anti-bias training

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 14 Oct 2021

Admittedly, neither her popularity nor her work in this field happened overnight. She earned a BA from Seattle University, then an MA and PhD from the University of Washington. She then went on to write books, teach, and coined the phrase “white fragility” in a peer review in 2011, and she has been doing anti-bias training since at least 2007. She has put in years of effort, but there are a couple problems: her rates and the fact that anti-bias training actually doesn’t work. First, a word about the money issue. Let me be clear: If there is a demand for what you can supply and it’s not illegal and won’t kill anyone, I commend your entrepreneurial spirit to give it a go and turn that into a business.

…

Yet, where is the uproar over the fact that DiAngelo, Wise, and others of their ilk are considered the leading authorities and are the ones who the majority of white people will listen to over the everyday Black activists who have been doing this work for decades? There wasn’t any. Don’t believe me? Let’s use DiAngelo as an example and look at the trajectory of her book and career since the New Yorker labeled her “the country’s most visible expert in anti-bias training.” At the time I’m writing this, White Fragility has been on the New York Times bestsellers list for ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FOUR WEEKS. That’s two and a half years. By comparison, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist has been on the list for forty-six weeks. Granted, his book was published a year after hers, in 2019, but the ratio is glaring: DiAngelo’s book has been on the list practically since publication, while Kendi’s has been on the list for only half of its book life.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer
Published 14 Jun 2021

For some Americans, especially educated white ones, the summer of 2020 became a season of white fragility, anti-Blackness, implicit bias, racial reckoning, allyship, and the “Fourth Founding” (after 1776, 1863, and 1965). This activism shifted the scene from blighted urban neighborhoods and prisons to human resources departments, anti-bias training sessions, and BIPOC reading lists. It was less interested in social reform than a revolution in consciousness. The pandemic almost disappeared from mind as millions of white people experienced the kind of collective moral awakening that comes over Americans in different periods of our history.

…

But talking about race rarely gets to the heart of the matter. The talk is crippled by fear, shame, hurt, anger, politeness, posturing, self-censorship, self-flagellation, and the inability of flawed human beings to rise to the subject’s huge demands. No one says what they think when the setting is a university classroom, an anti-bias training session, a newspaper op-ed, or a tweet. These are all performance spaces. It would be better to have real conversations, two people of different races alone in a room together, speaking, listening, responding, on and on, for an hour or two or three, telling the truth. Do it with a hundred different pairs, film the conversations, disguise the identities of the participants, and stream them unedited on YouTube.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever
by Alex Kantrowitz
Published 6 Apr 2020

If it can’t, now that federal regulators are bearing down and politicians are calling for its breakup, Facebook will end up in the very place Zuckerberg has long sought to avoid: as a footnote in technological history. CHAPTER 3 INSIDE SUNDAR PICHAI’S CULTURE OF COLLABORATION In July 2017, a little-known Google engineer named James Damore wrote a ten-page memo critiquing the company’s diversity and inclusion practices. He composed his memo after attending Google’s anti-bias trainings, and sent it to the sessions’ organizers in an attempt to deliver some feedback. Unequal representation of men and women in tech, Damore wrote, may be in part due to biological differences, and not overwhelmingly due to bias, as the trainings emphasized. Women are more neurotic than men, he said, a potential reason why they hold a smaller percentage of “high-stress” jobs.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

Well-respected companies like Coca-Cola implemented corporate programs teaching employees “to be less white” and that “to be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble” and that “white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white.”8 Starbucks said it would mandate anti-bias training for executives and tie their compensation to increasing minority representation in its workforce. In 2021, the new trend became unstoppable. In response to Georgia’s new voting rules this year, Delta’s CEO declared that “the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values,” failing to explain why Americans should care whether a voting law matches the values of an airline company.9 Coca-Cola’s CEO added: “Our focus is now on supporting federal legislation that protects voting access and addresses voter suppression across the country,” a statement that sounded more like that of a Super PAC than a soft drink manufacturer.10 Biotech industry leaders called on CEOs to “actively consider alternatives to investing within states that have enacted voter suppression laws” and to encourage “alternative venues for conferences and major meetings.”11 Hundreds of other companies issued similar statements.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All
by Laura Bates
Published 2 Sep 2020

Yet hundreds, even thousands, of men get away with such acts every day online, with no punishment whatsoever. We know that institutionalised prejudice is a problem within the police force. We know that women and certain groups – in particular, women of colour and LGBT people – have not always had positive responses when reporting to the police. System-wide anti-bias training would help to tackle issues around victim-blaming and the fact that these crimes are often not taken seriously. But this is not just an issue of individual failings. Indeed, many individual officers and forces are championing and supporting victims, but a widespread lack of funding and training hampers progress.