On June 9, national nonprofit advocacy group Color Us United—a coalition aimed at fighting discriminatory corporate and institutional policies that divide workers—held its first annual Zoomfest.
The national virtual event brought together people from across the nation, providing workers with resources and information to combat the policies pushed by corporate titans. It featured headline speaker Vivek Ramaswamy, an author, speaker and former CEO of a multibillion-dollar biotech company. Ramaswamy’s New York Times bestseller, "Woke Inc.," examines corporate "wokeness" from a CEO’s point of view.
“You will help create a workplace that can return to its ideals of being the one place where America came together, to work together for a common goal,” Color Us United President Kenny Xu told participants at the event. “America was built on a foundation of ordinary people united by the task ahead. What united Americans was not race or religion or tribe, but the desire and the will to subordinate all that to make something great. We are here today because we believe in that greatness and we want to restore that trust.”
Color Us United is mounting a national effort to collect stories from American workers who have been suppressed by so-called ”diversity, equity and inclusion” programming. The organization will deliver these stories to corporate CEOs as part of their Labor Day Listen Down campaign. The campaign’s purpose is to tell CEOs to listen “down” the corporate ladder to the workers that fuel their company’s success.
According to the UK Daily Mail, American Express recently held a racially charged Diversity, Equity and Inclusion seminar with Nation of Islam-tied speaker Khalil Muhammad. The seminar, called "A Conversation about Race in America: Reflecting on our History and 'the American Dream,'" described capitalism as "racial capitalism" and said American Express decries its staffers as "complicit" in protecting white privilege.
Color Us United said the sweeping woke policies are taking corporate workplaces by storm. A publicly available LinkedIn learning series on diversity training used but not required of employees by Coca-Cola instructs people to try to "be less white," according to an opinion article in Newsweek written by a spokesman for Color Us United. Lowe's pushed white workers to "cede power to people of color" and the Salvation Army demanded workers to "repent" for the country's racism.
While 90% of workers surveyed said that they attended a race-based training, only 59% of employees underwent training on sexual harassment and only 67% received necessary job training.
New polling from Color Us United and Echelon Insights found that workers at large corporations have been forced to attend so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs rather than "sales, customer service, general company procedures or other sessions that could improve their work performance."
Zenefits, a human resources platform, said diversity and inclusion programs can have unintended consequences.
"Research has overwhelmingly shown negative messaging in D&I training not only doesn’t help, but it may also set inclusion efforts back," according to its 2019 report. "Social scientists have also found, over a number of years, that people naturally tend to rebel against enforced rules."
Arizona is home to Fortune 500 companies including Freeport-McMoRan, Avnet, Carvana, Republic Services, Insight Enterprises, Taylor Morrison Home and ON Semiconductor.