After Toyota, Ford, John Deere, and Boeing, the world’s largest retailer Walmart has announced its decision to roll back its ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusivity’ or DEI policies. Walmart announced on the 25^th of November that it will no longer consider race and gender to increase diversity when awarding supplier contracts, and it will stop collecting demographic data when determining financing eligibility. It would cease using the word “DEI” in its official correspondence. It will also reduce racial justice training for employees, discontinue participation in prominent rankings by LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, and reconsider its support for Pride and other events.

It is worth noting that DEI programs have grown common in companies, schools, and institutions across the United States. A 2023 Pew Research Centre study found that more than half of all U.S. workers had received some type of DEI training. Moreover, institutions overall spend about $8 billion every year on these activities. Thus, the impact of DEI training on people, particularly, employees working in companies with DEI training facilities and students undergoing DEI training cannot be dismissed as diminutive.

There have been concerns that contrary to the supposed purpose of DEI to foster an environment of more inclusive, respectable and equitable towards diverse communities, DEI training programs are instilling racist and hateful thoughts in the minds of the trainees.

DEI training programs fostering bias and prejudices against Brahmins

A joint research report published by Rutgers University and the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) titled INSTRUCTING ANIMOSITY: HOW DEI PEDAGOGY PRODUCES THE HOSTILE ATTRIBUTION BIAS, revealed that DEI programs are causing adverse psychological and social impact instead of fostering inclusivity and addressing racial and religious discrimination. Published on Monday (25^th November), the research findings indicated that some DEI programs are spreading negative stereotypes and animosity against certain religious, racial and caste groups like the Brahmins.  

Describing the methodology used in the study, the report says, “The study used caste sensitivity training materials from Equality Labs as the experimental condition, designed to evaluate the effects of DEI rhetoric. For the control condition, NCRI compiled together an academic essay on caste from the works of well-published scholars from institutions such as Berkeley, Cambridge and elsewhere. The control essay was deliberately chosen to provide a neutral, academic perspective, free from sensationalized or accusatory language. This control allowed us to measure the specific impacts of highly charged DEI narratives while controlling for the topic of caste itself, providing a clearer assessment of how anti-oppression narratives can shape attitudes and the inclination to be punitive.”

The report further mentions the “intervention” and “control” texts it provided to the respondents. Here the intervention text was an excerpt from Equality Labs which read, “Shudras and Dalits are caste-oppressed; they experience profound injustices, including socioeconomic hardship and brutal violence at the hands of the upper castes. Dalits live in segregated ghettos, are banned from temples, and are denied access to schools and public amenities. The 2,500-year-old caste system is enforced by violence and maintained by one of the world’s oldest, most persistent cultures.”

Meanwhile, the control text, or the neutral text based on scholarly works read, “Jāti and varna are concepts from India that describe ways people might identify and interact socially. Jāti refers to groups with common characteristics, including clan, class, language, family background, region of origin, religion, and occupation. Varna describes a philosophy in Hindu scripture of understanding human diversity and purpose.”

In the experiment, researchers took 850 individuals and gave one group a neutral essay on the caste system, while the other received caste-sensitivity training material from anti-Brahmin Equality Labs. After both the respondent groups read the assigned texts, they were given a neutral scenario with no explicit caste indicators to measure their perceptions of caste-based bias, the study said. This scenario was “an admissions process and names of characters were reversed in a counterbalanced fashion between respondents to avoid artifacts that might be associated with the names themselves: “Raj Kumar applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2022. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer, Anand Prakash. Ultimately, Raj’s application was rejected.”

The respondents were then presented with questions to evaluate the presented scenario to understand the extent to which they perceived casteism. The study found that exposure to the Equality Labs intervention led to significantly higher perceptions of microaggressions, perceived harm, and assumptions of bias during the interview process (increases of 32.5%, 15.6%, and 11%, respectively) compared to the control condition. Further assessment found that participants who read the Equality Labs text showed more willingness—19%— to punish the administrator in the fictional scenario provided to them and about 47% of them perceived Hindus as “racist” compared to the participants who read the neutral text. This indicates that DEI content instead of eliminating, is actually creating prejudices against Hindus, particularly the so-called “upper-caste” Hindus like Brahmins, who are already at the receiving end of hate campaigns of the anti-Hindu elements.

“These results suggest that caste sensitivity training, along with other training delivered within an anti-oppressive DEI framework, may create hostile attribution biases that negatively distort perceptions of interpersonal interactions and promote rather than ameliorate intergroup hostilities,” the report says.

Similarly, when the participants who read the DEI-inspired material looked at modified past statements from German despot Adolf Hitler that replaced the word “Jew” with “Brahmin,” they were more likely to agree that Brahmins were “‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%).”

The findings of the NCRI-Rutgers report suggest that some anti-oppressive DEI narratives can lead to hostile attribution bias, racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviours without evidence. The extent to which DEI training programs can instil biases, prejudices, and hatred in people’s minds is so profound that Hitler’s rhetoric becomes acceptable and worth implementing against specific caste groups, Brahmins in this context. And it is not an exaggeration to say that the dissemination of “Hitlerean” rhetoric against Brahmins or other upper caste Hindus will culminate in fostering a mindset that yearns for a holocaust of Brahmins.

Anti-Brahmin Equality Labs

Notably, Equality Labs is a prominent anti-Brahmin Caste activism group in the United States. had collaborated with the Organisation for Minorities in India (OFMI), among other organisations, for a report titled ‘Caste in the United States: A Survey Of Caste Among South Asian Americans’. The OFMI was founded by Bhajan Singh Bhinder, a known ISI operative, and his puppet Pieter Friedrich was part of the organisation too. Equality Labs also campaigned hard against Amit Jani, who had worked in the Joe Biden campaign, accusing him of supporting ‘Hindu Fascism’. It had also inserted a ‘Dalit’ angle to the anti-farm law protests even though the demonstrations were clearly an attempt by the dominant caste groups in Punjab and Haryana to preserve their privilege. Moreover, Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of the erstwhile Twitter, had once stoked a massive controversy when he held an anti-Brahmin placard that said ‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’, a poster designed by Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the executive director of Equality Labs.

Mainstreaming of “caste” in the US

The Rutgers-NCRI report traces a timeline of the mainstreaming of non-existent caste discrimination in the US which gave a push an imaginary need to protect “caste” as a category requiring protection from ‘discrimination’ in various sectors across the United States. The timeline states begins with Brandeis University in Massachusetts adding caste to its non-discrimination policy in December 2019 and includes the CISCO caste discrimination case, Harvard University, Colby College, Brown University, and California State University adding caste to its non-discrimination policy, the dismissal of CISCO case, Seattle council passing a bill to add caste to protected category, California Senate approving the outrageous SB403 bill, and it eventually getting vetoed by California governor Gavin Newsom.

Hatred against Brahmins, false victimhood for Muslims: DEI training programs or How to be a Hindu-hating Islam apologist 101?

Besides fostering bias and prejudices against Brahmins, the DEI programs are also capable of causing people to assume unfair treatment of Muslims despite there being no evidence of bias or discrimination. To assess the impact of anti-Islamophobia narratives, the NCRI presented the case of two criminals Ahmed Akhtar and George Green, both of whom were convicted of similar terrorism charges. Akhtar’s case was assessed for perceived fairness while Green’s case was served as a comparative measure.

In this experiment, the participants were recruited from Amazon Prime Panels and there were two groups—Control and Ant-Islamophobia Treatment Group. As the names suggest, the control group participants were exposed to neutral information and they found Akhtar’s trial just as fair as that of Green, however, the second group rated Ahmed Akhtar’s trial as less fair compared to that of George Green despite their situation being similar with no unfairness during the trial.

Regarding this the researchers said, “This effect highlights a broader issue: DEI narratives that focus heavily on victimization and systemic oppression can foster unwarranted distrust and suspicions of institutions and alter subjective assessments of events. In the effort to improve sensitivity to genuine injustices against people from designated identities, such trainings may instead create a hostile attribution bias. This could, in turn, undermine trust in institutions, even in the absence of bias or unfair treatment (as in our scenarios). These findings are particularly concerning given that ISPU’s [Institute for Social Policy and Understanding] educational efforts include training Federal Agents on Islamophobia sensitivity.”

DEI training programs furthering racism

The Rutgers-NCRI research also included an experiment wherein they shared anti-racist DEI materials from authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo with participants. The NCRI concentrated on materials that emphasised knowledge of and opposition to “systemic oppression,” as popularised by books like Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist.” In the study, those who were exposed to anti-racist texts showed higher levels of racial bias. Participants were also more willing to favour punitive measures against perceived perpetrators of “microaggressions”, despite a clear lack of evidence.

New York Times and Bloomberg killed their stories on Rutgers-NCRI research on DEI training programs

To no surprise, leftist propaganda outlets like the New York Times and Bloomberg, who had their stories on the Rutgers-NCRI research on the impact of DEI training programs ready, decided at the eleventh hour not to publish them citing ‘editorial concerns’. It, however, is quite obvious that propaganda outlets like NYT, notorious for downplaying violence against Hindus and romanticising Islamic and Khalistani terrorists would not want to publish a story exposing how the DEI initiatives are perpetuating hatred against Hindus given. OpIndia had reported how NYT downplayed Islamist violence against Hindus in Bangladesh as ‘political revenge’. It is their ideological imperative to suppress the materials or studies exposing how much-hyped DEI training amplifies racism, biases and prejudices against Brahmins or “upper caste” Hindus and evokes unwarranted sympathy for Muslims.

Conclusion

With it becoming clear that the DEI training programs foster bias and prejudices against specific caste and racial groups while generating sympathy for a specific community even when there is no explicit bias or discrimination, contrary to its supposed objective of fostering inclusivity and alleviating prejudices, it is paramount that the businesses and institutions scrutinise their DEI policies and if required scrap them just as Walmart has done. Otherwise, the “DEI-trained” people in the US will end up hating and possibly turning violent against Brahmins and other communities due to their far-from-reality perceptions about specific groups as oppressive or inherently privileged.