New York Halts ‘Inflammatory’ Manual Calling Whites Racists

An affirmative action manual that contends “all white individuals are racists” was denounced Sunday by state officials, and one assemblyman called it “inflammatory and hate-filled.”

The 38-page manual was used by the State Insurance Fund, a state agency that handles workmen’s compensation cases, at three recent employee training seminars, but officials said they recalled it and canceled further seminars after they became aware of its contents.

The manual defines racism as “different from racial prejudice, hatred or discrimination. Racism involves having the power to carry out systematic discriminatory practices through the major institutions of our society.

“In the United States at present, only whites can be racists since whites dominate and control the institutions that create and enforce American cultural norms and values,” the manual reads.

It concludes that “all white individuals in our society are racist,” even those who have no conscious prejudice, because they receive “benefits distributed by a white, racist society through its institutions.”

“Our institutional and cultural processes are so arranged as to automatically benefit whites, just because they are white,” it said.

“It was never approved by either the Board of Commissioners or the management here,” Maria van Hoy of the state agency said of the publication. The manual was compiled by Carolyn Pitts, a $39,872-a-year affirmative action officer who has worked for the State Insurance Fund since 1985, Van Hoy said. Pitts, who is black, could not be reached for comment Sunday.

State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who called attention to the manual in a press release over the weekend, said: “I was shocked to read such inflammatory and hate-filled material generated by our own state institutions.”

“Most of the manual was very fair,” Van Hoy said. She said that it instructed supervisors in how to handle complaints of discrimination and sexual harassment.

Van Hoy said that Pitts explained that the offending passages were compiled from similar manuals she had read, but she was not able to identify those sources.