Trainers at the City of Seattle's Human Services Department told employees that "white people are cannibals," that "racism is in white people's DNA," and that "white people are like the devil." Attendance was mandatory. The program was called the Race and Social Justice Initiative.
On September 28, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that this kind of training may violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by creating a racially hostile work environment. The court that conservatives love to hate just handed them a landmark weapon against DEI.
The case is Diemert v. City of Seattle. Joshua Diemert joined the city's Human Services Department in 2013 and spent years in mandatory sessions that included racially segregated "caucuses," a game called "privilege bingo," and a "continuum of racism" ranking. He alleges a supervisor pressured him to give up a lead role so a person of color could be promoted instead. He resigned in 2021 and sued in 2022.
A lower court had thrown out his hostile work environment claims. The Ninth Circuit reversed that decision, finding the alleged incidents were "sufficiently numerous, frequent, and severe to create a triable issue as to the existence of a racially hostile work environment." The case now goes to a jury trial.
The legal architecture here is what makes this devastating. Title VII was built to protect employees from workplace discrimination. For decades, HR departments weaponized it in one direction — creating the very training programs and diversity mandates that employees couldn't refuse without risking their careers. The Ninth Circuit just said the shield works both ways.
"Title VII protects every employee from a racially hostile work environment, regardless of race," said Laura D'Agostino, an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented Diemert. Grady Block of Mountain States Legal Foundation, which filed an amicus brief, put it more directly: "Title VII's protections don't depend on the race of the employee, and employers don't get a free pass to discriminate simply by calling it equity training."
Seattle will likely push for an en banc rehearing — the full Ninth Circuit reconsidering what a three-judge panel decided. But the opinion is already written. The standard is already articulated. And every corporate HR department running mandatory "anti-racism" sessions just got put on notice that the same hostile-work-environment framework they built their entire compliance regime around can now be turned against them.
The City of Seattle made employees sit in racially segregated rooms and listen to trainers explain that their race made them inherently defective. They called it equity. They made it mandatory. They ran it for years.
A federal court just called it what Title VII calls it.