When ‘Diversity Training’ Is All About Feeding Racism


Last month, the city of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an e-mail inviting “white city employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in . . . white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to black, indigenous and people of color.” Hoping to learn more, I submitted a public-records request for all documentation related to the training.

The results are disturbing.

At the start, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to minorities. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racism and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles.

The city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to “whiteness” — that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.

Once the diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.” As part of this process, white employees must abandon their “white-normative behavior” and learn to let go of their “comfort,” “physical safety,” “social status” and “relationships with some other white people.”

As writer James Lindsay has pointed out, this isn’t the language of human resources; it is the language of cult programming — persuading members that they are defective in some predefined manner, exploiting their vulnerabilities and isolating them from previous relationships.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post

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Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal, documentary filmmaker, and research fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. This piece was adapted from City Journal.

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