Comment by Spivak
18 days ago
I think even the people you would call the most woke hate mandatory DEI training. The idea is fine in theory, there's three main parts that seem to be common to them.
* Here's some genres of people you might not have interacted with in your personal life before that you might run into at work, and here's the broad strokes of how each of those groups would describe themselves and some cultural differences you might want to keep in mind.
* Here's a baby's first introduction to intersectionality and some situations where that lens might be relevant at work.
* Stop sexually harassing your coworkers, Jesus people.
But the implementation is unbelievably patronizing and presented with so much "sensitivity" that the overall experience is an hour of what feels like walking on eggshells. It's exhausting.
Agreed. But while pretty much everyone hates mandatory training, there's a large group of people who's beliefs align closely with that ideology. In other words, it's a real ideology, regardless of what one thinks about it.
My mental model here is to avoid labeling or lumping people into buckets and just forming opinions of them as an individual, for purely selfish reasons (not missing out on learning from that person).
From my perspective as a white person who grew up in very poor black and Latino communities, where we were often the only white family for several blocks, DEI training has been a super weird experience. I now live in an area where white is >90% of the population. I can't quite pin down why, but it feels really patronizing and disingenuous. I find myself often thinking about something that is taught in the training that my friends would find racist or offensive.
This is why I'd prefer they just stuck to kindness and respect. We're all flawed humans. That is our beauty.