Minnesota state employees were taught in a leadership course that they are “swimming in the waters of white supremacy” and that the Republican Party “is overtly and boldly claiming a white supremacy, autocratic agenda,” a training document shows.
The Minnesota Management and Budget department utilized a 32-page document, “White Supremacy Culture – Still Here” in its supervisory and management training from April 2024 until early February, according to the conservative Alpha News, which first reported on the training. The department describes its employees as “stewards of the state’s financial and human resources.”
The training document by anti-racist educator and activist Tema Okun was published in 2021 and is updated from an article she originally wrote in 1999.
According to the document, “the power elite” in the American colonies constructed white supremacy to intersect with, support, reinforce, and reproduce capitalism and various forms of oppression, and to “commodify and dehumanize all living things in the name of power and profit for a few at the expense of many.” White supremacy, it says, “is a project of psychic conditioning and toxic belonging” that not only colonizes minds and bodies, but also “the land and the water and the sky and the air we breathe.”
“We are all swimming in the waters of white supremacy culture,” Okun wrote.
“This construction of white supremacy is alive and well,” Okun’s document adds. “For just one example, we are living through a period where the U.S. Republican Party is overtly and boldly claiming a white supremacy, autocratic agenda.”
According to Okun, white supremacy culture is characterized by, among other things, the pursuit of perfection, the value of objectivity and rationality over the emotional, and the belief that progress is measured by being bigger and having more. White supremacy, she wrote, worships the written word, including writing that is grammatically correct and properly cited. And it also celebrates individualism, which, for white people, means “seeing yourself and/or demanding to be seen as an individual and not part of the white group.”
Conveniently for Okun’s thesis, being defensive about or denying white supremacy is also a characteristic of white supremacy. “White supremacy culture encourages a habit of denying or defending any speaking to or about it,” she wrote.
Okun describes herself online as a North Carolina-based educator, speaker, writer, artist, activist, spiritual guide, coach, and mentor. “I am a white woman, currently cisgender and able-bodied, upper class, queer. I am older, sometimes an elder,” she wrote on her website. She also describes herself as a “spiritual anarchist” who knows “a thing or two about a thing or two, including white supremacy and racism.”
Okun is no fan of President Donald Trump, whose administration is “currently rolling out the Project 2025 agenda, conceived by right wing Christian Zionists,” she wrote on her website.
“I invite you to understand, if you don’t already, that this administration is conducting a master class in the use of aggressive white supremacy and racialized capitalism to achieve their goals,” she wrote. “In plain speak, their aim is to further empower and enrich a small billionaire class by leaching off the labor, lives, and loveliness of all living things in order to accumulate even more power and wealth.”
A Minnesota Management and Budget spokesman Patrick Hogan told Alpha News that Okun’s document was removed from the department’s training in mid-February.
“MMB leadership was contacted on Feb. 11 about this document, determined it did not meet our training standards, and removed it from use in training the same day,” he said.