#workplace antiracism trainings

[eretzyisrael]

Defining oppressed Jews as ‘white’ and ‘privileged’ is insulting to all

This article is a few months old but the trends it criticises are with us and continue to gain traction. David Bernstein, Jason Guberman and Elina Caplan argue convincingly in the Jewish Journal that efforts to make the Jewish community more inclusive of Jewish diversity have been used to smuggle in an illiberal ideology—often under the guise of racial justice or antiracism.

David Bernstein

Jason Guberman

The idea that Jews benefit from a presumed system of oppression paints them, in the prescriptive victim/oppressor ideology, as privileged oppressors. This notion, which should be offensive to all Jews, is downright insulting to many immigrants who were often severely oppressed in their home countries. For example, Middle Eastern and North African Jews were “otherized” at times by legal restrictions and by informal yet widespread discriminatory practices. Jews from the FSU suffered overt, government-led oppression that explicitly kept them out of universities and workplaces and sent them to prison or labor camps for so much as learning Hebrew. Defining them as “white” in the binary model where all white people are considered oppressors erases their identities and imposes a worldview completely at odds with their lived experience.

Too often, American Jewish organizations have misguidedly embraced this ideology themselves. One Jewish denomination offered a four-part “learning” on race and racism for rabbis and cantors, proclaiming, “This space is for white clergy and will serve as a white antiracist affinity space.” Such ideological pronouncements and trainings (disturbingly similar to “re-education” campaigns that many suffered through) are anathema to immigrant Jewish communities that oppose the familiar revolutionary concept of dismantling systems, rather than making incremental progress in the very nation and system that has attracted refugees from all over the world. Indeed, for all its flaws, America remains the number one destination in the world for immigrants, voting with their lives to attain the unrivaled freedom of the U.S. Constitution, which ensures that the American system can evolve and that individuals can define themselves and make their own opportunities.

If the Jewish community listens, it will hear an immigrant chorus that is in equal parts dismay and horror. Dismay over the reality that most American Jews cannot recognize the extreme ideological and antisemitic undertones of what is happening right in front of them. And horror over the fact that by the time American Jews come to their senses, it may be too late. These Jews are far more likely to feel alienated rather than supported by these well-intentioned, ideologically charged efforts at making the Jewish community more inclusive. Such efforts do not, in fact, make Jewish life more inclusive. They make it more exclusionary. They shut out Jews who bring to this country all of their high hopes—as well as their traumas.

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[finishinglinepress]

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Kenisha Coon, MS, (she/her) has lived experience of trauma and resilience in the child welfare system. She has her Bachelor's degree and Master’s degree in Psychology. She has a Post-Masters teaching certificate in Psychology and a DEI in the workplace certification. She has 13 years of experience in the sector of child welfare and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Work. She is a leader of Antiracism and DEI work throughout the country, such as facilitating conversations, training, creating strategic plans, and consulting. She is a graduate of the Minority Professional Leadership Development Program and has collaborated with AdoptUSKids, National Adoption Association, and Families Rising to bring racial awareness and equitable training and education to the child welfare scene. In her personal life, Kenisha runs a DEI consulting business, Kenisha Coon Consulting as well as a calligraphy business, Lettering by Kenisha. Kenisha volunteers in several communities where the main focus is on expanding and educating of Race Equity and DEI learning to those who may not have had the space to be courageous. By day you will Kenisha working to dismantle the disparities of black and brown youth in the child welfare system and teaching others lessons toward becoming antiracist in everything that they do. By night, she is lettering, doodling, and creating to make folks happy and to nurture her own mental health. She is a consultant, a speaker, an ally, an activist, a writer, a mom, and a wife. Her latest project is as the author of And Then She Persisted. The story of overcoming generational trauma, abuse, and neglect. It is the story of standing up against racism. It's a story of advocacy, passion, allyship, and surrendering to stepping into one's purpose. Kenisha is exploring publishing right now.

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[swanlake1998]

Article: The Paris Opéra's Diversity Report Proposes Steps Towards a More Inclusive Company

Date: February 9, 2021

By: Laura Cappelle

Five years after Benjamin Millepied was met with fierce resistance for bringing up racist practices within the Paris Opéra Ballet, the French company is finally acknowledging its lack of diversity. This week, the Paris Opéra released an official report with recommendations, commissioned in the wake of last summer's racial reckoning and increased support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

At the time, the worldwide push for social justice encouraged a group of Black and Asian employees, led by the Paris Opéra Ballet's five Black dancers [Isaac Lopes Gomes, Awa Joannais, Guillaume Diop, Letizia Galloni, and Jack Gasztowtt], to write a manifesto demanding change. Among the issues they raised were the continued use of the French n-word, a lack of tights and cosmetics for darker skin tones, and the absence of an effective anti-discrimination policy. The Paris Opéra's new general director, Alexander Neef, who arrived in September from the Canadian Opera Company, lost no time in offering support, and appointed the historian Pap Ndiaye and the civil servant Constance Rivière to lead an independent audit.

Their 66-page report, based on interviews with nearly 100 people both inside and outside the Paris Opéra, is at once measured and unequivocal. In the report, the Paris Opéra is described as "mostly a white world far removed from contemporary French society," with artists, management, board members and donors who remain overwhelmingly un-diverse. (No actual data is available, as racial statistics are strongly discouraged in France.)

Some of the report's 19 recommendations will strike observers outside France as common sense in 2021. Eliminating blackface, brownface and yellowface from the repertoire, or "opening choreographic commissions to diverse choreographers," are hardly radical moves at this point, and the Paris Opéra Ballet should arguably have committed to them a long time ago. Ndiaye and Rivière do insist on the need for more creations rooted in the classical technique, a longtime gripe of many POB aficionados, as the company tends to look to contemporary and hip-hop dancemakers to signal its openness.

POB also took action on some basic demands before the report was even released: A wider range of makeup and hair products was recently introduced (in the past Black dancers had to bring their own products), and in late January, for the first time, Black corps members wore tights that matched their skin tones during a livestream of the annual Défilé.

Other recommendations go much further. The suggestion that POB "reach out to high-level non-white artists in France and abroad to hire them into the corps de ballet," in order to "create role models," will likely be controversial within the company, as it has consistently refused to change its entrance competition system and allow for direct recruitment. Additionally, Ndiaye and Rivière focus much of their attention on the Paris Opéra Ballet School, described as "very homogeneous," with regards to its teaching staff and the very few minority children. They advocate for reform of the admittance process.

At present, the school essentially waits for students to come to it; instead, the report's authors say that it should be "more open to the outside world," step up outreach efforts, rethink its stringent physical criteria and organize auditions all around the country as well as in French overseas territories. A clash looks inevitable with the current school director, Élisabeth Platel. She has long insisted that the school is doing enough and isn't elitist because tuition is free, and recently defended the use of white face powder on Black dancers.

Platel isn't alone in France: The Paris Opéra's newfound interest in becoming an inclusive workplace has already sparked a political war of words. Renewed demands for antiracist action in the country since last summer have been derided by conservative thinkers as American-style divisiveness, and incompatible with France's universalist model, which hinges on a colorblind ideal. In December, the far-right politician Marine Le Pen seized on the Paris Opéra's efforts to accuse Neef of "antiracism gone crazy" and "obscurantism." (POB étoile Germain Louvet rightly pointed out that the Swan Lake video Le Pen tweeted wasn't even a company production. It actually starred the Bolshoi's Svetlana Zakharova and La Scala's Roberto Bolle in Milan.)

Even within the Paris Opéra, proactive, long-term support for this diversity drive is far from guaranteed. According to the newspaper Le Monde, less than 300 Paris Opéra employees, out of roughly 1,500, signed the manifesto last summer; some have even made their reluctance clear on social media.

Many of the recommendations—which include employee training, the appointment of a diversity officer, the creation of a committee of experts and greater contextualization of the repertoire for the audience—will also require significant financial investment, at the worst possible time. Despite a €61 million pandemic rescue package from the French state, the Paris Opéra anticipates additional losses of €29 million through the end of the 2022 fiscal year, as theaters are currently shut for the foreseeable future.

Millepied found out during his tenure just how slow POB can be to change. His successor as ballet director, Aurélie Dupont, expressed support, but Neef is clearly taking the lead and has remained steadfast in the face of criticism. Now the hard work begins: changing minds and ingrained habits, day by day, even as the news cycle moves on.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

If you look at American workplaces at the moment I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that antiracism was quite easy. The speed at which diversity training programs mushroomed in the aftermath of the anti-police uprisings of the past summer, along with specialist gurus leading them, could easily lead you to think that antiracism was a set of politics best practiced in the bowels of HR departments. No Black bodies left dying on streets, no police stations to burn, just a stack of Robin D’Angelo books and late afternoon management-led sensitivity training sessions.

US companies currently spend $8 billion annually on diversity training. This is despite multiple studies demonstrating that such training neither increases diversity nor stamps out racism. And yet they continue. They continue precisely because these HR exercises are not about dismantling white supremacy; they are about inoculating companies and universities against lawsuits from people who encounter racism and sexism at work.

[arcticdementor]

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.

…

It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.

Yet these ideas are taking America by storm. The movement that calls itself “antiracism” – I think it deserves that name a lot less than “pro-lifers” deserve theirs and am amazed journalists parrot it without question – is complete in its pessimism about race relations. It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

…

This dingbat racialist cult, which has no art, music, literature, and certainly no comedy, is the vision of “progress” institutional America has chosen to endorse in the Trump era. Why? Maybe because it fits. It won’t hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars.

Democratic Party leaders, pioneers of the costless gesture, have already embraced this performative race politics as a useful tool for disciplining apostates like Bernie Sanders. Bernie took off in presidential politics as a hard-charging crusader against a Wall Street-fattened political establishment, and exited four years later a self-flagellating, defeated old white man who seemed to regret not apologizing more for his third house. Clad in kente cloth scarves, the Democrats who crushed him will burn up CSPAN with homilies on privilege even as they reassure donors they’ll stay away from Medicare for All or the carried interest tax break.

…

Corporate America doubtless views the current protest movement as something that can be addressed as an H.R. matter, among other things by hiring thousands of DiAngelos to institute codes for the proper mode of Black-white workplace interaction.

If you’re wondering what that might look like, here’s DiAngelo explaining how she handled the fallout from making a bad joke while she was “facilitating antiracism training” at the office of one of her clients.

When one employee responds negatively to the training, DiAngelo quips the person must have been put off by one of her Black female team members: “The white people,” she says, “were scared by Deborah’s hair.” (White priests of antiracism like DiAngelo seem universally to be more awkward and clueless around minorities than your average Trump-supporting construction worker).

…

The downside, which we’re already seeing, is that organizations everywhere will embrace powerful new tools for solving professional disputes, through a never-ending purge. One of the central tenets of DiAngelo’s book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and can only be managed through constant, “lifelong” vigilance, much like the battle with addiction. A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts — in the fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever.

Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He reportedly was forced out of the Writer’s Union of Canada for the crime of “cultural appropriation,” and denounced as a racist by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki “doesn’t see the humanity of indigenous peoples.” Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing to provide proof that she was Indigenous.

…

People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of “anti-black racism” to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other’s careers before they’ve even finished growing?  

“People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs,” one 16 year-old said. “Someone rly started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives… I love twitter,” wrote a different person, adding cheery emojis.

A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago.

[loudlytransparenttrash]

This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 22

Students at George Mason University spent days protesting the hiring of Brett Kavanaugh as a visiting law professor at GMU’s Law School. Some students complained to campus leaders, telling them students’ mental health is threatened by the Kavanaugh hire, despite the Law School being located 3,500 miles away from the university. “This decision has really impacted me negatively. It is affecting my mental health knowing that an abuser will be part of our faculty.” Another female student gave similar comments to the board, “As someone who has survived sexual assault three times I do not feel comfortable with someone who has sexual assault allegations like walking on campus.” A third female student told the board, “we are fighting to eradicate sexual violence on this campus. But the hiring of Kavanaugh threatens the mental well being of all survivors on this campus.” The next day, students marched around campus chanting “kick Kavanaugh off campus” and holding “cancel Kavanaugh” signs while some stuck blue tape over their mouths.

University of Colorado Denver brought back a 2016 course, “Problematizing Whiteness: Educating for Racial Justice.” Students will learn “the plight of people of color and how white people are complicit.” The course details explains, “The study of whiteness has always sought to challenge racism, racial privilege, white supremacy, and colorblind racism. However, to overindulge in the spectacle of ‘white racial epiphanies’ overlooks the ongoing work whites must do to participate in racial justice. Beyond the feel-good of momentary White racial awareness lurk enormous concerns about how to continually examine Whiteness in order to uphold antiracism, moreover the fruition of a more racially just society.” It also, understandably, tells students that recording any of the lecture is forbidden.

A State University of New York College at Old Westbury professor wrote an article which he states it makes him happy when he sees poor white people on the street begging for food and often wonders how hard he should kick them in the head. “White people begging us for food feels like justice. It feels like Afro-Futurism after America falls. It feels like a Black Nationalist wet dream. It has the feels I rarely feel, a hunger for historical vengeance satisfied so well I rub my belly.” White people, he says, are a Rorschach test: “I see in them the history of colonization, slavery and mass incarceration that makes their begging Black people for money ironic - if not insulting. You wasted your whiteness! Why should we give to you?” The professor admits that this isn’t a “good look,” however, when he thinks about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “be thy best self” and “show compassion to those who spite you,” he retorts “go f**k another secretary Martin!” 

A University of Utah student reported her business professor to campus administrators for assigning too many books written by male economists and philosophers. “Many of these figures are of great importance. But at what cost do we continue to plant the seed of sexism in the minds of individuals? But especially in a course and college that is already deemed to be a ‘boys club,’ continuing those teachings, and those teachings being delivered by a professor of his character is dangerous.” The student also took issue in her bias report about a joke the professor made about how, “while all our jobs will be taken by robots,” he will be “retired living in Tahiti surrounded by 40-45 beautiful women feeding him grapes.” The student complained, “Not only did the professor willingly and openly objectify women, but he also objectified women of color. Women of another culture.”

University of Texas at Austin freshmen were threatened to be doxed if they considered joining the Young Conservatives of Texas or Turning Point USA. “Hey #UT23! Do you wanna be famous? If you join YCT or Turning Point USA, you just might be. Your name and more could end up on an article like one of these,” the tweet said, linking to previous doxing posts of conservative students at the school. “So be sure to make smart choices at #UTOrientation.” They went on to encourage other students, “if you begin to spot the young racists trying to join YCT or TPUSA, send us a tip so we can keep our reports up to date.” The anarchist student network have already released extensive personal information of pro-Brett Kavanaugh demonstrators at UT Austin, including their names, photos and contact information. It went so far as to post some of the phone numbers of the employers of students and urged them to be fired.

Webster University offered its white faculty and staff a chance to “witness their whiteness” in a program that seeks to eliminate racism. According to the event description, Witnessing Whiteness is about “white people voluntarily coming together to do work around racism in a supportive, non-threatening setting.” It’s also about “learning to speak about race and racism, exploring white privilege, and practicing allying with sisters and brothers of color.” White attendees also were taught how to commit to positive change in their lives, workplace and region and understand and practice interrupting racism and developing skills to act as agents of change.

University of North Georgia hosted several "safe zone trainings" to make the school a “safer, more inclusive environment for members of the LGBTQ+ community.” Students were given handouts which featured a ‘gender unicorn’ cartoon and encouraged attendees to use “LGBTQ-Inclusive Language” by giving them a list of “Dos and Don'ts.” They asked students to not use words such as “mailman” and “ladies and gentlemen” or phrases such as “both genders” and “opposite sexes,” instead suggesting that they use “all genders.” Attendees were also shown a YouTube video from Franchesca Ramsey called “5 Tips For Being An Ally,” which instructed them to understand their privilege.

Middlebury College were forced to soothe upset and angry students after Polish conservative scholar and politician Ryszard Legutko was invited to speak on campus about totalitarian temptations within liberal democracies. Ironically, the school canceled the lecture just hours beforehand after some students complained, then later held a reflection meeting with the student protestors, where administrators told them, “I hear you, and you should be outraged, and we should acknowledge that and apologize, because that’s the least we can do right now, because we can’t make it right in the moment. But in the future we will do everything we can to make it right.” As the safe space meeting was going on, unbeknown to the protesters, a political science professor allowed Legutko to be ushered into his classroom and address students in secrecy. 

At University of Texas at Austin, a pro-life speaker’s event was disrupted after someone set off a smoke bomb, triggering the building’s fire alarm and forcing attendees to be evacuated. The event went forward in another building.

A Canadian University of New Brunswick professor said he is in favor of taking a variety of actions against “white supremacists” who speak on campus, including publicly shaming them, firing them from their jobs and driving them from restaurants. What’s concerning about this is the professor’s definition of white supremacists. He said the "Make America Great Again" hats will carry the same shame as the uniforms worn by the Ku Klux Klan. “Every time I watch a documentary about the civil rights movement and all the hateful violence they faced, I wonder what the white people who were doing those horrible things were thinking... We are living in an era with Donald Trump and the Republican Party and the right-wing movement in America where things of similar gravity are happening. The entire sentiment of 'Make America Great Again' implies that there was a time when America was great and it's not any longer... America for Trump and his supporters is no longer great because black people have too many rights or there are too many women in the workplace."

A City University of New York professor was interviewed on radio where she stated the “ideology of racialized terrorism” is the responsibility of every white person in the United States. She criticized America for building "mental health hospital beds for white home-grown terrorists, but concentration camps and high-level security prisons for Black, and Black and Brown immigrants.” She goes on to wonder why we pay tribute every September 11 to “the pillars of American capitalism,” but never to “the young Black and Brown” victims. She also claims she's suffered in capitalist America after being designated a “other, non-white" on her arrival into the country and "white America has damned this democracy into the hands of white terrorists.” 

A University of Arizona student live-streamed herself on Facebook harassing two Border Patrol agents who were giving a lecture to Criminal Justice students. The female student stood near the door of the room, zooming in on the officers repeatedly while calling them murderers and saying they were an extension of the KKK on campus. “They allow murderers to be on campus where I pay to be here. Murderers!” In the second part of the video, the student follows the Border Patrol agents to their vehicle, repeating the phrase “Murder Patrol!” and also yelling at them in Spanish. At the end of the video, she films a protest apparently against the appearance of the officers. The student also launched into a rant about the “white woman” who attempted to talk to her. 

Gonzaga University’s Women and Gender Studies and Native American Studies departments hosted a screening and discussion about Disney’s film, Moana, titled, "Is Moana about rape?" According to the flyer, the professor behind the lesson discussed how Western patriarchy and masculinity attack “the feminine,” indigenous cultures, and the environment and nature. “Layne will ultimately also suggest that the film is Neocolonialist. It excuses Western culture from oppressing women, degrading the environment and erasing/murdering indigenous people,” the flyer says. It also came with a trigger warning, stating that racism, sexual assault, genocide and colonialism will be addressed.

Tufts University decided to remove a historical mural after students complained that the paintings depicting only white people eroded the school’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. The Alumnae Lounge mural, which depicts “the great names of men” of the school’s history, does not include “a single image of a person of color" which has lead students to complain that “they don’t want to receive awards in Alumnae Lounge because they feel excluded.” Tufts Senior Vice President said. “We want to attract a diversity of people to the university. But no less important, when they arrive, we want them to feel they belong here.” Tufts Africana Center Director applauded the decision, saying “the murals create an unwelcoming space for current students of color.”

Also at Gozaga University, an assistant professor wrote an op-ed where he blasted one of his white law students and accused him of deliberate “racial antagonism” because the student wore a MAGA hat to class. Without naming the student, the assistant professor wrote, “From my perspective as a black man living in the increasingly polarized political climate that is America, MAGA is an undeniable symbol of white supremacy and hatred toward certain nonwhite groups. I was unsure whether the student was directing a hateful message toward me or if he merely lacked decorum and was oblivious to how his hat might be interpreted by his black law professor. I presumed it was the former. As the student sat there directly in front of me, his shiny red MAGA hat was like a siren spewing derogatory racial obscenities at me for the duration of the one hour and fifteen-minute class. As my blood boiled inwardly, I jokingly told the student, ‘I like your hat.’ Without missing a beat, the student mockingly grinned from ear to ear and said, ‘Thank you.’” The professor concluded by arguing that “‘making America great again’ suggests a return to the days when women and people of color were denied access to these very institutions.”

A George Mason University assistant professor took to Twitter to ask white parents across America: “Why are you producing so many young white male terrorists?” “What is going on in your households? How involved are you with your sons? Are you missing signs their racism is filtering out of commonplace household racism into ‘I want to murder strangers’ racism?” She followed up with a reply to the white parents declaring their devotion to making sure their child isn’t a white terrorist, “I appreciate the testimonials of white parents doing the work of raising anti racist children. You give me a bit of hope.” 

The University of Michigan revamped its already transgender-friendly student health plan to include more services on top of sex-change operations. The school already covers mastectomies, genital surgeries, hormone therapy and counseling for transgender students. These plans now also accommodate “facial feminization surgeries,” as well as facial hair removal and “Adam’s apple reduction.” Another addition is “fertility preservation” for transgender students whose transition efforts result in infertility.

A Massachusetts school superintendent told a community audience that white people in our “systematically corrupt system that oppresses black individuals” need to “rewire their brains” in order to overcome their biases. The Pittsfield Public Schools chief (who is white) also blasted Trump, blaming the president's “daily hate” for the rise in racism and hatred on a national level. The event was planned to announce the implementation of African American history courses in local high schools. The course will delve into African American oppression and plans on stopping the normalization of seeing “black people being beaten on TV.” A teacher who worked on the curricula design at the schools said her eyes had been opened after participating in implicit bias training and reading the book "Waking Up White." 

Hofstra University students protested a statue of Thomas Jefferson at an annual event, titled “Jefferson Has Gotta Go!” which was co-organized by local Planned Parenthood staff. For the past few years, students have defaced the statue with “DECOLONIZE” and “Black Lives Matter” in an attempt to pressure the university president to join the long list of schools removing or covering up “traumatizing” statues and artwork. So far, the statue remains. 

An academic conference in Toronto focused on “Critical Becky Studies,” with multiple professors and faculty from American universities participating. “This session aims to characterize ‘Becky,’ a term specific to white women who engage whiteness, often in gendered ways,” the session description states. “Explorations of Becky and implications of educational practice from a variety of perspectives and contexts will illuminate the dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression tied to the gendered and raced mechanisms of whiteness enacted by Becky,” says the session description. Another paper discussed in the panel was titled “Border Becky: Exploring White Women's Emotionality, Ignorance, and Investment in Whiteness.” According to the description, the paper focuses on white women who must undergo a battle in order to extract themselves “from the white supremacist alliance.” 

At University of South Dakota, a planned ‘Hawaiian Day’ themed event had to be changed to ‘Beach Day,’ due to a cultural appropriation complaint from a single student. The student group planning the party were told to make the name change and to ban handing out leis as it violates the school's policy on inclusiveness. The group posted, “It was determined that these (leis) are culturally insensitive by the administration after doing research based off of the essay written by the initial complainant.” 

Williams College student activists demanded the Board of Trustees "commit to a complete process of reparation and reconciliation to indigenous peoples." The open letter states, “Many junior faculty of color are considering medical leave due to the unmitigating stress of living in an unsupportive and callous environment and to avoid the emotional detriment of existing here.” The students then demanded a “complete process of reparation and reconciliation” to the indigenous peoples, “approve a request of $34,000 as well as the increase of $15,000 additional funding for incoming Minority Coalition groups.” ”Offer free weekend shuttles for faculty and staff" and provide separate housing for black and queer students, as well as for all other marginalized groups. Lastly, “hire more therapists, especially trans and racial minority therapists.”

Dominican University in California has added a new major, wholly focused on social justice. The school created the major after a “growing number” of students became interested in social justice “careers,” according to the university news release. Students who major in social justice will have the chance to “examine the links between well-being, social justice, and diverse worldviews.” Additionally, students will “analyze social injustices and work toward positive social change.”

The State University of New York-Plattsburgh offered students the chance to de-stress with therapy donkeys during their Wellness Fair. 

[seriesofnonsequiturs]

For folks wondering how to encourage their workplaces to dismantle systematic racism in their institution, I recommend asking a boss or supervisor for anti-racism training. If they are willing to find and pay a group for regular anti-racism training, great - I hope that the group are people of color who are paid for their labor of education. 

Otherwise, I recommend forwarding the above link ^^^^ 

It is called “Project READY”, it is free, and it is:

“Welcome to the Project READY online curriculum site. This site hosts a series of free, online professional development modules for school and public youth services librarians, library administrators, and others interested in improving their knowledge about race and racism, racial equity, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. The primary focus of the Project READY curriculum is on improving relationships with, services to, and resources for youth of color and Native youth.“

Yes it is aimed a libraries and schools, but there are many professional organizations that can benefit from going through these modules. They can at least do the first section before it gets too library specific: 

Section 1: Foundations

Module 1a: Agreements

Module 1b: Introduction

Module 2: History of Race and Racism

Module 3: Getting on the Same Page: Defining Race & Racism

Module 4: Implicit Bias & Microaggressions

Module 5: Systems of Inequality

Module 6: Indigeneity and Colonialism

Module 7: Exploring Culture

Module 8: Cultural Competence & Cultural Humility

Module 9: Racial and Ethnic Identity Development

Module 10: Unpacking Whiteness

Module 11: Confronting Colorblindness and Neutrality

Module 12: Equity Versus Equality, Diversity versus Inclusion

Module 13: Allies & Antiracism

Ask. Ask for anti-racism training. Bring it up at staff meetings. Send an e-mail so your request is on record. Ask for time to go through the modules and time for regular discussion groups. Build the foundation you and your coworkers and your administration or management need to dismantle the systems of racism and unconscious bias in your institution.

[unfilteredpatriot]

New Post has been published on Unfiltered Patriot

New Post has been published on http://unfilteredpatriot.com/backwards-universitys-resident-advisers-segregated-for-racial-training-classes/

Backwards: University’s Resident Advisers Segregated for Racial Training Classes

The further we go along the critical race theory path, the more it begins to feel like there’s very little daylight between these so-called “antiracists” and actual, true-blue racists. For instance: Segregating people by race! We’ve already seen this phenomenon at other schools; one of them, a couple of months ago, created a café for “non people of color” – you know, the people we used to call “white.” And now, at the University of Kentucky, we learn that students training to be Residential Assistants were segregated according to race and sent to different racial presentations.

Humorously, the trainings came to light via the Campus Bias Tip Line, which is a new thing that many schools have developed to give students an avenue through which they can complain about microaggressions and other racial grievances that they dream up while distracted from their studies. From the tip line, these trainings were reported to the conservative Young America’s Foundation. This is how we now know that white RA trainees were corralled into a “White Accountability Space” and taught about the “41 common racist behaviors and attitudes of white people.”

The Daily Wire has more on this training:

Number one on the list states that white people “believe they have ‘earned’ what they have, rather than acknowledge the extensive white privilege and unearned advantages they receive” and “believe that if people of color just worked harder…” The list also includes claims that white people don’t “notice the daily indignities that people of color experience; deny them and rationalize them away with PLEs (perfectly logical explanations),” “resent taking direction from a person of color,” and tend to ask “people of color to repeat what they have said.”

Brandon Colbert from UK’s Bias Incident Support Services, offered a presentation for the trainings, allegedly talking about “microaggressions and microinvalidations in the workplace and the harm that they cause.”

As YAF’s Kara Zupkus reported, Colbert’s previous tweets have “denounced the American Flag, National Anthem, and Independence Day all as being the stuff that makes [America] racist.”

In a statement, YAF’s University of Kentucky chapter president Parker Bowman said the segregation was self-evidently reprehensible.

“This action by the university to segregate RA training is abhorrent,” Bowman said. “For a campus that prides itself on diversity, this is taking a step in the wrong direction. We should be talking to each other, not separating ourselves based on immutable characteristics.”

Yeah, well, no argument here. But color-blindness and integration are the New Racism and segregation and pointing fingers is the new Antiracism.

We can’t imagine what could possibly go wrong.

[salestipstricks]

Trump’s Ban Censors The Type Of Diversity Training Companies Need Most, Antiracism Training

Trump’s Ban Censors The Type Of Diversity Training Companies Need Most, Antiracism Training

getty

Just as American workplaces have doubled down on diversity training in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter moment, President Trump has abruptly restricted if not banned diversity related trainings in federal agencies. Trump purportedly rejects the view that systemic racismin America is a problem and has now banned any trainings related the concepts of white privilege or critical…

[rafaelthompson]

Opening a New Café During COVID-19: United States

Three U.S. cafés talk about the risks and rewards of opening during a pandemic.

BY MARK VAN STREEFKERK BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE

Cover photo by Scott Christianson

Now six months into a global health crisis, it’s clear that COVID-19 will be with us for the foreseeable future. Instead of us putting life on pause for a few months, COVID-19 has just become part of our new normal. While it might still seem like a risky time to open a café—especially with so many established ones temporarily or permanently closed, massive unemployment, and of course health and safety concerns—these three U.S. cafés opened in or around March of 2020, when many states were mandating stay-at-home measures. Today we take a look at Drip Coffee Makers in New York, JoJo’s Java in Tigard, Ore., and Union Coffee in Seattle, and learn about the challenges and rewards of opening in a pandemic. 

Drip Coffee Makers started as a coffee push cart outside the Brooklyn Museum. Drip’s brick-and-mortar location has been open since early this year. Photo by Nigel Price.

Nigel Price, founder of Drip Coffee Makers, left the financial world around the mortgage crisis of 2008, about the same time he was exposed to specialty coffee. “After more than a decade in finance I realized I needed to focus more on my mental, spiritual, and physical health, not just my savings account,” Nigel says. 

He started out with a coffee push cart outside of the Brooklyn Museum and Botanical Garden. The success of the cart led to a brick-and-mortar café in the Bushwick/Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York on January 20, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. When the COVID-19 pandemic called for stay-at-home measures in New York, Price was admittedly unsure about the café’s future. “I didn’t expect Drip to survive COVID, so my only intention was to be whatever my neighbors needed me to be. And what I received in return was all of the love I put out as they’ve all reciprocated by supporting my business, and we’ve never had to close or even reduce hours,” he says.  

Until recently, Drip has been a one-man operation, but Nigel has been able to hire on additional help. He says that “[identifying] what your customers’ needs are and meet[ing] them where they are” has made all the difference. Drip’s retail coffee and brewing equipment have been big sellers, and those who order to-go are “so happy to have a temporary respite from the home/office, even if only for five minutes.” 

JoJo’s Java in Tigard, Ore., opened the first week of March. Photo by @portlandcoffeeshops.

In Tigard, Ore., JoJo’s Java opened the first week of March, and manager Hope Hines credits their ability to stay open to their community of customers and supportive neighboring cafés. “The community is what’s going to help us stay alive. That’s always the factor. We can’t do it without our community,” she says. 

Being such a new café, closing temporarily wasn’t financially feasible for JoJo’s at the beginning of the pandemic. Hope runs the café with only her partner, Jamie Kay Christianson, and is careful to follow all state guidelines, including meticulous sanitizing, face masks for themselves and customers, and indicating proper social distancing at the café with tape. JoJo’s also has a garage door opening, which encourages customer flow throughout the café. 

Hope’s networks with other coffee shops in Oregon and Vancouver, Wash., have been an important part of how she stays informed during COVID-19. Adjusting to a pandemic felt less overwhelming as Hope realized so many others were in the same boat. “It was really hard at first, and then everyone started trying to figure it out, and we’re still trying to. Being able to have that conversation of ‘How are you doing it?’” 

Hope’s advice for any fledgling coffee business during COVID-19 is, “Don’t be afraid. There are amazing communities out there that definitely want to support people who are business owners. I’m a woman, I’m Pureto Rican, and I have a lot of people who want to support me just because of that, which is amazing. … Just try … COVID’s probably always going to be here, we just need to find that new normal.” 

Geetu Vailoor wasn’t planning on taking ownership of a café during COVID-19, but that’s just what happened. “I’m going to take this opportunity even though it’s super risky,” she says. Photo by Mark Van Streefkerk.

Union Coffee owner Geetu Vailoor certainly wasn’t planning on taking over a café at the beginning of a pandemic, but that’s just what happened. Geetu, formerly the coffee educator and wholesale manager at Boon Boona Coffee, was approached by Union Coffee owner Zack Reinig in February with an offer. “He told me, ‘I wanna step away from my café. Would you wanna do this?’” Geetu explains. At the time, she was in the midst of several personal and professional transitions, and the thought of taking over a café felt like too much. The more Geetu sat with the thought, however, the more it seemed like the right thing to do. 

“As time went by, I realized there was not really a workplace environment that would really suit me. It dawned on me: ‘I’m going to take this opportunity even though it’s super risky. I’ve never run a business before … I never expected to be a café owner, but I also realized that there’s not really a lot of spaces for a queer woman of color to really succeed and make more than minimum wage for a lot of labor, or make a space that feels safe.”

In a turnkey operation, Geetu assumed ownership of Union on March 19, right as Washington’s stay-at-home mandate went into effect. Around that time, she “struggled a lot with not wanting to encourage people to leave their homes during COVID, but realize[d] I needed to make income … I just felt like, I’m gonna be sitting at home anyways, I might as well sit at the café and see if people walk in.” 

Since those early days, Geetu gradually added a few more baristas, and invited Juice Club, a natural wine bottle shop, to share the space. With the help of Oatly, Geetu was able to host antiracism training for the team. Even if the move was risky, taking over a formerly white-owned café in the middle of COVID-19 was a chance to create more of the inclusive coffee community Geetu wanted to see. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mark Van Streefkerk is Barista Magazine’s social media content developer and a frequent contributor. He is also a freelance writer, social media manager, and novelist based out of Seattle. If Mark isn’t writing, he’s probably biking to his favorite vegan restaurant. Find out more on his website.

The post Opening a New Café During COVID-19: United States appeared first on Barista Magazine Online.

Opening a New Café During COVID-19: United States published first on https://espressoexpertsite.tumblr.com/

[nypaenergy]

NYPA First Utility to Team With American Association of Blacks in Energy

At the NYPA Board of Trustees committee meeting this week, Authority CEO & President Gil Quiniones outlined the commitment to further its culture of diversity, equity and inclusion. New plans include working with the Energy Equity Initiative of the American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE), implementing a ten-point diversity, equity and inclusion action strategy, and doubling investment from $5m to $10m on antiracism training throughout the organization. NYPA is the first utility in the U.S. to join the AABE Energy Equity campaign.

“We are embracing an opportunity today to lead -- to lead our industry and our sector – by pursuing a multi-faceted, action plan to create a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace at NYPA,” said Gil Quiniones. “By partnering with the American Association of Blacks in Energy to achieve its essential campaign’s far-reaching goals, we will together achieve greater African American representation at NYPA, and in the broader energy, renewable energy and electrification fields.”  

The plan’s internal & external measures include the following points: 

Internal Commitments

1. Reaffirm NYPA’s commitment to building and maintaining a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture.

2. Ensure that NYPA processes, policies and procedures are transparent and free from bias.

3. Expand ongoing training to NYPA employees on antiracism, unconscious bias, microaggression, and cultural competency.

4. Create a Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer position, reporting to the President and CEO and to the Chief Human Resources and Administration Officer – and increase investment in the office of Civil Rights and Inclusion. 

5. Invest in NYPA’s black employees and create pathways for career development and upward mobility.

6. Cast a wider net and secure a diverse slate of applicants for vacancies by partnering with professional organizations such as the American Association of Blacks in Energy, Historically Black Colleges and Universities and local and national colleges and universities.    

7. Partner and support our employee unions at the national, regional and local levels and invest in their diversity, equity and inclusion programs and initiatives.

External Commitments

8. Leverage NYPA’s experience, resources and purchasing power to build capacity and access to MWBE firms.

9. Broaden NYPA’s community-based STEM, student internship and mentorship programs to increase the pipeline of utility and clean energy workers of tomorrow – including the creation of a targeted college scholarship program.

10. Create an enterprise wide employee service program dedicated to understanding racial justice through our clean energy business, such as community solar for example, and energy sustainability work in environmental justice communities. 

Paula R. Glover, President & CEO, The American Association of Blacks in Energy, said, “The American Association of Blacks in Energy is pleased to team with NYPA in its work on racial equity. Like NYPA, we believe that working together we can be a better industry when we embrace opportunities to improve the representation of African Americans in the energy industry. With its 10-point plan, NYPA is the first energy company to join our Energy Equity Initiative. NYPA has long demonstrated support for communities during times of great need. We are thrilled to work with NYPA and at their commitment. AABE is committed to addressing the issues of equity and bias, and we invite others to join with us. We look forward to working with NYPA and other partners to make a difference in our business for African Americans.”

Further details can be found in the NYPA press release here.

[topmixtrends]

IN HER 1981 keynote address to the National Women’s Studies Association, the poet and freedom fighter Audre Lorde described the perils of some such gatherings. She told her audience that “I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, ‘Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.’” Lorde then asked: “But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?” Lorde was up against “white fragility,” but the problem then lacked a name.

The person providing the name has been Dr. Robin DiAngelo, whose doctorate in education from University of Washington analyzed the racial discourse of white preschool teachers. An award-winning professor who has increasingly turned to being a facilitator of workshops designed to teach whites to frankly discuss their own racial position, she first used “white fragility” in a 2011 article. Her work has informed many experts in multicultural education and activists in social movements. In the book under review here, DiAngelo mostly lets readers figure out what white fragility is by trickling out interesting concrete examples, often from her workshop experiences. Through the years her most succinct definition has specified,

White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.

There rages among antiracists and those who imagine that we are past all that a pretty fierce debate over the merits of asking people to confront, in an organized way, the advantages accruing to them as whites. On the right, DiAngelo is already attacked, as is critical whiteness studies generally. Indeed, one perverse dimension of such venomous attack is an ability to perpetually gin up outrage and white fragility around academic studies of whiteness as if it were a new and intolerable thing, a quarter century after the first such attacks. Now that DiAngelo’s book has appeared on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, she is almost certain to become the outrage du jour.

At one extreme of progressive opinion is the position taken by the political scientist Adolph Reed and the literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels. They discern in activism and education around racism the diversionary initiatives of a “class” of academics, middle managers, and political hired hands who, consciously or otherwise, divert attention from the hard facts of economic inequality and keep us preoccupied instead with obsessing about identity. This “antiracism/industrial complex” — odd that a nation so bereft of industrial jobs is said to keep generating these complexes — allegedly expresses the interests of a professional/managerial class serving capital. The counter-positions to those of Reed and Benn Michaels hold that stark racial inequality continues and that something like what feminists called “consciousness raising” has value where whiteness is concerned. Whites — the feminist imagination of a process with the oppressed themselves at the center is perhaps insufficiently emphasized in the antiracist variant — might then puzzle out the miseries, to others and themselves, done in the name of adherence to a set of unexamined assumptions and fiercely defended privileges.

Neither position very much encourages constructing a balance sheet regarding what antiracist seminars, study circles, workshops, and certificates might achieve. Neither much notices the differing ideologies and material realities under which they operate. For Reed and Michaels, the antiracist consultant is a class enemy; the more sympathetic, myself included, are sometimes too tempted to then suppose that the well-meaning consultant ought not be criticized, or even that the critiques are themselves simply evidence of a desire for what DiAngelo calls “comfort” and “white-centeredness” among the critics.

To occupy more fruitful ground, treating the contradictions and success of the book together seems apposite before I offer a closing section on the challenges and possibilities of antiracism training. White Fragility fascinatingly reads as one-part jeremiad and one-part handbook. It is by turns mordant and then inspirational, an argument that powerful forces and tragic histories stack the deck fully against racial justice alongside one that we need only to be clearer, try harder, and do better. On the one hand, as its subtitle suggests, the book underlines how wildly difficult it is for mere conversation to break through layers of defensiveness among whites. The sedimented debris of past injustices conspire with current patterns of white advantage to make white employees and even white activists very hard to coach toward any mature questioning of racial oppression. Their practiced (in all senses of the word) resort to defensiveness and even tears in squelching talk about such advantage is both reflexive and conscious. That very fact adds to opportunities for race talk to devolve into a need to validate the good intentions of individual whites at the expense of serious consideration of either structures of white supremacy or its impacts on its victims. Seldom can anyone learn anything.

On the other hand, White Fragility and DiAngelo’s website offer lists, links, and rules for working antiracist magic, making the task seem at times straightforward and centered on the skills of the workshop facilitator and perhaps on lay people adopting and adapting her wisdom. “Robin DiAngelo is,” Michael Eric Dyson writes a little oddly, in a generous and apt foreword, “the new racial sheriff in town.” DiAngelo is able to bring a “different law and order to bear upon the racial proceedings.” She can, he holds, deliver results by making whites own up to fear, pain, and privilege. If we do things right, the movement, workplace, or the congregation will change and grow, at the very least coming to contain better people. In tone and content, the book jars against itself. The can-do spirit of the workshop and primer knocks against the sober accounts of the utter embeddedness of white advantage in structures of both political economy and of personality and character. Such jarring is not indefensible. We live in contradictions and we do what we can. “Optimism of the will,” the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci enjoined, but also “pessimism of the intellect.” The danger perhaps arises when doing ameliorative work well begins to seem like a strategy for deep structural change.

The subtitle itself suggests how hard it is for a book to thread needles that a society and the states of its social movements do not provide us with the resources to thread. I never blame an author entirely for his or her title and subtitle, as I have unhappily learned from personal experience how the marketing department can commandeer the naming of books. But whomever gave it to us, the subtitle of White Fragility offers a telling example of the apt severity of the book’s analysis clashing with its search for a plausible fix. It promises to tell us “Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” a real problem, but one deepened even more by the fact that white people do in fact drone on about race and racism. They speak privately, rehearsing what I have elsewhere called “whitelore” and to a remarkable extent casting themselves as the victims of racism. When a Donald Trump or a Rush Limbaugh markets himself as having the courage to defend in public what “you” already know and say, they trade on an extensive, if intellectually impoverished, discourse.

Thus the challenge only seems to be getting whites to open up and fill a void. At its best, DiAngelo’s work knows this well and emphasizes likewise that whites are not in the main vexed by being actually fragile around race. The more exact and obdurate problem is that they tend to be sullen, anxious to defend advantages, and given to performing a stance of fragility. It is less clear that all readers will know as much or that allowing them to acknowledge what underlays their fragility will change their attitudes.

The author’s keen perception, long experience, and deep commitment make White Fragility revealing as to how whites hunker down and huddle together for warmth. In movement settings, I have seen the term white fragility deployed to great effect, especially in the least scripted scenarios. In its appreciation of the emotional content of white identity’s many associations with misery, it calls to mind the indispensable work of the theologian Thandeka in Learning to Be White, though the latter leaves more room to acknowledge that the pain of white racial formation is profound and real as well as contrived. As Katy Waldman has written in The New Yorker, DiAngelo has issued a necessary “call for humility and vigilance.”

Though at times White Fragility envisions race as a durable category — even calling for whites to have more “racial stamina” in order to question whiteness — it does not imagine anything redemptive about whiteness and hopes at least for so-called white people to become “less white.” It is uncommonly honest about the duration and extent of entrenched injustice and provocative on the especially destructive role of progressive whites at critical junctures. How often, in the age of Trump, do we read that: “White progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color?”

Nevertheless, for me White Fragility reads better as evidence of where we are mired than as a how-to guide on where we are on the cusp of going. Its pessimistic half convinces more than its optimism. Without more than appeals to logical consistency and to conscience, what lasts beyond the workshop is likely to fade. There is no firm sense of the politics that might be productively attached to the attack on white fragility and white supremacy to which DiAngelo is passionately committed. Between the book’s lines, some sort of reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration would seem the logically desired outcome, but DiAngelo elaborates little regarding what comes after white fragility.

Part of the problem is a certain reticence to become curious about what antiracist training is, who it has as an audience, and what are its limits. Is the workshop the project of a union, a church, a radical collective, or, as is so often the case, an employer? This difference goes unexamined. It includes much textured description of training sessions, but perhaps too little about their contradictions and limitations.

Beyond the contradiction belabored above — the one setting powerful structural and emotional causes for white fragility against discursive and voluntary solutions — several other (potentially productive) difficulties arise. What voices and eventualities are relatively missing from the description of the workshops deserves consideration. As Waldman points out in her appreciative review, the role of people of color in the sessions described is pretty scant. They appear as rightfully suspicious and not active at times or as weighing in late in the proceedings or afterward with a critique that enables the facilitator to reflect and grow, modeling the overcoming of white fragility. But the substance of their contributions and the ways in which they might become more central to the discussions remain unclear. The very important and often transformative moments when people of color disagree with each other in discussions of race are perhaps subjects for another book. The labor historian in me also wonders how many antiracism workshops take place in workplaces, and whether we should not emphasize that those interactions are management-sponsored as well as workplace-centered. As much as Starbucks, for example, seems to enter the side of the angels by undertaking diversity training, they and other corporations also manage workers hierarchically, and use their antiracism training in marketing, in damage control, and in combating litigation. Such corporations are themselves in large measure responsible for the obscene racial wealth gap in the United States. Under their auspices may not be the most favorable setting for workers to find their ways beyond racism.

Full disclosure: I have had an inglorious and meager career — okay, the better noun is surely side hustle — in giving non-corporate antiracist workshops, in addition to being a historian of race and class. If asked to do so by unions or by friends wanting me to do something extra when in town to do an academic talk, I grudgingly assent. The critical legal theorist john powell and I long ago prepared a questionnaire on whiteness. I still sometimes trot out a few questions from it — “When are you white?” or “What would you put in a display on white culture?” — to try to break through to frank discussions very like those DiAngelo has honed strategies for encouraging.

Sometimes, such antiracism without a license has proven to be a wonderful learning experience, more for me than my interlocutors. The best examples came a quarter century ago. I was still trying to figure who the “white worker” was, past and present, and why so much of her or his political behavior accented the “white.” So I just asked, particularly in workshops in Missouri sponsored by the New Directions Movement within the United Automobile Workers and the summer schools of the United Steelworkers: “Why would anyone want to claim the identity of ‘white worker?’” The students were perhaps two-thirds white, and it was the white trade unionists who first answered. They said that if you were white you could get a job in higher-paying skilled trades, that you could get a better interest rate and buy a house in any neighborhood, that your kids could go to better schools, that cops were less likely to hassle you and your family. That is, they understood acutely — in that setting anyway — the advantages attending whiteness.

The remarkable matter-of-fact set of insights that those workers presented, reinforced by interspersed comments from African-American workers, suggests that White Fragility may — if taken as panacea rather than as a useful corner of a big problem — be too pessimistic as well as too cheery. Some of the critique of whiteness may already reside in the heads of ordinary whites, though sadly what they already know can increase defensiveness as easily as decrease it.

Long ago, in The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin invited a dis-identification from whiteness so that whites in the United States might join in the “suffering and dancing” around them. More than ever in our moment we need just that. In my view, such a change will come when whites are swept into social movements that express the interests of humanity and that probably will seldom have whites at their center. White Fragility — indeed any single book — cannot conjure up such movements. But it does much help us to get there.

¤

David Roediger chairs the American Studies Department at University of Kansas. His recent Class, Race, and Marxism (Verso) has won the C. L. R. James Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association.

The post On the Defensive: Navigating White Advantage and White Fragility appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2wQw2Wp