If you’re white and you work for the federal government get ready to be labeled a racist, regardless of how fair you are, how colorblind your worldview. On Friday, President Joe Biden ordered all federal agencies to ramp up workplace training on “systemic and institutional racism” and “implicit and unconscious bias.”
Those are buzzwords for the new racial ideology sweeping the nation. It holds that all whites are biased against minorities and the American nation as a whole was irredeemably racist at its founding and remains so to this day. This is emphatically not diversity training. It’s about framing one group – whites – as “oppressors” and humiliating them.
Assume you work in an office with people of various races, all getting along pretty smoothly as a team. Then the supervisors subject you and your coworkers to mandatory critical-race-theory training. Whites will be ridiculed as racists, and if they try to deny it, the trainers will tell them that their very denials are proof of unconscious bias and “white fragility.” Black employees will understandably question whether they can even trust white coworkers.
Critical race theory is a train wreck for workplace morale.
Expect an avalanche of lawsuits challenging Biden’s effort to saturate the federal workplace with this divisive doctrine. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars employers from engaging in racial discrimination, period. A “toxic work environment” is a no-no. Federal regulations define that as permitting “ridicule, mockery, insults or put-downs” based on race and other protected characteristics.
That’s exactly what goes on in these training sessions. No one should have to put up with being called a racist as a condition of employment.
Or as a condition of serving in the military. No other institution in US society has been more colorblind since the early 1950s than the US armed forces. In Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East, black and white infantry soldiers have fought side by side in the trenches, trusting each other with their lives.
But on Wednesday, the nation’s top military man, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, defended teaching critical race theory at West Point and assigning critical race theory texts to troops. What could be the outcome except distrust based solely on skin color?
Compelling employees to tolerate lectures about “their racial ancestors or their individual current white privilege runs contrary to an employer’s responsibility to avoid creating a hostile work environment,” cautions University of Maryland, Baltimore County professor George R. La Noue.
Biden’s already drowning in legal challenges to his other racially discriminatory policies. Federal judges have suspended his debt forgiveness program for black farmers because it specifically excludes white farmers. Federal courts have also halted grants to restaurant owners hurt by the pandemic because most white male restaurateurs were told they had to go to the back of the line, behind minorities and women. Team Biden seems to forget that discrimination is against the law, even if it’s discrimination dressed up in noxious academic theories.
It’s one thing to promote the values of diversity and inclusion. We need to show mutual respect and work together. In the federal workforce, people of color make up nearly half of entry-level positions but only one-third of senior positions. More can be done to help minorities succeed. But not by demeaning whites.
Defending assigning critical-race-theory texts, Gen. Milley told Congress that it’s important for military personnel to be widely read. “I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin, that doesn’t make me a communist,” Milley said.
But he’s being misleading. Critical race theory isn’t taught as one of many ideas to be debated. It’s being held up as dogma. Activist Robin DiAngelo says that even staying silent during a discussion of racism makes you a racist.
The idea isn’t to foster debate. Only to indoctrinate and compel acquiescence.
On Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz introduced a bill to block funding for Biden’s workplace-indoctrination scheme. “The federal government has no right to force a political agenda on Americans . . . and divide us based on race.” The US Constitution agrees.
*story by The New York Post
