Sorry about the audio issue, guys. I'm in transit and away from my computer so there's not much I can do at the moment, and it is like 5am on the west coast, but when Katie is up she will be on it.
The thing about being sex trafficked by a horse is that the horse can just have you sit on its back while it traffics you. And then you could pass by a police officer, and be like, help! I’m being sex trafficked by a horse, and the cop is like, ha ha, buddy, nice one. That’s a beautiful mare though.
That’s okay, it sounds like Katie is sending us subliminal messages in stereo. “Send me money for Moose treats… buy merch for Moose… send the birds after Jesse…”
It’s funny that this came out today. I had an interesting experience at a DEI session yesterday. I work for a non-profit that is under a national brand, but we are like a franchise. We pay dues to be part of it, but we are locally run. I was at a state conference for all the agencies in the state to collaborate and share ideas.
I was pushed by my boss to go to the “JEDI” training: Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Largely the whole presentation was a guy defining these four terms vaguely, and a bunch of people agreeing how important it is. There was no real attempt to explain how any of us can do our work better.
He made one drastic claim that got my attention. The presenter claimed that Black business owners in his area must jump through a bunch of hoops to get “certified” and white people don’t. He implied that businesses owned by black people could not operate without doing these extra steps.
My BS alarm went off. There was no way that a law required Black people to do more than white people to operate, so afterward I asked him for clarification. I asked, "There is a law that requires black business owners to jump through hoops to operate that white people do not?" He said, "Yes, that's what I'm told." When I asked him for more detail, he said he'd get it for me. He called someone and got back to me later in the conference. He explained that the extra steps were to be certified as a “black owned business.”
I looked it up. It’s a perk of the local Chamber of Commerce to be recognized as a Black owned business. On the form to get on the list, it does ask if you are certified as a minority owned business,. I clicked the link for more info, it was about being certified 8(a) by the Small Business Administration. There might be hoops for this registration, but it’s a program to help funnel federal funds to small businesses owned by people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Yes, it’s discriminatory but not in the way he claims. Instead of showing continued racism, it shows that his community and the federal government are taking steps to help. As part of his introduction, the presenter explained how he was on various leadership boards related to race in his city. I think he should have known this info if he's using it as evidence in a presentation.
Anyway, I felt like I was in a cult during this session. This guy’s presentation was bad, and that is unrelated to content. I assume that no one pushes back on this guy when he does this kind of thing. I know that he has done these presentations at other agencies and was lauded for it. In the room, people were like congregants at a church. I don’t know if I heard any literal “amens,” but all comments were basically saying that.
“I feel like everyone has joined a cult” describes most of my experience in progressive circles over the last 5 years. Which is so frustrating b/c most of my views continue to be decidedly left of center (as measured in 2012).
I get it. It makes me think of when Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was asked about why he shifted to the left. He said he didn't, the court shifted around him. For me its the opposite. My views haven't changed much in the last 15 years, but I'm a lot closer to the center now than I was then.
I'm still a liberal Democrat. Like, I think people should have health care. I don't feel like the progressive left has moved leftward -- as in, Bernie Sanders -- so much as taken leave of its senses on the woke shit. It's very discombobulating. Time was -- like, two minutes ago -- all the crazies were on the other team, or so it seemed, at least for the most part.
If the DNC, the Washington Post, the CIA, Black Rock, Doritos, the NHL, the American Board of Thoracic Surgeons, and your neighborhood library agree on something, I am against that thing.
Ha this reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, from "A Confederacy of Dunces": "Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions." (Btw I love Doritos.)
> “... Can white-owned businesses do that even if they wanted to?”
Yes! A tenant in my building is a Black-Owned business. The guy who runs it, a lily-white elite college grad, has a wife who apparantly is 1/4 black (I didn't know until she told me.) She ostensibly owns his business. He uses this for advantage to get government contracts and grants.
(His business is related to the specialized degree and field in which he works, and not at all related to his wife's skills and expertise. I only see her at the office during social events.)
Yeah, it's clearly discriminatory, just not against the people he thinks it is. I don't really have a problem with it as such, but I did take issue with the framing.
I think that they rely on the 8(a) certification, even though it's not solely about race, because how else are they going to "verify" your race? What if someone who wasn't black asked to be on the list? It would get weird.
The problem with it, is these endeavors are very harmful to the functionality/cost effectiveness of certain industries. I work in an industry where you get huge bonuses for being a women or minority owned business. So one firm was sold from a self made poor white guy to a minority woman at very favorable terms, and then she changed all the staff to contractors and ditched everyone’s benefits. Also she moved from NY to FL for tax reasons despite supposedly being super progressive!
So several of the businesses being sold to women, and a ton of money wasted on trying to prop up the couple of completely dysfunctional and borderline criminal/fraudulent black owned firms because it would look bad if there were no black owned firms and thus there are no standards for them. No amount of non performance stops them from getting more work.
As a white guy (at a woman owned firm) sometimes I would get work basically redoing the black firms work. Or hired as an outside consultant to educate their consultants who themselves are supposed to be experts but knew nothing.
So much extra money wasted, though I still get work because you eventually need someone who knows what they are doing even if horror or horrors they are a white man, but 5 other people have to get their cut first.
Disadvantaged business allowances. Some percentage of a contract needs to go to a minority or woman owned business. Usually this is a small specialist subcontractor that's part of a larger contracting team. The businesses still have to strive to be part of the larger teaming effort. So it's not as "free money" as it seems on the surface.
And it's not just NY. It's true of all federal and state contracts
Which is how you get companies like this place I worked at where a verbally abusive Chinese dragon lady had a 51% stake in the business and everyone else in the leadership was a white man.
Thanks for the additional context! Yeah I know it’s not free money or anything - you still have to compete and do the job. I would still be interested to know whether the legal basis holds up I guess given AA in higher ed can’t be “explicitly race based” any longer.
Not sure. I deal with govt contracting in my work, and so far, none of that has percolated into this world. Interesting to see what will happen in years to come.
It's not just like a form of affirmative action, it's one of the most common forms of affirmative action in the US. The recent focus on selective college admissions has obscured other forms of affirmative action. As other commenters note, minority business preferences are often gamed. (I couldn't say exactly how often, though.) David Bernstein's book Classified is a good recent source for info (with a skeptical take).
As to constitutionality, just two weeks ago a federal district court ruled against an instance of such preferences:
Good grief, the "black-owned business" example is so emblematic of how messed up this industry is. Nobody is fact-checked on anything and there are no consequences at all for just blatant lying.
The idea of sitting in a room with cult members definitely resonates with me, but as I've peeked out of the closet and started telling people that I disagreed with the content, I've been pleasantly surprised by how frequently people agree with me.
I sat through a workshop on "self-connectedness as a path to authentic leadership" last week that was essentially monetized narcissism--the facilitator talked about themself for 30 minutes straight, there was one barely-interactive section that basically just asked us to do cognitive behavioral therapy about why we were feeling what we were feeling that day, and zero examples of how to implement their recommendations in our day to day lives. (Personally, I think "leaders" who constantly think about themselves are *probably* not likely to be as good of leaders as those who think about their team, but what do I know? I'm not an "inclusivity expert.") Afterward, when the attendees were chatting about how it went, people would generally say they really liked it, but also reacted positively and agreed when I said some variant of, "I didn't find it very valuable because it was too theoretical. The presenter didn't offer any case studies of what this would look like in practice, and it was basically just re-packaged cognitive behavioral therapy. I think there's good content in there about being aware of who you are, but without examples of practical applications, it's just so many words."
The trick, I've found, is to start with a procedural concern like "lack of evidence for claims asserted in the presentation." If people click with that, the skepticism train is ready to leave the station.
I really relate to this. I'm a high school teacher and, at my first job (this was some years ago, pre-Floyd), we had to attend a two-day seminar called "Courageous Conversations," Glenn Singleton's thing. (Teachers would then go on to have regular CC meetings throughout their careers.) This school had been doing this for many years. Everyone was given earlier DiAngelo books to read, well before White Fragility and before she became a household name. They didn't call it DEI or EDI or JEDI. I think we still called it race sensitivity training as a generic descriptor, later "equity work."
I was really startled by the content of the seminar. I wouldn't use the word "cultish," but it was definitely indoctrinate-y, and it was horrendous for all the reasons that have since reached a wider public. It trafficked in shameless stereotypes. We were asked to swallow the notion of "whiteness" -- DiAngelo's specialty -- which, as far as I could tell, amounted to being Ferris Bueller. (They literally showed like a ten-minute compilation of scenes from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.) There was barely any actual advice, and what there was was contradictory. In the very same seminar, we were told two stories about a black person with a white friend. In story A, the black person is subjected to a third-party micro-aggression, and the white friend's sin was not saying anything. In story B, told by someone else later in the seminar, the black person is subjected to a third-party micro-aggression, and the white friend's sin was coming to the black person's defense. A black administrator at the school told a long, personal story, the upshot of which was that he felt deep shame and anguish for the "work hard, get smart, get ahead" ethos that his family had instilled in him as a kid. I was a little gobsmacked by that story, but I still kept going along.
North Korea-esque confessions that you did a racism were modeled for us. There were elaborate rules -- "agreements" and "understandings" and having to identify what part of a metaphorical "compass" you were speaking from -- that we were told we should incorporate into everything we say in the seminar. These understandings smuggled in, of course, contentious substance that we were not to question. We were shown that asinine chart about how things like science, logic, "clock time," hard work, Christianity (!), "worship of the written word," etc. embodied whiteness.
Well, that, on day two, was my purple pill moment. I said to the people at my table, "I don't know if I can go along with this," to some nods and furrowed brows. I said something to the effect that this chart seemed racist -- not reverse racist, but plain old regular racist -- like something David Duke would say, albeit without the same intent.
I wrote a long email to the "facilitators" outlining my qualms and objections. I didn't get in trouble or anything like that, but it became clear that I shouldn't have bothered. I had two very frustrating meetings, the first of which involved a facilitator being peeved I had sent the email and asking me, with some irritation, "so you don't believe there's a white dominant culture?" I asked this person, a math teacher, what she did in her classroom to act on these ideas. (You're always asked how you're doing that, but whatever you say can't be race-neutral, "just good teaching." It has to be race-specific somehow. And yet, they hardly ever just tell you, or even suggest, what to do.) What she came up with was having lotion in her room. To which I said, "That's it?" Nothing wrong with that, I said, but that doesn't strike me as a major thing in the grand scheme, something that's going to eliminate the achievement gap, this particular school's Holy Grail, never achieved. In the second meeting, I was basically told to rethink everything I do with an eye toward racial equity. Once again, non-specific, but I came to see what that meant.
Surprise: what it meant was lowering academic and disciplinary standards. Give 50% for assignments not turned in, or use a five-point scale rather than the traditional 100-point scale. Let everyone redo everything. Let people move around and be disruptive. Eliminate honors classes. (The solution to having students of widely varying talents and abilities in the same class was a magical word -- "differentiation.") Make content choices superficially relatable at every turn, because nobody can handle learning something new, which I thought was the point -- to pull kids' brains out of their asses, not shove them further up. But, whatever you do, from dumbing down to adopting a permissive attitude toward unacceptable behavior among a handful, call it "rigor."
Teaching is my second career. I was a lawyer in my first. And this was a culture shock. Nobody I knew talked this way or acted this way -- I mean, not within a hundred miles of this crap. I came up in an academic tradition that valued robust debate, getting to the point, logical argument, assessment of evidence, all with open-mindedness and generosity. (Whiteness?) And these teachers weren't dumb. (A couple were also recovering lawyers, actually.) I saw how they handled it in those regular CC meetings. Many just shut up. Some, who thought they were brilliant, mansplained the concept of equity at some length. (Those guys taught me what mansplaining was; I had had little personal experience.) Lots of "journal" time, which many of us used to actually prepare for our classes. In other words, a bad joke, a fraud.
I moved on to a Catholic school, that's, yes, diverse, that has dipped its toes in these waters but isn't really buying the crazy. I'm not even Catholic, and nobody cares. Most are pretty liberal, in the pre-woke sense. You'd be forgiven, hearing about this choice, for thinking that I went from a secular, open-minded school to a rigid, religious one. Turns out, it was just the reverse.
Ferris Bueller! I don't know if I'd be physically capable of not laughing during that. Also I went to a Catholic school where I had cool teachers; good on you for going your way.
So much of this resonates with me as a high school math teacher. We haven't gone too far down this road yet, but there are influential people in the school who seem tempted, at least.
Thanks for pushing back on this stuff and highlighting the money side. One of the "agreements" you're supposed to adopt in the seminar (and all the seminars forever) is to "expect and accept non-closure." Very handy!
Hey, the idea I think was that he was rich, white, privileged, popular, entitled, could thumb his nose at rules and authority and have it be endearing. They were trying to say, I guess, whiteness = obnoxious spoiled brat.
Although that movie, along with others from the Hughes oeuvre, were part of my childhood, I never warmed to them much. I tended to find the characters a little unlikable, truth be told.
My God, that reads like a parody. What the hell happened to SciAm? I know, it's been bizarre for years now, but I still miss its old, boring, scientific incarnation.
All of this - unicorns, mermaids, rainbows, Jedi, feminism - I will not give up. Fuck the language thieves. This is as much my language as it is theirs!
Now, don't be silly. In the Star Wars films the Jedi ended up becoming generals over armies of clones raised from birth to be unquestionably obedient. In an invented conflict which ended up pushing the galactic republic away from democracy and towards tyranny. Very different.
I worked for a small nonprofit (20 employees) in California that made grants to community organizations. I really liked most of my colleagues and felt that we all got along well. In 2019 we had a diversity training led by two local women who wrote a book about racial reconciliation. The thing that sticks out in the training was an activity where the facilitators showed a list of identities/classes (sex, race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, etc) and specifically listed which types of people in each identities are privileged/marginalized (e.g. men are privileged and women are marginalized).
We were then asked to think about our own identities and tell a story about a time when we experienced discrimination based on one of these characteristics. I’m appareantly the ultimate oppressor (cishet white Christian middle class man) so I didn’t have a story about one of these characteristics. Turns out I was the only one who didn’t have at least one of these marginalized identities. So while everyone else told their story, I was asked to tell about a time that I discriminated against someone. I was a shy, fat kid growing up and faced bullying, but it wasn’t on the list so I couldn’t talk about those experiences.
Anyway, it was a really negative experience being singled out like that with my colleagues. It really soured me to the whole DEI training endeavor. I ended up leaving a few months later for another job and I wonder sometimes how much that training contributed to the organization losing some of its appeal to me.
Sounds like the time you experienced discrimination was in that session. But that doesn't count, because engendering discrimination towards their disfavored populations is merely one part of the process they've devised to enrich themselves via these trainings.
I think some people use these things as a way to "get back" at someone who was terrible to them, at some point in their lives. My view is that no amount of misery I cause to some random straight dude will ever un-gay-bash me, so any misery I cause says something about me and not about the random straight dude.
Hostile work environment. Big settlements have been won for less, like peers making racist jokes that the employer should have known about and corrected.
The company hiring a firm to engage in racial harassment is far more egregious.
Serious question: if “whiteness” having an explicit negative connotation does not meet a legal standard, or having different treatment for attending “white” people (listening only, etc.,) does not meet a legal standard… what about the reverse? Would framing “blackness” as related to a set of negative features, etc. meet the standard? Is it different for historically disadvantaged groups?
The Toronto Star article is definitely worth a read for more context on the teacher suicide (https://archive.is/RWzEE Paywall removed). I find it so interesting, and chilling, that the DEI trainer referred to his different perspective on US vs Canada healthcare and education system as 'resistance' and in this framework any sort of 'resistance' to the teacher's viewpoint is a form of white supremacy. The problem with this kind of standpoint epistemology is that it has such clear rules for whose voice can be authoritative and it uses all kinds of subtle propaganda techniques to silence dissent. These are techniques I usually associate with the McCarthy era so it's disconcerting to see so many people on the Left now make these appeals to authority. I thought the Left was supposed to be inherently anti-authoritarian but it looks like I was wrong about that.
Thanks for the link. The author clearly agrees with the trainers that there are types of response that are simply not appropriate ("That’s not a help-me-understand question typically posed by workshop participants to trainers.") and that any disagreement or "resistance" furthers the goals of white supremacy. It's disingenuous to then claim that repeatedly using someone's comment as an example of such resistance does not equate to calling him a resistor or white supremacist. I think most people would say that "upholding white supremacy" makes someone a white supremacist.
If a man hadn't lost his life, I'd be rolling on the floor laughing and swearing that the whole saga was generated by the Babylon Bee. Disturbing all the way around and a perfect example of why most DIE training is absolute garbage.
Imagine the audacity to push back on the idea that Canada is more racist than the US. I'm combing through my old college textbooks searching for discussion of Canada's role in the Atlantic slave trade and Jim Crow laws.
Sidenote: I suppose I'm guilty of stereotyping but whenever I see a South or East Asian person like the author spouting SJW nonsense I'm a bit startled. I guess I'm too wedded to the "model minority" mindset and don't expect them to have drank the kool-aid. I'm still trying to digest the Asian college students who supported Harvard and UNC in the affirmative action case, claiming that Asian opponents are nothing but handmaidens of white supremacy and being used as pawns against other "people of color". Apparently Asians are too stupid to recognize and act on their own interests.
yeah nova scotia out lawed slavery in 1748-9. in their first legislature. hence rebel slave ships headed for nova scotia. that's so racist eh? the under ground railroad went to ontario. harriet tubman often worked from ontario , canada ain't perfect and we are still working indigenous issues but to callitmore racist than the usa is ridiculous.
I agree! Look at the name of the DEI leader. I did a spit-take:
> The sessions were led by Kike Ojo-Thompson, founder of the KOJO Institute, a consulting firm that provides anti-racist training to organizations in both the public and private sector, including large corporations, governments and several school boards. (The Toronto Star has also previously hired the company.)
> The conflict arose after Ojo-Thompson is alleged to have suggested that Canada was more racist than the U.S., in part because Canada has “never reckoned with its anti-Black history” in the way the U.S. has.
A DEI facilitator named "Kike"? Maybe I should change my name to "N-word" and teach courses!
Whether on the right or on the left, very few people are really anti-authoritarian. They are anti-the authority of the other side. And that only gets worse in times of crisis. The goal should be for everybody to calm down a bit.
One more point: I don't think one of the massive benefits companies get for putting on these type of workshops gets discussed enough. If the Black employees in a company see their white coworkers as racist microaggressors and the white employees are afraid accidentally bumping into a Black coworker can become a hate crime, they are far less likely to want to form solidarity in a union. Robin DiAngelo gets paid a lot for her corporate seminars but it's nothing compared to what companies get in return for the union-busting she does. You don't see many useful idiots with PhDs, but she 100% is.
That is interesting and even more interesting (to me at any rate) is that the only place this aspect IS being discussed in earnest is by socialists on WSWS. They were also some if the first to hit back with any legitimacy on 1619 by publishing dissenting historians.
Critical Social Justice ideology is ruining my state-level educators' union and some local activist/adherents have been causing a great deal of mischief in my local! I hadn't thought about the union-busting aspect of DiAngelo and her ilk before. Brilliant, Chris!
I don't have direct knowledge of DiAngelo's client roster but my impression was that she speaks mostly to private-sector white collar knowledge workers. Unionization is rarely an issue in these settings. (Newspapers being a notable exception).
This NYT Magazine article gives some info on the companies seeking her out, and it's some of the biggest companies in the world, though I'm not sure how many are bringing her in for lectures and for multi-day seminars. I always think about the anecdote about the talk she gave at Levi's where no one from senior leadership was there because they were all at a shareholders' meeting.
David Dayen and Lee Fang have done some reporting on how companies are now using social justice/DEI language to stop unionization campaigns.
Same here but its not the first I’m hearing of identity politics being used by the elites to divide and conquer. I've seen this meme rolling around for years:
Also, tone policing is a microaggression. We all need to do the work and think long and hard about how complaints about the audio quality of a podcast about anti-racist training plays into systems of white supremacy. Doing the work should be uncomfortable. Do better, y'all.
As a Unitarian minister this is the story of our past 7 or so years and the reason I'm no longer involved. But the story needs to be retold until people get the utter absurdity of it. One thing I think about every time: how condescending and belittling this all is to POC... assuming they are so fragile they can't be disagreed with or challenged. It's actual racism.
Yes! I even spoke to Katie before it came out. I'd suggested some years earlier they look into it and I accompanied Kate Rohde at her "hearing." Not that it helped! Been a fan of B&R for a long time.
I went to seminary and was ordained in 1995, served churches for 25 years. I'm retired, still a Unitarian theologically, but do not interact with the denomination or the woke ministers who have taken over. Unlike Kate R and others, I haven't been removed from Fellowship. Hope that answers your question. You can listen to that episode if you haven't already.
This is not an original observation, but as a relative outsider, there is something very strange and religious about the absolute taboo of even mentioning the “n-word.” The way it’s treated in American culture has big “drawing Mohammed” energy.
Maybe in a few hundred years it will be so taboo no one remembers what the word actually was, and it will go the way of the original pronounciation of YHWH.
It's part of the ongoing weird psy-ops we're all being subjected to (willingly???), in the name of "anti-racism." I hear this horrible, awful, magically evil, world-destroying word a zillion times a day up here in Harlem. Coming from the cars and boomboxes blasting the shitty kind of hip-hop all day and night long. I hear that same shitty music using "that HORRIBLE word" played at picnic parties for KIDS in Riverbank State Park. I hear the bruthas and sistas - and mothers with their babies - on the street use it CONSTANTLY. ("Oh, but it's different when historically marginalized communities use the word. They're 'reclaiming it.'" Yeah, no. Let's stop pretending this word is anything special. Yeah, it sort of has this unique "horrifying history" but the reality TODAY is quite different. It's just another stupid fucking word. There are plenty of words with awful histories which we are not forced to pretend have this magical evil spell on them. I'm just tired of all the looniness we "good" Progressives are supposed to pretend we "believe". Fuck the N word and all the bullshit moralizing about it. I'm just sick of all the bullshit. So sue me. I don't care.
The part I find strange is that there are little kids calling each other the N-word but ending with A. But if a white person repeats the N word ending in A from a song, THAT is traumatizing for.vlack people. Even though no white person used the N word ending in A ro dehumanize a black person
It's another outgrowth of the "trauma industry" we have all witnessed growing in the past few years. Also, the "horror, the horror" surrounding this word is mostly a distraction from plenty of REAL issues which need to be addressed. Like everything else in Woke-Land, a distraction and misdirection, with serious consequences...
“Queer” used to be a slur. Now it’s a celebrated identity/label. Maybe it’s part of the weird postmodern “language creates reality “ theory? Like if you say the n word, you somehow have transformed a Black person in 2023 into an enslaved person in the 1700s.
Would be fascinating seeing academia try to reclaim this one. N***a Studies? N****r Studies?
I actually think art and integration is going to eventually soften the term in popular culture. I think it was going this way for a bit until the modern DEI movement really started problematizing for profit, but I haven't done/read any serious ethnographies on the matter.
Etymology fact of the day: the Germanic languages have a different word for "bear" than the other Indo-European languages (whose words are related to "ursus," "ours," arktos," etc.) because the early Germanic-speaking people were so afraid of bears that they used a euphemism ("the brown one") to refer to them. This is why "bear" in English, German, the Scandinavian languages, etc., is so similar to the word for "brown" rather than to other Indo-European words for "bear."
A few hundred years may be optimistic. As long as race-hustler activists get to issue a fatwa against anyone who even mentions the word (with support from the MSM and academia), the taboo will still exist. And yes, there is something quasi-religious about the entire concept, on par with blasphemy.
Circa 2008~2009, I went to a college threatre production of the musical "Big River" at East Carolina U. I remember that there was a note in the programs explaining the the word "nigger" was used in the production, as it was authentic to the history, or whatever, and not meant to cause offense. A trigger warning, if you will. I wonder if this would be allowed today.
I'm maybe late to the party here but I write a lot of stuff about DEI training, especially as it pertains to our school district here in Evanston, Illinois. I just wrote a substack today on the Pacific Education Group, who is probably the largest vendor in the US and our town has spent over $1mm with them on DEI training like what is described in the pod.
One thing is that a lot of these organizations, whether it's Robin D'Angelo or Pacific Education Group operate as quasi-MLMs. It's generally one central entity that creates the books, media, content, etc and then they use an army of (mostly paid on commission only) facilitators to go out and do sales, etc. Often, in our community especially, there are cases where individuals begin demanding we invest more resources in DEI training .. yet, they themselves are either facilitators or content creators for the business.
These companies are very crazy with protecting their IP and parents have had to sue to even *look* at the contents of the DEI training in schools. You can't FOIA this stuff.
I haven't seen a single one that operates as a non-profit, despite capitalism being one of those things they assign to "whiteness" - the whole business is basically inequity profiteering. It's all very gross and intellectually inconsistent.
Fuck this is a heart-breaking story. Just soul crushing. I used to call myself progressive, but I can't anymore. I wanted to believe in the ideal of moral progress, but it's all just historically contingent. We're lucky, not good, or, at least, not better.
I don’t know if I agree with all of that, but I do know that a lot of “progressives” have some pretty backwards ideas. And yeah, that FP story made me so angry I thought I was gonna puke.
I used to think it was kind of strange that progressives didn’t want to use a different term to distance themselves from the eugenicists and prohibitionists of the early 1900s who originated the progressive label.
Now? Not so strange, there’s just so little self reflection.
The swastika thing made me roll my eyes so bad. The left/progressives have made it pretty clear at this point that they believe "Jews don't count" (in the words of David Baddiel) and the narrative of "Jews are always playing the anti-Semitism card to silence criticism or gain power." Just look at any conversation surrounding Jeremy Corbyn or Israel.
But yeah, give them an image that kind of looks like a swastika and they're all over it. LMAO.
Lol right? "Well, its true, you wouldn't think a progressive book club would lend itself to becoming a klan rally but after this one author seminar, the hoods really seemed the only way to go..."
I left a job in education last year where we had weekly (!) DEI trainings from a black mother-daughter duo. It was the usual DEI craziness but focused almost entirely on the black experience, specifically their own family’s experiences with racism. No discussion of class, ever.
I’ll always remember one session where the daughter complained at length about the process of selling her house and how she probably got less money than a white seller due to systemic racism. Meanwhile I’m thinking about how I’ll literally never be able to afford a house on a teacher’s salary, and can barely afford my rent.
It was extremely frustrating having these two overpaid DEI consultants come in every week, take away 2 hours of our time that could’ve been spent catching up on paperwork or serving students, just to ramble about racism and struggle to use PowerPoint. Absolutely ridiculous.
Sorry about the audio fuck up! It has been fixed.
Sorry about the audio issue, guys. I'm in transit and away from my computer so there's not much I can do at the moment, and it is like 5am on the west coast, but when Katie is up she will be on it.
Jesse, waking up naked and hungover in a seedy Amsterdam hotel room covered in melted baklava and glitter does not count as 'in transit'.
“In transit” means he’s being sex trafficked as we speak!
By a horse!
The thing about being sex trafficked by a horse is that the horse can just have you sit on its back while it traffics you. And then you could pass by a police officer, and be like, help! I’m being sex trafficked by a horse, and the cop is like, ha ha, buddy, nice one. That’s a beautiful mare though.
That’s okay, it sounds like Katie is sending us subliminal messages in stereo. “Send me money for Moose treats… buy merch for Moose… send the birds after Jesse…”
Trippy!
I had to ask myself "did I do drugs too late at night?" when I stumbled into the echoing hall of Katies about 20 minutes in 😂
Sorry I missed it. "Echoing hall of Katies" sounds like an experience. Probably the best attraction at the Blocked and Reported Hall of Infamy
I hope they release it!
Start looking around 23:00 :)
It’s funny that this came out today. I had an interesting experience at a DEI session yesterday. I work for a non-profit that is under a national brand, but we are like a franchise. We pay dues to be part of it, but we are locally run. I was at a state conference for all the agencies in the state to collaborate and share ideas.
I was pushed by my boss to go to the “JEDI” training: Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Largely the whole presentation was a guy defining these four terms vaguely, and a bunch of people agreeing how important it is. There was no real attempt to explain how any of us can do our work better.
He made one drastic claim that got my attention. The presenter claimed that Black business owners in his area must jump through a bunch of hoops to get “certified” and white people don’t. He implied that businesses owned by black people could not operate without doing these extra steps.
My BS alarm went off. There was no way that a law required Black people to do more than white people to operate, so afterward I asked him for clarification. I asked, "There is a law that requires black business owners to jump through hoops to operate that white people do not?" He said, "Yes, that's what I'm told." When I asked him for more detail, he said he'd get it for me. He called someone and got back to me later in the conference. He explained that the extra steps were to be certified as a “black owned business.”
I looked it up. It’s a perk of the local Chamber of Commerce to be recognized as a Black owned business. On the form to get on the list, it does ask if you are certified as a minority owned business,. I clicked the link for more info, it was about being certified 8(a) by the Small Business Administration. There might be hoops for this registration, but it’s a program to help funnel federal funds to small businesses owned by people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Yes, it’s discriminatory but not in the way he claims. Instead of showing continued racism, it shows that his community and the federal government are taking steps to help. As part of his introduction, the presenter explained how he was on various leadership boards related to race in his city. I think he should have known this info if he's using it as evidence in a presentation.
Anyway, I felt like I was in a cult during this session. This guy’s presentation was bad, and that is unrelated to content. I assume that no one pushes back on this guy when he does this kind of thing. I know that he has done these presentations at other agencies and was lauded for it. In the room, people were like congregants at a church. I don’t know if I heard any literal “amens,” but all comments were basically saying that.
“I feel like everyone has joined a cult” describes most of my experience in progressive circles over the last 5 years. Which is so frustrating b/c most of my views continue to be decidedly left of center (as measured in 2012).
I get it. It makes me think of when Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was asked about why he shifted to the left. He said he didn't, the court shifted around him. For me its the opposite. My views haven't changed much in the last 15 years, but I'm a lot closer to the center now than I was then.
I'm still a liberal Democrat. Like, I think people should have health care. I don't feel like the progressive left has moved leftward -- as in, Bernie Sanders -- so much as taken leave of its senses on the woke shit. It's very discombobulating. Time was -- like, two minutes ago -- all the crazies were on the other team, or so it seemed, at least for the most part.
That's how I feel, and I think a lot of BARpod listeners feel the same.
Reagan's famous quip: I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.
My politics are:
If the DNC, the Washington Post, the CIA, Black Rock, Doritos, the NHL, the American Board of Thoracic Surgeons, and your neighborhood library agree on something, I am against that thing.
I don't care what the thing is, I'm against it.
Ha this reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, from "A Confederacy of Dunces": "Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions." (Btw I love Doritos.)
This seems like a reasonable strategy. No judgment here.
“Black-owned businesses have to jump through hoops white-owned businesses don’t!”
“To be allowed to operate? That sounds highly illegal.”
“No, to be certified as a black owned business!”
“... Can white-owned businesses do that even if they wanted to?”
> “... Can white-owned businesses do that even if they wanted to?”
Yes! A tenant in my building is a Black-Owned business. The guy who runs it, a lily-white elite college grad, has a wife who apparantly is 1/4 black (I didn't know until she told me.) She ostensibly owns his business. He uses this for advantage to get government contracts and grants.
(His business is related to the specialized degree and field in which he works, and not at all related to his wife's skills and expertise. I only see her at the office during social events.)
Is the guy in your building a red-headed Englishman estranged from the royal family and married to a C-list Hollywood actress?
That’s a twist on the typical set up (“woman-owned”).
Oh, it gets "Woman-Owned" points, too.
The thing about women is that we are often married to men.
Yep, and thereby own half the business anyhow. Why not formalize that and put it to work?
Yeah, it's clearly discriminatory, just not against the people he thinks it is. I don't really have a problem with it as such, but I did take issue with the framing.
I think that they rely on the 8(a) certification, even though it's not solely about race, because how else are they going to "verify" your race? What if someone who wasn't black asked to be on the list? It would get weird.
The problem with it, is these endeavors are very harmful to the functionality/cost effectiveness of certain industries. I work in an industry where you get huge bonuses for being a women or minority owned business. So one firm was sold from a self made poor white guy to a minority woman at very favorable terms, and then she changed all the staff to contractors and ditched everyone’s benefits. Also she moved from NY to FL for tax reasons despite supposedly being super progressive!
So several of the businesses being sold to women, and a ton of money wasted on trying to prop up the couple of completely dysfunctional and borderline criminal/fraudulent black owned firms because it would look bad if there were no black owned firms and thus there are no standards for them. No amount of non performance stops them from getting more work.
As a white guy (at a woman owned firm) sometimes I would get work basically redoing the black firms work. Or hired as an outside consultant to educate their consultants who themselves are supposed to be experts but knew nothing.
So much extra money wasted, though I still get work because you eventually need someone who knows what they are doing even if horror or horrors they are a white man, but 5 other people have to get their cut first.
No wonder we have a problem with cost disease.
There are rules in NY state that government agencies have to favor contracts from businesses that have women or minority owned business status.
I can see the benefit, it’s like a form of affirmative action, but also I’m confused about how it can be constitutional.
Disadvantaged business allowances. Some percentage of a contract needs to go to a minority or woman owned business. Usually this is a small specialist subcontractor that's part of a larger contracting team. The businesses still have to strive to be part of the larger teaming effort. So it's not as "free money" as it seems on the surface.
And it's not just NY. It's true of all federal and state contracts
Which is how you get companies like this place I worked at where a verbally abusive Chinese dragon lady had a 51% stake in the business and everyone else in the leadership was a white man.
Thanks for the additional context! Yeah I know it’s not free money or anything - you still have to compete and do the job. I would still be interested to know whether the legal basis holds up I guess given AA in higher ed can’t be “explicitly race based” any longer.
Oh sometimes it is totally “free money”.
Not sure. I deal with govt contracting in my work, and so far, none of that has percolated into this world. Interesting to see what will happen in years to come.
It's not just like a form of affirmative action, it's one of the most common forms of affirmative action in the US. The recent focus on selective college admissions has obscured other forms of affirmative action. As other commenters note, minority business preferences are often gamed. (I couldn't say exactly how often, though.) David Bernstein's book Classified is a good recent source for info (with a skeptical take).
As to constitutionality, just two weeks ago a federal district court ruled against an instance of such preferences:
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/07/19/district-court-strikes-down-race-preference-in-usdas-and-sbas-contracting-schemes/
Good grief, the "black-owned business" example is so emblematic of how messed up this industry is. Nobody is fact-checked on anything and there are no consequences at all for just blatant lying.
The idea of sitting in a room with cult members definitely resonates with me, but as I've peeked out of the closet and started telling people that I disagreed with the content, I've been pleasantly surprised by how frequently people agree with me.
I sat through a workshop on "self-connectedness as a path to authentic leadership" last week that was essentially monetized narcissism--the facilitator talked about themself for 30 minutes straight, there was one barely-interactive section that basically just asked us to do cognitive behavioral therapy about why we were feeling what we were feeling that day, and zero examples of how to implement their recommendations in our day to day lives. (Personally, I think "leaders" who constantly think about themselves are *probably* not likely to be as good of leaders as those who think about their team, but what do I know? I'm not an "inclusivity expert.") Afterward, when the attendees were chatting about how it went, people would generally say they really liked it, but also reacted positively and agreed when I said some variant of, "I didn't find it very valuable because it was too theoretical. The presenter didn't offer any case studies of what this would look like in practice, and it was basically just re-packaged cognitive behavioral therapy. I think there's good content in there about being aware of who you are, but without examples of practical applications, it's just so many words."
The trick, I've found, is to start with a procedural concern like "lack of evidence for claims asserted in the presentation." If people click with that, the skepticism train is ready to leave the station.
I really relate to this. I'm a high school teacher and, at my first job (this was some years ago, pre-Floyd), we had to attend a two-day seminar called "Courageous Conversations," Glenn Singleton's thing. (Teachers would then go on to have regular CC meetings throughout their careers.) This school had been doing this for many years. Everyone was given earlier DiAngelo books to read, well before White Fragility and before she became a household name. They didn't call it DEI or EDI or JEDI. I think we still called it race sensitivity training as a generic descriptor, later "equity work."
I was really startled by the content of the seminar. I wouldn't use the word "cultish," but it was definitely indoctrinate-y, and it was horrendous for all the reasons that have since reached a wider public. It trafficked in shameless stereotypes. We were asked to swallow the notion of "whiteness" -- DiAngelo's specialty -- which, as far as I could tell, amounted to being Ferris Bueller. (They literally showed like a ten-minute compilation of scenes from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.) There was barely any actual advice, and what there was was contradictory. In the very same seminar, we were told two stories about a black person with a white friend. In story A, the black person is subjected to a third-party micro-aggression, and the white friend's sin was not saying anything. In story B, told by someone else later in the seminar, the black person is subjected to a third-party micro-aggression, and the white friend's sin was coming to the black person's defense. A black administrator at the school told a long, personal story, the upshot of which was that he felt deep shame and anguish for the "work hard, get smart, get ahead" ethos that his family had instilled in him as a kid. I was a little gobsmacked by that story, but I still kept going along.
North Korea-esque confessions that you did a racism were modeled for us. There were elaborate rules -- "agreements" and "understandings" and having to identify what part of a metaphorical "compass" you were speaking from -- that we were told we should incorporate into everything we say in the seminar. These understandings smuggled in, of course, contentious substance that we were not to question. We were shown that asinine chart about how things like science, logic, "clock time," hard work, Christianity (!), "worship of the written word," etc. embodied whiteness.
Well, that, on day two, was my purple pill moment. I said to the people at my table, "I don't know if I can go along with this," to some nods and furrowed brows. I said something to the effect that this chart seemed racist -- not reverse racist, but plain old regular racist -- like something David Duke would say, albeit without the same intent.
I wrote a long email to the "facilitators" outlining my qualms and objections. I didn't get in trouble or anything like that, but it became clear that I shouldn't have bothered. I had two very frustrating meetings, the first of which involved a facilitator being peeved I had sent the email and asking me, with some irritation, "so you don't believe there's a white dominant culture?" I asked this person, a math teacher, what she did in her classroom to act on these ideas. (You're always asked how you're doing that, but whatever you say can't be race-neutral, "just good teaching." It has to be race-specific somehow. And yet, they hardly ever just tell you, or even suggest, what to do.) What she came up with was having lotion in her room. To which I said, "That's it?" Nothing wrong with that, I said, but that doesn't strike me as a major thing in the grand scheme, something that's going to eliminate the achievement gap, this particular school's Holy Grail, never achieved. In the second meeting, I was basically told to rethink everything I do with an eye toward racial equity. Once again, non-specific, but I came to see what that meant.
Surprise: what it meant was lowering academic and disciplinary standards. Give 50% for assignments not turned in, or use a five-point scale rather than the traditional 100-point scale. Let everyone redo everything. Let people move around and be disruptive. Eliminate honors classes. (The solution to having students of widely varying talents and abilities in the same class was a magical word -- "differentiation.") Make content choices superficially relatable at every turn, because nobody can handle learning something new, which I thought was the point -- to pull kids' brains out of their asses, not shove them further up. But, whatever you do, from dumbing down to adopting a permissive attitude toward unacceptable behavior among a handful, call it "rigor."
Teaching is my second career. I was a lawyer in my first. And this was a culture shock. Nobody I knew talked this way or acted this way -- I mean, not within a hundred miles of this crap. I came up in an academic tradition that valued robust debate, getting to the point, logical argument, assessment of evidence, all with open-mindedness and generosity. (Whiteness?) And these teachers weren't dumb. (A couple were also recovering lawyers, actually.) I saw how they handled it in those regular CC meetings. Many just shut up. Some, who thought they were brilliant, mansplained the concept of equity at some length. (Those guys taught me what mansplaining was; I had had little personal experience.) Lots of "journal" time, which many of us used to actually prepare for our classes. In other words, a bad joke, a fraud.
I moved on to a Catholic school, that's, yes, diverse, that has dipped its toes in these waters but isn't really buying the crazy. I'm not even Catholic, and nobody cares. Most are pretty liberal, in the pre-woke sense. You'd be forgiven, hearing about this choice, for thinking that I went from a secular, open-minded school to a rigid, religious one. Turns out, it was just the reverse.
Ferris Bueller! I don't know if I'd be physically capable of not laughing during that. Also I went to a Catholic school where I had cool teachers; good on you for going your way.
So much of this resonates with me as a high school math teacher. We haven't gone too far down this road yet, but there are influential people in the school who seem tempted, at least.
I just wrote a story about the Pacific Education Group! ie courageous conversations
https://www.foiagras.com/p/vendor-profile-pacific-education
Thanks for pushing back on this stuff and highlighting the money side. One of the "agreements" you're supposed to adopt in the seminar (and all the seminars forever) is to "expect and accept non-closure." Very handy!
What. Why Feris Bueller? (Just too white of a cast?)
Hey, the idea I think was that he was rich, white, privileged, popular, entitled, could thumb his nose at rules and authority and have it be endearing. They were trying to say, I guess, whiteness = obnoxious spoiled brat.
Although that movie, along with others from the Hughes oeuvre, were part of my childhood, I never warmed to them much. I tended to find the characters a little unlikable, truth be told.
As a kid I loved Ferris Bueller. As an adult I see he’s an utter dick, especially to poor depressed Cameron. I’m 100% Team Jeannie these days.
Um, so works of art that feature challenging authority are super rare and only made by privileged white people. Yeah.
Dammit. These people have already ruined unicorns, mermaids and rainbows for me. I'll be damned if they're going to ruin Jedi too
Don’t worry! Jedi has already been canceled. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-term-jedi-is-problematic-for-describing-programs-that-promote-justice-equity-diversity-and-inclusion/?amp=true
My God, that reads like a parody. What the hell happened to SciAm? I know, it's been bizarre for years now, but I still miss its old, boring, scientific incarnation.
I subscribed for a while because of fond memories of the issues laying around the house....
Maybe I should do Nat Geo.
It's not any better.
Isn't that a Murdoch rag now?
It’s owned by Disney.
Well then. It's official science now.
JEDI are racist.
All of this - unicorns, mermaids, rainbows, Jedi, feminism - I will not give up. Fuck the language thieves. This is as much my language as it is theirs!
From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!
"They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks"
I dunno, this actually sounds like it describes the DEI consultant class very well!
Now, don't be silly. In the Star Wars films the Jedi ended up becoming generals over armies of clones raised from birth to be unquestionably obedient. In an invented conflict which ended up pushing the galactic republic away from democracy and towards tyranny. Very different.
I worked for a small nonprofit (20 employees) in California that made grants to community organizations. I really liked most of my colleagues and felt that we all got along well. In 2019 we had a diversity training led by two local women who wrote a book about racial reconciliation. The thing that sticks out in the training was an activity where the facilitators showed a list of identities/classes (sex, race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, etc) and specifically listed which types of people in each identities are privileged/marginalized (e.g. men are privileged and women are marginalized).
We were then asked to think about our own identities and tell a story about a time when we experienced discrimination based on one of these characteristics. I’m appareantly the ultimate oppressor (cishet white Christian middle class man) so I didn’t have a story about one of these characteristics. Turns out I was the only one who didn’t have at least one of these marginalized identities. So while everyone else told their story, I was asked to tell about a time that I discriminated against someone. I was a shy, fat kid growing up and faced bullying, but it wasn’t on the list so I couldn’t talk about those experiences.
Anyway, it was a really negative experience being singled out like that with my colleagues. It really soured me to the whole DEI training endeavor. I ended up leaving a few months later for another job and I wonder sometimes how much that training contributed to the organization losing some of its appeal to me.
Sounds like the time you experienced discrimination was in that session. But that doesn't count, because engendering discrimination towards their disfavored populations is merely one part of the process they've devised to enrich themselves via these trainings.
I'm sorry that happened to you.
I think some people use these things as a way to "get back" at someone who was terrible to them, at some point in their lives. My view is that no amount of misery I cause to some random straight dude will ever un-gay-bash me, so any misery I cause says something about me and not about the random straight dude.
How is it possible that having suffered bullying doesn't enter their list? It's crazy.
If it was because of a marginalized identity, it certainly would be on the list. I'm kind of surprised that being fat didn't count, though...
Dude, you should('ve) fucking sue(d). I'm totally serious. What the actual fuck.
Hostile work environment. Big settlements have been won for less, like peers making racist jokes that the employer should have known about and corrected.
The company hiring a firm to engage in racial harassment is far more egregious.
Serious question: if “whiteness” having an explicit negative connotation does not meet a legal standard, or having different treatment for attending “white” people (listening only, etc.,) does not meet a legal standard… what about the reverse? Would framing “blackness” as related to a set of negative features, etc. meet the standard? Is it different for historically disadvantaged groups?
What sort of things *would* meet the standard?
The Toronto Star article is definitely worth a read for more context on the teacher suicide (https://archive.is/RWzEE Paywall removed). I find it so interesting, and chilling, that the DEI trainer referred to his different perspective on US vs Canada healthcare and education system as 'resistance' and in this framework any sort of 'resistance' to the teacher's viewpoint is a form of white supremacy. The problem with this kind of standpoint epistemology is that it has such clear rules for whose voice can be authoritative and it uses all kinds of subtle propaganda techniques to silence dissent. These are techniques I usually associate with the McCarthy era so it's disconcerting to see so many people on the Left now make these appeals to authority. I thought the Left was supposed to be inherently anti-authoritarian but it looks like I was wrong about that.
Thanks for the link. The author clearly agrees with the trainers that there are types of response that are simply not appropriate ("That’s not a help-me-understand question typically posed by workshop participants to trainers.") and that any disagreement or "resistance" furthers the goals of white supremacy. It's disingenuous to then claim that repeatedly using someone's comment as an example of such resistance does not equate to calling him a resistor or white supremacist. I think most people would say that "upholding white supremacy" makes someone a white supremacist.
If a man hadn't lost his life, I'd be rolling on the floor laughing and swearing that the whole saga was generated by the Babylon Bee. Disturbing all the way around and a perfect example of why most DIE training is absolute garbage.
Imagine the audacity to push back on the idea that Canada is more racist than the US. I'm combing through my old college textbooks searching for discussion of Canada's role in the Atlantic slave trade and Jim Crow laws.
Sidenote: I suppose I'm guilty of stereotyping but whenever I see a South or East Asian person like the author spouting SJW nonsense I'm a bit startled. I guess I'm too wedded to the "model minority" mindset and don't expect them to have drank the kool-aid. I'm still trying to digest the Asian college students who supported Harvard and UNC in the affirmative action case, claiming that Asian opponents are nothing but handmaidens of white supremacy and being used as pawns against other "people of color". Apparently Asians are too stupid to recognize and act on their own interests.
yeah nova scotia out lawed slavery in 1748-9. in their first legislature. hence rebel slave ships headed for nova scotia. that's so racist eh? the under ground railroad went to ontario. harriet tubman often worked from ontario , canada ain't perfect and we are still working indigenous issues but to callitmore racist than the usa is ridiculous.
I agree! Look at the name of the DEI leader. I did a spit-take:
> The sessions were led by Kike Ojo-Thompson, founder of the KOJO Institute, a consulting firm that provides anti-racist training to organizations in both the public and private sector, including large corporations, governments and several school boards. (The Toronto Star has also previously hired the company.)
> The conflict arose after Ojo-Thompson is alleged to have suggested that Canada was more racist than the U.S., in part because Canada has “never reckoned with its anti-Black history” in the way the U.S. has.
A DEI facilitator named "Kike"? Maybe I should change my name to "N-word" and teach courses!
I would bet hard American currency that Ms. Ojo-Thompson doesn't see the irony in her first name.
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLOw_SzkRQ8
In Chinese such people are referred to as “baizuo,” which is literally “white left.”
Fuck these people. They need to be met with unremitting hostility.
The suicide of a prominent ANTI-RACISM ACTIVIST after DIE bullying should most definitely be a wake-up call.
Whether on the right or on the left, very few people are really anti-authoritarian. They are anti-the authority of the other side. And that only gets worse in times of crisis. The goal should be for everybody to calm down a bit.
One more point: I don't think one of the massive benefits companies get for putting on these type of workshops gets discussed enough. If the Black employees in a company see their white coworkers as racist microaggressors and the white employees are afraid accidentally bumping into a Black coworker can become a hate crime, they are far less likely to want to form solidarity in a union. Robin DiAngelo gets paid a lot for her corporate seminars but it's nothing compared to what companies get in return for the union-busting she does. You don't see many useful idiots with PhDs, but she 100% is.
That is interesting and even more interesting (to me at any rate) is that the only place this aspect IS being discussed in earnest is by socialists on WSWS. They were also some if the first to hit back with any legitimacy on 1619 by publishing dissenting historians.
Yep, they do does some really important work over at the WSWS. I bought their 1619 book but my TBR stack is the size of a skyscraper.
Lol there it is, WSWS not SWSW. I guess I had SXSW festival on the brain. I mean, they’re all commies, amirite?
Excellent point. (And they may be Trotskyists, but at least they're not Leninists, Stalinists, or Maoists?)
Critical Social Justice ideology is ruining my state-level educators' union and some local activist/adherents have been causing a great deal of mischief in my local! I hadn't thought about the union-busting aspect of DiAngelo and her ilk before. Brilliant, Chris!
DEI / CRT / Woke-ism is probably the most successful psy-op ever devised by the ruling class.
I don't have direct knowledge of DiAngelo's client roster but my impression was that she speaks mostly to private-sector white collar knowledge workers. Unionization is rarely an issue in these settings. (Newspapers being a notable exception).
This NYT Magazine article gives some info on the companies seeking her out, and it's some of the biggest companies in the world, though I'm not sure how many are bringing her in for lectures and for multi-day seminars. I always think about the anecdote about the talk she gave at Levi's where no one from senior leadership was there because they were all at a shareholders' meeting.
David Dayen and Lee Fang have done some reporting on how companies are now using social justice/DEI language to stop unionization campaigns.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html
Thanks for the tip. First I'm hearing of a linkage between DEI and unionization.
Same here but its not the first I’m hearing of identity politics being used by the elites to divide and conquer. I've seen this meme rolling around for years:
https://ifunny.co/picture/introduce-them-to-identity-politics-lK08mfWn9
I dunno...I kind of feel like a podcast on Robin D’Angelo should be this disorienting to listen to.
Also, tone policing is a microaggression. We all need to do the work and think long and hard about how complaints about the audio quality of a podcast about anti-racist training plays into systems of white supremacy. Doing the work should be uncomfortable. Do better, y'all.
Outstanding!
If we're going to cry about the audio problems, we have to leave the room.
Only if we're White women.
I'll show myself out...😪
🤣
🤣
Hahahaha, excellent point!
As a Unitarian minister this is the story of our past 7 or so years and the reason I'm no longer involved. But the story needs to be retold until people get the utter absurdity of it. One thing I think about every time: how condescending and belittling this all is to POC... assuming they are so fragile they can't be disagreed with or challenged. It's actual racism.
Assuming (but not assuming, because that makes an ass out of u and me, as we know) you've heard this episode? — https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/how-the-unitarian-universalist-church#details
Yes! I even spoke to Katie before it came out. I'd suggested some years earlier they look into it and I accompanied Kate Rohde at her "hearing." Not that it helped! Been a fan of B&R for a long time.
It was a great episode — good call on suggesting it!
How did you come to be a Unitarian minister?
What do you mean by "no longer involved"? (Just curious how that squares with "as a Unitarian minister".)
I went to seminary and was ordained in 1995, served churches for 25 years. I'm retired, still a Unitarian theologically, but do not interact with the denomination or the woke ministers who have taken over. Unlike Kate R and others, I haven't been removed from Fellowship. Hope that answers your question. You can listen to that episode if you haven't already.
You probably know my former minister; she’s one of the woke ones. I quit the denomination in 2017 and haven’t looked back.
This is not an original observation, but as a relative outsider, there is something very strange and religious about the absolute taboo of even mentioning the “n-word.” The way it’s treated in American culture has big “drawing Mohammed” energy.
Maybe in a few hundred years it will be so taboo no one remembers what the word actually was, and it will go the way of the original pronounciation of YHWH.
It's part of the ongoing weird psy-ops we're all being subjected to (willingly???), in the name of "anti-racism." I hear this horrible, awful, magically evil, world-destroying word a zillion times a day up here in Harlem. Coming from the cars and boomboxes blasting the shitty kind of hip-hop all day and night long. I hear that same shitty music using "that HORRIBLE word" played at picnic parties for KIDS in Riverbank State Park. I hear the bruthas and sistas - and mothers with their babies - on the street use it CONSTANTLY. ("Oh, but it's different when historically marginalized communities use the word. They're 'reclaiming it.'" Yeah, no. Let's stop pretending this word is anything special. Yeah, it sort of has this unique "horrifying history" but the reality TODAY is quite different. It's just another stupid fucking word. There are plenty of words with awful histories which we are not forced to pretend have this magical evil spell on them. I'm just tired of all the looniness we "good" Progressives are supposed to pretend we "believe". Fuck the N word and all the bullshit moralizing about it. I'm just sick of all the bullshit. So sue me. I don't care.
The part I find strange is that there are little kids calling each other the N-word but ending with A. But if a white person repeats the N word ending in A from a song, THAT is traumatizing for.vlack people. Even though no white person used the N word ending in A ro dehumanize a black person
It's another outgrowth of the "trauma industry" we have all witnessed growing in the past few years. Also, the "horror, the horror" surrounding this word is mostly a distraction from plenty of REAL issues which need to be addressed. Like everything else in Woke-Land, a distraction and misdirection, with serious consequences...
“Queer” used to be a slur. Now it’s a celebrated identity/label. Maybe it’s part of the weird postmodern “language creates reality “ theory? Like if you say the n word, you somehow have transformed a Black person in 2023 into an enslaved person in the 1700s.
Would be fascinating seeing academia try to reclaim this one. N***a Studies? N****r Studies?
I actually think art and integration is going to eventually soften the term in popular culture. I think it was going this way for a bit until the modern DEI movement really started problematizing for profit, but I haven't done/read any serious ethnographies on the matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e61cxZtPe2I
Part of the ever-growing Trauma Industry.
Etymology fact of the day: the Germanic languages have a different word for "bear" than the other Indo-European languages (whose words are related to "ursus," "ours," arktos," etc.) because the early Germanic-speaking people were so afraid of bears that they used a euphemism ("the brown one") to refer to them. This is why "bear" in English, German, the Scandinavian languages, etc., is so similar to the word for "brown" rather than to other Indo-European words for "bear."
A few hundred years may be optimistic. As long as race-hustler activists get to issue a fatwa against anyone who even mentions the word (with support from the MSM and academia), the taboo will still exist. And yes, there is something quasi-religious about the entire concept, on par with blasphemy.
Circa 2008~2009, I went to a college threatre production of the musical "Big River" at East Carolina U. I remember that there was a note in the programs explaining the the word "nigger" was used in the production, as it was authentic to the history, or whatever, and not meant to cause offense. A trigger warning, if you will. I wonder if this would be allowed today.
I'd bet no.
DEI is perhaps a good example of what David Graeber meant with “bullshit jobs”.
I'm maybe late to the party here but I write a lot of stuff about DEI training, especially as it pertains to our school district here in Evanston, Illinois. I just wrote a substack today on the Pacific Education Group, who is probably the largest vendor in the US and our town has spent over $1mm with them on DEI training like what is described in the pod.
https://www.foiagras.com/p/vendor-profile-pacific-education
One thing is that a lot of these organizations, whether it's Robin D'Angelo or Pacific Education Group operate as quasi-MLMs. It's generally one central entity that creates the books, media, content, etc and then they use an army of (mostly paid on commission only) facilitators to go out and do sales, etc. Often, in our community especially, there are cases where individuals begin demanding we invest more resources in DEI training .. yet, they themselves are either facilitators or content creators for the business.
These companies are very crazy with protecting their IP and parents have had to sue to even *look* at the contents of the DEI training in schools. You can't FOIA this stuff.
I haven't seen a single one that operates as a non-profit, despite capitalism being one of those things they assign to "whiteness" - the whole business is basically inequity profiteering. It's all very gross and intellectually inconsistent.
If you haven’t read the Free Press’ piece on the guy in Canada and the monstrous human being who drove him to suicide (and implied he was a liar in an official statement after his death), it gives more details: https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/a-racist-smear-a-tarnished-career-suicide?r=y4an&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Fuck this is a heart-breaking story. Just soul crushing. I used to call myself progressive, but I can't anymore. I wanted to believe in the ideal of moral progress, but it's all just historically contingent. We're lucky, not good, or, at least, not better.
I don’t know if I agree with all of that, but I do know that a lot of “progressives” have some pretty backwards ideas. And yeah, that FP story made me so angry I thought I was gonna puke.
I used to think it was kind of strange that progressives didn’t want to use a different term to distance themselves from the eugenicists and prohibitionists of the early 1900s who originated the progressive label.
Now? Not so strange, there’s just so little self reflection.
Yeah, this episode was not ready for upload. It sounds like Moose did the editing. This is literal violence.
DO.(clap)(clap)(clap)BETTER.(clap)(clap)(clap)
I think I finally understand "quiet quitting."
The swastika thing made me roll my eyes so bad. The left/progressives have made it pretty clear at this point that they believe "Jews don't count" (in the words of David Baddiel) and the narrative of "Jews are always playing the anti-Semitism card to silence criticism or gain power." Just look at any conversation surrounding Jeremy Corbyn or Israel.
But yeah, give them an image that kind of looks like a swastika and they're all over it. LMAO.
Getting a group of white people to agree they are racist seems like a very bad idea.
Lol right? "Well, its true, you wouldn't think a progressive book club would lend itself to becoming a klan rally but after this one author seminar, the hoods really seemed the only way to go..."
LMFAO. but also, seriously WTF?!!!11!1!!
I left a job in education last year where we had weekly (!) DEI trainings from a black mother-daughter duo. It was the usual DEI craziness but focused almost entirely on the black experience, specifically their own family’s experiences with racism. No discussion of class, ever.
I’ll always remember one session where the daughter complained at length about the process of selling her house and how she probably got less money than a white seller due to systemic racism. Meanwhile I’m thinking about how I’ll literally never be able to afford a house on a teacher’s salary, and can barely afford my rent.
It was extremely frustrating having these two overpaid DEI consultants come in every week, take away 2 hours of our time that could’ve been spent catching up on paperwork or serving students, just to ramble about racism and struggle to use PowerPoint. Absolutely ridiculous.