The Washington Examiner has a chilling story of corporate leftism at Cigna, the giant insurance company. It is evidently based on inside information from disgusted Cigna employees:
I assume the “privileged” religion is Christianity.Employees at one of the nation’s largest health insurance providers are routinely subjected to far-left critical race theory lessons and asked not to consider white men in hiring decisions, according to leaked documents and chat logs obtained by the Washington Examiner.
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Those who work at Cigna told the Washington Examiner that they are expected to undergo sensitivity training they consider racist and discriminatory. Lessons include reviews of concepts such as “white privilege,” “gender privilege,” and something called “religious privilege,” which is described as “a set of advantages that benefits believers of a certain religion but not people who practice other religions or no religions at all.”
Cigna has a recommended reading list for employees. We have come to quite a pass in corporate America when a formerly-stodgy insurance company has books on that list by Angela Davis, a murderer (to be fair, she got off despite overwhelming evidence of guilt) and a Communist.
Cigna’s discouraged figures of speech list descends to laughable trivia, as in: No more “brown bag lunch” or “going into this blind,” or “quiet in the peanut gallery!” That, I fail to get. Peanut equity? Beats me. No “hip, hip, hooray!” is also a mystery. On the other hand, no "China virus" is overdetermined. For that, there is no acceptable substitute, so perhaps Covid-19 is a forbidden topic at Cigna.
Cigna proudly declares its support for “equality and equity for communities of color,” perhaps not understanding that equality and equity are contradictory concepts, as the Left defines equity. You have to choose one or the other.
It has been shown, I believe, that during the Jim Crow era, racial discrimination was most acute in government and in less-competitive industries like regulated utilities. Absent other imperatives, competitive pressures lead companies to hire and promote the best people they can. They do this not out of altruism, but in self-defense. Chalk it up as one of many benefits of free enterprise.
If Cigna feels free to discriminate against whites, especially white men, it means one of two things: Either it does not see itself as functioning in a competitive environment, perhaps because its nominal competitors can be trusted to do the same thing, or it thinks that going “woke” will curry enough favor with government, and perhaps others, to outweigh the inefficiency of hiring and promoting less-qualified employees. Either alternative is depressing.