New York City Mayor Eric Adams is requiring all 325,000 city employees to take "racial equity" training based on "critical race theory," the New York Post reported Monday.
According to the Post, FOX Digital News initially reported that the city sent a memo to all employees saying the training "provides all NYC employees with a framework to understand … the importance of racial equity … in the workplace."
"Race has no genetic or scientific basis," the memo reportedly said, according to the report. "It is a social construct created to classify people on the arbitrary basis of skin color and other physical features. Despite this, race has a very real impact on people's lives. This is because our society has used race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, exclusion, and oppression."
The Post reported that a source who works for the city did not agree with having to take the mandated training.
"The [racial equity training] leads me to believe that they want the contracts with the city and the hiring from the city being looked at through this lens," the source said in the report. "And that's what I think is really unfair. It goes against their [stated claims] … that everybody should be treated equally."
The Post reported that Adams' administration responded by telling the Post that the Fox report was not accurate.
"Fox News irresponsibly misreported this story without ever even coming to us asking if this was true," a city hall spokesperson said in a statement to the Post. "In reality, for years, city employees have completed EEO and Diversity and Inclusion training, and the 'Everybody Matters: EEO and Diversity & Inclusion Training' has nothing to do with critical race theory.
"Employees have been completing this training every two years, and trainings like these ensure that the city workplace remains a welcoming and fair environment for all New Yorkers."
According to the Education Week website, critical race theory is an "academic concept" that has been around for more than 40 years and posits "race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies."
According to the publication, CRT grew out of legal analysis in the late 1970s and 1980s by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlie Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado.
The theory maintains that systemic racism, which came from past practices like "red-lining" in real estate that did not allow Black people from purchasing homes in certain areas during the 1930s, continues to some degree in our modern society and needs to be recognized.
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