Even conservative school districts aren’t safe from woke ideology.
Walmart is pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion training on public school children in Northwest Arkansas, the area where the corporation is based. According to a recent report from the Washington Free Beacon, Walmart offered to arrange DEI training for schools in Bentonville; in Fayetteville, Walmart money funded a five-year “equity plan” for public schools.
In Bentonville, the news outlet reports, “teachers were learning that ‘perfectionism’ is ‘white supremacy’ and that ‘all our systems, institutions, and outcomes emanate from the racial hierarchy on which the United States was built.’”
The Free Beacon adds that in Fayetteville, “School leaders attended trainings on the ‘six tenets of critical race theory,’ learned that ‘systemic inequality = trauma,’ were drilled on the harmful effects of ‘microaggressions,’ and sat through PowerPoints on ‘intersectionality.’”
Two things are troubling here.
First, Walmart’s philanthropic endeavors used to ruffle educators’ feathers by unapologetically supporting charter schools and school choice. Now, in addition to these worthy parent-empowering ideas, Walmart initiatives are doing exactly what the education establishment wants: teaching DEI and critical race theory to children.
Walmart received a 100% on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index 2022. Considering that Walmart has sponsored drag shows for kids, it’s not hard to see why. As we learned recently with Bud Light, seemingly no corporation is safe from woke ideology.
Second, and perhaps more concerningly, not even conservative school districts are safe from woke ideology. Northwest Arkansas public schools are caught in Walmart’s powerful gravitational pull; when it goes woke, so go the schools.
“Parents are often lulled into the belief that woke ideology won’t happen in their schools because they live in a ‘red’ state,” Bentonville parent Carolyn Horine told the Free Beacon. “Trust me as someone living in a conservative area: it can happen anywhere.”
Diversity, equity, and inclusion may sound innocuous, but the popular phrase has become a catchall for initiatives that preach the evils of Western civilization and divide listeners more than they unite them.
Initiatives such as those now being pushed by Walmart—and popular in many schools across the country—aim to impose the harmful ideology of an elite class on everyday Americans. According to the Free Beacon report, one of Walmart’s diversity programs for public schools even admitted that DEI “sometimes must be imposed from the top down.”
This should be troubling for parents who want their children to grow up to be independent thinkers, and for everyone in the U.S. who wants its future leaders to grow up valuing true freedom and equality.