DEI trainings gave ‘signals to white and Asian employees that they are not going to be treated equally’

Zack De Piero, a professor who sued Penn State University alleging a “racially hostile” environment, recently filed an appeal after a district court dismissed his lawsuit earlier this year.

“To make even more clear what should have been obvious all along: Employers violate the law when they treat their employees as playing pieces in some kind of racial power game,” attorney James Kerwin told The College Fix recently. 

Kerwin and Mountain State Legal are representing De Piero in the appeal, which they filed in August.

A few weeks ago, the attorneys submitted a brief to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals as part of the appeals process, urging the judges “to reverse the lower court’s decision” and let De Piero’s “discrimination and retaliation claims” move forward, according to the legal organization.

De Piero, a former English professor at the public university’s Abington campus, filed the lawsuit after he said he was basically forced to resign in 2022. 

In the lawsuit, he claims Penn State’s diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings and race-based grading practices created a hostile work environment and amounted to racial discrimination. 

The faculty DEI trainings “were consumed by divisive ideology” that claimed “white teachers are a problem” and “traditional writing standards were ‘white supremacy,’” according to a news release from Mountain State Legal. 

De Piero alleges he was “singled out,” ridiculed, and pressured over his objections to the trainings, according to the lawsuit. 

In one example cited in De Piero’s initial lawsuit, then-Assistant Provost for Educational Equity Alina Wong allegedly “expressed her intention to cause Penn State’s white faculty to ‘feel the pain’ that George Floyd endured” during a June 2020 Zoom conference, The Fix reported previously.

The provost allegedly “led the faculty in a breathing exercise in which she instructed the ‘White and non-Black people of color to hold it just a little longer — to feel the pain.’”

Kerwin told The Fix via email that Professor De Piero was subjected to “serious workplace hostility” through Penn State’s DEI training and affirmative action programs.

“They are signals to white and Asian employees that they are not going to be treated equally; and they are signals to black workers that their employers have exceptionally low expectations for their performance,” he said. “All of this is racist and illegal.”

De Piero hopes his case will “set an example both for Penn State and for other employers—especially government employers—that they cannot get away with corrosive racial hostility, purportedly in the name of ‘equity,’ and that they cannot silence and censor the people who are brave enough to speak up and challenge their illegal conduct,” Kerwin told The Fix.

The Fix also reached out to Penn State’s media relations office twice for comment on the lawsuit, but the emails went unanswered. 

MORE: White professor who resisted race-based grading files discrimination lawsuit