The Free Beacon: Walmart Crusaded for Woke DEI Indoctrination in Arkansas' Schools

Wonderful, wonderful "conservative-leaning" corporations -- what would we do without them?

How Walmart Pushed Arkansas Public Schools to Go Woke

Documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show a private company's unprecedented effort to inject DEI into classrooms

Aaron Sibarium
April 17, 2023

In January 2020, Walmart approached public school administrators in Bentonville, Arkansas, about hosting diversity training sessions for the district.

"We want people to feel welcomed, comfortable, and safe living here" in Northwest Arkansas, Candice Jones, Walmart's head of diversity, emailed district leaders, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. To that end, the company was offering to arrange teacher training sessions with a North Carolina-based consultancy known as the Racial Equity Institute, a group "devoted to creating racially equitable organizations and systems."

"This would be great for teacher development and a great way to connect with the community," Jones said.

By August, 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."

Bentonville--the site of Walmart's corporate headquarters--wasn't alone.

In nearby Fayetteville, the district's public schools embarked on a five-year "equity plan" funded and designed by Walmart-funded groups, including a DEI "research institute" at the University of Arkansas. 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."

The district also implemented a "restorative justice" program--designed to combat the allegedly "disproportionate" discipline of black students--that discouraged teachers from breaking up fights and instructed them to sit on the floor with students to "dispel any sense of hierarchy."

This report is based on thousands of pages of documents obtained through public records requests submitted by families in Bentonville and Fayetteville. It reveals how the world's largest retailer is transforming schools in its hometown through grants, nonprofits, and corporate outreach, laundering its ideology as a kind of noblesse oblige.

The transformation highlights the tension between democracy and DEI, which--as one Walmart and Walton-funded diversity program, "TRUE," put it in a presentation to Fayetteville Public Schools--"sometimes must be imposed from the top down."

These initiatives might seem out of place in Northwest Arkansas, which voted overwhelmingly for former president Donald Trump. But Walmart, long a bogeyman for liberals concerned about the power of big business, has become just as progressive as the rest of corporate America, earning a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index in 2022.

The company is owned and controlled by the descendants of Sam Walton, who opened the first Walmart store in 1962. Once staunch Republicans with close ties to the national GOP, the Waltons have shifted left with each passing generation--and with the 2016 election, they began giving nearly as much to Democratic campaigns as to Republican ones.

Read the whole thing. Recall that former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed a bill to exclude boys and men from girl's and women's sports -- acting, of course, at the behest of his corporate donor Walmart.

And of course Asa Hutchinson is only running for president because he has the Woke Walton family's money to burn as they try to bribe their way into a Woke, DEI-supporting, gun-controlling, Transgender Extremist GOP.

One might even say that Asa Hutchinson is a "Managed Principal" and pawn of the "globalist corporatists," but then, there's a lot of that going around lately.

posted by Ace at 01:22 PM

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