#workplace antiracism workshop

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Zack K. De Piero

Published: Jun 29, 2023

A so-called antiracist work environment was, actually, a hostile work environment

I’m a white writing professor, and apparently, that’s a problem. That was the unmistakable message sent to me at Penn State University – and that’s why I’m suing them.

In November 2020 – nearly half a year after George Floyd’s murder – I was subjected to a “White Teachers Are a Problem” video for a monthly professional development meeting for writing faculty. Its featured speaker, Asao Inoue, is a self-described antiracist practitioner. Not an obscure one, either: About a year prior, Inoue gave the Chair’s Address at a prestigious writing studies research conference – the same field in which I earned my Ph.D. – where he declared, “White people can perpetuate White supremacy by being present [...] Your body perpetuates racism.”

At the heart of Inoue’s appalling comments is the baseless attribution of negative characteristics to a particular race. Inside radical academic bubbles, that might be applauded; in the real world, that’s called discrimination. And it’s illegal. When discrimination enters the workplace, depending on its frequency and intensity, citizens can file a hostile work environment lawsuit against their employer.

At my Abington campus, my direct supervisor pushed an aggressive “antiracism” campaign through private emails and monthly meetings. She laid the groundwork by echoing a colleague’s stance that “reverse racism isn’t racism,” thereby abandoning cherished human rights principles. “[R]acist structures are quite real in assessment and elsewhere regardless of [anybody’s] good intentions,” she claimed. “Racism is in the results if the results draw a color line.” Later, citing a “Black Linguistic Justice!” resolution from an increasingly politicized research organization, my supervisor issued two directives: “assure that black students can find success in our classrooms” and “assure that all students see that white supremacy manifests itself in language and in writing pedagogy.” 

Translation: the English language is racist, teaching writing is racist, and grading black students by consistent standards is racist.

Tough spot if you’re a white writing instructor and one of your black students doesn’t submit a big paper. Even tougher if you work at a “majority minority” campus: out of 20 undergraduate campuses across the Penn State system, to its credit, Abington is the only with a majority of minority students. But the toughest position goes to every black student in this environment – an educator seems to believe they’re incapable of achieving academic success on their own merit.

Misguided as my supervisor was, she wasn’t just one rogue professor in the bunch. Antiracism fever ran rampant through the school’s institutional culture. To commemorate Juneteenth 2020, Abington’s DEI director told us to “Stop being afraid of your own internalized white supremacy” and to “Hold other white people accountable.” That same week, amidst faculty panic over a masked-up return to campus, one colleague invoked “history and white male privilege” to forecast, without discernible evidence, “One can already see a mile away that there will be some who resist wearing masks, etc. Such resistance is also more likely to be led by white males and in classrooms taught by women and people of color.”

In September 2021, I complied with my state-mandated duty to report bias of these (and other) incidents.  The Penn State Affirmative Action Office summoned me into a Zoom meeting where its associate director informed me, “There is a problem with the White race” then directed me to continue attending antiracist workshops “until you get it.”

The next antiracist workshop was titled, "The Myth of the Colorblind Writing Classroom: White Instructors Confront White Privilege in Their Classrooms." During this meeting, my supervisor provided a quote: "Without attending to issues of inequity and particularly the role race [plays] in constructing social inequities, we remain unaware of and thereby unwittingly reproduce racist discourses and practices in our classrooms.” As the target audience for this message, I sensed that I’d soon get accused of racism for holding my students to reasonable (and necessary) standards – I could feel my $53,000/year, non-tenured and non-unionized job hanging in the balance. So, I asked for examples of how I could bring equity into my classroom and what this actually looked like in practice.

Rather than help me to “get it,” the Affirmative Action Office deemed my questions to be evidence of bullying and harassment. Yet, my supervisor’s years-long actions were “in line with the Campus Strategic Plan.” Human Resources asked me to sign a performance reprimand, then Penn State inserted those charges into my annual performance review.

Now I’m fighting back. With a Right-to-Sue letter from the Department of Justice, it’s time for Penn State to account for real racial discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. I’ve got the support of Allen Harris Law and a nonpartisan civil rights group, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.

“Antiracism” isn’t quite the right term to describe the performative activism that’s happening across academia and corporate America. Let’s call this hustle what it is: plain and simple, racism. And just like racism, the so-called antiracist movement threatens everything in its path: freedom of speech, due process, healthy workplace relationships, professional excellence, academic rigor, and the psychological welfare of teachers and students alike.

Zack De Piero was employed by Penn State University - Abington College as an assistant teaching professor of English and composition from 2018-2022. He has a Ph.D. in education from the University of California Santa Barbara, where he studied the teaching and learning of postsecondary writing. His personal views in this piece do not reflect those of his current employer, Northampton Community College.

Zack De Piero, PhD began working at Pennsylvania State University in August of 2018 as an English writing professor at the Abington campus. 

Almost immediately upon the outset of his employment, Professor De Piero noticed a race-essentialism focus, which he feared would be harmful to his students, a majority of which were from minority backgrounds and ethnicities. 

Professor De Piero was required to attend professional development meetings to view videos such as “White Teachers Are a Problem”, and was directed to “assure that all students see that white supremacy manifests itself in language and in writing pedagogy.”  Incidents like these made it clear that Penn State harbored a bias against him based on his skin color. So he took the prescribed course of action and filed a bias report.  The Penn State Affirmative Action Office quickly called Professor De Piero into a Zoom meeting where its Associate Director informed him that, “There is a problem with the White race” then directed him to continue attending antiracist workshops “until you get it.” 

It became impossible for Professor De Piero to effectively perform his job duties. In August 2021, he was forced to leave a job he had prized and students he cared for deeply. 

Professor De Piero has now filed suit against Penn State in federal court, alleging violations of his civil rights under federal and Pennsylvania law. 

Professor De Piero is represented by FAIR Network Attorneys Michael Allen and Samantha Harris of Allen Harris Law.

==

It's a cult.

The only thing that will turn around this insanity is suing the crap out of them.

[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.

[naruhearts]

FCS Article of the Day || Jan 16 2019 || -Mod @naruhearts

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Antiracism and America

White people assume niceness is the answer to racial inequality. It's not.

by Robin DiAngelo

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I am white. As an academic, consultant and writer on white racial identity and race relations, I speak daily with other white people about the meaning of race in our lives. These conversations are critical because, by virtually every measure, racial inequality persists, and institutions continue to be overwhelmingly controlled by white people.

While most of us see ourselves as “not racist”, we continue to reproduce racist outcomes and live segregated lives.

In the racial equity workshops I lead for American companies, I give participants one minute, uninterrupted, to answer the question: “How has your life been shaped by your race?” This is rarely a difficult question for people of color, but most white participants are unable to answer. I watch as they flail, some giving up altogether and waiting out the time, unable to sustain 60 seconds of this kind of reflection. This inability is not benign, and it certainly is not innocent. Suggesting that whiteness has no meaning creates an alienating – even hostile – climate for people of color working and living in predominantly white environments, and it does so in several ways.

If I cannot tell you what it means to be white, I cannot understand what it means not to be white. I will be unable to bear witness to, much less affirm, an alternate racial experience. I will lack the critical thinking and skills to navigate racial tensions in constructive ways. This creates a culture in which white people assume that niceness is the answer to racial inequality and people of color are required to maintain white comfort in order to survive.

An inability to grapple with racial dynamics with any nuance or complexity is ubiquitous in younger white people who have been raised according to an ideology of colorblindness. I have been working with large tech companies whose average employees are under 30 years old. White employees are typically dumbfounded when their colleagues of color testify powerfully in these sessions to the daily slights and indignities they endure and the isolation they feel in overwhelmingly white workplaces. This pain is especially acute for African Americans, who tend to be the least represented.

“How often will a white person accused of racism gather as evidence to the contrary friends and colleagues to testify to their niceness?”

While the thin veneer of a post-racial society that descended during the Obama years has been ripped away by our current political reality, most white people continue to conceptualize racism as isolated and individual acts of intentional meanness. This definition is convenient and comforting, in that it exempts so many white people from the system of white supremacy we live in and are shaped by. It is at the root of the most common kind of white defensiveness. If racists are intentionally and openly mean, then it follows that nice people cannot be racist. How often will a white person accused of racism gather as evidence to the contrary friends and colleagues to testify to their niceness; the charge cannot be true, the friend cannot be racist, because “he’s a really nice guy” or “she volunteers on the board of a non-profit serving under-privileged youth”. Not meaning to be racist also allows for absolution. If they didn’t mean it, it cannot and should not count.

Thus, it becomes essential for white people to quickly and eagerly telegraph their niceness to people of color. Niceness in these instances is conveyed through tone of voice (light), eye contact accompanied by smiling and the conjuring of affinities (shared enjoyment of a music genre, compliments on hair or style, statements about having traveled to the country the “other” is perceived to have come from or knowing people from the other’s community). Kindness is compassionate and often implicates actions to support or intervene. For example, I am having car trouble and you stop and see if you can help. I appear upset after a work meeting and you check in and listen with the intent of supporting me. Niceness, by contrast, is fleeting, hollow and performative.

In addition to niceness, proximity is seen as evidence of a lack of racism. Consider the claims many white people give to establish that they aren’t racist: “I work in a diverse environment.” “I know and/or love people of color.” “I was in the Peace Corps.” “I live in a large urban city.” These are significant because they reveal what we think it means to be racist. If I can tolerate (and especially if I enjoy and value) proximity, claims of proximity maintain, I must not be racist; a “real” racist cannot stand to be near people of color, let alone smile or otherwise convey friendliness.

In a 1986 article about black students and school success, Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu describe a “fictive kinship” between African Americans, a kinship that is not consanguineal (by blood) or affinal but derived from the assumption of shared experience. The racial kinship white people attempt to draw from niceness might be seen as a false or fabricated affinity. Most white people live segregated lives and in fact have no lasting cross-racial relationships. We are in the position to choose segregation and often do. The claims of non-racism that we make are therefore based on the most superficial of shared experiences: passing people of color on the street of large cities and going to lunch on occasion with a co-worker.

Note that our cursory friendliness does not come without strings. Consider the case of a white California woman who called the police this past May when a group of black Airbnb guests did not return her smile. The expectation is that the “nod of approval”, the white smile, will be reciprocated. This woman, like all the other white people who have called the police on people of color for non-existent offenses, vigorously denied she was racist. After all, she did smile and wave before reporting them.

I have heard many black Americans talk about the awkwardness of white people “over-smiling”. The act is meant to convey acceptance and approval while maintaining moral integrity, but actually conveys white racial anxiety. Over-smiling allows us to mask an anti-blackness that is foundational to our very existence as white. A fleeting benevolence, of course, has no relation to how black people are actually undermined in white spaces. Black friends have often told me that they prefer open hostility to niceness. They understand open hostility and can protect themselves as needed. But the deception of niceness adds a confusing layer that makes it difficult for people of color to decipher trustworthy allyship from disingenuous white liberalism. Gaslighting ensues.

The default of the current system is the reproduction of racial inequality. To continue reproducing racial inequality, the system only needs for white people to be really nice and carry on – to smile at people of color, to go to lunch with them on occasion. To be clear, being nice is generally a better policy than being mean. But niceness does not bring racism to the table and will not keep it on the table when so many of us who are white want it off. Niceness does not break with white solidarity and white silence. In fact, naming racism is often seen as not nice, triggering white fragility.

We can begin by acknowledging ourselves as racial beings with a particular and limited perspective on race. We can attempt to understand the racial realities of people of color through authentic interaction rather than through the media or through unequal relationships. We can insist that racism be discussed in our workplaces and a professed commitment to racial equity be demonstrated by actual outcomes. We can get involved in organizations working for racial justice. These efforts require that we continually challenge our own socialization and investments in racism and put what we profess to value into the actual practice of our lives. This takes courage, and niceness without strategic and intentional anti-racist action is not courageous.

[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.

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