The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) under Joe Biden has spent at least $91,000 on mandatory “diversity and inclusion” seminars for the Air Force Band, awarding a contract to a group that focuses on pushing diversity in music.
According to Fox News, the DOD contract was given to a group called the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, based out of Philadelphia, on May 6th, thus putting Black Pearl in charge of arranging and providing the seminars to the 184-member Air Force Band.
Black Pearl describes its mission on its website, saying that it seeks “to take the audience beyond spectatorship to participation in the musical experience by combining artistic excellence with cultural diversity and innovative community engagement.”
“Black Pearl’s education and community engagement activities are unique because they offer audiences unprecedented and direct access to the musicians and conductor,” the website continues. “These award-winning programs were created by Maestro Johnson who believes that giving audiences – regardless of their level of knowledge – the opportunity to reach into an art form for a more direct experience, is the best way to engage them.”
Black Pearl had previously received a grant of $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts back in June, which used COVID-19 relief funds from Biden’s COVID stimulus bill, known as the “American Rescue Plan.”
The move represents the latest example of the Biden Administration’s large-scale efforts to indoctrinate the American military with the far-left concept of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT), a race-based line of thinking which says that all White people are automatically racist, and that America is a fundamentally racist country. As such, advocates for CRT attempt to whitewash history by replacing White people with minorities, claiming it to be in the name of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”
Several Republicans in Congress have called out these indoctrination efforts in the military. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), said that “when I encouraged military whistleblowers to share their concerns privately, we were flooded with hundreds of messages about declining standards and degraded capabilities.”
In some cases, essential training in weapons systems, navigation, and ship handling is falling by the wayside,” Cotton’s statement continued, “while commanders are forced to prioritize woke ‘diversity’ trainings you’d expect to see on a liberal-arts campus.”