During an appearance on Alabama Public Television’s Capitol Journal, State Sen. Will Barfoot (R-Pike Road) discussed his proposal that passed the Senate last week prohibiting state-funded DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives.
“DEI has been a problem throughout the nation and specifically in Alabama,” Barfoot said.
“DEI offices at higher institutions of education and public universities have really worked to divide us rather than unite us. DEI sounds inviting and sounds like something we should all get behind, but in fact those DEI offices around the state have been used to silo people by race, by color, by religion, ethnicity or national origin.”
“So what this bill does is effectively eliminate those DEI offices that have been huge to divide rather than unite,” Barfoot explained.
Barfoot agreed that while racism and sexism are still an issue — this bill seeks to eliminate them.
“Some of the comments by my colleagues are exactly right, unfortunately we do have racism, we do have sexism, we do categorize people and try to value their work based on external factors that we shouldn’t consider. This bill does away with that. You can’t change the human heart or human spirit by legislation, but we can say we’re not gonna pay to continue to do those things,” Barfoot said.
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He also went on to address the “divisive concepts” section of the bill, which is intended to bring the official teaching of concepts such as Critical Race Theory in schools to an end.
“This has been brought up the past two years and hasn’t passed, we decided these two concepts kind of mirror each other. We don’t use the word CRT in this bill at all, it’s divisive concepts. And those are that you cannot make somebody agree to or consent that one race is superior to another or that somebody’s moral character is based on their skin color or background, these are the types of concepts we don’t allow. Free expression, free beliefs, believe whatever you want no matter how wrong you are, but we aren’t gonna pay for it,” Barfoot said.
“We need to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. There’s plenty of that to go around, and unless we talk about all of that, including the bad and the ugly we will never be able to benefit and know how we got to where we’re at.”
Michael Brauner is a Senior Sports Analyst and Contributing Writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @MBraunerWNSP
