The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a lawsuit against Washington University in St. Louis, alleging that the school's diversity training program discriminated against a Black employee, who was segregated from her colleagues and later lost her job after complaining.
According to the complaint, in January 2025, the university's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion required staff to participate in "shared racial identity spaces"—essentially Zoom breakout rooms divided by race. The employee, a senior program manager, was the only Black member of her team and warned the office beforehand that this would isolate her. The university proceeded anyway.
After the session, the manager filed an internal complaint and then a charge with the EEOC. Months later, her position was eliminated. A university diversity official dismissed the incident as a miscommunication and defended the racial breakout rooms as part of anti-racism work.
In a statement, EEOC Acting General Counsel Catherine Eschbach said the employee was "separated from her white colleagues exactly as she feared, then lost her job for objecting to it."
This case is part of a broader federal crackdown on DEI programs that sort people by race. The Justice Department has targeted several universities, including Yale, UCLA, Duke, and George Washington University, for using racial proxies in admissions. At Duke, for example, rejected white and Asian applicants had higher median LSAT scores than admitted Black applicants. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon stated that schools "do not get a free pass to discriminate" based on good intentions.
The administration's stance is rooted in the 2025 executive order "Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy," which argues that outcome gaps alone do not prove discrimination. The EEOC has also sued the New York Times and settled with Planned Parenthood of Illinois and HCL America over similar DEI practices.
Defenders of DEI argue that these programs address historical inequities. But as the author, a governance expert, notes, "When you sort people by race into rooms, committees, hiring pools or admissions tiers, you are discriminating by race—full stop." The original civil rights laws were designed to end such sorting, not to refine it.
As federal agencies treat DEI language as evidence of wrongdoing, universities and corporations are being forced to reconsider their policies. The message is clear: programs that segregate or prefer by race will face legal consequences, regardless of their stated aims.
