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> I had to "confess" that I'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career. So, basically inquisitor wannabees and pseudoscience
by pvaldes 6y ago
> I had to "confess" that I'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career.
So, basically inquisitor wannabees and pseudoscience cultists. Your colleague dodged a bullet.
The idea that claiming that you are racist makes you not racist is totally gaga, random, and based in magical thinking, not in science. It only helps to hide in plain sight the real racists making much easier to admit it for everybody.
- inanutshellus 6y agoHe signed the document to stay at the institution. I wouldn't call it "dodging a bullet" I'd call it "securing his own yoke".
- shadowgovt 6y agoGod forbid large firms employing people from diverse backgrounds require employees to take training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.
- luckylion 6y agoAre you suggesting it's required to "confess that you're a racist" in a Mao-style struggle session to work with people from diverse backgrounds?
- shadowgovt 6y agoI'm definitely not. I also hold such descriptions of these trainings in high skepticism, because I've been through a similar training and had a coworker describe it as such when all the training was doing was surfacing the scientific evidence suggesting unconscious bias is a real phenomenon that people aren't aware of. The fact my colleague took it so personally says more about them, I think, than the training.
- luckylion 6y agoYou might have visited different seminars than the ones this thread was originally about, or you might just experience them differently given that you appear to be a staunch believer in white privilege & the post-modern theory of racism. Religious rituals seem totally normal to the initiated and strange and cult-ish to others.
- shadowgovt 6y agoConflating trainings derived from theory based on research and evidence with religion is also strange.
- luckylion 6y agoI think research & evidence is vague when you include gender & diversity studies in sciences. There's a lot that's barely above an essay, it'll stick for a few years and then get retracted (gender pay gap anyone?) The cultish behavior surrounding it ("I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning, I'm worthless, oh please, Lord, forgive me, I submit myself before your will") makes it look like a replacement for religion, not anything stemming from science. I don't believe the similarity to Maoist struggle sessions is an accident, it's born from the same general school of thought.
- free_rms 6y agoThe "school of thought" behind the cultural revolution was twofold: 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.
- alentist 6y ago> None of it really had much to do with marxist philosophy Nonsense. The Cultural Revolution had much to do with Marxist philosophy. For goodness’ sake, read the May 16 Notification and Sixteen Points.
- rayiner 6y agoWhat you’re doing is called a motte and bailey fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy 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.
- shadowgovt 6y agoYou'd have to nail down what rhetoric you mean for me to have any response to that.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoI don't think specific examples are really useful here. At the end of the day, either I'm allowed to say "I am not a racist" at work and be left alone for making that statement, or I'm not. If I'm not, it's a cryptofascist struggle session.
- shadowgovt 6y agoWithout specific examples, I have no idea if I am committing a motte and bailey fallacy because the specific examples I have in my mind are the weaker example, the specific examples the speaker has in their mind are a different example, I've never experienced their example (but have experienced people experiencing my example and treating it as something more draconian that could, perhaps, approximate their example). So not much more to say on this topic without specific examples.
- rayiner 6y agoThe example is in my OP: It's a session where white people acknowledge that they take personal responsibility for participating in a system of "white privilege" and admit to being "racist" and "gatekeepers of white supremacy." (That's the bailey.) By contrast, your motte: "training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThere's nothing wrong with bringing privilege and systemic racism up and taking a "course" as a way to make it poignant. Forcing white people to say "all white people, including myself, are racist P's of S" is garbage and I would get up and walk out at that point, no amount of money or "this position is cool" would convince me to do otherwise. If you don't have standards then why even be alive or call yourself an individual? Sure if you're racist speak up and would like to fix it, otherwise it's blackmail and you are working with garbage people.
- pvaldes 6y agoAnd their friend was fired. We talk about an institution that will only hire people as long as they came out as racists first. Wow!. Looks like the type of workplace to avoid at any cost.
- inanutshellus 6y ago(It feels important to point out that my post is based on the text above, not based on having read the document being referred to nor the full context of the document. A company that would, say, require 100% of the employees to sign a document saying, in effect, that "everyone has inherent predilections towards folk they most relate to" and that "here we expect everyone to rise above that" would be pretty cool but what was described seemed weird to me.)
- pessimizer 6y agoIf you go around asking who the "real racists" are, you'll never find any. Turns out self-reporting is dubious.
- eli_gottlieb 6y agoKlansmen and neo-Nazis are perfectly happy to call themselves racists.
- LanceH 6y agoThe alternative is hardly declaring people such based on skin color.
- LandR 6y agoIf you declare everyone a racist then finding the actual racists becomes a much harder problem. Firstly, if everyone is a racist then the word racist loses meaning. So when you have an actual racist and say this person is racist, it's meaningless. Everyone is racist. Secondly, the amount of false positives will just be crazy high. How can this possibly ever work? I don't know what they think they are achieving?
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago>I don't know what they think they are achieving? They don't think they're actually hunting down people who hate others based on race. They're self-consciously building class power that serves themselves as individuals and the material interests of their class.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoAre you a real racist?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shadowgovt 6y agoThe trainings I'm familiar with have the opposite intent: to help people who don't believe they are racists (or believe racism doesn't exist) understand the unconscious mental processes that feed into racism and the nature of structural discrimination, even when unintended.
- kofejnik 6y ago> understand the unconscious mental processes that feed into racism and the nature of structural discrimination, even when unintended. I wonder how scientific this understanding is
- shadowgovt 6y agoUCSF has a useful overview on the topic. https://diversity.ucsf.edu/resources/state-science-unconscious-bias https://diversity.ucsf.edu/resources/state-science-unconscio...
- tomp 6y agoQuite biased. At least the Wikipedia page includes a Criticism section. Also, as with most psychology, the prior should be that all these studies are a result of p-hacking and publication bias (i.e. that the effect is actually noise). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Criticism_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Crit... Also pretty obvious biased cherry picking on that page. Counterexample: Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481
- shadowgovt 6y agoI don't see how the provided counterexample is a counterexample. It appears to indicate unconscious bias favoring women in STEM faculty positions for hiring.
- 6y ago