SHRM just lost an $11.5 million discrimination lawsuit. Their CEO called it "a blip."

The institution that trains America’s employers to prevent discrimination was just found liable for racial discrimination and retaliation. The irony is not accidental. It is diagnostic.

On December 5, 2025, a Colorado jury ordered the Society for Human Resource Management to pay $11.5 million in damages to Rehab Mohamed, a Black and Egyptian woman who alleged that SHRM—the world’s largest HR organization, with 340,000 members—fired her shortly after she filed a racial discrimination complaint.

The jury found that SHRM violated Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Not Title VII. Not the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law invoked dates to 1866—the same year that white legislators, still processing the formal end of slavery, codified protections against race discrimination in contracts. 159 years later, the organization that certifies HR professionals in employment law was found to have violated the oldest federal civil rights statute on the books.

I want to begin by being precise about what happened.

Mohamed worked at SHRM for four years. She was promoted months before her termination. She reported racial discrimination by her supervisor to CEO Johnny C. Taylor Jr. and then-Chief Human Resources Officer Sean Sullivan. Weeks later, she was fired. SHRM claimed performance issues. The jury did not believe them.

The jury awarded $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages. Punitive damages are not awarded for mistakes. They are awarded to punish conduct that is egregious, malicious, or undertaken with reckless indifference to the rights of others.

Ten million dollars in punishment. From the organization that trains others to avoid this exact outcome.

THE IRONY IS NOT INCIDENTAL

There is a particular audacity in SHRM’s situation that deserves examination. This is not a manufacturing company that stumbled into a discrimination case. This is not a startup without legal infrastructure. This is the self-proclaimed “trusted authority on all things work.” SHRM certifies hundreds of thousands of HR professionals. It publishes best practices. It offers courses on employment law compliance. It hosts conferences on workplace equity.

And yet, when a Black woman reported discrimination to its own leadership, the organization retaliated against her with enough deliberateness that a jury levied ten million dollars in punitive damages.

This is not irony. This is a pattern.

The pattern is not new. In 2024, SHRM removed the word “equity” from its DEI framework, announcing it would focus on “inclusion and diversity” instead. The timing was notable: the announcement coincided with Black Women’s Equal Pay Day. The message was clear. When SHRM renamed its approach, it was not evolving; it was retreating.

In 2025, SHRM invited Robby Starbuck—the conservative activist who has pressured corporations to dismantle their diversity programs—to speak at its DEI-focused conference. The organization that trains HR professionals on equity invited a man whose stated mission is to end equity work. At least three other discrimination complaints have been filed against or settled with SHRM over the past eight years, according to Business Insider. The organization maintains it has done nothing wrong.

The pattern is consistent. Teach others what you are unwilling to do. Preach what you will not practice. Profit from the language of inclusion while operating in the tradition of exclusion.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INSTITUTIONAL DISSOCIATION

In my work on the Psychopathy of Whiteness, I describe a mechanism I call dissociation: the capacity to commit harm while maintaining a narrative of innocence. Dissociation allows institutions to implement violence through policy, procedure, and personnel decisions while simultaneously insisting that their intentions were good, that their processes were fair, that their culture is one of “integrity and transparency.”

SHRM’s statement following the verdict is a textbook illustration:

“This claim has no merit. None. Today’s decision does not reflect the facts, the law, or the truth of how SHRM operates. We have acted with integrity, transparency, and in full alignment with our values and obligations.”

Read that statement again.

A jury of twelve citizens listened to testimony for a week. They examined the evidence. They concluded that SHRM discriminated against and retaliated against a Black woman. They levied $10 million in punitive damages—a remedy reserved for conduct that shocks the conscience.

SHRM’s response: “This claim has no merit. None.”

This is not a legal strategy. This is a psychological posture. It is the defensive architecture of an institution that cannot integrate the reality of what it did with the image it holds of itself. The harm is real. The denial is reflexive. The gap between the two is where dissociation lives.

CEO Johnny Taylor referred to the verdict as “a blip in the history of SHRM.”

Eleven and a half million dollars. A federal civil rights violation. A punitive damages award that signals the jury found SHRM’s conduct egregious. And the CEO calls it a blip.

This language is not accidental. It is diagnostic. It reveals an institution that has learned to minimize harm as a reflex, to frame accountability as inconvenience, to treat the suffering of a Black woman as an administrative nuisance rather than a moral failing.

WHAT SHRM TEACHES VS. WHAT SHRM DOES

I have spent more than fifteen years training professionals at major health systems, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies on the dynamics of institutional racism. What I have learned is that the organizations most likely to cause harm are often the ones most fluent in the language of harm prevention.

This is not a contradiction. It is a feature.

The fluency creates cover. When an organization can point to its DEI statements, its training programs, its published values, it can deflect scrutiny. “How could we be discriminatory? Look at all the work we do on diversity.” The language becomes a shield rather than a commitment. The programs become evidence of good intent rather than mechanisms for good outcomes.

SHRM trains HR professionals to document personnel decisions. SHRM teaches that retaliation is illegal. SHRM publishes resources on how to conduct fair investigations. And yet when Mohamed reported discrimination, she was terminated weeks later. The very protocols SHRM teaches were absent in SHRM’s own practice.

This gap between stated values and actual conduct is not unique to SHRM. It is endemic to American institutions. Hospitals teach implicit bias training while Black women die in childbirth at three times the rate of white women. Police departments adopt de-escalation curricula while officers continue to kill unarmed Black civilians. Universities create diversity offices while Black faculty remain underrepresented and underpaid. The pattern is consistent: adopt the language, resist the substance, punish those who name the gap.

THE MEANING OF PUNITIVE DAMAGES

The jury’s decision to award $10 million in punitive damages is significant. Punitive damages are not compensation for lost wages or emotional distress. They are punishment. They are levied when a jury concludes that the defendant’s conduct was so willful, so reckless, or so indifferent to the rights of the plaintiff that mere compensation is insufficient.

Ten million dollars is not a misunderstanding. It is a verdict on character.

When a jury levies punitive damages at nearly seven times the compensatory amount, they are sending a message. The message is: What you did was not a mistake. It was a choice. And that choice reflected something deeper than a personnel error. It reflected a culture.

SHRM can appeal. It likely will. The organization has already announced its intention to fight the verdict “to the highest courts in the land.” But the appeal cannot undo what the jury concluded: that the world’s largest HR organization, the institution that certifies professionals to prevent workplace discrimination, was itself an employer that discriminated and retaliated.

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?

There is a larger question embedded in this case, and it is not limited to SHRM. Who holds accountable the institutions that are supposed to hold others accountable?

SHRM certifies HR professionals. It accredits programs. It shapes the standards by which workplaces are evaluated. If SHRM itself cannot comply with the laws it teaches, what does that reveal about the entire structure of workplace equity in America?

The answer is uncomfortable but necessary: the structure was never designed to produce equity. It was designed to produce the appearance of equity—enough programming, enough language, enough certifications to create plausible deniability. The goal was never to dismantle discrimination. The goal was to manage the perception of discrimination while preserving the conditions that produce it.

I have written extensively about how American institutions operationalize harm while narrating virtue. Courts laundering bias as neutrality. Corporations adopting “belonging” language while eliminating structural commitments to Black communities. The SHRM verdict is another data point in a pattern that is now centuries old: institutions that perform inclusion while practicing exclusion.

WHAT THIS SHOULD MEAN FOR HR PROFESSIONALS

If you are an HR professional certified by SHRM, this verdict should trouble you.

Not because SHRM’s liability reflects on your personal ethics. But because it exposes the limits of credentialing as a proxy for competence. A credential from an organization that cannot practice what it preaches is a credential in form, not in substance.

The question every HR professional should be asking is not “How could SHRM let this happen?” The question is: “What does my organization do when a Black employee reports discrimination?”

Does leadership take the complaint seriously, or does leadership view the complainant as a problem to be managed? Is the investigation conducted with rigor, or is it conducted to reach a predetermined conclusion? Are the findings used to change behavior, or are they filed away while the complainant is quietly pushed out?

These are not theoretical questions. They are the questions that determine whether an organization’s commitment to equity is real or rhetorical.

SHRM’s verdict should be a mirror. It should force HR professionals to examine their own institutions with the same scrutiny they would apply to an external case study. If the world’s largest HR organization can fail this spectacularly, no organization is immune.

WHAT HAPPENS NOW

SHRM has announced it will appeal. The organization’s leadership has framed the verdict as an aberration, a blip, a decision that does not reflect the truth of how SHRM operates.

But the truth is what the jury found it to be.

The truth is that a Black woman reported discrimination to the highest levels of the organization. The truth is that she was terminated weeks later. The truth is that a jury of twelve citizens, after reviewing the evidence, concluded that SHRM violated federal civil rights law. The truth is that the jury was so troubled by SHRM’s conduct that it levied ten million dollars in punitive damages.

That is the truth. SHRM’s narrative about itself is something else entirely.

I have spent my career documenting the gap between what institutions say and what they do. That gap is where Black people are harmed, where accountability is evaded, where dissociation flourishes. SHRM’s response to this verdict—denial, minimization, defiance—is the predictable behavior of an institution that has been caught. It is not the behavior of an institution prepared to reckon with what it has done.

Reckoning is the first step in any healing process. Without an honest accounting of harm, there can be no repair. Without repair, there can be no trust. And without trust, there can be no legitimate claim to authority.

SHRM’s authority in the HR profession was built on the premise that it knew how to do this work better than others. That premise is now on trial—not in a courtroom, but in the court of professional credibility.

The verdict is in. Whether SHRM will accept it remains to be seen.

Dante King is the author of Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness: White Psychopathology, Collective Psychosis, and Trauma in America and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medical Education at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. He has trained HR and healthcare professionals at Mayo Clinic, Stanford Medicine, UCSF, Johns Hopkins, and Fortune 500 companies for over 15 years.

→ Read & Watch: The patterns described in this essay are documented across 400 years of American law in Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness and the accompanying 10-part docuseries.

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