The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals this morning ruled in favor of a group of school employees who argued that their free speech rights were violated when they were forced to endure a DEI “training” session that declared, among other things, that “calling the police on black people” or “treating kids of color as adults” are forms of “white supremacy.” Agreeing with arguments that the Goldwater Institute offered in its friend of the court brief, the decision marks a major victory for color-blind justice as well as the free speech rights of government employees.
The saga began when school officials in Springfield, Mo., ordered employees to attend a meeting where they were taught what was then up-to-date social justice dogma: specifically, that America’s legal, economic, social, and cultural institutions are saturated with “covert white supremacy”—manifested in everything from “claiming reverse-racism” to the idea of “colorblindness.” Instructors at the session told attendees that white people are inherently “privileged,” and that they were morally obligated to not only to “acknowledge your privileges” but to renounce that “privilege,” and to undertake, at all times, to eliminate their inherent, and even subconscious, racism.
Two of the school employees objected to these assertions but were told that their views were “confused and wrong” and that they “needed to work on [themselves].” When they persisted, they were told that their disagreement was like “having a conversation about football and you bring up baseball”—whatever that means. In the end, they were forced to shut up and stay silent. Worse, they were required to take a test in which the “correct” answers were those prescribed by DEI orthodoxy. When, for example, one employee was asked on the exam how including DEI concepts in the class will improve the educational environment, she wanted to answer that it does not, because she thinks people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skins. But that was considered an “incorrect” answer.
That’s unconstitutional, though: the government isn’t allowed to tell people what to believe, or to shut them up when they want to express disagreement. And public school employees have the same constitutional rights as everyone else. While schools can prescribe curricula and teachers can be required to listen quietly to the explanation of concepts they disagree with, they can’t be punished for disagreeing or compelled to assert that they do agree.
So, the employees sued. Represented by our friends at the Southeastern Legal Foundation, they argued that the DEI “training” requirement—more accurately labeled an indoctrination session—violated their First Amendment rights. Amazingly, the trial judge threw the case out as “frivolous” and punished them by imposing a massive attorney fee award against them. When they appealed, the Goldwater Institute filed a friend of the court brief, joined by the Kansas Justice Institute, the Mississippi Justice Institute, and the Show Me Institute, arguing that in fact DEI is inherently compulsory, because under DEI theory, to disagree with the assertion that white people are inherently racist is automatically deemed racist—and being labeled racist is, of course, career suicide for any public school employee.
Today’s decision reverses the trial court decision in its entirety. The “training” session, the court explains, forced employees to pledge allegiance to DEI and censored them from expressing their disagreement. Not only did the school district “force acceptance or adoption of the school’s views,” but it threatened to punish those who voiced opposition—even while it claimed that they could speak their minds. “The plaintiffs self-censored to avoid negative consequences that the school district itself repeatedly said it would impose—the employee would be asked to leave the training; the employee would not receive credit; and … if this happened, their pay would be docked because completion of the training was mandatory.”
The decision is a major win for public school employees who for years now have been forced to sit silently through DEI lectures that assert that the ideal of colorblindness is racist, and that America is a fundamentally racist nation. Coming on the heels of the closure of Ibram Kendi’s “Center for Antiracist Research” at Boston University and significant changes in the DEI programs at some 400 other colleges nationwide, the ruling is an important signal that Americans are fed up with the reverse-racism that recently dominated cultural discourse.
That doesn’t mean DEI is dead—on the contrary, much remains to be done, as many institutions are simply “rebranding” the dogma to call it by a different name. That’s why states need to implement the Goldwater Institute’s Freedom from Indoctrination Act. But today’s victory is a critical step out of a perverse ideology that destroys equality in the name of fairness.
You can read the ruling here and the Goldwater Institute’s amicus brief here.
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute.
