not racial harassment, then what is?
In front of a jury, how persuasive are the lawyers of the
New York AG’s office likely to be in claiming that this case concerns, as they
put it, “petty slights and trivial inconveniences” that do not “rise to the
level” of a hostile work environment?
Indeed, the New York AG’s answer to Root’s claim seems like it comes right out of White
Fragility. “The ‘criticisms’ lodged against members of the white faculty at
CUNY were that they needed to ‘learn to reflect’ on their race, and that they
were subconsciously complicit in perpetuating a system of ‘white normativity.’
These comments may reference race, but they do not denigrate Plaintiff’s
race or carry racially charged connotations.”
That is an amazing stance. An accusation of “subconscious
complicity” in injustice, an accusation leveled against an entire race, does
not “denigrate” that race?
All of this, plus, to repeat, smoking gun harassment
evidence (the chairman’s email) and much implicating the leadership (dean, CDO,
department chair) of a public university.
If this case is not governable by American civil rights
law, then there is something seriously wrong with the law.
How did the civil rights revolution became such a punitive and divisive agent of social paranoia? There can
be no doubt that civil rights law helped to create the CUNY anthropology
department fiasco exposed in this lawsuit.
Once “discrimination” came to include (via the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission and Supreme Court) hostile environment
harassment and employers were forced to police it anywhere and everywhere in the
workplace (whether “work” related or not) or face severe consequences —
lawsuits in the millions, toxic reputational harm — then indoctrination
sessions in the ballpark of the CUNY faculty self-policing efforts
became unavoidable.
But nobody told employers what that would mean in detail.
Surprise, surprise: The people teaching the new semi-civic lessons were all on
the left (with billions of dollars each year in salaries and consulting
gigs at stake), to include plenty of folks on the very far left.
Will Root’s lawsuit change things? If nothing else, the
history of employment discrimination law suggests that employers will follow their self-interest to avoid bad publicity and being
sued. Higher ed, like corporate America, can be trusted to do what the law
tells it to; and civil rights law is being rethought more and more to ensure that it does not discriminate against
“majority” groups.
Won’t that mean that we’ll just compound one kind of ugly
thought-policing with another? Won’t DEI then expand yet again to include
anti-anti-whiteness as one more secular piety — with sensitivity toward whites
one more tiresome indoctrination point? Is the answer to the excesses of DEI to
double down on it?
There’s something to those worries. Modern democratic
life is being taken over by anti-discrimination politics in a way that nobody
planned.
But the alternatives can be worse. Some on the right are now gaining a wide following by
saying that whites should “get organized” — and talk of throwing “bodies on the
gears.” (What they will call themselves, these organized whites?)
But doing nothing is not an option, either. Anti-white
prejudice and harassment are real, and we should use the law to counter them.
The bad news is that the main source of trouble is in the law. The good news, such as it is, is this: The more
that all groups, to include the majority, make use of these laws, the sooner
the day will come when the law’s defects will be — painfully, unavoidably —
obvious to everyone.
So let us hope for many more cases like this. The EEOC receives something like 80,000 discrimination
complaints each year. May more and more whites — and males, and straights, and
Christians — find their inner civil rights activist and launch lawsuits to call
out DEI training that engages in petty discriminatory tyrannizing.
Let us all eat from the trough that is
anti-discrimination law until we choke on it — equally. Then at some point
maybe we’ll start to think about “civil rights reform.”
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