Walmart has put more than 1,000 employees through a critical race theory training that teaches that the U.S. is a “white supremacy system” and that white trainees are guilty of “white supremacy thinking” and “internalized racial superiority,” according to a new report.
Whistleblower documents obtained by City Journal’s Christopher Rufo reveal that Walmart first launched the program, which is based on the core principles of critical race theory, in 2018 in partnership with the Racial Equity Institute.
SCOOP: @Walmart has launched a critical race theory training program that denounces the United States as a “white supremacy system” and teaches white hourly-wage workers that they are guilty of “white supremacy thinking” and “internalized racial superiority.”
Buckle up.
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2021
The company has made the program mandatory for executives, while it is recommended for hourly-wage workers. Rufo calls out Walmart over its hypocrisy, noting that its whole nine-member top executive leadership, except technology chief Suresh Kumar, is white.
Walmart confirmed to Rufo that it has “engaged REI for a number of training sessions since 2018” and has “found these sessions to be thought provoking and constructive.”
The training claims that the U.S. is a “white supremacy system,” created by white Europeans “for the purpose of assigning and maintaining white skin access to power and privilege,” according to the report.
The program suggests that white people are guilty of “white privilege” and “internalized racial superiority,” the belief that “one’s comfort, wealth, privilege and success has been earned by merits and hard work” rather than through the benefits of systemic racism. The training claims that the “white supremacy culture” is defined by several qualities, including “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “defensiveness,” “power hoarding,” “right to comfort,” and “worship of the written word.”
It adds that “discussions about racist conditioning” should occur in racially segregated groups as “people of color and white people have their own work to do in understanding and addressing racism,” the report notes.
According to the training, employees who are racial minorities suffer from “constructed racist oppression” and “internalized racial inferiority” and struggle with internal messaging such as, “we believe there is something wrong with being a person of color,” “we have lowered self-esteem,” “we have lowered expectations,” “we have very limited choices,” and “we have a sense of limited possibility.”
This harmful internal thinking forces them to buy into the “myths promoted by the racist system,” according to the training, and to develop feelings of “self-hate,” “anger,” “rage,” and “ethnocentrism,” and they are forced to “forget,” “lie,” and “stop feeling” to survive.
The program suggests that the solution is for white people to work on “white anti-racist development” and to accept their “guilt and shame” and that “white is not right.” Ultimately they should work toward “collective action” where “white can do right.”
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