The New York Times keeps lying about the Trump Administration banning “diversity training.” In a September story, the paper conflated “racial sensitivity” training with the more sinister concept of “critical race theory,” which until the Trump administration banned it by executive order, was being used in mandatory indoctrination in federal agencies.
Wednesday’s edition ran another, similarly dishonest pitched story by Hailey Fuchs, “Trump Order On Training Chills Efforts On Diversity.” Fuchs lamented that the everyone-and-everything-is-racist gravy train has ground to a sudden halt and commiserated with a special set of victims:
For the diversity consulting industry, this summer was like no other. Amid the racial reckoning spurred by the death of George Floyd, a wave of senior-level executives began to look critically at their companies, and consultants like Melanie Miller and Loretta VanPelt found themselves deluged with work.
Then President Trump stepped in.
An executive order, issued in late September as Mr. Trump was stepping up his charged attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters and “political correctness,” banned the federal government, as well as its contractors, subcontractors and grantees, from offering certain diversity training on racial and gender biases -- teachings that the order called “divisive” and a “malign ideology.”
Such orders, prompted by the president’s fixations of the moment, have been staples of the Trump years and often lead nowhere. Like others, Mr. Trump’s focus on diversity training seems to have originated with an interview he saw on Fox News, when Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative scholar at the Discovery Institute, told Tucker Carlson of the “cult indoctrination” of “critical race theory” programs in the government.
This, apparently is bad news:
But this time, the impact has rippled through corporate America, academia and the government with remarkable speed. Two government agencies canceled their sessions with Ms. Miller and Ms. VanPelt within weeks, and two companies put their training on hold. Two more might follow suit, the consultants said.
….
The “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” appears transparently political, the latest effort by the president to shore up support among his largely white base ahead of the November election. Asked about it during the presidential debate last month, Mr. Trump said such trainings were “racist” and “teaching people that our country is a horrible place.”
Fuchs tried to tie the move toward workplace sanity into alleged racial appeals made by Trump.
Both implicitly and explicitly, Mr. Trump has made race a centerpiece of his bid for re-election, warning suburban voters of the perils of low-income housing and the spreading of “anarchy” in the cities. During the debate, he refused to condemn white supremacy and told the Proud Boys, an organization linked with white supremacy and acts of violence, to “stand back and stand by.”
Beyond rhetoric, the president has mobilized the federal government to prosecute his efforts.
The next paragraph maintains the misleading tone. This isn’t just “diversity training,” but “critical race theory.” “CRT” is a theoretical construct imported directly from the radical university settings into the corporate world -- condemning all whites as racist, that American society is structurally racist, etc. -- without regard to whether such propaganda actually improves racial relations.
The offensive against diversity training takes those individual efforts further. The White House’s budget director, Russell T. Vought, informed government leaders that they were to make significant changes to diversity training sessions that were “un-American propaganda.” Mr. Vought told the agencies to begin to identify training programs on white privilege or “critical race theory,” which holds that racism is foundational to American institutions, and any training that suggests that the United States is inherently racist or evil or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.
Mr. Trump’s executive order cited a Treasury Department seminar that promoted the idea that “virtually all white people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are, contribute to racism.”….
Apparently only easily frightened “diversity consultants” have correct opinions about our country’s history.
Carole Copeland Thomas, a diversity consultant in Lakeville, Mass., who had a client cancel after the executive order, called its descriptions “misrepresentations of the country’s history.” She worried about the consequences of erring on the side of caution at the expense of marginalized groups in the workplace.
“It puts a level of fear into the eyes and the ears of federal contractors, federal agencies who want to do the right thing,” Ms. Copeland Thomas said. “The cost will be not having opportunities offered to people of color.”
