Trainers told staff 'racism is in white people's DNA' during city sessions
A federal appeals court has sent Seattle's racial equity training program to trial over claims it helped create a hostile work environment.
The Ninth Circuit ruled on September 28 that a former city employee raised enough evidence to take his race-based hostile work environment claims before a jury. The worker, a white man, spent eight years in Seattle's Human Services Department before resigning in September 2021.
At the center of the case is the city's Race and Social Justice Initiative, launched in 2004 to address institutionalized racism. It required staff to attend racial justice trainings and offered racially aligned affinity groups - a "White Caucus," an "African Descent Caucus," and others. The worker alleged the program, combined with what happened in and around those sessions, made his workplace racially hostile.
The incidents stretched back years. In 2015, a manager discouraged him from applying for a supervisory role, saying she wanted someone "bilingual" with "contacts within one of the marginalized communities." The job went to a person of color. That same year, another manager asked what he could "possibly offer our department ... being a straight white male."
Then came the trainings. At a 2019 session, trainers stated that "white people are cannibals," that "racism is in white people's DNA," and that "white people are like the devil," according to the court's opinion. Coworkers called him a "white supremacist." A supervisor called him a "colonist" and allegedly "physically accosted" him. He filed an EEOC charge in December 2020.
The city investigated, but he withheld cooperation over what he saw as investigator bias. The complaint was rejected.
The appeals court found the incidents "sufficiently numerous, frequent, and severe" to warrant a trial. Workplace training addressing racial barriers "are not inherently discriminatory," the court held - but they "may violate Title VII when they create a racially hostile work environment."
The worker did not succeed on everything. The court affirmed dismissal of his constructive discharge, disparate treatment, and retaliation claims, and found he lacked standing on his equal protection challenge because he could not show personal injury from any racial classification.
Only the hostile work environment claims go to trial.
For HR teams running equity or anti-racism programs, the practical question is now concrete: what trainers say, and how those messages filter into day-to-day workplace conduct, can become evidence of a hostile work environment under Title VII.
