Seattle City Employee Sues Over Anti-White Discrimination, ‘Racially Hostile Work Environment’

A former Seattle city employee has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging he was a victim of anti-White discrimination due to a “racially hostile work environment.”

Joshua Diemert, who worked as a program intake representative in Seattle’s Department of Human Services from 2013 to 2021, filed suit Nov. 16 against the city and its mayor, Bruce Harrell, claiming he was constantly belittled and harassed at work for being White and that he was denied advancement opportunities and retaliated against due to the color of his skin.

Diemert’s lawsuit blames the alleged anti-White culture he experienced on the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI), which seeks to “end institutionalized racism and race-based disparities in City government,” according to the city government’s website.

{snip}

“The City routinely urged Mr. Diemert to join race-based affinity groups and required him to participate in training sessions that demeaned and degraded him based on his racial and ethnic identity,” the lawsuit states. “He was chastised and punished for combating racially discriminatory hiring practices by [Department of Human Services] colleagues.”

“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,’” it claims. “And he was denied opportunities for advancement by the City based on his racial and ethnic identity.”

As part of his RSJI training, the lawsuit alleges, Diemert was required to attend a two-day workshop in 2019 called “Undoing Institutional Racism,” during which facilitators declared, “white people are like the devil,” “racism is in white people’s DNA,” and “white people are cannibals.”

“When Mr. Diemert objected, the facilitators used their platform to belittle and attack Mr. Diemert,” the lawsuit claims. {snip}

“Mr. Diemert’s colleagues used their work emails to berate and entertain violence against him, referring to him as ‘some a–hole,’ the ‘reincarnation of the people that shot native Americans from trains, rounded up jews for the camps, hunted down gypsies in Europe and runaway slaves in America,’ noting that it was not worth addressing his concerns because he would ‘just come back with more stupidity,’ and that someone should ‘get a guy to swing by when Josh is in the restroom and beat him bloody,’” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit also claims that Diemert was required to attend racially segregated trainings for White people and meetings where supervisors forced employees to “identify their race and to stand and affirm where they ranked themselves on a defined ‘continuum of racism.’”

{snip}