President Trump issued an Executive Order Tuesday that would withhold federal funding from government contractors who engage in ‘critical race theory’ training sessions, calling the ideology behind the training “divisive.”
The Executive Order specifically defunds government contractors who continue to train their employees on theory and ideology based on race and sex stereotyping in the Federal workforce, Uniformed Services, and among Federal contractors.
“This order will prohibit Federal agencies and Federal contractors from conducting training that promotes race stereotyping, for example, by portraying certain races as oppressors by virtue of their birth,” the White House said in an announcement.
Critical race theorists argue that racism infects all our societal institutions, from public education to the criminal justice system, thus the claim of systemic racism. They claim that although race is a “social construct,” the repercussions of “racialization” are real, resulting in profound racial and ethnic disparities.
In his Executive Order, the President wrote that some are pushing an ideological theory that is a “different vision of America, that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual…This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”
The President provided several examples of the abuses associated with Critical Race Theory Training that have recently taken place across the federally-funded spectrum including at the US Treasury Department, the Argon National Laboratory, the Sandia National Laboratory, and the Smithsonian Institution.
In these training sessions attendees were instructed that: “virtually all White people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are, contribute to racism”; “rationality over emotionality” was a characteristic of “white male[s]”; racism “is interwoven into every fabric of America”; and that concepts such as “objective, rational linear thinking,” “hard work” being “the key to success,” and the “nuclear family,” are “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.”
In the Smithsonian Institution’s training it was declared that, “[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear.”
In his order the President stated that this type of ideologically-based trainings “[perpetuate] racial stereotypes and division and can use subtle coercive pressure to ensure conformity of viewpoint.”
Recently, the President launched the 1776 Commission, tasked with establishing a school curriculum centered on the patriotic teaching of US History. He took this action to counter the Critical Race Theory-based 1619 Project by The New York Times which sought to re-write America’s founding to the arrival of slaves in the colonies circa 1619.
