The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a lawsuit against The New York Times, charging the media outlet with violating the 1965 Civil Rights Act for racial discrimination in hiring.

“The New York Times chose not to promote a well-qualified white male employee because of his race and/or sex,” the EEOC explains. “The New York Times has a well-documented commitment to enacting race and sex conscious decision making in the workforce through its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. In The New York Times’s 2021 ‘Call to Action’ and throughout numerous other publications, the company stated goals and action plans to increase non-white and female representation in its leadership positions.”

The Times employee in question had worked for the paper for over a decade, specifically in real estate journalism, a prerequisite for the job he was seeking — deputy editor on the Real Estate desk.

The complainant noted that he was the only white male applicant and pointedly observed that the person eventually hired for the position had no experience in real estate journalism. Furthermore, the complainant points to the Times’s own expressed woke diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals in its aforementioned “Call to Action” agenda. The Times planned “to make employment decisions on the basis of race and sex to achieve its desired demographic goals,” the complaint says. “A decrease in the percentage of White male employees (whether new hires, existing employees or those in leadership, as appropriate) was a necessary consequence for the N.Y.T. to achieve these results.”

Unfortunately, for the complainant, he happened to be both white and male, and therefore, was disqualified for the position based solely upon his race and sex characteristics.

The candidate who was eventually chosen is described as a multiracial female.

EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas stated that the law applied equally and without prejudice. “No one is above the law — including ‘elite’ institutions. There is no such thing as ‘reverse discrimination’; all race or sex discrimination is equally unlawful, according to long-established civil rights principles,” she said. “Federal law is clear: making hiring or promotion decisions motivated in whole or in part by race or sex violates federal law. There is no diversity exception to this rule.”

Yet over the last decade, as the leftist woke ideology seemingly spread like a virus out of institutions of higher learning and has impacted nearly every sphere of life, including business HR departments, DEI has been viewed as the new moral standard.

Dubbed as anti-racist, the great irony is that DEI promotes racism against the white majority. Because whites are deemed “privileged,” DEI proponents advance the ridiculous and blatantly false claim that racism against whites is not possible.

The Times, of course, attempts to defend itself by first charging that the EEOC’s lawsuit is meritless and a purely politically motivated action by the Trump administration. Second (and even more ridiculously), Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha claimed, “Neither race nor gender played a role in this decision. We hired the most qualified candidate, and she is an excellent editor.”

Well, based upon the claims as raised by the EEOC, but also the Times’s own proudly trumpeted pro-DEI goals, the notion that race and sex were not a significant factor in the paper’s hiring decision is dubious at best.

Indeed, the regular demonization of white straight men within the pages of the Times is ubiquitous. Recall that the Times published that blatantly anti-white revisionist historiographical fiction by Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project.

This is the ideological worldview the Times has been pushing, but as soon as it comes to facing the music and defending it, the Gray Lady claims it has never committed the very discrimination it has been preaching.

It will be fascinating to watch not only the outcome of this lawsuit but also the ripple effect it may have on business HR departments across the nation. This is a massive warning shot from the EEOC that it’s serious about going after businesses, no matter how big or influential, that don’t expunge the inherent racism of DEI ideology from their hiring or promotion practices.

The most effective method to end racism is to stop making decisions based upon race, period. Moreover, as actor Morgan Freeman famously observed years ago, the best way to stop racism more generally is to “stop talking about it.” One of the reasons America is such a great nation is that we have a system that rewards skills, talent, and hard work. We are a meritocracy where what you can do as an individual matters more than what you look like or who your ancestors were.

As a culture, we need to once again herald the meritocratic view and value it above all these racial grievances, equity, and demographic concerns.