Coca-Cola Confirms Training Employees to ‘Be Less White’
beckernews.com
beckernews.com
The headline implies that Coca-Cola is taking some affirmative action to make people watch these videos.
But reading the article and the linked tweets, it seems like:
- Coca-Cola pays for LinkedIn Learning, an educational platform
- LinkedIn Learning has a variety of paid and free content
- one of the free pieces of content Robin DiAngelo's presentation with the "Be less white" phrase -- that is, anyone can watch this at https://www.linkedin.com/learning/confronting-racism-with-ro...
- Coca-Cola says: "The video circulating on social media is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company’s curriculum"
It's not clear from Coca-Cola's statement whether this means Coca-Cola has encouraged or required its employees to watch this video. Perhaps you could infer from the lack of a denial that they are requiring people to watch it, but IMO, that doesn't merit the certainty expressed in the headline.
At this point, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If they say "Oh that was bad and we are sorry" then a one cancel army will come for them.
If they say "We stand by that curriculum" a second cancel army will come for them.
Their only option is to say "It is part of a larger set of materials we license from a 3rd party and we continue to refine our training".
which is basically what their only viable option was.
> After a public relations fiasco, Coca-Cola has effectively conceded that some of its employees participated in a public LinkedIn Learning seminar that advocated that some of its employees be “less white.”
So if I work for Google and out of a bunch of options I take this publicly held LinkedIn seminar using company time, “Google is training employees to be less white”?
Instead of asking that we stop use terrible reporting to reconfirm our own very biased views of the world, I’ll instead ask we do the bare minimum and just stop sharing terrible reporting.
Google is paying for the training and should be responsible for the content.
This is like if I was at home and did a Google search for "vegan recipes". Because I'm logged into my corporate account, my employer's logo appears in the upper right corner. If I shared a screenshot of that search, does it mean that my employer is forcing its employees to learn how to live a vegan lifestyle?
Perhaps Coca-Cola is mandating this. Perhaps they aren't, though.
Racism is like that. White-on-black racism is the absolute leader in terms of causing real human misery in America.
When your boss tells you to fix the code that's causing 80% of your program crashes, do you complain that there's other code crashing, too? Or do you act like a real engineer, and fix the big issues first?
Sure, why don't we act as "real engineers"? If we did, we'd see that inequality and class issues are the "absolute leaders in terms of causing real human misery in America".
Those pareto-results however are swept under the carpet for more fashionable and inconsequential causes (because changing those would entail changing it for everybody, black, latino, white, asian, muslim, etc.), and it would also mean many changes to capitalism and how it operates (in the corporate space, education, health, legal, etc).
Whereas now it's just enough that e.g. a big business creates some diversity initiative, sponsors some apps with token multiracial people posing, and continue business as usual.
Not to mention that even if one wanted to tackle racism, telling people to "be less white" would be the very last thing they should do. If anything, the "pareto pricinple" that some racism is OK, since "our 20% shit doesn't stink, only the 80% of shit does" would only help increase actual bad blood against blacks.
I notice msm and journalists like leaving off the last word (supremacist) for the sake of outrage. This is a 500+ year problem that negatively affected most of the planet, we can't decontextualize.
The solution to discrimination is not more discrimination.
And the biggest issue that the federal government/ American citizens face is not systemic racism.
You cannot absolve groups of individuals of their poor decision making. You can try to manipulate outcomes, but it doesn't end well if individuals continue to make poor decisions.
The analogy is flawed because race doesn't account for 80% of the problems in the US, and I don't think it breaks 5%.
I checked, all the way through #427, and it is absolutely nowhere. Why was this silently disappered?
It seems to be excluding one specific group, though.