On December 14, a white DEI staffer sued the University of Wisconsin for allegedly discriminating against her.
Rochelle Hoffman, a former assistant director of the Multicultural Student Services at UW-Eau Claire, claims college officials discriminated against her because she is white and later retaliated against her when she complained about harassment.
Hoffman, in an email last year to Wisconsin Sen. Patrick Testin, said UW has become a “hostile environment,” pervaded by “blatant actions of racial discrimination against white folks” such as her.
“On a regular basis there are great educators that are told they shouldn’t occupy multicultural space, to check their white privilege, passed over for jobs for an outside candidate of color, and reminded they are ‘inherently racist’ because they are white,” she alleged.
Michael Knuth, a UW director of communications, says the university “will not offer a statement or comment on the lawsuit in question” because of its policy of not commenting on pending litigation. But he also said that “UW-Eau Claire does not discriminate based on race in any employment decisions.”
Allegations like Hoffman’s are fueling increased scrutiny from legislators. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in December that university DEI programs are “cancerous.” He said people should be selected “based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” He wants to “eliminate the DEI process” in university hiring.
Hoffman alleges her employment experience “dragged out over 10 months and irrevocably damaged [her] career.”
It began after her appointment two years ago as interim director of the Office of Multicultural Student Services, and continued during time as assistant director, according to the lawsuit.
Hoffman alleges her track record had been recognized as impeccable, and that she got reviews of “exceeding expectations” and “outstanding” during her six previous years working at the university. But this did not keep students and staff from complaining because of her race.
During an Open House forum in February 2022, students made disparaging comments about Hoffman’s race, including, “Do you personally feel white staff can do as effective a job as a person of color, within a space for people of color?” and “We don’t want white people in the MSS office,” according to the complaint she filed in court.
Students contended that “for a student to be well served, they needed to be assigned a coordinator of the same ethnic background,” the lawsuit states.
The problem mushroomed after the Student Senate passed a resolution condemning Hoffman’s appointment, noting “concerns over placing white identifying individuals in positions of interim leadership for major EDI offices.”
Hoffman said other staffers made it harder for her to do her job, and an anonymous complaint was filed with the Office of Affirmative Action 19 months ago claiming her “presence made the complainant feel uncomfortable.”
On July 12, college officials who met with Hoffman admitted the work environment was “hostile” for her, but, instead of working to fix the problem, told her “she had to move” to another office, the lawsuit alleges.
Hoffman said this amounted to constructive termination, in that she could not handle the hostility anymore and felt compelled to resign from her position as assistant director.
“The University completely ignored federal law prohibiting race and/or color from being a factor in employment decisions affecting an individual’s compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,” her lawsuit says.
Colleges have massive racial and ideological double standards. A left-wing employee can get away with calling for the castration of white men, while a conservative employee at the very same university gets investigated and suspended merely for criticizing affirmative action.
One example is from the University of California at Los Angeles, where its Director of Race and Equity, Johnathan Perkins, claimed that “every white person is racist to some degree”, and falsely claimed that “white people cannot be victims of racism,” and “only white people can impose racist harm.”
UCLA did not care that he said this, even though those positions conflicted with the civil-rights responsibilities of the office where Perkins works, UCLA’s Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
Under the civil-rights laws, white people can be victims of racial discrimination, as the courts have ruled many times. Perkins is simply wrong. Moreover, non-whites have been found guilty of imposing racist harm, and stereotyping whites as racist simply because they are white is considered racially hostile workplace behavior that can lead to civil-rights violations. The Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to fire white employees because they were white, in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education and in McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co. (1976). Courts have ruled that racial harassment is illegal even when it is committed by blacks against whites, in cases such as Huckabay v. Moore (1998) and Bowen v. Missouri Department of Social Services (2002).
The federal courts have sentenced non-whites to prison for committing violent racial harms — hate crimes — against whites. Those decisions make plain that it is not “only white people” who “can impose racist harm,” as Perkins claims. Courts have ruled that “baseless accusations of racism” made against white employees because they are white can be racial harassment that contributes to a racially hostile work environment in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (See Underwood v. Northport Health Services (1989)).
College administrators can be removed from their positions when they take racist positions at odds with their job responsibilities. There is no right to be racist while holding a civil-rights position. (See Harleston v. Jeffries (1995)).
Yet Perkins advocates racial discrimination against whites, and frequently expresses racial hostility, with impunity. He tells whites not to wish him a “Happy Juneteenth” because he will “flip tf out” if they do. He says that whites, unlike Blacks, “should NOT be awarded the day off for Juneteenth,” even though that is discriminatory. Perkins says that while “most” people “value community,” “white people do not.” He said on Juneteenth 2023 that he was “Blaming white people, who should ALL be working today, of all damn days.”
In 2022, Perkins reacted to the death of England’s Queen Elizabeth by saying,“Good riddance.” He also publicly yearned for the death of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, saying on Twitter that “no one wants to openly admit [we all] hope Clarence Thomas dies.”
Perkins’ undignified, hateful rants have been at odds with the stated “mission” of UCLA’s Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, where Perkins is a director. It describes its “mission” as “to uphold dignity for all.”
Perkins previously worked in Harvard University’s Office of General Counsel. Perkins fabricated a racial incident in 2011, claiming to be racially harassed by campus cops at the University of Virginia — as a way to “bring attention to the topic of police misconduct.”
“As I stood there, humiliated, with my hands on the police car, my only thought was: ‘There is nothing I can do to right this wrong. I have absolutely no recourse,’” Perkins wrote in a letter to the editor to the student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily. But after an investigation found his claims to be false, he was forced to admit the events he claimed happened “did not occur.”
In 2022, Perkins accused those who took issue with his argument for abolishing the police of engaging in “white supremacy.”
Perkins claims to be “antiracist.” But self-described “antiracists” are often racist. Earlier this year, Auburn University’s Black Student Union sent a document containing over 250 racial slurs for whites in a recent GroupMe chat it hosted, even though it has claimed to support “antiracism.” The Black Student Union (BSU) is part of Auburn’s student Governance Branch along with the Student Government Association.
The insults for white people included “mayonnaise monsters,” “failed abortions,” “deformed dna,” “mockery of humanity,” “bleach demons,” “albino pigs,” and “not meant to exist.”
If white students behaved this way toward blacks, they would likely be disciplined by a college for racial harassment (whatever the First Amendment may say). But since this was aimed at whites by blacks, no college administrator cares. Legally, though, blacks can be found liable for racially harassing whites. For example, courts have ruled that employers are liable for allowing racial harassment against whites, in cases like Bowen v. Missouri Department of Social Services (2002) and Huckabay v. Moore (1998)).
In practice, “Anti-racism” means left-wing ideology, including opposition to capitalism and support for illegal racial preferences. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says the best-selling “anti-racist” book How to Be An Antiracist. That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate.
The “key concept” in the book How to Be an Antiracist is that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” it says. Such discrimination violates Supreme Court rulings like Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education (1986).
