Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz’s Department of Education and Department of Veterans Affairs held programs segregated by race and sexuality during his tenure as Minnesota governor.
Under Walz, Minnesota’s Department of Veterans Affairs between 2022 and 2023 advertised a series of training sessions to racial minority veterans on how to address homelessness among those who had served in the armed forces, specifically focusing on veterans who identified as “BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ and/or [a] woman,” according to materials first reported by the Washington Free Beacon. Walz’s Department of Education, meanwhile, held “restorative justice” trainings in 2022, with one session explicitly barring white people from attending.
Straight white males could technically attend the trainings held by Walz’s Department of Veterans Affairs, but only if they were willing to serve as a “stakeholder or ally” to non-white LGBT veterans, according to the Free Beacon. The department paid the training’s attendees $50 an hour.
Walz’s Department of Education, meanwhile, created a “people of color affinity community” that was “reserved for people who personally identify as Black People, Indigenous People and People of Color,” the Free Beacon reported. White people were told that they “may attend other circle trainings.”
Walz is no stranger to incorporating racial grievances into his governance, signing a multi-billion dollar educational spending bill in 2023 that, among other things, introduced a requirement that school districts develop an “ethnic studies” curriculum.
Under the requirement, first graders must be able to “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.” High school students, meanwhile, are required to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” while being critical of “dominant European beauty standards.”
Additionally, Walz’s Department of Health used race to determine who would receive potentially life-saving treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the department adopted a framework, which it later revised following backlash, that gave black people privileged access to monoclonal antibodies, a promising treatment for the virus that was in short supply at the time.
Under the system, a healthy 25-year-old African American would have been prioritized over a 55-year-old white person with hypertension or a 64-year-old who didn’t have “BIPOC status.”
The Harris campaign and the Minnesota governor’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
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