Cobb County-headquartered home improvement retail giant The Home Depot has been trending on Twitter today for a training document from their Canadian division on how to recognize different kinds of privilege, including white privilege, cisgender privilege, and heterosexual privilege.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist and activist popular with the American right wing, tweeted the following on March 21, with a photographed image of the flyer:
“Welcome to the commissariat at Home Depot. How can our capitalist corporations be so blind to their own interests?”
Welcome to the commissariat at Home Depot. How can our capitalist corporations be so blind to their own interests? https://t.co/bEgK2VFcTg
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 21, 2022
Home Depot’s response
A spokesperson for The Home Depot emailed the following response to the Courier this afternoon:
“While we fully support diversity across our company, this material was not created or approved by our corporate diversity, equity and inclusion department. This was a resource in our Canadian division and not part of any required programming.”
About The Home Depot
The Home Depot was founded in 1978 after co-founders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were fired from the Handy Andy home improvement chain in southern California.
The decided to go into business together, and opened three stores in Atlanta.
According to company promotional materials:
The Home Depot is the world’s largest home improvement specialty retailer. The Company operates a total of 2,298 retail stores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico. In fiscal 2020, The Home Depot had sales of $132.1 billion and earnings of $12.9 billion. The Company employs approximately 500,000 associates. The Home Depot’s stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: HD) and is included in the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
A big to do about nothing. Canada is off it’s rocker, everyone knows that. That whole mess is nothing but propaganda anyway. There are many white people in this country that came from poor, broken, abusive households. Many of these people, like myself, had to work for everything in this world because nothing was handed to them. It’s a little difficult to look at a gangster rapper in a million dollar home and believe you are privileged. Unless you have walked in another person’s shoes, do not judge them by the color of their skin. That is the epitome of racism