The accusation against the Rhode Island-based corporation is not a new one. A leaked audio call from Sept. 2021 urged white employees to be an “active ally” by admitting and confronting their racist beliefs, Fox Business reported last fall.
White employees were instructed to write a personal "commitment plan" in which they outlined how they intend to "practice conscious inclusion" over days, weeks, and months, the story said.
Eight months after that training was leaked, Scott Shepard, representing National Center for Public Policy Research, attended a May 11 shareholders meeting where he warned the corporation it is creating legal and moral problems with its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies that single out white males on its payroll for being non-woke racists.
Shepard tells AFN the race-based training at CVS is something to witness considering the demographic-obsessed corporation brags in annual reports and on its corporate website that 70% of its employees are female and a majority of the employees are minorities.
To say CVS is obsessed with the sex and race of its employees is an understatement: A 2020 Strategic Diversity Management Report shows chart after charter of the sex and race of pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, nurses, medical directors, store workers, distribution center workers, mid-level managers, and corporate leaders.
Like many corporations, CVS preaches “diversity” of its workforce by bragging about its hiring and promoting of women and minorities, an effort that can be traced to the “Me Too” movement and, more recently, the “Black Lives Matter” movement. But that commitment often spirals into board room-approved demagoguery in which the tenets of Critical Race Theory are applied to white employees. Not only are those white employees assumed to be the product of “privilege," which has allowed them to unfairly succeed over minorities, they are literally born racist, the theory claims.
"As human beings," Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, the new CVS health equity officer, said this week, "by nature of how our brains are designed, we tend to have bias. That does impact the way we make decisions."
"Allyship is the act of advocating for as well as supporting communities other than your own," the unidentified speaker told white CVS employees last year. "So being an ally means that we’re aware of our own identities as well as the intersectional identities of others. We’re recognizing and actively mitigating bias, and we’re modeling inclusive leadership behaviors."
CVS famously pledged in 2020 to spend $600 million to “advance employee, community and public policy initiatives that address inequality faced by Black people and other disenfranchised communities,” the company’s former CEO, Larry Merlo, announced two years ago.
At last week’s meeting, Shepard asked CVS to conduct a self-examination of its own policies to determine if it is treating all of its employees equally, since its own white male employees don’t fall in the “diverse” category. That request was predictably rejected by a corporation that Shepard says is openly discriminating in the name of diversity.
“CVS is a racist company. It’s a sexist company. It’s a discriminatory company,” Shepard tells AFN. “And proud of it.”
