Diversity center earns win in federal suit
Trump executive order would have frozen funding for anti-bias, racism training
SANTA CRUZ >> The Diversity Center of Santa Cruz County and several partner agencies have won a recent legal battle in a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration.
The suit took issue with a Sept. 22 executive order signed by President Donald Trump that would prevent workplace diversity training by threatening to withhold federal contracts and funding from both the organizations providing the seminars and those offices receiving it.
Diversity Center Executive Director Sharon Papo said her organization, which provided more than 90 such diversity training sessions in 2019 alone, was “delighted and honored to be invited to part of this case.” Papo said she suspected that the executive order was signed in reaction to recent successes of the Black Lives Matter movement and other efforts “organizing and awareness around racism and racial justice issues and white supremacy.”
The order and subsequent administration guidance labeled “the discussion of intersectionality, critical race theory, white
privilege, systemic racism, or implicit or unconscious bias in diversity training as ‘race and sex scapegoating’ and forbids agencies from ‘promot’ these ‘divisive concepts,’ “law firm Lambda Legal, representing the Diversity Center and others, wrote in a release announcing the win.
“We know that this executive order, if it went into action, would have been horrific for our nation; and it would have hugely rolled back so much of the grow ing awareness about racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and it would have created workplaces that are less tolerant and less accepting and that would have been incredibly damaging for our county,” Papo said in an interview this week ahead of stepping down from the organization Jan. 15.
Lambda Legal’s efforts were on behalf of the Diversity Center, Los Angeles LGBT Center; Dr. Ward Carpenter, co- director of Health Services at LA LGBT Center; AIDS Foundation of Chicago; CrescentCare in New Orleans, LA; Bradbury- Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown, PA; SAGE, based in New York City; and the Michiganbased B. Brown Consulting.
U. S. District Court for the Northern District of California Judge Beth Labson Freeman on Dec. 22 granted the suit’s requested preliminary injunction, further preventing its scheduled Nov. 15 effective date.
In part, Freeman wrote in her order, “Requiring federal grantees to certify that they will not use grant funds to promote concepts the G over nment considers ‘divisive,’ even where the grant program is wholly unrelated to such concepts, is a violation of the grantee’s free speech rights.”
Asked what comes next in the legal battle, Papo said she believed the lawsuit had already been effective in its efforts. According to the requirement s of g ra nting a preliminary injunction, a judge must find, in part, that the case is “likely to succeed on the merits.”
“They could challenge it, but Trump’s leaving office,” Papo said. “The big work was to ensure that it didn’t start. It had a date … it was supposed to go into effect and it didn’t because we put the lawsuit forward and stopped it from being implemented.”