According to Christopher Rufo, a so-called “diversity” training is continuing apace within the federal government. Using the term “diversity” to explain the content is a complete sham. The foundations of the program are critical race theory. It assigns thoughts, values, and behaviors to people by race as if skin color creates homogeneous populations.
Diversity is more than skin deep
These are the same theories being peddled in a book by Robin DiAngelo called White Fragility, which has become a national bestseller recently. Her book centers around the idea that the color of your skin should be the central focus of your identity. Directed at white people, the book scolds them to become “less white.” One of the best takedowns of her theories, which are racist in and of themselves, came from Ben Shapiro.
The grievance industry
These ideas have just reached national prominence, but they have been seeping through our universities for some time. Alternately termed “grievance studies,” “social justice,” and “intersectionalism,” they are not based on rigorous scientific methods or research. As Douglas Murray noted in his book The Madness of Crowds:
Another curiosity of the intersectional movement is the camouflage that it employs. Aside from McIntosh’s most popular document, the one thing all the purveyors of the ideologies of social justice and intersectionality have in common is that their work is unreadable. Their writing has the deliberately obstructive style ordinarily employed when someone either has nothing to say or needs to conceal the fact that what they are saying is not true.
This obstructive style is also a feature of the training based on the social justice view of the world. The training provided only to white employees of the city of Seattle is a glaring example. An email inviting employees who identify as white to the training described the goal as teaching participants that they have “complicity in the system of white supremacy.” They must be held “accountable to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”
According to Rolfe, similar training is occurring in our federal agencies.
Last month, a private diversity-consulting firm conducted a training titled “Difficult Conversations About Race in Troubling Times” for several federal agencies. The training called on white employees at the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Credit Union Administration and the Office of the Comptroller to pledge “allyship [sic] amid the George Floyd Tragedy.”
Dangerous rhetoric
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of being an ally in the context of race relations, it is defined as the following on the TriColleges Library website:
Allyship is a process, and everyone has more to learn. Allyship involves a lot of listening. Sometimes, people say “doing ally work” or “acting in solidarity with” to reference the fact that “ally” is not an identity, it is an ongoing and lifelong process that involves a lot of work.
One type of ally is a white ally. A white ally acknowledges the limits of her/his/their knowledge about other people’s experiences but doesn’t use that as a reason not to think and/or act. A white ally does not remain silent but confronts racism as it comes up daily, but also seeks to deconstruct it institutionally and live in a way that challenges systemic oppression, at the risk of experiencing some of that oppression. Being a white ally entails building relationships with both people of color, and also with white people in order to challenge them in their thinking about race. White allies don’t have it all figured out, but are committed to non-complacency.
You must, at all times, be on the lookout for racism and call it out to be considered an ally. The federal training gets even better:
According to a trove of whistleblower documents I’ve reviewed, the training begins with the premise that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and hold narratives that “don’t support the dismantling of racist institutions.” Therefore, the trainers argue, white federal employees must “struggle to own their racism” and “invest in race-based growth.”
”The trainers then ask “white managers” to create “safe spaces,” where black employees can explain “what it means to be black” and to be “seen in their pain.” White staffers are instructed to keep silent and to “sit in the discomfort” of their racism. If any conflicts arise, the trainers insist that whites “don’t get to decide when someone is being too emotional, too rash [or] too mean.” Whites are told they can’t protest if a person of color “responds to their oppression in a way [they] don’t like.”
So the federal workplace is supposed to be one neverending struggle session? It sure sounds like it. And here’s the kicker. Five million of your taxpayer dollars have gone Howard Ross, a white man, to push this nonsense within the government.
Rejecting identitarianism
Identitarianism from the right or the left is simply toxic. And the far left’s premise is the mirror image of the actual white supremacists. There is nothing David Duke would love more than to have the color of an individual’s skin define his or her character. And Martin Luther King Jr. would be horrified.
President Trump should issue an immediate executive order to ban employee training based on critical social justice theories. Likewise, Betsey DeVos needs to ban them from public K-12 education in schools that receive federal dollars. These theories promote resegregation based on race and are meant to increase hostility and division. Teaching them to our children could not be more dangerous.
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Remember the 20th Century
Dr. Jordan Peterson has been warning about identitarian movements for several years. He has devoted a great deal of study to the brutal regimes of the 20th Century, which he criticizes the education system for not covering in-depth or accurately. In his summer lecture series in 2017, he made the following comments:
Having the right to degenerate into identity politics does not seem to be a positive solution. One of the things I would say is: I understand why the identity politics that has been practiced so assiduously and so devastatingly by the left has been co-opted by the right. I understand that. But here’s what I would say to the people on the right, who are playing that game:
If you play the game of your enemies, and you win, you win their game. You don’t win. That’s not victory. You just become the most sucessful exponent of their pathology. How is that a good thing? It is a bad thing.
So what does that leave people as an alternative? Well, I don’t think that the caucasians should revert to being white. I think that is a bad idea. It is a dangerous idea, and it is coming fast. And I don’t like to see that. I think the whole group identity thing is seriously pathological.
I think we’ve made big mistakes in Canada. I understand why, at least to some degree, in that respect, and large mistakes are being made across the Western world. Where we’re making your group identity the most important thing about you. I think that is reprehensible. It is devastating. It is genocidal in its ultimate expression. I think it will bring down our civilization if we pursue it. We shouldn’t be playing that game.
Diversity is a celebration of differences where they are viewed as valuable and something that makes our culture richer. It should encompass far more than the color of our skin. And it should never assign motives, thoughts, values, or behaviors based on it. This dangerous game needs to stop, and most certainly, it should not be funded by the government.
And those like Di Angelo and Ross who personally profit from peddling division and stunning racism should be exposed for the frauds and grifters they are.
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