Relevant to corporate nonsense and CRT, I had a truly *BIZARRE* experience on Friday when I attended my mandatory company Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training. It was not what I was expecting, and I think the best method to shed light is just describe it.
First brief comments:
I’m now thoroughly convinced there are two unique strands of the current cultural moment.
One is indeed a very race obsessed Ibram X Kendi/BLM moment, and a short time browsing Rufo’s twitter feed can produce plenty of examples of this kind. Some companies may do this, but mine didn’t. I would say that race took up less than 5% of the session and there was no passion behind the subject. Gender took up more, but identity issues were simply not that central or critical the what was going on in the grand scheme of the session.
The other, which I’m now very confident is a separate cultural strand, is sort of related to DiAngelo-ism but mostly not about “whiteness”. It’s not even political or cultural really, but intensely focused on vapid self help psychology.
Namely, I once had someone describe wokeness to me as “estrogen + mental illness”. Boy, that is accurate. Ross Douthat called it Bad Religion. Oprah-ism. Moral Therapeutic Deism. Whatever those ladies buying spirit healing crystals in Sedona think they are doing. Or people who watch “The Secret”.
So anyway, let’s describe.
The meeting was two hours and had fifty people in it. Thank God for COVID because we could do it in Zoom, I can’t imagine attending this in person. We were encouraged but not required to keep on our webcams and participate, some but not a majority did this.
The first thing I would note is the following. Despite the sex ratio being about even, 99%+ of the talking was done by women. I can only remember one man speaking briefly once. The two people leading the talk were women.
How would I describe the two women leading the talk? First, they were internal company volunteers, this isn’t their job and they aren’t even being paid for it. They are just passionate about it. Second, they were not very attractive women in their 40s doing what I would describe as cubicle grunt work. They each had one grown child and no others. One had no husband and I don’t know about the other (they shared a LOT, so get ready for that). We will get to this later but the kids were defiantly messed up. One was an adult child living with the parent unable to move out, the other…we’ll get to her story later.
I think the goal of the exercise was to convince people that the company they worked for really cared about YOU. “The Whole You”. “Bring Your Whole Self to Work.” At one point we discussed Intersectionality, and each person was supposed to identify their various identities (this was not mandatory for everyone, voluntary). This wasn’t just race and gender though, it could be hobbies or other random things. They crammed as many things on a slide as possible. The thing they kept harping on was that THE COMPANY CARED about ALL of these aspects of your personality. This comes into sharp focus during the sharing section of the meeting, but clearly the company is suppose to play the role of therapist, spirit guide, comforting family member, etc.
So most of the meeting was about “sharing”. Either “who we are” (intersectionality) or “bias” incidents were observed or where a part of. I’m going to just repeat the ones that were given.
One of the session leaders offered up that she was visiting a niece and reading a children’s story where a boy and girl were fighting over a doll. The niece assumed the boy was stealing the doll from the girl based on a picture of them fighting without it being explicitly in the story up to that point . Apparently the session leader was very troubled by this, and has remember the incident for some time and felt the need to bring it up with us.
The second is far more bizarre! The second session leader has a daughter (she eventually slipped up and said “she”) that is going to be a freshmen in college this Fall. She describes here daughter as a “non-binary genderqueer they/them who likes to be called Xir”. She then proceeds to say that when choosing a dorm room after a long story she ends up sharing a dorm room and a bathroom with two boys. At this point in the story it becomes obvious though she won’t admit it that the mother thinks she made a mistake, but her solution takes the cake. She decides that the best way to protect her daughter is to take the names of her new doormats and stalk them online by going to their Facebook, Instagram, etc. She doesn’t like what she finds. One of the boys is from a small town, likes hunting, and has several pictures with American Flags! She flat out tells us she was afraid he would KILL her daughter for being transgender. She decides to message the boy and ask if her daughter being transgender is going to be a problem. After a week the boy replies saying that it’s not a problem. The mother is relieved, and informs us that she was “biased” against the boy based on the above factors and she is glad she reached out.
Now, that sounds like a prolonged description of mentally ill behavior…but it was offered up as a positive example for the rest of us.
The rest of the session involved either sharing in smaller breakout groups or sharing with the entire group. In the smallest meeting I was in with ten people and no instructor, everyone sat in silence for ten minutes and then we went back to the main group. However, we did get several employees sharing “bias incidents”. Here are a few:
One woman has her pre-pubescent daughter participate in what some would describe as “slutty cheerleader competitions for little girls”. You can look this stuff up to judge for yourself. In any event, sometimes when strangers see her young daughter dolled up like a whore they give her bad looks and it makes her feel bad. The instructors let her know that those people are biased and wrong.
Another woman says that she has been morbidly obese her whole life and that people look at her scornfully, especially at the doctors office. The instructors not only inform her that people are biased against her and shouldn’t do that, but also state that “new research shows that stigma against obesity, rather then obesity itself, may be the cause of health problems typically associated with obesity, and that this was up to debate among experts.”
Another woman kept her child on one of those leash things in public and someone made a bad comment to her, and the instructor said that person was bias against them.
There were others, I can’t remember them all. Very few had something to directly to do with what we often discuss related to identity politics. Mostly, they were the banal bad choices of middle aged cisgendered white woman who could tell others were judging them for their bad choices and wanted official validation of their flaws and vices.
One can surmise from the stories that most of them had very unsatisfying lives at work, community, family, and personally. The company was offering what swindlers of many types have offered in the private market for a long time. What I once heard described on Mad Men as the essence of advertising.
“It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that, whatever you’re doing, it’s OK. You are OK.”
Either because companies believe providing this therapy increases the productivity of these women (or more accurately, they can’t measure productivity, but they can spam out HR surveys and get the results they want) or simply because this archetype of person cares a lot more about capturing large institutions we now have a situation where mental illness is running the show. I don’t think these people truly deeply care about race/gender except insofar as attaching themselves to these socially approved causes validates their own narratives, and when they demand extreme things on these issues and don’t get pushback it makes them feel heroic. They are desperate for their lives to have meaning, but not if it involves difficult sacrifices or changes in behavior on their part.
Lotta words there bit none I can tell about “CRT.” As far as the “training” goes, a lot of that is familiar to me but you really go off the rails on the whole transgender thing and I stopped reading. It could be you are an honest reporter in all this but how would we know your anecdote here is even representative of the reality? We dont.
As far as Lowry, he uses CRT as some kind of conjuring word. “A whole generation will be ruined!” I’ve been hearing those exact words about this thing or that thing my whole life and life has gone on.
Thanx for posting this gripping stuff, asdf.
Esp. on
“middle aged cisgendered white woman who could tell others were judging them for their bad choices and wanted official *validation*….
when they demand extreme things on these issues and don’t get pushback it makes them feel *heroic*. They are desperate for their lives to have meaning, but not if it involves difficult *sacrifices or changes* in behavior on their part.”
Yeah, upper- middle class types in particular, seeking validation (at others’ expense), esp. w/ minimal sacrifices on their part.
Don’t let the trolls deter you.
Just another repetition of the n=1 fallacy?
I mean, it’s not like we are making this stuff up.
Relevant to corporate nonsense and CRT, I had a truly *BIZARRE* experience on Friday when I attended my mandatory company Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training. It was not what I was expecting, and I think the best method to shed light is just describe it.
First brief comments:
I’m now thoroughly convinced there are two unique strands of the current cultural moment.
One is indeed a very race obsessed Ibram X Kendi/BLM moment, and a short time browsing Rufo’s twitter feed can produce plenty of examples of this kind. Some companies may do this, but mine didn’t. I would say that race took up less than 5% of the session and there was no passion behind the subject. Gender took up more, but identity issues were simply not that central or critical the what was going on in the grand scheme of the session.
The other, which I’m now very confident is a separate cultural strand, is sort of related to DiAngelo-ism but mostly not about “whiteness”. It’s not even political or cultural really, but intensely focused on vapid self help psychology.
Namely, I once had someone describe wokeness to me as “estrogen + mental illness”. Boy, that is accurate. Ross Douthat called it Bad Religion. Oprah-ism. Moral Therapeutic Deism. Whatever those ladies buying spirit healing crystals in Sedona think they are doing. Or people who watch “The Secret”.
So anyway, let’s describe.
The meeting was two hours and had fifty people in it. Thank God for COVID because we could do it in Zoom, I can’t imagine attending this in person. We were encouraged but not required to keep on our webcams and participate, some but not a majority did this.
The first thing I would note is the following. Despite the sex ratio being about even, 99%+ of the talking was done by women. I can only remember one man speaking briefly once. The two people leading the talk were women.
How would I describe the two women leading the talk? First, they were internal company volunteers, this isn’t their job and they aren’t even being paid for it. They are just passionate about it. Second, they were not very attractive women in their 40s doing what I would describe as cubicle grunt work. They each had one grown child and no others. One had no husband and I don’t know about the other (they shared a LOT, so get ready for that). We will get to this later but the kids were defiantly messed up. One was an adult child living with the parent unable to move out, the other…we’ll get to her story later.
I think the goal of the exercise was to convince people that the company they worked for really cared about YOU. “The Whole You”. “Bring Your Whole Self to Work.” At one point we discussed Intersectionality, and each person was supposed to identify their various identities (this was not mandatory for everyone, voluntary). This wasn’t just race and gender though, it could be hobbies or other random things. They crammed as many things on a slide as possible. The thing they kept harping on was that THE COMPANY CARED about ALL of these aspects of your personality. This comes into sharp focus during the sharing section of the meeting, but clearly the company is suppose to play the role of therapist, spirit guide, comforting family member, etc.
So most of the meeting was about “sharing”. Either “who we are” (intersectionality) or “bias” incidents were observed or where a part of. I’m going to just repeat the ones that were given.
One of the session leaders offered up that she was visiting a niece and reading a children’s story where a boy and girl were fighting over a doll. The niece assumed the boy was stealing the doll from the girl based on a picture of them fighting without it being explicitly in the story up to that point . Apparently the session leader was very troubled by this, and has remember the incident for some time and felt the need to bring it up with us.
The second is far more bizarre! The second session leader has a daughter (she eventually slipped up and said “she”) that is going to be a freshmen in college this Fall. She describes here daughter as a “non-binary genderqueer they/them who likes to be called Xir”. She then proceeds to say that when choosing a dorm room after a long story she ends up sharing a dorm room and a bathroom with two boys. At this point in the story it becomes obvious though she won’t admit it that the mother thinks she made a mistake, but her solution takes the cake. She decides that the best way to protect her daughter is to take the names of her new doormats and stalk them online by going to their Facebook, Instagram, etc. She doesn’t like what she finds. One of the boys is from a small town, likes hunting, and has several pictures with American Flags! She flat out tells us she was afraid he would KILL her daughter for being transgender. She decides to message the boy and ask if her daughter being transgender is going to be a problem. After a week the boy replies saying that it’s not a problem. The mother is relieved, and informs us that she was “biased” against the boy based on the above factors and she is glad she reached out.
Now, that sounds like a prolonged description of mentally ill behavior…but it was offered up as a positive example for the rest of us.
The rest of the session involved either sharing in smaller breakout groups or sharing with the entire group. In the smallest meeting I was in with ten people and no instructor, everyone sat in silence for ten minutes and then we went back to the main group. However, we did get several employees sharing “bias incidents”. Here are a few:
One woman has her pre-pubescent daughter participate in what some would describe as “slutty cheerleader competitions for little girls”. You can look this stuff up to judge for yourself. In any event, sometimes when strangers see her young daughter dolled up like a whore they give her bad looks and it makes her feel bad. The instructors let her know that those people are biased and wrong.
Another woman says that she has been morbidly obese her whole life and that people look at her scornfully, especially at the doctors office. The instructors not only inform her that people are biased against her and shouldn’t do that, but also state that “new research shows that stigma against obesity, rather then obesity itself, may be the cause of health problems typically associated with obesity, and that this was up to debate among experts.”
Another woman kept her child on one of those leash things in public and someone made a bad comment to her, and the instructor said that person was bias against them.
There were others, I can’t remember them all. Very few had something to directly to do with what we often discuss related to identity politics. Mostly, they were the banal bad choices of middle aged cisgendered white woman who could tell others were judging them for their bad choices and wanted official validation of their flaws and vices.
One can surmise from the stories that most of them had very unsatisfying lives at work, community, family, and personally. The company was offering what swindlers of many types have offered in the private market for a long time. What I once heard described on Mad Men as the essence of advertising.
“It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that, whatever you’re doing, it’s OK. You are OK.”
Either because companies believe providing this therapy increases the productivity of these women (or more accurately, they can’t measure productivity, but they can spam out HR surveys and get the results they want) or simply because this archetype of person cares a lot more about capturing large institutions we now have a situation where mental illness is running the show. I don’t think these people truly deeply care about race/gender except insofar as attaching themselves to these socially approved causes validates their own narratives, and when they demand extreme things on these issues and don’t get pushback it makes them feel heroic. They are desperate for their lives to have meaning, but not if it involves difficult sacrifices or changes in behavior on their part.
Lotta words there bit none I can tell about “CRT.” As far as the “training” goes, a lot of that is familiar to me but you really go off the rails on the whole transgender thing and I stopped reading. It could be you are an honest reporter in all this but how would we know your anecdote here is even representative of the reality? We dont.
As far as Lowry, he uses CRT as some kind of conjuring word. “A whole generation will be ruined!” I’ve been hearing those exact words about this thing or that thing my whole life and life has gone on.
Thanx for posting this gripping stuff, asdf.
Esp. on
“middle aged cisgendered white woman who could tell others were judging them for their bad choices and wanted official *validation*….
when they demand extreme things on these issues and don’t get pushback it makes them feel *heroic*. They are desperate for their lives to have meaning, but not if it involves difficult *sacrifices or changes* in behavior on their part.”
Yeah, upper- middle class types in particular, seeking validation (at others’ expense), esp. w/ minimal sacrifices on their part.
Don’t let the trolls deter you.
Just another repetition of the n=1 fallacy?
I mean, it’s not like we are making this stuff up.
Don’t be evil!
https://christopherrufo.com/dont-be-evil/