Speaker Series: Tristin Green
In February 2025, the Trump Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague letter to universities and K-12 schools in which it insisted that teachings that trigger feelings of guilt or “moral burden” because of race amount to discrimination by “deny[ing] students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.” Several years earlier, the Executive Office of the President under then-president Donald Trump issued a letter directing all federal agencies to “cease and desist” in their workplaces from funding diversity training sessions that teach “divisive concepts,” including any trainings “suggesting that any individuals should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological stress on account of his or her race.” The common idea across these directives is that teaching about racial bias, systemic racism, racial history, or injustice amounts to discrimination against whites solely because it imposes harms related to race in the form of psychological stress or emotional anguish. Feeling badly about race, in other words, renders the teachings discriminatory without any further inquiry.
These directives build from a larger shift in antidiscrimination law over the past several decades toward measuring individual harm in determining whether discrimination occurred. The shift, what Tristin Green calls “centering personal offense,” is particularly evident in the area of employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Judges during this time began to see and emphasize individual, psychological harm as a principal discrimination harm and at the same time to raise concerns about claims for mere trifles, creating legal doctrines designed to protect employers from liability through judgments about individuals’ harms where no such doctrines existed before.
As the anti-DEI directives so starkly illustrate, centering personal offense in antidiscrimination law deforms and decontextualizes the discrimination inquiry by burying normative determinations in individualized measurements of harm. In this way, it dovetails with (though is distinct from) calls for formal equality and colorblindness. What’s more, once measuring harm is part of the discrimination inquiry, it appears natural for judges to weigh individual harms against each other in deciding whether discrimination took place: One individual’s judicially declared affront to dignity is put up against another individual’s judicially declared much ado about nothing.
In this project, Tristin Green exposes the turn in antidiscrimination law toward centering personal offense (a turn that has been implicitly embraced by progressives and conservatives alike), and I illustrate why it is problematic. Looking to the future, she then shows how a seemingly narrow recent Supreme Court decision, Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, can be understood to upend it. With antidiscrimination law under attack, re-centering institutions and normative debates about what amounts to discrimination and why is more crucial than ever.
To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.
Tristin Green is a sociolegal scholar interested in the role of institutions—such as workplaces, educational systems, and legal frameworks—in perpetuating discrimination. Her work critically examines how prevailing ideologies about discrimination shape legal doctrines and, in turn, influence the potential for law to effect substantive and meaningful social change. Her work pushes against narrow frames of discrimination to instead emphasize institutional and organizational decisions, especially as they affect the context for day-to-day relations.
Professor Green is the author of dozens of scholarly journal articles and book chapters, as well as two books: Racial Emotion at Work: Dismantling Discrimination and Building Racial Justice in the Workplace (University of California Press, 2023) and Discrimination Laundering: The Rise of Organizational Innocence and the Crisis of Equal Opportunity Law (Cambridge University Press, 2017).