Robin Root v CUNY: Fighting Back Against Anti-Majority Discrimination
Submitted by Thomas F. Powers
A broad counter-reaction to higher ed DEI, political correctness, wokeness (etc.), has been gathering momentum over the past several years. The best known strategies involve harnessing freedom of speech, banning diversity statements and “divisive concepts” in diversity training, and challenging affirmative action (following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard).
Another emerging strategy is to insist upon applying civil rights law on behalf “majority” groups—whites, men, straights, and Christians—in a more exacting way when they come under attack. (The “majority” term is imperfect of course, but it is a term of use in the law, indicating instances involving “that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”)
In a way this has been part of the conservative stance on civil rights for a very long time; when affirmative action efforts are characterized as “reverse discrimination,” there is of course an implied claim that such policies discriminate against men, whites, etc.
But there is more to anti-discrimination law than the realm of affirmative action policy and other areas of law that map onto the debate about it (like voting and “disparate impact”). A potentially consequential development of just the past few years has been heightened concern for anti-majority discrimination in diversity training and the like—where diversity training and related efforts on college campuses or in the workplace take the shape of what might be considered “hostile environment” harassment of members of majority groups, and therefore actionable under various civil rights statues (Title VII and Title IX above all).
Such an episode is at the heart of a case filed back in 2020, as I detailed recently in National Review. The Robin Root case is important for a number of reasons. It has survived a motion to dismiss and seems likely to go trial (the plaintiff is seeking a jury trial). It is a case in state court, and in a blue state at that. (Other similar cases are working their way through the federal courts as well.) While it does not deal directly with “diversity training,” the Root case does involve something similar that was backed officially by the school (the chair of the Anthropology and Sociology Department, and the dean of the college in which the department is housed). The case also involves retaliation (a demand by the chair that Root retract her discrimination claim).
Prof. Root must here claim “anti-white” discrimination and harassment and retaliation. As awkward as that might be for a lifelong civil rights advocate on the left (as she is), there was no other way to register her sense that something had gone wrong with civil rights idealism (or radicalism) as it took shape in this instance. Read the full story for the details. The long and the short of it is that in the name of anti-racism, faculty (and administrators) at this public university indulged and participated in a vigorous and troubling campaign of anti-white harassment. If the moral condemnation of an entire race of people is not racial discrimination, what is?
We are all in Prof. Root’s debt for standing up to this kind of bullying. At the same time, it is possible to wonder how we got to this point. How did anti-racism become, not just implicitly but manifestly, a tool of an effort to demonize and castigate the members of one racial group? What does it mean for the future of our country if the majority has to turn to civil rights law to protect itself from attacks that have their origin in civil rights idealism?