6 ms·

He 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 ago
God forbid large firms employing people from diverse backgrounds require employees to take training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Are 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 ago
    I'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 ago
      You 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 ago
        Conflating trainings derived from theory based on research and evidence with religion is also strange.
        luckylion 6y ago
        I 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 ago
        The "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.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        > "I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning" 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.
    - asdiovjdfi 6y ago
      In my experince, the true believers find the diversity courses validating.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      You don't have to believe the description of the session--there are screenshots in the article.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        Nothing about the article suggests that text was forced. I'm not going to trust the Free Beacon's interpretation of some out-of-context screenshots.
        rayiner 6y ago
        The statements standing alone are damning, whether forced or not. That's not how faculty and administrators should be speaking in front of students.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        Agree to disagree
- rayiner 6y ago
  What 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 ago
    You'd have to nail down what rhetoric you mean for me to have any response to that.
    - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
      I 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 ago
        Without 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 ago
      The 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 ago
  There'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 ago
And 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.)

shadowgovt 6y ago

God forbid large firms employing people from diverse backgrounds require employees to take training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.

luckylion 6y ago
Are 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 ago
  I'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 ago
    You 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 ago
      Conflating trainings derived from theory based on research and evidence with religion is also strange.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        I 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 ago
        The "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.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        > "I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning" 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.
  - asdiovjdfi 6y ago
    In my experince, the true believers find the diversity courses validating.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    You don't have to believe the description of the session--there are screenshots in the article.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      Nothing about the article suggests that text was forced. I'm not going to trust the Free Beacon's interpretation of some out-of-context screenshots.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        The statements standing alone are damning, whether forced or not. That's not how faculty and administrators should be speaking in front of students.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        Agree to disagree
rayiner 6y ago
What 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 ago
  You'd have to nail down what rhetoric you mean for me to have any response to that.
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    I 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 ago
      Without 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 ago
    The 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 ago
There'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 ago

And 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.)