guest COMMENTARY

The Bias of Disney’s ‘Woke’ Job Training

Last week, City Journal reporter Christopher Rufio, shared leaked documents from a Disney Parks employee which display critical race theory to the extreme. Employees of Disney are now being trained on topics such as, “systematic racism,” “white privilege,” and a slew of other racially charged ideologies. Disney’s “diversity and inclusion” program, titled, “Reimagine Tomorrow,” displays a clear bias against “whiteness.” It has implemented a series of “antiracist” training modules which host a number of political materials that specifically stereotype individuals based on the color of their skin. From “Allyship for Race Consciousness,” to “What Can I Do About Racism?” these modules focus less on embracing everyone’s individuality and more on forcing white people to admit that America has a “racist history” “racist infrastructure,” and fill out a white privilege checklist to” re-educate” them.

There are a number of suggested reading materials which include propagandist pieces like, “Your Kids Are Not Too Young To Talk About Race,” and “75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice” (which has been updated to include 103 things). The latter was written by a white woman who claims that it intends to, “fix what we broke and left broken. The work isn’t done until Black folks tell us it’s done,” but it reeks of white guilt and virtue signaling.

Included in this list are donating to BLM chapters, joining a “white space” to discuss biases that white people have, joining a Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) group, participating in reparations, decolonizing one’s bookshelf, watching Roots, and other “Black movies,” encouraging anti-racism programs in schools and the workplace, plus many more. The author, Corinne Shutack, offers no credentials or sources to support herself or her list, and the comments section is full of varying responses from people of all colors.

Suggesting that white people watch “black movies” to end racism assumes that people like me — who were raised in diverse areas — do not already do this. Decolonizing a bookshelf encourages people like me to get rid of classic works of literature and forget my history and my heritage to replace it with modern progressive lies. Asking someone like myself — who was born and raised in poverty and never owned slaves — to pay reparations to people who have never been slaves is the most problematic issue on this list.

I’m half Irish. Most of my ancestors came here in the early 1900s, after slavery. Those who were here before that were poor and may have even been white slaves. Disney’s attempt at “wokeness” completely ignores the rich history of poor hard- continued from page

working Americans who immigrated here from all over Europe.

Many of these individuals suffered just as much bias and struggle as minorities. In reality, it wasn’t black or white for most of the 1900s. People were Italian, Irish, Spanish, French, Russian, Austrian, and so on. Italians and Eastern European immigrants were highly discriminated against, and to ignore that and indoctrinate a new class of workers into the fallacy that “white people” are all the same, have never struggled, and didn’t earn everything they have is absurd.

Looking at Disney’s “White Privilege” selfassessment is even more absurd. It details a long list of boxes that are to be checked to measure one’s “white privilege.” The first item on this list merely states: I am white. Along with this are statements like, “I am heterosexual,” “I have never been raped,” “I have had an unpaid internship,” “I graduated college,” “I do not have any physical disabilities,” “I have never attempted suicide,” “I have never had an addiction,” and so on. How working to graduate college, working for FREE, or not being raped pertains to one’s color is unclear, but black, Asian, and Latino workers are not required to fill out similar questionnaires.

Only white people are being singled out to answer this slew of very personal questions — many of which address one’s physical and mental health and have nothing to do with ethnicity or the honest history of this country.

It doesn’t ask: have you ever been homeless? A question I can check off my list. I guess my “white privilege” failed me in my early adulthood when I was thrust out on my own due to circumstances I couldn’t control.

To make these training protocols more enraging, Disney’s “CEO sponsored priorities” initiative launched “affinity groups” (also known as Business Employee Resource Groups (BERGs) which are racially segregated for minority employees only, to better allow them “culturally-authentic” insights. How brilliant! Resegregation to achieve “diversity.” I’m sure that won’t cause unforeseen issues in the years to come.

I urge anyone being directed to these kinds of harassment programs (that is truly what they are) in the workforce to speak with a legal professional right away. Any employer singling out their workers for who they are needs to be corrected in their obvious bias.

There is no awakening in “wokeness.” It is all political. And it is made to divide us so we are more easily controlled. There was once a time that politics was meant to be kept out of polite society. But manners have long since gone out the window. Businesses also once cared about catering to as many people as possible, and work was a place for employees to clock in and do their job. Thanks to “wokism,” Disney has decided to move forward with an “inclusive and diverse” business model that judges people by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character. The proper term for this is discrimination, and it cannot be tolerated.