Politics

Biden Executive Order Mandates Divisive, Unscientific Race ‘Training’ At Every Level Of The Federal Government

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Michael Ginsberg Congressional Correspondent
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President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Friday that ensures that every part of the federal government will conduct race-conscious diversity training and engage in race-conscious hiring.

The executive order “establishes an ambitious, whole-of-government initiative that will take a systematic approach to embedding DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] in Federal hiring and employment practices,” according to a White House fact sheet. In practice, it will ensure that federal agencies employ tenets associated with Critical Race Theory (CRT) within their hiring practices and day-to-day activities.

CRT holds that America is fundamentally racist, yet it teaches people to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. Its adherents pursue “antiracism” through the end of merit, objective truth and the adoption of race-based policies.

The executive order directs federal agencies to “develop strategic plans to eliminate any barriers to success faced by under-served employees.” This will be felt through federal hiring, which will prioritize “communities that have historically faced employment discrimination and professional barriers, including people of color, women, first-generation professionals and immigrants, individuals with disabilities, [and] LGBTQ+ individuals.”

Other designated groups to be prioritized in hiring include “Americans who live in rural areas, older Americans who face age discrimination when seeking employment, parents and caregivers who face employment barriers, people of faith who require religious accommodations at work, individuals who were formerly incarcerated, and veterans and military spouses.”

Notably, the order requires diversity trainings like the one conducted by Sandia National Laboratories, a government contractor that helps manage nuclear weapons. During a three-day “White Men’s Caucus,” male employees were required to recite “white privilege” and “male privilege” statements, according to leaked documents reported on by Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo. Trainers at the caucus told the participants that “white supremacists,” “KKK,” “Aryan Nation,” “MAGA hat,” “privileged” and “mass killings” were all associated with “white male culture.” (RELATED: ‘Deeply Disturbing’: Sen. Hawley Reacts To Documents Detailing ‘White Men’s Caucus’ Race Training In US Nuclear Facility)

Those trainings were later banned by a Trump administration executive order. That executive order was later challenged in court by the NAACP, and Biden revoked it on his first day in office.

The Biden administration claims that these trainings “promote respectful and inclusive workplaces and… increase understanding of implicit and unconscious bias.” However, numerous studies have found that the trainings not only fail to achieve their stated aims but actually make race relations worse.

Implicit bias trainings have not “been shown to result in permanent, long-term reductions of implicit bias scores or, more importantly, sustained and meaningful changes in behavior,” public health professor Tiffany Green and psychology professor Nao Hagiwara wrote in Scientific American.

The value of the Implicit Association Test, which purports to measure implicit biases, is hotly contested by psychologists. “There’s not a single study showing that above and below that cutoff [0.65 on a 2 point scale] people differ in any way based on that score,” Texas A&M University psychology professor Hart Blanton argues.

Even worse, diversity trainings like the one the employees of Sandia Labs were required to participate in can actually make race relations worse. Those trainings can generate “increased belief in race essentialism, or the notion that racial group differences are valid, biologically based, and immutable,” three researchers found in a 2018 study.

Diversity trainings make participants “more likely to believe that they themselves are being treated unfairly,” three psychologists wrote in 2016 in the Harvard Business Review.