What you’re doing is called a motte and bailey fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

You’re defending diversity training, which nobody is attacking. We’re talking about a particular kind of rhetoric where people take personal responsibility in behalf of their race and label themselves with words that, in ordinary usage, have extremely inflammatory meanings.

I’m from a “diverse background.” I think diversity training and making organizations more diverse is great. But this rhetoric is an explosively bad approach to race relations, and as a non-white person I am very worried about what the result will be.

You'd have to nail down what rhetoric you mean for me to have any response to that.

The example is in my OP: It's a session where white people acknowledge that they take personal responsibility for participating in a system of "white privilege" and admit to being "racist" and "gatekeepers of white supremacy." (That's the bailey.)

By contrast, your motte: "training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.

Honestly, I don't see much distinction between teaching people about structural privilege and suggesting they admit they benefit from it. Difference of degree, perhaps, but not much.

You trusted your alma mater when you were taught there; not trusting the direction it's taking now? Is it possible you're not seeing the picture the way they are?

But do you see the difference between teaching people about structural racism and having them stand up and declare "I am a racist" and "I am a gatekeeper of white supremacy?" Two things about that are outside acceptable norms:

1) Having people declare personal complicity for a general social ill; and

2) Using words that have widely-understood connotations to mean something different in order to achieve shocking rhetorical effect.

It's not just inconsistent with social norms, it's alienating to many non-white people. I don't think the well-meaning white people doing this (and almost everyone involved in this is white) really understand that we have to actually go on and try to interact normally our professors and administrators after this.

How does that change the normal interaction dynamic?

I generally try to avoid racist people, because they'll treat me and many of my friends poorly. That's what "racism" meant in the culture I was brought up in - a racist person was by definition one who treated certain races poorly.

Because of that, it's very hard for me to have normal interactions with people who explicitly identify as racist, even if they say they're a special kind of racist who intends to treat me well.

So it's a matter of definition, not behavior. Because the point of unconscious bias training is to help people see the ways in which they are racist even if they don't think of themselves as racist.

In other words, there's no magically non-racist person out there. Everyone's a little bit racist.

It's a magical, shifting definition that means whatever the high priests need it to mean at the moment.

Making people confess to being 'racist', at institutions where being Racist gets you fired, is a power-move.

Those of us who can see that aren't objecting to the idea of unconscious bias, we're objecting to the power move.

If only there were some kind of, I dunno, training to help clarify and de-magic these words. ;)

Do you believe racists should be shamed and fired?

I don't believe people should be shamed and fired for having unconscious bias and confronting it.

There's a world of difference between confronting one's unconscious bias and unapologetic, willful racism.

And, we're back to the magical shifting definition.

If there's such a world of difference, why conflate the two using the same word?

That's a question for the English language and dictionary authors, not for me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/merriam-webster-racism...

Any thoughts of your own on the matter? We're way in the sidebar, don't worry about downvotes. Tell me why.

Benefitting from structural privileges is very different from being a racist though.

In computer security, we often talk about the lack of distinction between malice and ignorance---if the security system is bad, it doesn't matter if the attacker is intent on causing harm or merely innocently curious and hack-sawing away through your computer security for fun. The outcome is the same.

I think the same principle applies here. Malicious racism and passive racism have the same effect.

"Ism" is a suffix that implies a philosophy. An ism is a suite of beliefs. Anything that is unconscious is, by definition, not an ism. Racism refers to people with a philosophy of racial hierarchy, or ideas about race that evoke or imply such a philosophy.

For instance, Buddhism is a suite of beliefs about enlightenment and transcendence. We don't refer to people as "structural Buddhists" simply because they have equanimity.

I'll bite, what the fuck is passive racism?

The unconscious biases people walk around with in their heads. They're things people pick up without realizing it that lead to friction for minorities in society.

Studies have shown that people who don't think themselves to be actually racist still act in race-discriminatory ways. For example, people with non-ethic-names get more callbacks for their resume controlled for qualifications on the resume (https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...).

So a bad way to say unconscious racism.

> suggesting they admit they benefit from it

Not "suggesting" - demanding, and specifically labelling themselves "racist" - not just admitting that they benefit from it.

I don't think specific examples are really useful here. At the end of the day, either I'm allowed to say "I am not a racist" at work and be left alone for making that statement, or I'm not. If I'm not, it's a cryptofascist struggle session.

Without specific examples, I have no idea if I am committing a motte and bailey fallacy because the specific examples I have in my mind are the weaker example, the specific examples the speaker has in their mind are a different example, I've never experienced their example (but have experienced people experiencing my example and treating it as something more draconian that could, perhaps, approximate their example).

So not much more to say on this topic without specific examples.

There's nothing wrong with bringing privilege and systemic racism up and taking a "course" as a way to make it poignant. Forcing white people to say "all white people, including myself, are racist P's of S" is garbage and I would get up and walk out at that point, no amount of money or "this position is cool" would convince me to do otherwise. If you don't have standards then why even be alive or call yourself an individual? Sure if you're racist speak up and would like to fix it, otherwise it's blackmail and you are working with garbage people.

Are you suggesting it's required to "confess that you're a racist" in a Mao-style struggle session to work with people from diverse backgrounds?

I'm definitely not. I also hold such descriptions of these trainings in high skepticism, because I've been through a similar training and had a coworker describe it as such when all the training was doing was surfacing the scientific evidence suggesting unconscious bias is a real phenomenon that people aren't aware of.

The fact my colleague took it so personally says more about them, I think, than the training.

You might have visited different seminars than the ones this thread was originally about, or you might just experience them differently given that you appear to be a staunch believer in white privilege & the post-modern theory of racism.

Religious rituals seem totally normal to the initiated and strange and cult-ish to others.

Conflating trainings derived from theory based on research and evidence with religion is also strange.

I think research & evidence is vague when you include gender & diversity studies in sciences. There's a lot that's barely above an essay, it'll stick for a few years and then get retracted (gender pay gap anyone?) The cultish behavior surrounding it ("I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning, I'm worthless, oh please, Lord, forgive me, I submit myself before your will") makes it look like a replacement for religion, not anything stemming from science.

I don't believe the similarity to Maoist struggle sessions is an accident, it's born from the same general school of thought.

There's also the similarity of the class alignment behind today's "neo-Maoist" stuff and the actual Cultural Revolution. https://www.thebellows.org/the-new-cultural-revolution/

The "school of thought" behind the cultural revolution was twofold:

1) Mao had been frozen out after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, and this was his way of discrediting his enemies and getting back on top.

2) Young people full of fervor are fucking vicious.

None of it really had much to do with marxist philosophy in general or with the things Mao in particular had said before he'd been frozen out. But it says a lot about power.

> None of it really had much to do with marxist philosophy

Nonsense. The Cultural Revolution had much to do with Marxist philosophy. For goodness’ sake, read the May 16 Notification and Sixteen Points.

> "I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning"

The entire point of the courses I've seen is to bring people awareness of unconscious bias and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of error to awareness of the potential for such error. And unconscious bias doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior.

Disclaimer: I realize the below could be interpreted in an inflammatory manner. I DON'T MEAN IT THAT WAY. I just find it absolutely unbelievable that someone could honestly claim not to see the clear religious parallels here.

The entire point of the [bible camp] I've seen is to bring people awareness of [unconscious sinning] and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of [sin] to awareness of the potential for [sin]. And [unconscious sinning] doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior [since we're all born in sin]. (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-the-biblical-ev...)

The parallel is obvious and I fail to see your point.

Original sin is a concept couched in Christian mythology. Unconscious bias is a concept derived from statistical study and observation. The similarity is that unconscious bias, like original sin, appears to be innate to the human existence---a byproduct of the way we think about the world, the thousands of quick decisions we make subconsciously to go about our days. The parallel doesn't make it untrue.

The entire point of some exhibits in science museums I've seen is to bring people awareness of optical illusions and help them transition from not knowing that the human eye has some fascinating corner case failure modes to awareness of the existence of those failure modes. And the eye being imperfect doesn't make it "worthless," it's a pretty ordinary side effect of evolution in the context where those failure modes are rare to observe.

In my experince, the true believers find the diversity courses validating.

You don't have to believe the description of the session--there are screenshots in the article.

Nothing about the article suggests that text was forced. I'm not going to trust the Free Beacon's interpretation of some out-of-context screenshots.

The statements standing alone are damning, whether forced or not. That's not how faculty and administrators should be speaking in front of students.

Agree to disagree