God forbid large firms employing people from diverse backgrounds require employees to take training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.
You’re defending diversity training, which nobody is attacking. We’re talking about a particular kind of rhetoric where people take personal responsibility in behalf of their race and label themselves with words that, in ordinary usage, have extremely inflammatory meanings.
I’m from a “diverse background.” I think diversity training and making organizations more diverse is great. But this rhetoric is an explosively bad approach to race relations, and as a non-white person I am very worried about what the result will be.
So not much more to say on this topic without specific examples.
By contrast, your motte: "training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.
You trusted your alma mater when you were taught there; not trusting the direction it's taking now? Is it possible you're not seeing the picture the way they are?
I think the same principle applies here. Malicious racism and passive racism have the same effect.
Studies have shown that people who don't think themselves to be actually racist still act in race-discriminatory ways. For example, people with non-ethic-names get more callbacks for their resume controlled for qualifications on the resume (https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...).
For instance, Buddhism is a suite of beliefs about enlightenment and transcendence. We don't refer to people as "structural Buddhists" simply because they have equanimity.
1) Having people declare personal complicity for a general social ill; and
2) Using words that have widely-understood connotations to mean something different in order to achieve shocking rhetorical effect.
It's not just inconsistent with social norms, it's alienating to many non-white people. I don't think the well-meaning white people doing this (and almost everyone involved in this is white) really understand that we have to actually go on and try to interact normally our professors and administrators after this.
Because of that, it's very hard for me to have normal interactions with people who explicitly identify as racist, even if they say they're a special kind of racist who intends to treat me well.
In other words, there's no magically non-racist person out there. Everyone's a little bit racist.
Making people confess to being 'racist', at institutions where being Racist gets you fired, is a power-move.
Those of us who can see that aren't objecting to the idea of unconscious bias, we're objecting to the power move.
There's a world of difference between confronting one's unconscious bias and unapologetic, willful racism.
If there's such a world of difference, why conflate the two using the same word?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/merriam-webster-racism...
Not "suggesting" - demanding, and specifically labelling themselves "racist" - not just admitting that they benefit from it.
The fact my colleague took it so personally says more about them, I think, than the training.
Religious rituals seem totally normal to the initiated and strange and cult-ish to others.
I don't believe the similarity to Maoist struggle sessions is an accident, it's born from the same general school of thought.
1) Mao had been frozen out after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, and this was his way of discrediting his enemies and getting back on top.
2) Young people full of fervor are fucking vicious.
None of it really had much to do with marxist philosophy in general or with the things Mao in particular had said before he'd been frozen out. But it says a lot about power.
Nonsense. The Cultural Revolution had much to do with Marxist philosophy. For goodness’ sake, read the May 16 Notification and Sixteen Points.
The entire point of the courses I've seen is to bring people awareness of unconscious bias and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of error to awareness of the potential for such error. And unconscious bias doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior.
The entire point of the [bible camp] I've seen is to bring people awareness of [unconscious sinning] and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of [sin] to awareness of the potential for [sin]. And [unconscious sinning] doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior [since we're all born in sin]. (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-the-biblical-ev...)
Original sin is a concept couched in Christian mythology. Unconscious bias is a concept derived from statistical study and observation. The similarity is that unconscious bias, like original sin, appears to be innate to the human existence---a byproduct of the way we think about the world, the thousands of quick decisions we make subconsciously to go about our days. The parallel doesn't make it untrue.
The entire point of some exhibits in science museums I've seen is to bring people awareness of optical illusions and help them transition from not knowing that the human eye has some fascinating corner case failure modes to awareness of the existence of those failure modes. And the eye being imperfect doesn't make it "worthless," it's a pretty ordinary side effect of evolution in the context where those failure modes are rare to observe.