Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said Wednesday that Minneapolis Public Schools will learn they cannot discriminate against white people. The Department of Justice’s civil rights division, which Dhillon leads, is suing the district for imposing race-, sex-, and national origin-based preferences in hiring, layoffs, reassignments, and reinstatements in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Dhillon stated that it has always been against the law to discriminate based on skin color, even against white people. “The Department of Justice was never run before by an administration that cared about protecting the rights of all Americans,” Dhillon said. “And yes, white Americans and men are protected by our employment discrimination laws.”
The complaint alleges that since July 2021, Minneapolis Public Schools has enforced collective bargaining provisions that intentionally favor “underrepresented” teachers — defined as Black, Indigenous, and other people of color — over white and Asian teachers. According to the lawsuit, the district’s 2021-2023 and 2023-2025 collective bargaining agreements required administrators to override standard seniority rules during layoffs and involuntary reassignments when a teacher was deemed “underrepresented.” In those cases, officials were instructed to skip the protected teacher and assign a “nonunderrepresented” teacher with more seniority.
Dhillon noted that when she sees egregious examples such as “paint-by-numbers” and “color-by-numbers” hiring practices in Chicago and Minneapolis, she opens investigations. “When we gather the evidence; we file lawsuits,” she added. The lawsuit describes a case of “not only disparate impact run amok but the types of affirmative action we are not having anymore in this country.” Dhillon concluded that “disparate impact, DEI, that’s all over from the federal government’s perspective.”
By Sam Barron
