Leaked documents describing contents from a diversity, equity, and inclusion training session at the federally funded Sandia National Laboratories caused Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley to send a letter Thursday to Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette questioning the program.
Sandia, a federal contractor, who is responsible for building the country’s nuclear arsenal, last year sent its white male executives to mandatory diversity training. There, they were invited to associate terms such as “Aryan Nation” and “mass killings” with “white men” and create a list of “assumptions about people of color,” including stereotypes such as “have broken families,” and to list examples of “male privilege,” including “men can kill bugs more easily than ‘most’ women.”
The educational documents were first obtained by Christopher Rufo, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who reported the three-day training session was hosted by the group “White Men As Full Diversity Partners” at the La Posada luxury resort in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The program was titled the “White Men’s Caucus on Eliminating Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Organizations.”
After listing several examples from the training materials, Hawley wrote in his letter:
“I fail to see how this fixation on the crudest imaginable gender and race stereotypes is productive or worthy of the expenditure of taxpayer dollars. The focus on providing trainings specifically for ‘white men’ is similarly concerning: while the race of the various participants in these workshops is not altogether clear, the use of overtly race-segregated diversity trainings would likely violate federal civil rights law.”
Hawley called for the Department of Energy to identify all sums paid to the organization hosting the DEI training sessions or any similar groups, provide copies of all DEI training materials, and provide the dates of all DEI training sessions DOE has conducted.
