(Official Washington Examiner editorial, Jan. 28) When even a liberal federal judge appointed by former President Barack Obama rules that diversity, equity, and inclusion practices can be illegal, it is time to recognize that most DEI regimes by design are invidiously discriminatory.
In a case that received too little attention, Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled this month that former Pennsylvania State University professor Zack De Piero had reasonable grounds to keep alive a lawsuit against the school based on its DEI practices. De Piero said DEI policies at the college essentially forced his resignation, and Beetlestone agreed the professor “plausibly alleged that he was subjected to a race-based hostile work environment.”
On the record as presented in De Piero v. Penn State, Beetlestone wrote, De Piero at least has a reasonable case, the full merits of which remain to be adjudicated, that he suffered “harassment that is ‘sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of [the plaintiff’s] employment and create an abusive working environment.’”
Those conditions were created explicitly by the university’s DEI policies and practices. For example, on five different occasions, the university required De Piero “to attend conferences or trainings that discussed racial issues in essentialist and deterministic terms — ascribing negative traits to white people or white teachers without exception and flowing inevitably from their race.” In one exercise after the Minnesota police killing of counterfeiter George Floyd, the instructor forced “White and non-Black people of color to hold [their breath] just a little longer [than black people] — to feel the pain.”
If literally being forced to feel pain because one is white isn’t racially discriminatory, nothing is. But that was only one example. In another instance, De Piero said the facilitator “condemn[ed] white people for no other reason than they spoke or were simply present while being white.” Meanwhile, he said, university officials specifically told him “to incorporate race into his grading” in a way that would “penalize [white] students academically on the basis of their race.”…. [The full editorial is at this link.]
