On Tuesday, prominent critical race theory critic Christopher Rufo shared documents reportedly obtained from within the defense contractor Raytheon, which tells white employees to “identify their privilege” and provides a list of resources to “understand and share what ‘defund the police’ really means,” “decolonize your bookshelf” and “participate in reparations.”
Rufo tweeted, “SCOOP: Raytheon, the nation’s second-largest defense contractor, has launched a critical race theory program that encourages white employees to confront their ‘privilege,’ reject the principle of ‘equality,’ and ‘defund the police.’ Let’s review the internal documents.”
“Last summer, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes launched the Stronger Together campaign instructing employees on ‘becoming an anti-racist today.’ He signed a corporate diversity statement and then asked all Raytheon employees to sign the pledge and ‘check [their] own biases,'” Rufo continued. “The program is centered on ‘intersectionality,’ a core component of critical race theory that divides the world into competing identity groups, with race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other categories defining an individual’s place within the hierarchy of oppression.”
Rufo tweeted, “Raytheon then asks white employees to deconstruct their identities and ‘identify [their] privilege.’ The company argues that white, straight, Christian men are at the top of the oppression hierarchy—and must work on ‘recognizing [their] privilege’ and ‘step aside’ for minorities.”
“Raytheon tells employees to ‘identify everyone’s race’ during workplace conversations,” Rufo’s Twitter thread continued. “Whites must ‘listen to the experiences’ of ‘marginalized identities’ and should ‘give [those with such identities] the floor in meetings or on calls, even if it means silencing yourself.'”
“Next, Raytheon explicitly instructs employees to oppose ‘equality,’ defined as ‘treating each person the same . . . regardless of their differences,’ and strive instead for ‘equity,’ which ‘focuses on the equality of the outcome,'” Rufo tweeted.
Rufo included a purported Raytheon internal slide that said, “Equality is a noble goal. Equal treatment and access to opportunities help each of us perform our best within a shared set of parameters. But we really need to be striving for equity, where we focus on the equality of the outcome, not the equality of the experience by taking individual needs and skills into account.”
“Finally,” Rufo’s tweet thread concludes, “in a collection of recommended resources, the company encourages white employees to ‘defund the police,’ ‘participate in reparations,’ ‘decolonize your bookshelf,’ ‘join a local ‘white space.'”
The slide referring to defunding the police states, “Understand and share what ‘defund the police’ really means. It’s about a new, smarter approach to public safety, wherein we demilitarize the police and allocate resources into education, social service, and other root causes of crimes.”
The slide calling to “participate in reparations” provides a link to a Facebook group on the topic and states, “Remember reparations isn’t just monetary — share your time, skills, knowledge, connections, etc. Thank you to Clyanna Blyanna for suggesting this addition.”
Raytheon has not responded to an American Military News request for comment at the time of publishing.
Raytheon isn’t the first U.S. defense contractor to draw scrutiny over its diversity training efforts. In June, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called on Lockheed Martin to address reports that more than 1,000 of its employees were made to attend and in which company employees broadly linked the term “white men” with terms like “racist,” “privileged,” and “KKK.”
Rufo tweeted he would be appearing on Fox host Tucker Carlson’s show Tuesday night “to discuss this explosive story.”
Carlson recently criticized U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley for comments in which Milley defended teaching critical race theory in the military and appeared to link the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol by demonstrators to “white rage.”
