(Scott Shepard, National Center for Public Policy Research) A rash of reports [last] week has revealed that some of the country’s biggest oligopolist companies have plunged headlong into critical race theory (“CRT”)-based employee training programs. In the name of “racial justice,” the programs facially discriminate against white employees, but also demean and infantilize the black and other “people of color” employees they are ostensibly designed to support.
This creates massive legal risks, of course, and also reputational ones, given that the more American investors, consumers and employees learn about “racial equity” under CRT, the less they like it. This reputational risk is multiplied because the executives who approve the programs and “encourage” general employee participation in them very much fail to apply the vile teachings to their own personal and professional lives.
Whenever news of corporate-executive mendacity and malignancy arises, odds are good that Bank of America and its CEO Brian Moynihan will play a role. And there they are.
As Chris Rufo reported last week, Bank of America – along with a host of other malefactor companies – has sponsored a “diversity and inclusion” program created by the United Way that instructs white employees that they are both personally and collectively responsible for any disparities in outcomes between whites and members of other ethnic groups, while the latter bear no responsibility for their own circumstances. Whites are instructed to “decolonize [their] mind[s]” and “cede power to people of color.”
This insistence that white employees sit quietly back – at the back of the office, perhaps – while people of color take charge and tell them of their racial guilt, and their duty to subordinate themselves to make amends, so obviously creates a hostile work environment that I’m surprised the lawsuits haven’t started already. (The next round of layoffs should be interesting.)
The whole theory also demeans the “diverse” people it claims to help. There are two categories of people who are absolved from any personal responsibility for their actions and their fate: children and the mentally incompetent.
Under the critical-race view of the world, white people – all white people, even toddlers – are superheroes of colossal and earth-shattering power who must meekly abjure their powers for the good of all. Non-white people are mewling and helpless in the face of wicked white domination, not personally responsible for their circumstances and only able to succeed if whites step aside.
That’s some red-hot racism Bank of America has sponsored – and then “encouraged” its employees to subject themselves to. We might assume that “encouraged” equates to “your participation will be noted and filed in your record.”
If not, how? And did Bank of America also sponsor less wildly racist “voluntary” employee-training programs, maybe some with anti-CRT viewpoints? Or does inclusion and diversity not include including diverse viewpoints?
Rufo found similar CRT-based racism at Verizon. There the program leader (who has since moved to Pfizer) read white employees’ minds for them, telling them that they “view[ed blacks] as inferior,” and black “live[s as] not as valuable as anyone else[‘s].” It does not appear that time – and “safe space” – for rebuttal or diverse opinion was provided.
As an instructor who was last seen contaminating American Express declaimed to Verizon’s “encouraged” employees while conflating capitalism and liberty with slavery: “This isn’t just Marxist talking points. It’s just the facts.”
Good heavens – that first “just” tells quite a tale, no? This Verizon program isn’t justMarxism. It’s also the same straightforward racism as at Bank of America, under which one race must subordinate itself to all others because of skin color alone.
And the powerful duo of racism and Marxism have led Verizon to endorse defunding the police – despite the fact that black people themselves oppose such measures, they being the primary targets of black crime in black neighborhoods.
