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...

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