Can You Oppress Me Now? Verizon Inflicts CRT Training on Employees

Matt Philbin | August 31, 2021
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Race shakedowns used to be simple affairs. If, say, Jesse Jackson came knocking, a busy CEO could offer a lucrative beer distributorship or maybe just a fungible donation to Operation Slush, and the alleged iniquities would just melt away. 

Not so these days. Sure, companies still dump cash on a variety of grifts -- how else do “trained Marxists” get $1.4 million to spend on their fourth home? But corporate America has bought (or pretended to) the woke blather of the race industry. As a result, employees have to endure farcical race training to learn where they fit on the victim continuum. 

Take Verizon (please!) On August 25, City Journal’s Christopher Rufo reported on the company’s “Race & Social Justice” initiative. Someone in the company leaked to Rufo the details of “ an extensive race reeducation program based on the core tenets of critical race theory, including ‘systemic racism,’ ‘white fragility,’ and ‘intersectionality.’

Yep. It’s the unholy academic Marxist incubi that escaped college dorm rooms to terrorize normal people. According to Rufo:

Verizon diversity trainers instruct employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and, according to their position on the “privilege” hierarchy, embark on a lifelong “anti-racism journey.” Employees are asked to list their “race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, religion, education, profession, and sexual orientation” on an official company worksheet, then consider their status according to the theory of “intersectionality,” a core component of critical race theory that reduces individuals to a network of identity categories, which determine whether they are an “oppressor” or “oppressed.”

And this makes better wi-fi. Doesn’t it? Well, okay, blah, blah, blah. Get the Diversity tee shirt and get back to work. 

But Verizon’s C-suite may be a hive of true believers. Rufo says that, “As part of the company’s ‘antiracism’ education series, #Next20, Verizon vice president David Hubbard interviewed Khalil Muhammad, great-grandson of former Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and newly minted professor of race at Harvard.”

Well there’s an unimpeachable source. Great Grandpa knew a thing or two about working a grift, and he built a a virulently anti-emitic black supremacist group. Khalil’s got pedigree. He must have sane, reasonable things to say. According to Rufo:

During his presentation, called American History 101, Muhammad argued that America is fundamentally racist and needs a “new origin story,” replacing the narrative of “American exceptionalism” with the narrative that America was founded on “systems of racism” that remain at the root of our society. 

Someday, some sane person will file a “hostile work environment” suit against the corporations that inflict this garbage on their employees. It may or may not succeed, but maybe the plaintiff will get a beer distributorship out of it.

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