Many moons ago, I used to make some beer money delivering similar stuff to miserable unwilling bureaucrats, mostly around employment equity. It was miserable work too. At least I actually tried to do a good job; a lot of the people doing it were either just going through motions to make a buck, or greatly enjoying the opportunity to harangue people and exercise some very momentary empowerment.
The funny thing about this is that such training was originally implemented to in effect protect white fragility. The idea was that people weren’t actually racist, you see, it was just that they were ill informed, and provided with better information, they would behave better, and the problem would go away!
“There is a problem here, something must be done! There, I have Done a Thing, the problem no longer exists!”
The Discovery Institute was a weird cross-over to suddenly be cited here by the administration. As the skeptic community knows, their bailiwick is trying to get Young Earth Creationism into schools. I’m sure all the people there are racist too, but going after diversity training is weirdly out of their usual wheelhouse.
Ingraham guest Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, claimed that contact tracing meant that the “French revolution is attacking the American revolution.” Ingraham agreed, comparing contact tracers to radical French revolutionaries.
“The Jacobins, they’re back,” she said.
Hm. I think that their view of God’s creation is a pyramid with humanitymankind at the top, and top of the top is a tiny white cap.
This is the root of all collective action problems, and is why the US is so far behind on climate change action. Naïve science communicators think people don’t believe in climate change because they just don’t have the right information. The skeptical community has long known, though, that such problems are never an information gap. We are swimming in correct information, but people will ignore all of it and find the one obscure factoid that confirms their bias. Attacking the information will never work. You have to attack how people form beliefs (and in the meantime create evidence-based government policy because we don’t have time for everyone to come around on their own on climate change).
They aren’t just any “conservative non-profit thinktank”. They are the premiere crypto-evangelical propaganda bureau in the United States, whose anti-anti-racism agenda is apparently a new field for them; their original raison d’être was pushing anti-evolution. attacking science itself. Their spokespeople regularly appear on Fox News with bylines openly identifying themselves as from TDI!
Thom, you quoted this criticism of the trainings: “these trainings have further claimed that there is racism embedded in […] the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job”, then you went on to say that this claim in the trainings was true, and you provided evidence that racial discrimination in hiring was widespread.
But the trainings were not taking a position on whether there was or was not frequent racial bias in hiring. The trainings were making a different claim, which is that the principle itself that the best candidate should be hired is in fact a racist principle. (The reasoning is that the best candidate, by whatever metrics have been defined beforehand, will often by white because they have a built-in advantage socio-economically etc. And that a true anti-racist practice would be to examine your metrics to ensure they do not advantage whites, even if the metrics seem on their face to be race-neutral.)
I do not support mandating that these trainings be ended, but calling the principle that “the best-qualified should be hired” a racist principle is at best debatable. And news articles have stated that participants are not allowed to question premises such as these; they are told that they are there to listen and learn.
Recently some musical organisations have called for an end to “blind auditions”, where candidates come in and play behind a screen so their sex and race are not a factor in deciding who gets hired. But apparently this process, which is literally color-blind, is not enough for anti-racists, who now say that the process needs to acknowledge race and make positive attempts to fix an imbalance. Calling “blind auditions” racist is the kind of thing the trainings defend, and which even some on the left object to.
Do you agree that while the principle itself is not racist, in the context of a largely white organization, within a largely white society, its deployment has been?
In other words, do you disagree with studies that demonstrate that hiring practices in the U.S. tend to favor white candidates, even when those doing the hiring would swear up and down that they don’t have a racist bone in their body?
… a great many of the things we who are privileged take for granted can be seen as making us “better qualified” on paper, even without seeing us physically as part of a particular group.
the motivation here is clearly to protect the feelings of White people
Well, that is the primary selling point of the Trump administration, after all.
Seems like I was reading something recently about how the evidence indicated that mandatory diversity training didn’t actually work as intended - the people who needed it most disregarded it and even became actively hostile to it. So the loss of it may not be nearly as bad as having Trump in the White House allowing federal works to feel their racism was acceptable.
So the loss of it may not be nearly as bad as having Trump in the White House allowing federal works to feel their racism was acceptable .
The problem is, removing diversity compliance training is a huge blinking neon sign telling them that their racism is acceptable. Doing it during the current events in the US right now? It might as well be an invitation to open racism.
The Irish were not regarded as “White” by WASPy Americans until the early 20th century. Nor were Italians, Slavs, and other eastern Europeans. They worked very hard, though, to mainstream themselves as White because they saw what it meant to be Black.
Latin Americans–and especially Mexicans–vacillated. Up through the 1950s groups like LULAC argued that Hispanics were white, and worked to do the same thing for Latin Americans that the Irish and Italians did. Then when various identity-power movements gained steam in the 1960s, they shifted. It’s an interesting arc, and says a lot about racial power structures in the US.
This order seems to ban the stereotype of diversity training [all it does is tell white people they’re racist] than any actual diversity training I’ve ever been through.
Right - I should have said that the loss of it isn’t as bad as the act of removing it, nor as bad as generally having Trump where he is (where his every act is about telling people their racism is acceptable).
Yes, exactly. My original post was a reply to someone pointing to that picture of the whiteness there in the oval office, but you don’t have to go very far back to a time when they wouldn’t have all been “white.”
That’s why I referenced Archie Bunker. He had a whole lexicon of racist names for people we now consider homogeneous “white.” I am sure the racist filth in power now do, too.
← needs to look more sad and less surprised.
