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My employer recently required me to take a training course on privilege, allyship, implicit bias and intersectionality. It was something like 2 hours total spre

My employer recently required me to take a training course on privilege, allyship, implicit bias and intersectionality. It was something like 2 hours total spread over 4 trainings. I found it hard to directly criticize anything they said as the majority of it was common sense and anything objectionable wasn't so egregiously objectionable to warrant any real complaint from me (not that they gave me the option, feedback in the series was suspiciously absent). The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood. I feel that our culture's relationship to victimhood is no better than the ancients but just in the opposite extreme. Before there were precious few 'celebrated' victims (victims lifted up and supported by society) - they mostly lived and died in obscurity perhaps not even knowing the nature of their victimhood. Now we want to explore each person's past and expose anything that could possibly be construed as oppression/victimhood and expose it to the world. We end up with the other type of error: people presented as victims who aren't (relative to our perception, of course victimhood is on a spectrum). No one wants a society full of victims, but we equally can't have a society organized via victim hierarchy (intersectionality).

taeric 5y ago
Oddly, this reminds me of the trope in a lot of fiction where the main protagonist has a super twisted back story. It is super tiring and doesn't seem to actually be necessary or informative.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  You must not be a DC Comics fan? It's often useful to the plot for the protagonist to be separated completely from normal concerns (and support systems). In our crowded modern world, the hero's journey can't really be into the wild. Of course we'd all like less hackneyed plots, but it's not a perfect world... https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkAndTroubledPast https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkAndTroubledP... https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeceasedParentsAreTheBest https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeceasedParentsA... https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeAsBackstory https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeAsBackstory
  - taeric 5y ago
    I have grown rather bored with the plots. Granted... Comic plots, in general, are way to dependent on exceptionalism for my tastes nowadays.
bassman9000 5y ago
> My employer recently required me Did everyone at the company take it?
- f154hfds 5y ago
  As far as I know, it is part of a long-term D&I initiative which has much more aspects to it. For example, your review weights your D&I performance as important as your technical performance.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    To me, this screams that you are in an organization where technical performance is not critical to the success of the organization. I mean, look, I don't want to return to the days where if you were technically good, you could be a sexist jerk or a racist jerk or just generally a jerk. I don't want to work in that kind of an organization. But... equal weighting? Your organization isn't fighting for its life on technical merit, I suspect...
    - CountHackulus 5y ago
      So what? I would argue that most companies don't live and die on their technical merit. I don't think that Toyota cares if they're using the latest JS framework or if their devs are 10% slower than the SV ideal. I for one struggle to think of a single company that is where it is only because of it's technical superiority, and not because they also knew how to sell that technology, how to talk about it, how to relate with people who should use it.
      - ramblerman 5y ago
        That's a different argument. The person working on the engine should be the best qualified person to do so. And similarly for the other technical areas. Nobody said anything disparaging about the need for sales, communication, or relationships. Only that in those respective fields you would also probably want the person who is most qualified, no?
wolverine876 5y ago
> The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood. Could you give examples? It's hard to understand what you mean. Everyone objects to 'victimhood'; the significance is in the actual events.
- f154hfds 5y ago
  There's nothing wrong with fixation on victimhood that actually exists: one person wronging another begets an oppressor and a victim. However, a fixation on victimhood to the extreme can lead to error with negative consequences. For example, many forms of microaggressions mentioned in the article do not (in my opinion) lead to victimhood. To say otherwise runs the risk of making victims that don't exist. Being offended for example does not _necessarily_ make you into a victim.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    It's pretty harmful psychologically to see yourself as a victim, no matter how much you really are or not. There is something wrong with fixation on it, it's self-destructive. It also destroys relationships because the victim sees their partner as an oppressor and finds a way to blame them for everything they don't like.
- javajosh 5y ago
  >Everyone objects to 'victimhood' Um, what? Victimhood has become THE status symbol of the left. If you aren't a victim you're an abuser, so anyone looking for status reaches for whatever victimhood they can get. Victimhood is also a potent weapon - if anyone disagrees with you, you can claim they are oppressing you, denying your victimhood, gaslighting you, and so on. Victimhood is the ultimate passive aggressive weapon in a culture that has seemingly forgotten that everyone lies.
  - flyingcircus3 5y ago
    Is it the left that endlessly wines about cancel culture, and social media taking away their platform? I could have sworn it was a different group...
jessaustin 5y ago
One solution to this dilemma is to refuse to consider oneself to be a victim, while simultaneously completely ignoring whether other people make the same refusal.
akomtu 5y ago
I've been to one of such trainings that demonstrated what we would call "a struggle session" (using the Mao's terminology). Basically, a few professional "victims" told sorrow stories and explained how they could improve their behavior in the future. The stories were bs and the "victims" were millionaires, but what impressed me was the sad and twisted expressions on their faces. The face expressions were genuine. While watching the show, I was thinking that they looked like "inversed saints": instead of teaching compassion and how attachment to emotions and material things causes misery, they teach to fixate on low-type emotions and minor physical traits and while doing so they demonstrate the mysereble psychological state they've inflicted on themselves.
- blahblahblogger 5y ago
  > I've been to one of such trainings that demonstrated what we would call "a struggle session" (using the Mao's terminology). Did you have to take part in this in any way or just observe? I've had to take training sessions that left me feeling ...hateful, to be honest. In the Chinese-Maoist sense, a struggle session is where you are essentially forced to take part in some ritual denunciations of self or of your friends/family with the threat of violence or violence applied or looming in the background. In the American version of this today the threat of violence isn't there but firing and shaming by coworkers/friends; And therein career/social death. Your session doesn't sound like a struggle session per se (unless you had to take part), it sounds like a "training" where the professional victims shared their stories. But yes, it's a growing industry and they're paid handsomely to embellish their stories.
  - blippage 5y ago
    > I've had to take training sessions that left me feeling ...hateful, to be honest. And that, right there, is how the history books end up filled with horrors like the gassing of Jews. Couldn't happen again? Well, that's the mechanism as to how such things occur. Probably not Jews next time, but some Other; like white men. I heard an anecdote from a monk once. He knew someone into activism, trying to save something-or-other, I don't remember what. Then, one day, the monk opened a book, and to his utter astonishment there was a picture of the guy. He was in charge of executions. Great atrocities are perpetrated in the name of righteous anger. To quote Nietzsche: if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Out of curiosity: did they actually prefixed 'privilege' with 'white' during the training just like online activists do? Because this one of these imposing Americanisms which has no relation to reality whatsoever in some other parts of the world, like in Russia, for example.
- f154hfds 5y ago
  To their credit they did not.
noobermin 5y ago
One of the problems is in the framing you gave. Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis which is ironically a very much against a sociological way of thinking. One of the prominent ideas in the now controversial (for silly reasons) critical race theory is to emphasize not individual actions or traits but to recognize systems and reckon with those hopefully through policy. The individualization of racism for example feels like a failure both in how it offends people and also how it leads to policy prescriptions that don't really solve the underlying power relations.
- evv555 5y ago
  >Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis which is ironically a very much against a sociological way of thinking. Marx subscribed to this way of seeing individuals as mouthpieces for the collective. So did people like Marcuse. You know, one of the influential thinkers from "Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Marxism". Name sound familiar? You are giving these people more credit then they deserve.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    That's actually a very non-Marxist way of viewing society and kind of a poor reading of people from the frankfurt school actually.
    - evv555 5y ago
      CRT as it's applied is very much a performative extension of how people are reading Frankfurt thinkers. Your reading is out of sync with the orthodoxy not mine.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis Intersectionality is about the experience of privilege/disadvantage/discrimination differing, on a way that is not a simple linear combination of effects, by combinations (“intersections”) of group memberships. While it applies to groups, there's no magical lower bound on size for its applicability, and when you consider more axes of differentiation, the size of the groups represented by distinct intersections approaches one.
enteeentee 5y ago
"Our Culture"? Your posting on an internationally available forum, available to many different cultures, countries, and even different cultures within countries. I have no idea what "your" culture is? If you're going to talk about "our culture", please have a bit more specificity.
moistly 5y ago
> the majority of it was common sense Common sense is surprisingly uncommon. Some people need to be taught the basics.
rayiner 5y ago
> The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood. I feel that our culture's relationship to victimhood is no better than the ancients but just in the opposite extreme. Before there were precious few 'celebrated' victims (victims lifted up and supported by society) - they mostly lived and died in obscurity perhaps not even knowing the nature of their victimhood. One of the problems with the discourse right now is that white liberals amplify those who wallow the most in their own victim hood. The vast majority of Hispanics and Asians, for example (70-80% according to a study linked in this article) say they “never” or “rarely” experience discrimination. But all the XYZ studies professors and activists marinate in feeling discriminated against. You can’t get tenure in an American university saying “yeah racism sucks but it’s actually quite rare.”
- tptacek 5y ago
  It's weird, the way you wrote this. The vast majority of Hispanics and Asians say they rarely experience discrimination. Yes... go on... For what it's worth, Pew says that roughly half of Latinos have reported experiences of discrimination. But that's not the point. The most polarizing political slogan of the last several years wasn't "Latino lives matter". In the airless vacuum of a message board, I guess it makes a sort of sense to appeal to the experience of Asians and Latinos as summative of the experience of non-white people in general. But obviously, that's not how the world actually works.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0183356.t002 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/... > For all racial and ethnic groups represented in the data, the majority reported experiencing either none or infrequent discrimination. The majority of non-white people are Latinos and Asians. The discourse has recently pitted whites versus non-whites. Over the last few years, I’ve seen media outlets and academic institutions amplify the most aggrieved (and frankly weird) Asians as part of the general “people of color” discourse. Hence my comment above.
  - GaryTang 5y ago

taeric 5y ago

Oddly, this reminds me of the trope in a lot of fiction where the main protagonist has a super twisted back story. It is super tiring and doesn't seem to actually be necessary or informative.

jessaustin 5y ago
You must not be a DC Comics fan? It's often useful to the plot for the protagonist to be separated completely from normal concerns (and support systems). In our crowded modern world, the hero's journey can't really be into the wild. Of course we'd all like less hackneyed plots, but it's not a perfect world... https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkAndTroubledPast https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkAndTroubledP... https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeceasedParentsAreTheBest https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeceasedParentsA... https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeAsBackstory https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeAsBackstory
- taeric 5y ago
  I have grown rather bored with the plots. Granted... Comic plots, in general, are way to dependent on exceptionalism for my tastes nowadays.

bassman9000 5y ago

> My employer recently required me Did everyone at the company take it?

f154hfds 5y ago
As far as I know, it is part of a long-term D&I initiative which has much more aspects to it. For example, your review weights your D&I performance as important as your technical performance.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  To me, this screams that you are in an organization where technical performance is not critical to the success of the organization. I mean, look, I don't want to return to the days where if you were technically good, you could be a sexist jerk or a racist jerk or just generally a jerk. I don't want to work in that kind of an organization. But... equal weighting? Your organization isn't fighting for its life on technical merit, I suspect...
  - CountHackulus 5y ago
    So what? I would argue that most companies don't live and die on their technical merit. I don't think that Toyota cares if they're using the latest JS framework or if their devs are 10% slower than the SV ideal. I for one struggle to think of a single company that is where it is only because of it's technical superiority, and not because they also knew how to sell that technology, how to talk about it, how to relate with people who should use it.
    - ramblerman 5y ago
      That's a different argument. The person working on the engine should be the best qualified person to do so. And similarly for the other technical areas. Nobody said anything disparaging about the need for sales, communication, or relationships. Only that in those respective fields you would also probably want the person who is most qualified, no?

wolverine876 5y ago

> The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood. Could you give examples? It's hard to understand what you mean. Everyone objects to 'victimhood'; the significance is in the actual events.

f154hfds 5y ago
There's nothing wrong with fixation on victimhood that actually exists: one person wronging another begets an oppressor and a victim. However, a fixation on victimhood to the extreme can lead to error with negative consequences. For example, many forms of microaggressions mentioned in the article do not (in my opinion) lead to victimhood. To say otherwise runs the risk of making victims that don't exist. Being offended for example does not _necessarily_ make you into a victim.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  It's pretty harmful psychologically to see yourself as a victim, no matter how much you really are or not. There is something wrong with fixation on it, it's self-destructive. It also destroys relationships because the victim sees their partner as an oppressor and finds a way to blame them for everything they don't like.
javajosh 5y ago
>Everyone objects to 'victimhood' Um, what? Victimhood has become THE status symbol of the left. If you aren't a victim you're an abuser, so anyone looking for status reaches for whatever victimhood they can get. Victimhood is also a potent weapon - if anyone disagrees with you, you can claim they are oppressing you, denying your victimhood, gaslighting you, and so on. Victimhood is the ultimate passive aggressive weapon in a culture that has seemingly forgotten that everyone lies.
- flyingcircus3 5y ago
  Is it the left that endlessly wines about cancel culture, and social media taking away their platform? I could have sworn it was a different group...

jessaustin 5y ago

One solution to this dilemma is to refuse to consider oneself to be a victim, while simultaneously completely ignoring whether other people make the same refusal.

akomtu 5y ago

I've been to one of such trainings that demonstrated what we would call "a struggle session" (using the Mao's terminology). Basically, a few professional "victims" told sorrow stories and explained how they could improve their behavior in the future. The stories were bs and the "victims" were millionaires, but what impressed me was the sad and twisted expressions on their faces. The face expressions were genuine. While watching the show, I was thinking that they looked like "inversed saints": instead of teaching compassion and how attachment to emotions and material things causes misery, they teach to fixate on low-type emotions and minor physical traits and while doing so they demonstrate the mysereble psychological state they've inflicted on themselves.

blahblahblogger 5y ago
> I've been to one of such trainings that demonstrated what we would call "a struggle session" (using the Mao's terminology). Did you have to take part in this in any way or just observe? I've had to take training sessions that left me feeling ...hateful, to be honest. In the Chinese-Maoist sense, a struggle session is where you are essentially forced to take part in some ritual denunciations of self or of your friends/family with the threat of violence or violence applied or looming in the background. In the American version of this today the threat of violence isn't there but firing and shaming by coworkers/friends; And therein career/social death. Your session doesn't sound like a struggle session per se (unless you had to take part), it sounds like a "training" where the professional victims shared their stories. But yes, it's a growing industry and they're paid handsomely to embellish their stories.
- blippage 5y ago
  > I've had to take training sessions that left me feeling ...hateful, to be honest. And that, right there, is how the history books end up filled with horrors like the gassing of Jews. Couldn't happen again? Well, that's the mechanism as to how such things occur. Probably not Jews next time, but some Other; like white men. I heard an anecdote from a monk once. He knew someone into activism, trying to save something-or-other, I don't remember what. Then, one day, the monk opened a book, and to his utter astonishment there was a picture of the guy. He was in charge of executions. Great atrocities are perpetrated in the name of righteous anger. To quote Nietzsche: if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Out of curiosity: did they actually prefixed 'privilege' with 'white' during the training just like online activists do? Because this one of these imposing Americanisms which has no relation to reality whatsoever in some other parts of the world, like in Russia, for example.

f154hfds 5y ago
To their credit they did not.

noobermin 5y ago

One of the problems is in the framing you gave. Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis which is ironically a very much against a sociological way of thinking. One of the prominent ideas in the now controversial (for silly reasons) critical race theory is to emphasize not individual actions or traits but to recognize systems and reckon with those hopefully through policy. The individualization of racism for example feels like a failure both in how it offends people and also how it leads to policy prescriptions that don't really solve the underlying power relations.

evv555 5y ago
>Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis which is ironically a very much against a sociological way of thinking. Marx subscribed to this way of seeing individuals as mouthpieces for the collective. So did people like Marcuse. You know, one of the influential thinkers from "Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Marxism". Name sound familiar? You are giving these people more credit then they deserve.
- noobermin 5y ago
  That's actually a very non-Marxist way of viewing society and kind of a poor reading of people from the frankfurt school actually.
  - evv555 5y ago
    CRT as it's applied is very much a performative extension of how people are reading Frankfurt thinkers. Your reading is out of sync with the orthodoxy not mine.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis Intersectionality is about the experience of privilege/disadvantage/discrimination differing, on a way that is not a simple linear combination of effects, by combinations (“intersections”) of group memberships. While it applies to groups, there's no magical lower bound on size for its applicability, and when you consider more axes of differentiation, the size of the groups represented by distinct intersections approaches one.

enteeentee 5y ago

"Our Culture"? Your posting on an internationally available forum, available to many different cultures, countries, and even different cultures within countries. I have no idea what "your" culture is? If you're going to talk about "our culture", please have a bit more specificity.

moistly 5y ago

> the majority of it was common sense Common sense is surprisingly uncommon. Some people need to be taught the basics.

rayiner 5y ago

> The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood. I feel that our culture's relationship to victimhood is no better than the ancients but just in the opposite extreme. Before there were precious few 'celebrated' victims (victims lifted up and supported by society) - they mostly lived and died in obscurity perhaps not even knowing the nature of their victimhood. One of the problems with the discourse right now is that white liberals amplify those who wallow the most in their own victim hood. The vast majority of Hispanics and Asians, for example (70-80% according to a study linked in this article) say they “never” or “rarely” experience discrimination. But all the XYZ studies professors and activists marinate in feeling discriminated against. You can’t get tenure in an American university saying “yeah racism sucks but it’s actually quite rare.”

tptacek 5y ago
It's weird, the way you wrote this. The vast majority of Hispanics and Asians say they rarely experience discrimination. Yes... go on... For what it's worth, Pew says that roughly half of Latinos have reported experiences of discrimination. But that's not the point. The most polarizing political slogan of the last several years wasn't "Latino lives matter". In the airless vacuum of a message board, I guess it makes a sort of sense to appeal to the experience of Asians and Latinos as summative of the experience of non-white people in general. But obviously, that's not how the world actually works.
- rayiner 5y ago
  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0183356.t002 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/... > For all racial and ethnic groups represented in the data, the majority reported experiencing either none or infrequent discrimination. The majority of non-white people are Latinos and Asians. The discourse has recently pitted whites versus non-whites. Over the last few years, I’ve seen media outlets and academic institutions amplify the most aggrieved (and frankly weird) Asians as part of the general “people of color” discourse. Hence my comment above.
- GaryTang 5y ago