I am not sure why you're being downvoted, because I not only have witnessed this happening within my own family/friends (it is sad and scary), but we are now having studies show that some common forms of anti-racism training has a "backfire" effect that produces more racism. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail

This is alarming not only because of the obvious reason--racism sucks and we should be trying to eliminate it as much as possible--but because the current political climate means that people are too scared to speak up and say, "Hey, can we please maybe re-think how we approach this so we don't accidentally cause harm?"

I know this from experience. I spoke up about this at my company, pointing out that the form of training we use has been shown to have a backfire effect that hurts minorities. The backlash was swift and damaging--I was accused of being a privileged white person with hurt feelings who "wasn't willing to do the work." Meanwhile I got over a dozen private messages from minorities thanking me for speaking up and stating they had identical concerns.

I will definitely not be bringing up my concerns again, and neither will anyone else in my company with half a brain. Which means my company will continue to use a form of training that is known to increase racism, which freaking sucks.

What bugs me immensely about this whole situation is that we can't really discuss it in public. I feel like if I dare express disagreement with current policies and predominant views, I could be fired. I could be publicly attacked and shamed, even for what seems to me like rational arguments along the lines of "let's take a step back and look at this problem from multiple angles".

Being attacked and labeled as a racist because you dare question these kinds of policies essentially amounts to gaslighting, and the idea that we're not allowed to express disagreement against these kinds of policies is well, censorious and oppressive.

I agree, it's creating a very unhealthy environment that is breeding resentment and worsening the issues it's trying to solve.

Frankly, I feel like it has become its own flavor of religion. Often, suggesting that a religion change a practice to a "better" one is considered just as blasphemous as rejecting religion outright. I see a very similar parallel with these trainings, including the false invitation to "share your thoughts and feelings", which is used more as a tool to identify and hush "non-believers" than to critically examine any criticisms that may be brought forward.

Harvard is amazing place. Create a IAT to find out all hidden racist at work. Create trainings to fix the issue. Then perform studies to find out that anti-racism training are failing.

Yeah it's sad, I feel like Martin Luther King Junior's dream was a pipe dream. In a better world or maybe just a better place or time, it would have happened. But what we have now is obviously diverging more and more from his dream.

The most bizarre part of this age is the rewriting of Martin Luther King into a person who thought that Black Americans should be left to sink or swim in a segregated pool, because in the only speech they know he described a future utopian dream where white kids and black kids skipped hand in hand not seeing race.

Pool metaphor: It's not enough for lifeguards not to see race when the majority kids bully minority kids as groups. It inevitably leads to the lifeguards seeing the minority kids as the source of the problem, since they're always in the middle of any fight, and when they're gone the fights are fewer.

MLK actually wanted reparations for the black community for all the work that their slave ancestors did to enrich USA - mostly the white folk.

https://youtu.be/30ui1x-eKIw

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/martin-...