Posted on 07/14/2007 4:39:36 AM PDT by Kaslin
If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, then corporate diversity training has to rank as one of the nastiest as well as newest. And it's considerably less honest. At least with a prostitute, a customer usually knows what he's getting in advance. A diversity trainer, on the other hand, is full of surprises -- at least for unsuspecting white employees. And they're not very pleasant surprises at that.
American corporations, contrary to their Far Left-manufactured caricature as bastions of "right-wing Republicans," have become boosters of anti-white racial and ethnic favoritism on a grand scale. Under the guise of "diversity," surely a more soothing and inclusive term than "affirmation action," our nation's largest companies have been busy during the last couple decades revolutionizing their respective organizations. If they remain profitable, that's despite the diversity regime they've forced upon employees, not because of it.
Diversity training and education has become a lucrative racket. At the invitation of their corporate benefactors, the people in this industry, whether working as in-house managers or as outside consultants, see as it as their mission to badger employees, especially white and/or male new hires, into availing themselves of prejudices ostensibly lurking deep within. Anyone doubting that intimidation is the name of the game should read "The Authoritarian Roots of Corporate Diversity Training," a new Special Report published by the National Legal and Policy Center.
Diversity training is a brief, intensive orientation program of lectures, audiovisual materials and role-playing exercises. In tone and substance, sadism rules the day. The training operates on an assumption that employees must be punished for sins not yet committed. CEOs typically openly tout diversity as integral to their respective company cultures. The Chrysler Group's Tom LaSorda is blunt about how he deals with subordinates who fail to promote diversity: "We'll kick their ass. They will be held accountable." Sprint's Gary Forsee, somewhat more benignly, states: "(A)ll Sprint Nextel managers are expected to embrace inclusion and diversity with their teams. This is an attribute of manager quality measured by our performance review process, which can impact bonuses."
Diversity, in the minds of such executives, is a full-time endeavor, something that must be lived, evaluated and reinforced every day, and not just during orientation. A company, wherever possible, must weave the diversity theme into relationships with board members, management, employees, suppliers, and anyone else with whom it does business.
A glossy monthly magazine, DiversityInc, makes sure that every company "gets it." The Newark, N.J.-based periodical each year comes out with a list of the nation's Top 50 Companies for Diversity. It's all about affirmative action and getting the requisite right numbers. "The Top 50 companies," writer Yoji Cole beamed last fall, "average 43 percent people of color in their new hires, while the national average for people of color in the work force is 28 percent. Almost 25 percent of Top 50 companies' managers are people of color, compared to 20 percent of the national work force. All of the Top 50 companies offer domestic-partner benefits for same-sex employees, compared with 49 percent of Fortune 500 companies."
The last thing any CEO or other management personnel wants is bad publicity from DiversityInc. It just might put a hold on career plans.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice for this state of affairs is a retired white elementary school teacher, Jane Elliott. A deceptively influential public figure, Mrs. Elliott got the ball rolling nearly 40 years ago with an exercise now common in schools, corporations, government agencies and other organizations.
On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King's assassination, she asked her third-grade pupils in tiny Riceville, Iowa, "How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?" Pause. "It would be hard to know, wouldn't it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?" A chorus of "Yeahs" went up. She'd clearly planned for this moment.
Without prior parental approval, Elliott proceeded to divide the room up into "blue-eyed" and "brown-eyed" students, proxies for white and black. She subjected "blue-eyed" pupils to a steady stream of verbal abuse, while giving preferential treatment to those who were "brown-eyed," encouraging them as well to taunt their peers. The next school day, she turned the tables -- it was the brown-eyed students' turn to suffer. But she noticed something this time. The blue-eyed students didn't take full advantage of their newfound upper-caste status. Eureka! Here was proof, or so Mrs. Elliott thought, that black underachievement was purely a product of white-dominated constructions of reality. The blue-eyed students had learned to empathize.
About a month later, thanks to student letters to the local paper, her exercise came to attention of Johnny Carson. She accepted his invitation to appear on "The Tonight Show." On the set, she gave a brief demonstration of her exercise. Once back home, she encountered hostility among her fellow teachers. Her children caught quite a few taunts from classmates, too.
The frosty local reaction merely hardened Mrs. Elliott's conviction that white America desperately needed her "training." She continued to push the exercise on her students. ABC-TV took notice, and in 1970 the network aired a documentary, "The Eye of the Storm," showing her in action. Later, in the mid 80s, as she was winding down her teaching career and beginning to apply her reprehensible talents to the corporate sector, PBS television did its own Jane Elliott documentary, "A Class Divided."
The Eighties were the right time to redirect corporate America toward a different path. Civil-rights attorneys, aided by the U.S. Justice Department, were discovering they could rack up huge settlements against companies guilty of allegedly discriminatory behavior. Corporate officials, in turn, saw hiring diversity trainers as a way of protecting their companies from lawsuits.
The industry took off like a rocket, packaged with egalitarian enthusiasm. The early leaders in diversity education, as Ryan O'Donnell noted several years ago, had their origins on the far Left. Marilyn Loden, Elsie Cross, Judith Katz, Mark Chesler, Lillian Roybal Rose, Tom Kochman and Price Cobbs -- all drew inspiration from their experiences in higher education and civil-rights radicalism. The result, not unpredictably, was an upsurge in discrimination and harassment complaints, more than 200 percent during 1991-2002.
A new retailing niche simultaneously emerged. The Jane Elliott training film library now includes such scintillating titles as "Blue-Eyed," "The Angry Eye," "The Stolen Eye," and "The Essential Blue-Eyed." National MultiCultural Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based diversity consultant, aggressively promotes her videos over the Web. So does the Encino, Calif.-based Business Training Media, Inc., which sells "The Essential Blue-Eyed" for $299.99. The company excitedly describes its contents:
Elliott divides a multiracial group of Midwesterners on the basis of eye color and then subjects the blue-eyed members to a withering regime of humiliation and contempt. In just a few hours, we watch grown professionals become distracted and despondent, stumbling over the simplest of commands. People of color in the group express surprise that whites react so quickly to the kind of discrimination they face every day of their lives.
Apparently, there is nothing like "a withering regime of humiliation and contempt" to boost profits. At least that's what many of today's CEOs want to believe.
All of this is rooted in a bitterly anti-white worldview. Here's a sample of Jane Elliott's factually-challenged wisdom in a Web interview circa 1998:
You're all sitting here writing in a language [English] that white people didn't come up with. You're all sitting here writing on paper that white people didn't invent. Most of you are wearing clothes made out of cloth that white people didn't come up with. We stole these ideas from other people. If you're a Christian, you're believing in a philosophy that came to us from people of color.
Move over, Louis Farrakhan, you've got competition from a white woman. That General Electric, ExxonMobil, AT&T and IBM, among other major corporations, have brought her in to personally lead training sessions ought to strike one as alarming. Her standard daily fee, at least as of several years ago, was $6,000.
Every diversity educator in a real sense is ratifying the legacy of Jane Elliott. That includes those who practice their craft abroad. One of her close associates in Great Britain, a black woman named Gillian Neish, has her own consulting operation. "We are committed to anti-racist, anti-oppressive ways of working and to making equity a reality," reads her website, www.neishtraining.com. A disillusioned government diversity specialist recently described the consequences of such rhetoric:
You cannot overestimate the damage to race relations that "diversity awareness" training is causing in this country. It's having the opposite effect to that intended, causing divisions, resentment, and an increase in judgments based on race, where previously such things were actually quite rare. How do I know this? I was involved in putting together a diversity "toolkit" for a government department, and saw first-hand the effect it had as it was rammed down the throats of staff.
Corporate officials point to such training as necessary to the bottom line. For them, diversity awareness "connects" their company with underserved populations. Without it, a firm will be at a competitive global disadvantage with companies flexible enough to reach out.
Many companies thus have created their own diversity departments. The specialists who run them aren't bashful about their motives. Deborah Dagit, executive director of diversity and work environment for Merck & Co., states, "We've been so nationalistic for so long that we don't recognize how we interact in the rest of the world." Company executives are delighted to have such people aboard. A number of years ago, IBM's then-CEO, Louis Gerstner, proudly introduced to his board Ted Childs, the company's new vice president of global workforce diversity, as "the most relentless man I've ever met."
All of this has relevance to immigration debate. Diversity education and evaluation, company officials reason, are a sound approach to accommodating the rising percentage of nonwhites in the U.S. work force. Instrumental to this shift, outside of native-born blacks, has been mass immigration. Our "need" for diversity training in large measure is a product of the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Mass immigration from Third World nations, especially Spanish-speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere, effectively operates as a de facto affirmative-action hiring program, a reality the late Hugh Davis Graham explained in his book, "Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America," (Oxford University Press, 2003). Congress made this connection quite explicit back in 1990 when it created the "diversity lottery" visa. The program annually admits up to 50,000 persons to the U.S. originating from nations that have sent no more than 50,000 immigrants over the previous five years. By no coincidence, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., an affirmative-action enthusiast without peer, led the charge for this piece of legislation.
In this context, it is quite understandable why major corporations have become fanatic about rooting out the tiniest hints of racial-ethnic bias from their respective organizations. It isn't simply that they want to avoid a Justice Department lawsuit. More to the point, they've come to accept the worldview of their Leftist tormentors. Peddling multiculturalism, of which Third World immigration is a variation, can render them as good corporate citizens, while providing a nearly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor.
Until Congress, immigration authorities, and the courts take steps to significantly restrict immigration, corporations will have a never-ending "need" for diversity -- and diversity trainers. Exacerbating ethnic and racial tensions under the pretext of alleviating them is a full-time job. And there are plenty of openings.
Carl F. Horowitz is director of the Organized Labor Accountability Project of the National Legal and Policy Center, a Townhall.com Gold Partner organization dedicated to promoting ethics in American public life.
My wife is a teacher and was teaching in rural Indiana. (There were only 2 blacks and 5 Asians in a K-12 school.)
In diversity training she pointed out that this was a bunch of “horse-hockey” because there was no black/white problem.
BUT, the 1-8 grades had about 30% Amish and there was pretty bad harassment and violence of the Amish. So she said, “Shouldn't’ we be teaching respect for all cultures?”
She was told to shut up and to listen to the message of the course. Of course the message was, “White Liberal Guilt needs to be the operating principle this school district works under.”
It’s David’s picture, but the article is not David’s.
So the future I see for all of us is:
Morning we trade our energy credits.
Afternoon we engage in reparations research - and pay various groups for their past generational suffering.
Nights we seek out more victims to compensate for all of the evil whites have caused.
Ping to read later.
More like regular kaka.
I was “allowed” to bypass the class after the initial introduction of meanings of diversity etc including African American, Mexican-American, Asian American, Caucasian-American ............management wanted me counseled. I refused and told em I did so on the recommendation of my lawyer. Diversity Class was a training class, to discuss the issues what was and wasn’t allowed in the workplace.
They opened the discussion and didn’t like my questions to the point that they said I was disruptive........they don’t want answers then they shouldn’t ask questions IMO.
I asked em to point out on the flat earth society globe they were using the country of Caucusia. (The Caucus Mountains maybe ?)
Second question I asked was why the curriculum is never taught by a white male ?
Third question was how much do they make with their “Keep the Hate Alive” course they peddle ot corporate america ?
A gazillon ways to dislike a person before you ever discover what their color or sex or country of origin is...........words , actions, etc pretty much paint the picture as we see here on FR. Race cards are for losers.....
Transactional analysis , I’m Ok, your Ok....BS / PC theories of Maslow, Demming, Black belt & Diversity training etc ....waste of time. I don’t allow my folks to attend socialist training crap.
If your lazy, unreliable, unproductive, disruptor, dishonest, trouble making sh*t stirring POS etc then you don’t work for me. Regardless of race, sex, religion or age.
I am an equal opportunity headhunter !
Isn’t that terrible? You liberal boss. UCK.
bttt
They started with examples that were obviously either racist or sexist. Then they would ask about innocuous statements such as "You look great today!", or "I really like your new hairstyle." When we at first didn't find these statements particularly harassing or offensive, the trainer made sure to harangue us about how wrong we really were. We're all pigs and scum, apparently, and we'd better watch every word that comes out of our mouths.
Actually no one is REQUIRED to subject themselves to this nonsense -its just that the American sheeple either don’t seem to know any better or dont stand up for their rights
Oh, and each and every manager had to post a giant poster with a pink triangle that read “SAFE SPACE”. When I questioned who and from what exactly needed to be saved, I was stared down with daggers.
Diversity training=white male on the bottom of the list.
The pro homosexual people have seized control of some of the policy writing tasks inside the company. One shouldn't read the current manuals on a full stomach as they aren't properly marked with barf alerts. The company employees are also stuck with higher insurance premiums as we subsidize the "same sex" and homosexual medical costs.
I really don't give a damn about "diversity". I want to get the job done. I'll pick the most capable people to accomplish the task at hand.
I was reading through a recent government proposal. It has some pretty substantially difficult technical objectives to achieve. It is also riddled with nearly impossible to attain "diversity" requirement. My colleagues are reviewing the proposal to make a bid/no-bid assessment. We have the technical talent to handle the technical requirements. It may still end up a "no-bid" because the technical talent to do the job doesn't measure up to the "diversity" ideals.
He did more than that. He made a blanket statement that no white males would be getting raises or promotions. He made the comment behind closed doors where he didn't think it would get out. Wrong. I was working at a Wingcast in San Diego (Ford/Qualcomm) when he made the statement. We heard about it within 15 minutes of the utterance. The immediate reaction was "Screw him". There was an immediate revolt and work slow down. The white males stopped putting in extra effort. They just worked the standard hours and made no extra effort to correct the errors being made by those with the preferred skin color.
Jack Nasser was handed his walking papers shortly after his stupid utterance. Wingcast folded the shop in June 2002, so I wasn't around to see what Bill Ford did to try to fix the damage done by Nasser. Wingcast was the ultimate exercise in "diversity". It was populated with H1B labor from around the world. It was also an abject failure. Too many highly compensated H1Bs with a terrible work ethic. Too many who were creative resume writers who couldn't deliver on the bottom line.
I wrote him quick note on the .signature. I asked him to consider where he was working and what new symbol was used on the men's restroom. The .signature disappeared. He hadn't considered the "possibilities" that it might have offered in his new office.
LOL — It was some time ago now. But the facilitator was complaining that not enough women were being promoted to high levels in the company. I said, “That is because many of them quit the corporate ladder to stay home and raise a family. So that in itself lessens the odds for women.” They didn’t want to hear such blasphemy.
Then I mentioned to them that my wife was a stay at home mom who made raising our children a priority instead of a corporate career. I was a real problem for them.
But I also challenged every little so called statistic they would throw out, challenging its accuracy, or offering non-PC reasons for it. The guy was really glad when the class was over. And I made it into a fun time instead of the drudgery it really was or could have been.
The great thing about it was my being vocal allowed other men in the group to be vocal too. It really derailed the who class. And all that was required was that we attended.. So I did that. LOL
I basically played it for what it was a joke.
“My question - why are the politicians and corporations so desperately trying to eliminate White Christians and Jews and destroy this country?”
Exactly. The world is the corporate onion. Just think of all that money to be made by the vast untapped masses. In addition to how controllable they will be. Certainly much less non sense about liberty and a “government of the people” if we can just get rid of strong largely white Judeo-Christian countries that are what stand in the way. Meanwhile we have a certain Republican component who thinks it is all just great. Capitalism and “Free markets” don’t you know. Why shouldn’t corporations be able to make money this way? We have too many brainwashed “citizens” who are either easily intimidated are naively buy into what they are selling.
I had to attend a three day reeducation session about 10 years ago. When the session began, the black female facilitator opened by assuring us that she had not been given this task simply because she was a black female. The whole room of about 150 erupted into uproarious laughter that lasted several minutes. She was completely off her game from then on and several of us spent the next three days challenging her assertions at every turn.
She was nearly brought to tears on several occasions, particularly when she said that Malcolm X wasn’t a racist and she was excoriated by about twenty guys, including several blacks. She also told us that blacks and hispanics love their families. I told her I was quite find of my kin as well, in case that wasn’t in her notes.
find = fond
Well, when the chief says it’s required then I had several choices. Go on their dime, refuse and get fired for insubordination or resign. I’m not a believer in cutting off my nose to spite my face.
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