The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is canceling a staff training course based on the quasi-Marxist critical race theory, which it had planned to implement in spite of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order banning the theory from federal trainings, after a whistleblower stepped forward.
Rufo said he obtained the documents from the whistleblower, who was “outraged” that the training was going forward despite Trump’s ban.
“I thought maybe they would wisely cancel this training series. Instead we got a message this morning confirming ... The pressure to participate is palpable and if you don’t you will have to explain why you aren’t a racist,” Rufo quoted the whistleblower as saying in a Sept. 14 tweet. A day later, Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced the training was off.
The training was called “Naming, Measuring, and Addressing the Impacts of Racism on the Health and Well-Being of the Nation and the World.”
It instructed the participants to find “racism” or “systemic racism” in all situations and become activists for spreading the critical race ideology further.
As racist “norms” it includes a “narrow focus on the individual,” an “a-historical stance,” “the myth of meritocracy,” as well as the so-called “myth of American exceptionalism.”
The phrase “If you work hard you will make it” is described as a part of the “Myth of meritocracy” and part of “the values targets for anti-racism work.”
A topic of one session is to “generalize” racism to mean “any system of structured inequity.” In practice, that means any setting where any non-white group on average doesn’t achieve the same or better results than whites is considered “systemically racist.”
In one session, “race” is described as a “rough proxy for social class” which is “meaningless for genes.”
Data suggests the opposite. Roughly 60 percent of American whites and 40 percent of blacks are in the middle or higher class,
based on 2018 income data. Meanwhile, a typical black American is genetically between 65 to 80 percent African and a typical white is about 3-4 percent African, according to
genetic ancestry data from different sources. That indicates race is a much better proxy for genetic makeup than for class.
The training instructs participants to work toward developing critical race curricula for schools of public health, medicine, social work, and law, as well as for K-12 schools and to even infuse it into children’s books.
“We are in the midst of a pandemic and the CDC is prioritizing a critical race theory training program that is in direct violation of a presidential order,”
Rufo said in a Sept. 14 tweet. “@CDCDirector Robert Redfield must immediately terminate this program—and focus on COVID-19, where CDC has been disastrous.”
