We all need to move on from the idea that if a group (or person) has more privilege than you on some axis of oppression, it’s okay to treat them badly. I used to fall into this when I was younger, talking about men and straight people in ways that I’d never talk about other groups. I won’t do it anymore. We all need to stop tolerating it.
It’s wrong, and more importantly it’s damaging to adopt this mentality—it sets us up for endless conflict.
One of the seductive aspects of “social justice” is that you get to be a bully and call it fighting oppression. You don’t even need to be oppressed to join in; plenty of white people get off on scolding other white people.
100%. In our final exchange I told her I knew what she thought of me, and that all of my objections stemmed from my “whiteness,” but I didn’t believe she thought of me that way because she’s Black. I told her I know for a fact there are a multitude of white people who would say and think the same thing about me.
I have some hope that this will self-adjust gradually. I remember when my best friend came out in college in the 90s, she went all-in hard on embracing everything she felt was involved with being a "real" lesbian: referring to herself as a dyke (which I feel weird about writing but weirder about trying to visually bleep out), making casually hostile comments about men/breeders/whatever, cycling through various calculated hairstyles and pointedly masculine outfits. It was like she needed to prove she truly belonged to her new community because she didn't have a lot of personal connections to anyone else in it yet. Once she actually got into her first relationship and joined a gay women's singing group and had a tangible community, the blatant signaling gradually petered out and she had just morphed into a slightly amplified and more confident version of the person she'd been before. When I'm feeling optimistic, I hope that part of the insanity of the current moment is rampant insecurity and lack of reassuring human contact to remind us that each of us, as is, is enough and ok and doing the best we can. I'm not sure a lot of online people have sufficient live human communities to remind them that each of us just feeling free to be ourselves every day is the best path forward. I'm very sympathetic to the extremely human desire to belong, but I think lately we're doing more excluding and shrinking when we should be enlarging and including.
(accidentally posted before I meant to, but hopefully managed to edit some sense into the ramble!)
You have a lot more patience than I do. As soon as I read someone make a statement that starts with any kind of broad race or identity based generalization I more or less write them off. Even if they're just describing their own life, I find it hard to believe that ALL the (insert group) they've ever encountered are (insert adjective). It speaks to either an incredible shallowness of lived experience, a deep inability to pay attention, or a lack of fundamental intelligence. Most likely all three.
I would really like to know who this author was, though....
This person not only claims a white best friend, but has a white family member. If you email me I'll respond and tell you. Its my first name dot last name at gmail
Oh man… I’ve kinda been there, there being both sides of that exchange!! I know how you feel. It’s just so frustrating to try to communicate something that seems so clear to you but is being heard through a distortive lens that apparently makes you sound like an asshole. From having been in her shoes too, all I can say is, you might have planted a seed, or watered a seed, or fertilized the ground or something. One day she could have a (hopefully not too painful) eureka moment where she finally understands what all these people have been trying to tell her. Or not… but one can hope 🤷🏻♀️
And yes to the cognitive distortions… I’m kind of surprised we don’t see more people pointing this out. I did a talk at a women's professional conference in the fall that was a modified version of the one I shared on my blog (actually being inclusive about inclusion). In it I listed all the cognitive distortions I’d been engaging in when it comes to DEI: mind reading, labeling, black and white thinking, filtering, blaming, catastrophizing, blah blah blah. You could see the light turn on in the eyes of the folks in the audience… “ohhhh shit.” I think the fact that it’s possible for people to snap out of it, that I’ve WATCHED them snap out of it, makes it all the more frustrating when you can’t break through. But kudos for trying.
Honestly that’s I think why I was so affected by this: I have been there. This time last year or certainly two years ago, I would’ve absorbed the blow. Because it’s time for white women to shut up. Then I remembered that prejudging by phenotype is wrong, no matter who you’re talking about. I also brought up the pseudo religious language because this person was formerly a religious themed writer. I suggested some of the theories that are providing this lens and language are filling a church-sized hole in a lot of peoples lives. But I’ve moved beyond accepting original sin, again no matter who is suggesting it.
I hadn't really ever thought about applying the CBT lens to the most maddening SJ arguments -- it's very smart. CBT and the techniques I learned saved me in college. I still have workbook pages I'll pull out sometimes to reason myself out of spirals.
To your experience here, while the abstract explanation that "people make these ridiculous arguments so they can't lose -- any objection signals that you're being defensive and thus 'not doing the work,' therefore you will never win" makes sense and can be reassuring when you run into these ideas online in a general, removed way... it's different when it comes from someone you respect and genuinely expected more nuance from. You're sort of forced to either feel betrayed and misunderstood or like a villain -- and neither option is fun (or, really, gets anyone anywhere).
Second, I'm glad you touched on the religious parallel at the end. Growing up super religious it was a constant cause of perplexment for me when people around me would talk about their religious experience. This isn't to denigrate the religious (I'm more religious than 99% of online leftists, which means I'm moderately religious). But people would tell me how they felt "God's presence" or "God move them" and this led to them having beliefs about His existence.
Now, maybe God just wasn't fond of me, but I always assumed those were just figures of speech. There's a thing called objective truth and all your feelings tell me is about how you feel. Which is important! But we're not Cartesians, it's not actually determinative of the real world.
It sometimes astounds me that there's a movement that marries one of my core beliefs (equality!) with the antithesis of everything I believe morally and logically. It's really impressive.
And I hadn't thought of it exactly as you put it in your final paragraph. But it resonates.
I don't really consider myself "religious" anymore though I absolutely still believe that prayer can be comforting, calming and beneficial (which is different than thinking it's influencing a supreme being). But even when I was very religious, I was never truly comfortable with language like "God led me to x" or "God told me y."
This was a terrific essay, on an important topic, Erin! I think the DEI way of confronting problems is ineffective for all the reasons you cite. Because it encourages generalizing behaviors from individuals to their identity groups, and because it doesn’t accept arguments about intentions, it turns white people into the enemy. White people in these seminars might actually have the same goals as the DEI trainers, but might think there are better ways to bring them about—for example, there’s a lot of evidence that diversity trainings are most successful when they don’t split people into identity groups but instead put people together to solve a common problem. This difference of opinion doesn’t make the white people in the training racist. Plus, human psychology being what it is, no one responds well to being scolded—ahem—“called out” publicly. It just makes people defensive.
On a side note, I love your new title—great Homer Simpson reference!
That is so funny about Homer Simpson because I wasn't even thinking of that! My grandmother used to say when I was disheveled (frequently) that it looked as though I'd been pulled through a hedge backward :) But it works for both.
And right on about your comments. This writer/consultant couldn't/wouldn't agree that gross generalizations when talking to an audience about this very subject matter is insulting. She wasn't speaking in historical terms, or even with any qualifiers. It was just straight up insults. She didn't see it that way.
I think "white" is far too singular a descriptor. Do we mean descendants of the Pilgrims? Do we mean Lithuanians who came to Chicago after 1918? Do we mean Italians from Calabria who arrived in New York between the 1880s and WWI? Do we mean the Irish who came after the famine in the 1840s? Do we mean the Poles who came after 1870? Do we mean the German Moravians who came to North Carolina in the 1750s? They may all be "white," but they have different histories, traditions and religions.
That was a major part of my point to her. My neighbor from Queens has a totally different life than my neighbor down the street from Nigeria than either of them have from the Afro-Latino family on the corner, but they all have more melanin than me so that makes them a group?
Yes, I agree. I am willing to support DEI work, but I won't do it by denouncing "white" people as most of them have harrowing stories of arrival, too. (I'm 1/2 Irish; 1/2 Hispanic).
Before taking my leave I insisted that I’m not giving up anti racism or whatever you want to call it, or even DEI in general. There are a lot of thinkers out there that I could name, all of whom are people of color, who I feel are presenting a better way.
I keep waiting for the one person at an office with lawyer friends, money, and a big streak of F U in him who's going to refuse to undergo DEI training and then, when disciplined, sue. I know very little of the relevant law (which of course varies from state to state) but I confidently anticipate (i.e. hope desperately) that they will win and, in doing so, reshape the landscape of the American workplace.
We all need to move on from the idea that if a group (or person) has more privilege than you on some axis of oppression, it’s okay to treat them badly. I used to fall into this when I was younger, talking about men and straight people in ways that I’d never talk about other groups. I won’t do it anymore. We all need to stop tolerating it.
It’s wrong, and more importantly it’s damaging to adopt this mentality—it sets us up for endless conflict.
One of the seductive aspects of “social justice” is that you get to be a bully and call it fighting oppression. You don’t even need to be oppressed to join in; plenty of white people get off on scolding other white people.
100%. In our final exchange I told her I knew what she thought of me, and that all of my objections stemmed from my “whiteness,” but I didn’t believe she thought of me that way because she’s Black. I told her I know for a fact there are a multitude of white people who would say and think the same thing about me.
I have some hope that this will self-adjust gradually. I remember when my best friend came out in college in the 90s, she went all-in hard on embracing everything she felt was involved with being a "real" lesbian: referring to herself as a dyke (which I feel weird about writing but weirder about trying to visually bleep out), making casually hostile comments about men/breeders/whatever, cycling through various calculated hairstyles and pointedly masculine outfits. It was like she needed to prove she truly belonged to her new community because she didn't have a lot of personal connections to anyone else in it yet. Once she actually got into her first relationship and joined a gay women's singing group and had a tangible community, the blatant signaling gradually petered out and she had just morphed into a slightly amplified and more confident version of the person she'd been before. When I'm feeling optimistic, I hope that part of the insanity of the current moment is rampant insecurity and lack of reassuring human contact to remind us that each of us, as is, is enough and ok and doing the best we can. I'm not sure a lot of online people have sufficient live human communities to remind them that each of us just feeling free to be ourselves every day is the best path forward. I'm very sympathetic to the extremely human desire to belong, but I think lately we're doing more excluding and shrinking when we should be enlarging and including.
(accidentally posted before I meant to, but hopefully managed to edit some sense into the ramble!)
You have a lot more patience than I do. As soon as I read someone make a statement that starts with any kind of broad race or identity based generalization I more or less write them off. Even if they're just describing their own life, I find it hard to believe that ALL the (insert group) they've ever encountered are (insert adjective). It speaks to either an incredible shallowness of lived experience, a deep inability to pay attention, or a lack of fundamental intelligence. Most likely all three.
I would really like to know who this author was, though....
This person not only claims a white best friend, but has a white family member. If you email me I'll respond and tell you. Its my first name dot last name at gmail
Oh man… I’ve kinda been there, there being both sides of that exchange!! I know how you feel. It’s just so frustrating to try to communicate something that seems so clear to you but is being heard through a distortive lens that apparently makes you sound like an asshole. From having been in her shoes too, all I can say is, you might have planted a seed, or watered a seed, or fertilized the ground or something. One day she could have a (hopefully not too painful) eureka moment where she finally understands what all these people have been trying to tell her. Or not… but one can hope 🤷🏻♀️
And yes to the cognitive distortions… I’m kind of surprised we don’t see more people pointing this out. I did a talk at a women's professional conference in the fall that was a modified version of the one I shared on my blog (actually being inclusive about inclusion). In it I listed all the cognitive distortions I’d been engaging in when it comes to DEI: mind reading, labeling, black and white thinking, filtering, blaming, catastrophizing, blah blah blah. You could see the light turn on in the eyes of the folks in the audience… “ohhhh shit.” I think the fact that it’s possible for people to snap out of it, that I’ve WATCHED them snap out of it, makes it all the more frustrating when you can’t break through. But kudos for trying.
Honestly that’s I think why I was so affected by this: I have been there. This time last year or certainly two years ago, I would’ve absorbed the blow. Because it’s time for white women to shut up. Then I remembered that prejudging by phenotype is wrong, no matter who you’re talking about. I also brought up the pseudo religious language because this person was formerly a religious themed writer. I suggested some of the theories that are providing this lens and language are filling a church-sized hole in a lot of peoples lives. But I’ve moved beyond accepting original sin, again no matter who is suggesting it.
I hadn't really ever thought about applying the CBT lens to the most maddening SJ arguments -- it's very smart. CBT and the techniques I learned saved me in college. I still have workbook pages I'll pull out sometimes to reason myself out of spirals.
To your experience here, while the abstract explanation that "people make these ridiculous arguments so they can't lose -- any objection signals that you're being defensive and thus 'not doing the work,' therefore you will never win" makes sense and can be reassuring when you run into these ideas online in a general, removed way... it's different when it comes from someone you respect and genuinely expected more nuance from. You're sort of forced to either feel betrayed and misunderstood or like a villain -- and neither option is fun (or, really, gets anyone anywhere).
First, obviously I'm flattered. Thank you!
Second, I'm glad you touched on the religious parallel at the end. Growing up super religious it was a constant cause of perplexment for me when people around me would talk about their religious experience. This isn't to denigrate the religious (I'm more religious than 99% of online leftists, which means I'm moderately religious). But people would tell me how they felt "God's presence" or "God move them" and this led to them having beliefs about His existence.
Now, maybe God just wasn't fond of me, but I always assumed those were just figures of speech. There's a thing called objective truth and all your feelings tell me is about how you feel. Which is important! But we're not Cartesians, it's not actually determinative of the real world.
It sometimes astounds me that there's a movement that marries one of my core beliefs (equality!) with the antithesis of everything I believe morally and logically. It's really impressive.
No, I'M flattered.
And I hadn't thought of it exactly as you put it in your final paragraph. But it resonates.
I don't really consider myself "religious" anymore though I absolutely still believe that prayer can be comforting, calming and beneficial (which is different than thinking it's influencing a supreme being). But even when I was very religious, I was never truly comfortable with language like "God led me to x" or "God told me y."
This was a terrific essay, on an important topic, Erin! I think the DEI way of confronting problems is ineffective for all the reasons you cite. Because it encourages generalizing behaviors from individuals to their identity groups, and because it doesn’t accept arguments about intentions, it turns white people into the enemy. White people in these seminars might actually have the same goals as the DEI trainers, but might think there are better ways to bring them about—for example, there’s a lot of evidence that diversity trainings are most successful when they don’t split people into identity groups but instead put people together to solve a common problem. This difference of opinion doesn’t make the white people in the training racist. Plus, human psychology being what it is, no one responds well to being scolded—ahem—“called out” publicly. It just makes people defensive.
On a side note, I love your new title—great Homer Simpson reference!
That is so funny about Homer Simpson because I wasn't even thinking of that! My grandmother used to say when I was disheveled (frequently) that it looked as though I'd been pulled through a hedge backward :) But it works for both.
And right on about your comments. This writer/consultant couldn't/wouldn't agree that gross generalizations when talking to an audience about this very subject matter is insulting. She wasn't speaking in historical terms, or even with any qualifiers. It was just straight up insults. She didn't see it that way.
I think "white" is far too singular a descriptor. Do we mean descendants of the Pilgrims? Do we mean Lithuanians who came to Chicago after 1918? Do we mean Italians from Calabria who arrived in New York between the 1880s and WWI? Do we mean the Irish who came after the famine in the 1840s? Do we mean the Poles who came after 1870? Do we mean the German Moravians who came to North Carolina in the 1750s? They may all be "white," but they have different histories, traditions and religions.
That was a major part of my point to her. My neighbor from Queens has a totally different life than my neighbor down the street from Nigeria than either of them have from the Afro-Latino family on the corner, but they all have more melanin than me so that makes them a group?
Yes, I agree. I am willing to support DEI work, but I won't do it by denouncing "white" people as most of them have harrowing stories of arrival, too. (I'm 1/2 Irish; 1/2 Hispanic).
Before taking my leave I insisted that I’m not giving up anti racism or whatever you want to call it, or even DEI in general. There are a lot of thinkers out there that I could name, all of whom are people of color, who I feel are presenting a better way.
We should ban DEI training
Now, Klaus. What’ve I told you about banning.
I keep waiting for the one person at an office with lawyer friends, money, and a big streak of F U in him who's going to refuse to undergo DEI training and then, when disciplined, sue. I know very little of the relevant law (which of course varies from state to state) but I confidently anticipate (i.e. hope desperately) that they will win and, in doing so, reshape the landscape of the American workplace.
WOW. I hadn't read that. Good for her.
I thought I understood the article until I read the comments. Now, I don't understand either the comments or the article.