Walmart launched an aggressive anti-racism tactic in 2018. The company uses a program that teaches company executives and salaries managers about the “white supremacy system” that was designed by European whites to keep themselves in power. The training urges managers and leaders to remember that “white is not right” but that “white can do right.” The public is just learning the details of Walmart’s critical race theory training because a whistleblower shared resources from the training with the media.
The Walmart whistleblower leaked documents to City Journal, which claim that the “white supremacy system” had been designed by white Europeans “for the purpose of assigning and maintaining white skin access to power and privilege.” The training explains that white people in America have undergone “racist conditioning” that teaches them how to practice “white supremacy,” or the view “that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions.”
Although Walmart might seem committed to inclusivity and diversity, the company does not seem to be willing to put people of color in positions of power. Currently, only one of the company’s nine top executives is non-white. That individual is Global Chief Technology Officer Suresh Kumar. The large majority of Walmart’s 40 vice presidents are white in race.
Walmart’s anti-racism training hopes to identify a psychological profile for whiteness and then treat it with “white anti-racist development.” Trainers teach how whites are guilty of “white privilege” since they were born into a system of white supremacy that lifts them up while putting people of color down. The training also articulates that whites have “internalized racial superiority” and believe that “one’s comfort, wealth, privilege, and success has been earned by merits and hard work” rather than because of whiteness.
The “white supremacy culture” that oppresses non-whites is described by the Walmart training as including the qualities of “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “defensiveness,” “power hoarding,” “right to comfort, “and “worship of the written word”—which work together to “promote white supremacy thinking” and “are damaging to both people of color and to white people.”
What do you think about Walmart’s critical race theory training for executives and managers?