I think what certain people don't see is the sheer cynicism behind companies like Disney holding these kind of "training" events. It used to be, just a few years back, that everyone got these really clumsy seminars on sexual harassment and how to behave around women. Now the popular issue in culture is race, so they hold them on those.

It's two-fold. One it's covering their own back for where the likely lawsuits might come from (can't blame us, we do extensive training!), and two it's currying favour. Next time Disney inevitably has an incident in the press about some racial issue, Disney can sell themselves to the public over just how much they really care. This crap is always about aesthetics first with actual engagement being a distant second.

And people actually buy into it. People actually think that these huge multinational billion pound corporations are overrun by leftists. As if there's any threat of Disney becoming a worker co-op sometime this year. As if Disney isn't just doing what they think covers their backs and sells their image.

The most cynical of these moves was a few months back when Twitch removed the "blind playthrough" tag as it was "ableist". Nobody asked for that. Nobody was pressuring for that. I haven't found anyone yet who cared about that. But next time Twitch, who are kind of exploitative in their treatment of their streamers and about to come under increasing fire for promoting soft-porn to minors, get some bad press, you know they're going to harp on about the great many efforts they take to be an upstanding pillar of the community. And it works.

Maybe, but to the extent it's been incorporated into public schools, media outlets and other public institutions, your explanation, IMO, is more about you finding a reason to handwave it away. Not to mention, this stuff alienates a significant percentage for it be just good PR.

I think it exists in a kind of weird irony. It's not always good PR. Lots of people hate this woke culture or, as we call it over here, "political correctness gone mad". What it is is future damage control for when those institutions inevitably have some scandal.

One way to look at it would be, other than seminars on race, maybe some affirmative action policies on the books, what about Disney or any other company of that size screams "leftist"? It's almost nothing. Maybe an HR department, but in practice HR departments are more about covering the company than employees.

Employees at Disneyland still get worked into the ground with long hours, short breaks, and a suit heavy enough to leave them with back problems. Hardly screams of progressivism and workers' rights. There's still all the exploitation of child actors, the elitism, all the other corporate things people hate. Don't worry though, their employers get forced to sit through a clumsy and questionable presentation on race relations.

These things are about having all the aesthetics of being anti-racism, all the plausible deniability money can buy, without any reason to think a company has actually made some political shift to the left.

And it's an awkward position to hold because I'm not opposed to that kind of education in the workplace, or in schools. I just think when I see things like the BBC having a speaker who recommended against using phrases like "sold down the river" that it's pretty obvious this isn't really about teaching serious academic concepts as much as next time the BBC get a scandal (like when the contracts of the men vs women presenters were revealed) they've got this stuff in the bank to say "Can't you see how seriously we take these things?".

The key is to maintain your cynicism and not stop at "those woke folk somehow infiltrated the business world". I'm not handwaving away anything. I'm willing to say Disney's training is probably garbage. That doesn't mean the academic concepts behind them are controversial.

Edit: Another example, and a hot take possibly, but Premier League footballers are still taking the knee before kick-off in support of BLM. Now, when the EPL and FA have actually dealt with incidents of racism it's been tame as anything. Prevaricating and umming and aahing over what to do about John Terry's racial slurs. Great hesitation of policies like the Rooney Rule, which still has huge loopholes. I'm glad that the players are doing their bit and showing their support, but I'm deeply concerned that football is once again showing the aesthetics of anti-racism without actually doing anything about it.

Do you think the general make-up of the opposition to this kinda stuff would look radically different if it was a more ~60s style/mlk project? Because I think it would look pretty much the same regardless. Should people fighting for civil rights only do so by the approved methods of the opposition?

I think with any diversity training that conservatives get up in arms about you can just roll your eyes at. No one takes diversity classes in and of themselves seriously and having them is just a means nothing to avoid liability, they've never been anything more.

Scanning the Disney training docs the author provided here most of it is boilerplate diversity stuff. Most, not all:



More ideological and normative than I'd care to see in public education.

They do help to change some behaviour at least.
Like sexual harassment training in the past. There were/are people that literally need it spelled out to them to not compliment a girl on her nice ass.
Diversity training will have a similar effect to at least get the mouth breathers in line a bit to not spout their stereotypical bs at the workplace.

Yeah, this is why I find it awkward to criticise, because I definitely don't want the result to be that places stop trying. I think it's more that when I see some of the stuff from these talks it reeks of some "motivational speaker" type cobbling together a presentation they can sell rather than the much more boring, tamer, and far more sensible stuff that people really need to here.

It makes me think of awkward team building exercises. Team building is a good thing, but you get the kind of stuff parodied here.

Oh ****.

And that's the bottom line. Workers of al stripes should unite and unionize if they want any type or equity. IE. A guy who does job A in City B makes wages C. And the wages are fair in relation to the value being added to the company.

All this woke culture is just another way to divide and conquer.

That's why it's funny to see the Fox News anti union guys get all caught up in it. The dumb fish can't help put strike the lure, no matter how many times you catch him and throw him back.

If the US had good jobs for those who wanted to work this stuff wouldn't be so important to anyone. It would be seen as a part of culture and not a threat. I mean...imagine being so afraid of blacks (because you think they may take your job and work cheap) that you refuse to admit they've been held back for centuries. It's just idiotic.

For sure. One of the biggest problems is that it's easier to convince people that they have more in common with say, Nigel Farage (because he drinks pints and didn't like hearing foreign languages on the train), than they do with the guy living a few doors down (if that guy happens to look a bit different or have an unusual surname).

I explained the problem with this perspective. Trying to conflate MLK and the Civil Rights Movement with critical race theory is incongruent at best, and egregiously disingenuous at worst. Critical race theorist oppose MLK's vision.

The California school system attempted to basically remove any mention of MLK and his legacy when it came to their equity and inclusion curriculum. I cited an article to which a close confident of King spoke out against that, and CRT.

I think the type of person who rejected MLK ideas is the type of person who is attracted to CRT, or white supremacy, i.e., an identitarian

It's odd that you would conflate opposition to CRT and opposition to MLK, since CRT explicitly rejects MLK's vision. There's a quite strong argument that MLK is the forefather of the color blind society.

I think it's just despicable that you conflate the honor of MLK's legacy with the trash that CRT is. CRT isn't even in the same ballpark when it comes to justice, and I would argue strongly it's actually counterproductive to justice, especially when it spits on the grave of MLK's legacy, then try to compare them, as if they are similar type movements.

King was pretty unpopular when he died. Even then the younger black leaders could see they weren't going to get anywhere by playing nice and trying to move 'beyond race'. So when you're dealt a hand you play it. It's pretty simple.

But props for racists using MLK when it suits them.

I'm not an expert on CRT. I haven't deeply read the academic literature here, and haven't form nuanced views on that yet. MOST of my exposure has actually been from people on the right who are attacking CRT and seem to be using it as a rorschach blob to attach whatever agitations they have about the left. But at a high level, it seems entirely appropriate to have a discipline that is exploring and analyzing the ways that race intersects with our institutional structures such as the law.

With that context said, let me ask the residents of this thread: To opponents, what parts of CRT are most reasonable and seem like they might have value to explore? To proponents, what parts of CRT are least reasonable and don't have much value?

I'm not sure there are any proponents of CRT itt. Most of us seem to be of a similar view as you.

But I do think shaming white people is going to set the march towards a color blind society back quite a bit. White people may not think of ourselves as having a higher status than others but we sure don't want to lose whatever we think we have. Real or imagined.

That being said, I find it a bit refreshing that some of us are owning the past and willing to try and make a better future. I honestly think that's progress I've seen in my lifetime. Literally every person in my working class neighborhood was openly racist when I was a kid. And that was just the norm. So let them whine. You can't stop a train, it goes where you built the tracks.

I feel like "color blind" is a pretty outdated narrative. Maybe there is some star trekian eutopia where this grand ideal might exist, but in any medium term view of the world I think we should be explicitly acknowledging the role of race. I think "color blind" can be quite a problematic approach because firstly, I think a lot of white people who claim to be "color blind" are FOS (consider implicit bias and the like). But perhaps more importantly, when you act and peak as if someones race doesn't matter in a society where race really does matter, I think you can really miss a lot of potential positive actions.

Just one example I saw recently, I'm sure not close to the best, but it was talking about colorblind diversity statements vs multicultural diversity statements, and the effect that this had on mathematical testing scores. https://www.researchgate.net/publica...ace_and_Gender

It's true
I've seen it with my own eyes.

I'm fine with CRT as an academic subject or a sort of societal investigative tool as you alluded to. Likewise I doubt I'd oppose a lot or even most of their prescriptions. My differences fall more with the ideological commitments.

I see. Are there ideological commitments in CRT that you think have value?

LOL

Just kidding.

Oh, point taken.

I don't actually think we should or need to be color blind in that sense. Just in the sense that all are treated equally by the system. Be proud of where you came from, it's an asset.

Then why do you think the make up of the opposition to both looks pretty much exactly the same? You want to say there's not a connection--but clearly there is.

No, a speech writer for King wrote a comment on the first draft, one of thousands of comments on the first of four drafts. That fact was then picked up by web sites who did not actually reporting and spun it for the rubes to believe that there's some hidden cabal of critical race theorists who want to erase African American history, erase Martin Luther King, and who are brainwashing students.

Haha, and you say this in the very next paragraph:


Whiteness.


Anyways, this is the fundamental problem you identitarians have.

You accuse folks who reject identity based perspectives as somehow wanting to hold on to an identity based role in society. There's somethimg fundamentally broken in your minds where you can't accept people actually do reject identity based perspectives on an intellectual level, and you constantly try to have to paint those people as evil, and you summon the ghost of MLK, to which you're diametrically opposed to.

You all really don't have any issues with CRT. I don't get why you have to lie about not embarrassing it. I get it, you've been taught it, but you want to deny it came from CRT.

As if the concept "white privilege" didn't originate from CRT and is not the basis of pretty much your entire worldview of race. Basis being a key word.