Is "race bias" training indoctrination?

Two articles discuss the legal, ideological and organizational implications of the so-called “race bias” trainings that are becoming compulsory in corporations, the government and universities. The lawyer and journalist Wender Kaminer writes in the Tablet that “Anti-racism or anti-bias training aims to uncover our racism for us, forcing us to explicitly (and publicly) confess and confront it. White people, including those who fought (or thought they fought) for racial justice, may think they know themselves, but the trainers know better. Dissent, much less resistance to reeducation, is simply denial, an expression of “white fragility.” The demands of anti-racism trainers are nonnegotiable. So, as mandatory training sessions proliferate in schools, government agencies, and private workplaces, litigation is inevitable. It’s already begun.” Michael Powell of The New York Times wrote an article about the events involving a student that claimed she was racially profiled while eating in a college dorm. An investigation found no evidence of bias. But the incident had a profound impact on the college community: “Those tensions come at a time when few in the Smith community feel comfortable publicly questioning liberal orthodoxy on race and identity, and some professors worry the administration is too deferential to its increasingly emboldened students.”

Comments