By Corinne Murdock |

A required biennial training program for Arizona State University (ASU) employees and faculty violates state law, per a complaint letter submitted by the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute.

In a letter to the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) on Tuesday, the organization alleged that the ASU Inclusive Communities, a required biennial training program for all employees and faculty, violates a new law passed last year, A.R.S. § 41-1494.

The law prohibits public funding for training that promulgates “blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.” The department of administration is required to submit an annual report listing all state agencies complying with the law to the governor, the state senate president, the house speaker, and the secretary of state. 

Per the law, “blame or judgment” qualifies as declaring that race, ethnic group, or sex determines inherent moral superiority, racism, sexism, oppression over another race, ethnic group, or sex. It also qualifies as concepts declaring an individual’s race, ethnic group, or sex as definitive of their moral character, endowing responsibility for the actions of others within their shared biological traits, insisting on negative, self-conscious feelings such as guilt or anguish with regard to their biological traits, and meriting discrimination or adverse treatment against them. 

“Blame or judgment” also includes the concept that meritocracy or traits such as hard work are racist, sexist, or created by members of a particular race, ethnic group, or sex to oppress members of another race, ethnic group, or sex. 

In their complaint letter, the Goldwater Institute noted that the ASU training does impart blame or judgment based on race, ethnicity, or sex. 

“The statute makes clear that while the state may, of course, teach that such ideas exist, it may not promulgate these messages of blame or judgment in any official sense, or mandate the participation of employees at any session where these ideas are promulgated,” said the organization. “The ‘ASU Inclusive Communities’ training, however, is premised on the ‘blame or judgment’ referred to in this statute.”

The organization included the following quotes from obtained training materials reportedly promulgating the concepts that white people are inherently privileged, racist, and supremacist, regardless of intent or consciousness, and that heterosexuals are inherently privileged and maintaining power over other “sexual identities”:

• “[A]cknowledging the history of white supremacy and the social conditions for it to exist as a structural phenomenon”
• “How is white supremacy normalized in society”
• “[G]iven the socio-historial [sic] legacy of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of structural inequality, perceptions of authority and control are not always granted to minoritized [sic] faculty.”
• “White Fragility”
• “What is White Privilege, Really”
• “Explaining White privilege to a broke white person […]”
• “7 Ways White People Can Combat Their Privilege”
• “Racism […] can take the form of […] and include seemly innocuous questions or comments, such as asking people of color where they are from […]”
• “Sexual identities are linked to power, and heterosexuality, the dominant sexual identity in American culture, is privileged by going on largely unquestioned.”
• “[I]t scares people to talk about white supremacy or to be called a white supremacist. But if we start thinking about it in terms of whiteness as something that is culturally neutral and we’re moving it from that neutral space into a critical space.”
• “[W]e have to open the space to critique whiteness.”
• “[W]hite supremacy […] referring to here is the period between the 1500’s and the 1800’s that encompasses both Spanish colonization and Euro-American colonization. And what colonization did, was it really created this system of binary thinking. There were folks that were inherently good and folks that were inherently bad, and that led to the systems of superiority that were then written into the foundational documents of our Nation.”

The Goldwater Institute requested ABOR to direct ASU to cease spending any public monies on its Inclusive Communities training, or make the training optional rather than mandatory.

Additionally, the organization suggested that ABOR audit ASU’s other courses and the activities and courses of the University of Arizona (UArizona) and Northern Arizona University (NAU) to ensure compliance. As examples of potential anti-discriminatory violations, the organization linked to the UArizona Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion trainings, the UArizona Eller College of Management Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training, and the NAU employee and faculty training.

Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.