The diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training forced on criminal investigators with the Internal Revenue Service featured content from a transgender professor who called for the “death of whiteness” in an academic journal article.
The DEI training, obtained by Judicial Watch, was part of a mandatory continuing education program at the IRS, and began with a section by Dafina Lazarus Stewart titled, “Cultural Inclusion Is About Justice.” Stewart, a transgender-identifying woman, chairs a department at the University of Denver and has focused much of her academic work on “whiteness,” even calling on other academics to “commit to the death of whiteness.”
Stewart, who focuses on “institutional transformation toward realizing equity and justice,” is the author of an academic article called “‘Dead Honky’ — Against The Technologies of (White) Violence.” The article calls for Critical Race Theorists to “commit to the death of whiteness,” even arguing that “whiteness is itself a violence” and asking academics to use the “verbal effigy “‘dead honky.’”
The DEI training comes as the Biden administration has leveraged the federal bureaucracy to push far-left ideology on race and gender, signing multiple executive orders to institutionalize Critical Race Theory and radical gender ideology in federal agencies.
The portion in the training from Stewart asks questions such as, “whose culture in the room is under constant threat?” and “whose cultural safety is being sacrificed to allow the dominate [sic] culture to degrade the subordinate culture?”
The answers, based on a reading of Stewart’s work, likely have to do with the evils of “whiteness.” In “Dead Honky,” Stewart alleges that “whiteness pretends to be innocent,” but in reality “creates terror and violence.”
“Critical whiteness studies (CWS) in the field of higher education fails to account for … technologies of violence that characterize whiteness and which whiteness employs,” Stewart writes in the journal article. “I theorize technologies of (white) violence as enactments of: (1) malicious white terror; (2) rhetorical white innocence, mobilized through white contempt and white transmission; and, (3) pacifying white concession.”
The article was published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, which has also published an article in which a different professor called for Critical Race Theorists to “do the work of disrupting, dismantling, and eradicating whiteness.” The journal publishes articles concerning “issues of racism (including whiteness, white racism, and white supremacy), capitalism, and its class structure,” as well as “gender identity, heterosexism, and homophobia.”
Stewart claims in another article that “whiteness as an ideology … reaches beyond race/racism to shape and reproduce other interlocking oppressive systems,” working to “undermine the success of trans students in US postsecondary education.”
The IRS’ Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion is led by Chief Diversity Officer Carrie Holland. While Holland’s salary in her role is not yet publicly available, her predecessor Valerie Gunter made $200,000 a year, more than double the median household income to push the DEI agenda.
Gunter confirmed in a 2021 interview that her role was responsible for “ensuring training” on diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as being the principal consultant on all DEI matters at the IRS, including DEI trainings.
“We have a [diversity and inclusion] education program which raises awareness around [equity, diversity, and inclusion], focuses on unconscious bias prevention, and cultural competency,” Gunter said, adding that the purpose is for managers to identify how DEI “concepts appear in real world working situations.”
The training for IRS agents is one of the latest examples of the DEI agenda being pushed throughout the federal government.
The Daily Wire previously revealed that the National Security Association (NSA) created a 34-page DEI glossary that endorsed the tenets of Critical Race Theory and gender ideology, with definitions for terms like “queer theory,” “white fragility,” “settler colonialism,” and “transmisogyny.”
Other agencies in the federal government have funded projects that further gender ideology, with The Daily Wire recently revealing that the Biden administration will pour nearly $1 million of taxpayer funds into an effort to make biology courses more “inclusive” of those who identify as transgender by denying that there are only two genders.
Biden’s Health and Human Services Department also funded a study on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone treatment to the tune of $3 million despite transgender children’s hospitals admitting that the practice could result in permanent sterilization.
But while various agencies within the federal government have aggressively pushed ideological initiatives under President Biden, former Trump administration officials, as well as former President Trump himself, have discussed plans to gut the administrative state should he be elected in 2024.
Some are advocating for a policy called Schedule F, which could remove civil service employment protections from unelected bureaucrats like the IRS’s Holland, empowering the president to fire unelected bureaucrats who may obstruct his policy objectives.
