Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — who, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, claims to want to “unify” the country — oversaw training sessions for veterans and teachers that were segregated along racial, ethnic, and sexual lines.
Much of this division, of course, was predicated on the infamous trio of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which, in progressive parlance, means uniformity, inequity, and exclusion. In short, white people — especially heterosexual white males — need not apply.
Vetting the Homeless for “Diversity”
Homelessness among veterans is a serious problem. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there were 35,574 homeless veterans in the United States last year. Of those, 57 percent were white.
Yet when Walz’s Department of Veterans Affairs held a series of training sessions for homeless veterans in 2022 and 2023, it explicitly excluded most white men. The department’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Ending Veterans Homelessness Work Group advertised for veterans with “lived experience of homelessness” who “identify as BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color], LGBTQIA+ and/or Woman.” The only way a straight, white male could participate in these “social justice” sessions, which paid $50 an hour up to a maximum of $2,500, was to appear as a “stakeholder or ally” to the favored groups.
“The Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs can’t offer up to $2,500 to any minority or female veteran who has been homeless, while offering it to white male veterans who have been homeless only if they are willing to call themselves ‘allies’ of the minority and female veterans,” U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member Gail Heriot told the Washington Free Beacon. “That’s still discrimination. It still violates both the Constitution and Title VI. I’m not sure why that’s so difficult for state agencies like this one to understand.”
When state agencies are packed with left-wing bureaucrats and political appointees, though, there’s no such thing as discrimination against white males, who, after all, are “privileged” even if they are living on the streets of Minneapolis in January.
Restorative Injustice
Walz’s Department of Education is even more committed to the DEI agenda than Veterans Affairs. Whether it’s curriculum or teacher training, the Education bureaucrats know how to divide and conquer.
The department has been conducting “restorative practices” training sessions for teachers and school officials since at least 2022. According to the 2022 web page on the sessions, “Restorative practices (RP) is an approach schools can use to improve school climate and repair harm, based in the knowledge and world-view of many Indigenous cultures” — which, simply by virtue of being melanin-blessed, are automatically assumed to be superior to melanin-deprived cultures.
One aspect of the sessions is the “People of Color Affinity Community,” which “is reserved for people who personally identify as” BIPOC to “celebrate culture, connection and collaboration” and have “brave and equitable discussions.” There is no “affinity community” for white people, who are instructed to “attend other circle trainings.” This year’s sessions did allow non-BIPOC individuals to participate, but only if they “embrace restorative practices in pursuit of equity.”
In 2020, the Education Department published a document on “staff support sessions” that also suggested creating “affinity groups”:
For instance, provide a space only for people of color to discuss the impact on them of the death of George Floyd, while white staff talk with each other about their response to the death…. Participants in any group may learn from each other, without causing further harm to the people most impacted by systemic racism.
Walz Into DEI
While a Walz apologist might shrug off these programs as creations of Education Department bureaucrats, there is no getting around the fact that the governor is responsible for an equally divisive ethnic-studies curriculum aimed directly at schoolchildren. According to an August Wall Street Journal report:
Mr. Walz signed the law establishing this initiative in 2023. The department’s standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.”
Fourth-graders must “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” High-school students are told to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.”
Walz can’t escape responsibility for the department’s other radical policies, either. The paper noted that his “administration has relied on committed political activists to design and guide implementation of the state’s education agenda.” Those activists, naturally, come from only one side of the political aisle — often its most extreme elements.
Walz has also managed to inject DEI into healthcare. The Free Beacon reported last month that, in 2023, Walz “signed into law a bill that established racial quotas throughout the state’s health department, from a requirement that two members of a pregnancy task force be ‘Black or African American’ to rules governing the composition of a ‘health equity’ council.” Those policies, too, are almost certainly unconstitutional, legal experts told the website.
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who hasn’t bought the whole “Midwestern dad” propaganda campaign on Walz’s behalf. Nor should it shock anyone who has paid attention to the Biden-Harris administration, which has been equally divisive in its pursuit of DEI. But it is further evidence that the Harris-Walz “unity” campaign is pure hogwash.
