In early September, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget issued a directive that barred federal agencies from providing staff training on concepts including critical race theory and White privilege. This directive, which characterized such training as “un-American propaganda” encouraged agencies to cancel contracts and divert funding from organizations that provide such opportunities. Later in the month, an executive order issued by the President sought to extend this ban to federal agencies, contractors, and grantees.
As the President of a Foundation whose research grantees are almost uniformly also funded by the federal government, I am appalled by the recent OMB directive and presidential executive order prohibiting anti-racist training for federal agencies, contractors, and grantees. In a new post for the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, I’ve issued a statement on these actions: “For a nation founded on principles of equality which have never been fully realized, nothing could be more patriotic” than cultivating in researchers a deep understanding of injustice and encouraging them “to carry out studies that develop and test strategies to dismantle systems of racial and economic inequality.”
