A 21st-Century Version of Jim Crow Emerges at Seattle, Which Now Faces Scrutiny in Federal Court

The Ayatollah Itch is a disease that manifests in an urge to use government power to coerce conformity to quasi-religious agendas. The disease is not confined to clerics in foreign theocracies. Consider Seattle.Next week, a former public servant, Joshua Diemert, who for eight years was a city employee administering social services, will get what the city wants to deny him: his day in court. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear his argument that a district court erred by granting summary judgment in favor of Seattle.That court held that no major factual issues are in dispute. Oh? Here are undisputed facts laden with legal significance:In 2004, Seattle’s government, as woke as a rooster at dawn, adopted the Race and Social Justice Initiative, which was more than a program to promote workforce diversity. Rather, it was a program of compelled racial identity.Its explicit purpose was to change “the fundamental nature of local government” by embedding “racial equity and social justice principles” throughout city “programs, budgets, and culture.” This involved evaluating city employees through a “racial equity lens.” Facially illegal and presumptively unconstitutional, this monomania featured the full spectrum of now-familiar nostrums and policies. They are divisive, bullying and, by now, boring.Favoring a color-blind society is stigmatized as “racial evasion.” What normal people consider elementary adult virtues — e.g., punctuality, individualism, perfectionism — are residues of “white supremacy culture.” Diversity, equity and inclusion trainers told trainees that racism is “in white people’s DNA.” Although it is against the law to “limit, segregate, or classify” employees by race “in any program, established to provide … training,” Seattle inflicted mandatory, race-segregated sessions. The preferred euphemism for such evasions of the law is “affinity groups.”They separate white people from blacks, the indigenous, and people of color, or Bipocs for short. Seattle seems unaware of how close it has come to formulating a 21st-century version of the Jim Crow “separate but equal” doctrine.The city’s first manager of the Race and Social Justice Initiative was almost endearingly candid: “We asked all the white people to go in one room and all the people of color [to] go in another room. … Well, the white people got in the room and just talked about their fear, and the black people got in the room and talked about how glad they weren’t the White people.” Living, no doubt, in a bubble of the like-minded, this person probably had no clue how repulsive he sounded to normal Americans.Racialized messaging was directed at White employees in general and Mr. Diemert specifically. But the district court complacently accepted Seattle’s insistence that its initiative cannot be discriminatory because its aim is “equity.”The training’s pettiness and animus sometimes produced unintelligible verbal mush, as with its instruction that white employees must “decenter” themselves. Such jargon is a sure sign that the speaker has had a smattering of what today counts as higher education.The district court accepted the city’s lackadaisical characterization of its Race and Social Justice rigmarole as a benign “presentation of concepts.” The city says each individual affront Mr. Diemert experienced was “not severe.” Yet what matters legally is the totality of conditions, and the cumulative impact of episodes. So, Mr. Diemert’s resignation from his city job satisfies the criteria for an involuntary “constructive discharge”: His working conditions were made so intolerable that he felt compelled to resign.Constitutional law is clear: Freedom of speech includes freedom from compelled speech — freedom from coerced affirmations of government catechisms. Furthermore, equity “training” — meaning, invariably, indoctrination — is inherently poisonous. It also is, however, a billion-dollar business, siphoning up government and corporate money, coast to coast. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm that defends Americans from government overreach, and is representing Mr. Diemert, has more work to do.In Illinois, the “LGBTQIA+ Equity and Inclusion” initiative sweeps far beyond compliance with nondiscrimination law, to propounding murky theories of “overlapping identities” and “micro-invalidations.” The purpose, obviously, is to extinguish viewpoint diversity.The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit recently looked askance at a Missouri school district’s mandatory training for staff who, presented with a migraine-inducing “oppression matrix,” are supposed to ingest the district’s interpretation of white supremacy. For example, “covert” supremacy includes the vice of “tone policing.” If you are mystified by that, you are presumptively a racist.The Ayatollah Itch is a communicable disease spread by aspiring thought police. The vaccine against it is the visceral American recoil against government establishment of religion. Including ersatz religions concocted from evanescent political fads.The Washington Post

A 21st-Century Version of Jim Crow Emerges at Seattle, Which Now Faces Scrutiny in Federal Court

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