DEI Discriminatory Hiring Flourishing at National Archives

We regret to inform taxpayers that the promoters of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs are still running amok within official agencies of the federal government. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), charged with preserving the documents of US governance for posterity, seems far more concerned these days with tilling the fields of fashionable contemporary racial grievance.

The dollar amounts involved are not trivial. “In its 2022 budget request, the federal agency asked Congress for more than $28 million and nearly 150 news staff to ‘advance racial equity and support underserved communities,’” The Center Square reported. Discriminatory hiring practices on the American citizenry’s dime are part of the agenda.

Whites Need Not Apply?

“This request includes funding to address staffing needs across the agency and funds targeted recruitment activities to ensure a diverse pool of applicants to help increase the diversity of NARA’s workforce,” the budget request reads. “In NARA’s most recent strategic DEI plan, the agency essentially pledges to work to get more minority applicants and leadership and lower the percentage of leading white Americans in the agency,” The Center Square’s Casey Harper writes. “The group’s 2012 report defines minorities as ‘all categories of current and potential employees identified as non-white.’”

The agency’s woke zealotry goes beyond discriminatory hiring practices. In June 2021, Jarrett Stepman at The Daily Signal aptly detailed how a NARA task force on racism report utilized the loaded language of critical race theory to decry the history of the US since its founding as an unbroken litany of unalloyed white bigotry. “The lengthy internal document... highlights ‘white privilege,’ ‘systemic racism,’ and ‘equity’ numerous times,” Stepman noted. “To no one’s surprise, it also cites The New York Times’ dubious 1619 Project and Ibram X. Kendi, the self-styled ‘anti-racist’ whose ideas sound a lot like racism.”

The lunacy even targets the iconic houses of government in the nation’s capital. “The Rotunda of the Capitol building itself is deeply problematic because, according to the task force, it ‘lauds wealthy white men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [black, Indigenous, and other people of color], women, and other communities,’” Stepman continued. The full NARA report, along with a lengthy summation of the agency’s racialist agenda, can be read here.

Everything Is About Race

A cursory examination of the official website of the National Archives finds alarming instances of revolutionary progressive social ideology offered up as valid historical endeavors. It’s not enough to merely struggle against the oppressive patriarchy anymore. For the DEI obsessive, everything must be viewed through the prism of racial grievance.

An August 2022 event held by the agency featured a feminist author’s incendiary take on the history of the women’s rights movement in America, tying it into the larger fight against “white supremacy.” “Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920–2020,” the headline touting the event on the NARA site declares.

From the text:

“In Formidable, [book] author Elisabeth Griffith chronicles and integrates the fight by White and Black women to achieve equality and their efforts to advance with sometimes competing causes. Black women wanted the rights enjoyed by Whites, and theirs was not only a women’s movement. White women wanted to be equal to White men. They sought equal legal rights, political power, safeguards for working women and immigrants, and an end to confining social structures....

“From feminists and civil rights activists to politicians and social justice advocates, from working class women to mothers and homemakers, from radicals and conservatives to those who were offended by feminism, threatened by social change, or convinced of white supremacy, the diversity of the women’s movement mirrors America.”

Colleen Shogan has served as US Archivist since May 2023. Her Senate confirmation was not a smooth glide. Republicans openly accused her of being a partisan agent of the political left. “We are living through the political weaponization of the National Archives, the political weaponization of the Department of Justice, the political weaponization of the FBI,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), asserted during her first Senate hearing in September 2022.

At a second hearing in February, Hawley grilled Shogan over her claims of professional neutrality despite what he described as “grossly partisan” tweets criticizing Trump and other Republicans. He also asked about a tweet in which she expressed support for the Architect of the Capitol removing religious flags flown at the Library of Congress. “I just wonder, does this have to do with your view that you wrote about that the religious right is connected to the rise of anti-intellectualism in American politics?” Hawley inquired. In 2007, Shogan had authored a paper titled “Anti-Intellectualism in the Modern Presidency: A Republican Populism.”

DEI Language Police On the Loose

Shogan’s predecessor, David S. Ferriero, addressed the racial task force’s findings in a 2022 speech posted on the National Archives site. His pledge to purify the wording of archived American history in the sacred waters of DEI babble are a monument to elitist inanity:

“In the summer of 2020, I chartered an agency-wide Task Force on Racism. One of the recommendations from the Task Force was to establish a working group that would develop an agency-wide approach to reparative description. Yale University Library notes that reparative archival description ‘aims to remediate or contextualize potentially outdated or harmful language used in archival description and to create archival description that is accurate, inclusive, and community-centered.’...

“We commit to a deliberative and thoughtful approach to archival description... that allows for community collaboration and cultural humility....

"We will listen to and seek ongoing input from marginalized people, colleagues within and outside of the archives field, and peer institutions about our descriptive practices.... We will seek to recognize their leadership and build on lessons learned as we work to fulfill NARA’s own potential as a leader for government archives in implementing large-scale reparative description.”

“The war on history was always going to make its way to not only our Founders, but to the founding documents. Our elite institutions are hard at work purging every shred of connection between the America of today and what they see as our loathsome, racist past,” The Daily Signal’s Shipman astutely observed.

The radical racial activists embedded inside the National Archives have the added privilege of having their insidious revisionism funded by those they are smearing as the beneficiaries of 250 years of institutionalized white supremacy. The burning tire of white guilt is being fastened around Americans’ shoulders, and they are to pay the freight for the cultural necklacing.