Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz’s administration, during his time as governor of Minnesota, oversaw initiatives within the Department of Education and the Department of Veterans Affairs that were organized based on race and sexual orientation.
From 2022 to 2023, the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs, under Walz’s leadership, promoted a series of training sessions aimed at racial minority veterans, focusing on strategies to combat homelessness among veterans. These sessions specifically targeted individuals identifying as “BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or women,” as reported by the Washington Free Beacon. Concurrently, Walz’s Department of Education conducted “restorative justice” training in 2022, with one particular session explicitly excluding white participants.
While straight white males were technically permitted to attend the training sessions organized by Walz’s Department of Veterans Affairs, their participation was contingent upon their willingness to act as a “stakeholder or ally” to non-white LGBTQ veterans, according to the Free Beacon. Participants in these training sessions were compensated at a rate of $50 per hour.
Additionally, Walz’s Department of Education established a “people of color affinity community,” which was exclusively available to individuals who identified as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color. White individuals were informed that they could participate in other training sessions.
Walz has a history of integrating racial issues into his administration, exemplified by his endorsement of a multi-billion dollar educational funding initiative in 2023. This legislation mandated that school districts create an “ethnic studies” curriculum.
According to this mandate, first-grade students are expected to “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation, and systems of power” and “utilize these examples to construct meanings for these concepts.” In contrast, high school students are tasked with “developing an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness,” while also critiquing “dominant European beauty standards.”
Furthermore, Walz’s Department of Health utilized race as a criterion for determining eligibility for potentially life-saving treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the department implemented a framework, which was later amended in response to public criticism, that prioritized black individuals for access to monoclonal antibodies, a crucial treatment that was in limited supply at that time.
Under this system, a healthy 25-year-old African American would have been given precedence over a 55-year-old white individual with hypertension or a 64-year-old who did not possess “BIPOC status.”
