The Home Depot is distancing itself from a pamphlet that was distributed to some of its Canadian retail employees that urged them to “check” their white privilege.
The “unpacking privilege” pamphlet, which was posted in the lunchroom of a Home Depot in Calgary, Alberta, urged white workers to acknowledge that their skin color grants them unearned “societal privileges” and provided a privilege checklist for employees to track if they’re white, male, Christian, able-bodied, or heterosexual.
A Home Depot spokeswoman confirmed to the Washington Examiner that a copy of the pamphlet posted on Twitter was “material from our Canadian division” but added the document was not created or approved by the company’s U.S. headquarters.
“While we fully support diversity across our company, this material was not created or approved by our corporate diversity, equity and inclusion department,” said Home Depot spokeswoman Margaret Smith. “This was a resource in our Canadian division and not part of any required programming.”
The pamphlet contained the Home Depot’s logo on both pages.
Portions of the Home Depot pamphlet appear to have been copied word for word from a University of San Francisco “Check Your Privilege” campuswide social marketing campaign from 2014.
For example, both a poster distributed during the 2014 USF campaign and the Home Depot pamphlet state: “If you can expect time off from work to celebrate your religious holidays, you have Christian privilege.”
The Home Depot’s definition of “cisgender privilege” is also identical to the 2014 USF campaign’s definition.
“If you can use public bathrooms without stares, fear or anxiety, you have cisgender privilege,” both resources state.
The Home Depot pamphlet urged workers to engage in “uncomfortable” conversations about white privilege with their co-workers while simultaneously claiming the word “white” creates “discomfort especially when individuals are not used to being defined or defined by their race.”
“White privilege does not mean your life has not been hard,” the pamphlet states. “It simply means that the color of your skin is not one of the reasons that makes it harder.”
The Home Depot isn’t the only entity that has caught heat for taking inspiration from the USF’s 2014 privilege campaign.
A California public school district came under fire in January after a high school English teacher used the USF campaign’s posters to teach students they were privileged if they held certain immutable characteristics.
After copies of the lecture materials were posted on Facebook by a concerned parent, a spokesperson for the school district said the teacher was “operating outside the scope of the adopted curriculum” and that “corrective action is underway.”
*story by The Washington Examiner
