Which actually really boils down to what the word "white male privilege" really means. If you think politics is annoying, then it's because you're privileged enough for it to not matter.
I've worked at a company that heavily encouraged discussion of politics at work, and it was a nightmare. The things management sponsored (at the request of employees) included:
- A women-only Slack channel.
- Women-only events, such as a free screening of Wonder Woman. The men at the company were expected to work during that time.
- An "ally skills workshop"[1], which attempted to indoctrinate us with an explicitly racist and sexist ideology.
- A Diversity Council that had the explicit goal of increasing the number of non-white non-men in engineering. One time when I was invited to a meeting of the council, I said that their goal should be to eliminate bias in the hiring process (such as by blinding resumes, replacing phone screens with text-only mediums, etc). I was taken aside and chastised for my statements.
If I had actually said my opinions, I have no doubt I would have been fired for my beliefs. If that's what happens when people are encouraged to bring their politics to work (especially in SF), I will gladly take the "no politics" option.
When disagreement almost ensures punishment (further indoctrination sessions with some career damage taken, on the "least harsh" side of the spectrum, to the loss of one's job, income and a heavily tarnished reputation on the other), I would be less inclined to call it indoctrination and more inclined to call it forced re-education.
Wow. Did that company implode? What's the point of so openly dividing your employees along political lines? How are you supposed to work as a team? It's bad enough with normal workplace troubles like pay differences and whatever else.
>"I said that their goal should be to eliminate bias in the hiring process (such as by blinding resumes, replacing phone screens with text-only mediums, etc). I was taken aside and chastised for my statements."
While it does sound like a good idea to eliminate bias, appearance is a contributory factor in the hiring process. If someone turns up with matted hair, hasn't showered in months, and is wearing a pizza stained t-shirt then most companies won't want to hire them and most employees won't want to work near them. Good idea in theory, not really in practice. You're going to have to have a face-to-face interview at _some_ point and that's when (mostly subconscious) racism/sexism/\*ism will
Also, that first slide from the workshop presentation reminded me how much I hate the push for people to declare pronouns. Contrapoints tweeted about this from a trans perspective[1] and got labeled "problematic" by a lot of leftists.
> If someone turns up with matted hair, hasn't showered in months, and is wearing a pizza stained t-shirt then most companies won't want to hire them and most employees won't want to work near them.
Such a person would probably stink, which is a sensible reason for employees not to work with them. Such a person also appears to demonstrate either being unaware of (very unlikely unless their sense of smell is broken and they don't have any friends who have told them it's a problem), or not caring about inflicting their stench on their prospective coworkers, which probably implies something bad about their judgment and considerateness, which is also a sensible reason not to hire them.
If you never saw the person until hiring them, that could be an issue; but if it were a line item in company policy (maybe alongside the dress code) that employees shall not inflict a stench on others, then at least you could get on their case about it on day 1, and have a fully justified reason to fire them quickly if they didn't shape up. Of course it'd be more efficient to have not hired them at all, but there will always be some problems you just don't find out about until later. I don't think this particular failure mode is common.
Any ideology which hinges on the "blank slate" hypothesis is extreme, insofar as that hypothesis is very obviously false. Furthermore, intersectionalism is essentially a conspiracy theory.
That's, uh, a wild statement. You don't think people disadvantaged on multiple axes have a harder time than people on one or none? Because that's what intersectionality means.
No one is on "one or none" "axis of disadvantage". Everyone is born with many advantages and many disadvantages. Intersectionality is concerned exclusively with the the advantages held by white men in Western democracies. Women have many advantages that men don't have, but intersectionalists don't care about those.
Western society has a long history of producing ideologies centered on guilt and sexual propriety, and intersectionality is just the latest iteration. It's a descendant of puritanism.
My reading of the slide is that they're making the distinction that it's an action (verb) not a state of being (identity), similar to the meme that "human being" is an action rather than a thing.
I take the following sentences as confirming this reading:
> Being a marginalized person takes no action - it is an identity:
> Acting as an ally is about action - it is not an identity, which is why we talk about "ally skills" instead of "allies"
> Depending on what is most relevant about you to the situation, you may switch between being marginalized and acting as an ally
Yes, of course. It would be useful to include some of that information on the slide to help justify why the session is three hours. As it, I think the author loses credibility as this is an irrational, non-data driven conclusion.
Using evidence to support statements is even more important when introducing a new concept to an audience.
Believing that the teaching you how to be a good ally is racist and sexist (against white men, I assume) is probably why you didn't fit in great there. I read that whole slideset and there's nothing racist in there - unless you're counting the scenarios of "what not to do."
The slides didn't have the explicitly racist and sexist bits. Basically if you were a white guy, you weren't allowed to interrupt anyone and anyone was allowed to interrupt you. There were also implications that one should discriminate against white men when choosing who to hire, who to promote, and who to have speak at conferences.
So if the white male has some important information for the bottom line of the company, should he wait 2hrs for wonder woman to stop playing or go and 'interrupt' 10 women not working and be a bad ally? What a joke.
Yeah, people have meetings. People go to lunch sometimes, or have appointments outside the workplace.
If it's "stop the world" important and absolutely needs to be dealt with right now, interrupt it, same as you would any other break. Otherwise, deal with it like you would any other situation.
The ideology is not especially deserving of anything but ridicule, but I went through the slides and excerpted some particularly goofy stuff.
"Marginalized person: Any woman who wants to work for
pay for an employer"
"Oppression: The self-reinforcing system of stories, TV,
news coverage, police, and legal system stereotyping Black
people as criminals, that benefits non-Black people and
harms Black people"
What TV shows has the author been watching? For my entire life, at least 95% of the depictions of black people that I've seen on television have been positive, sometimes to the point of being pandering. (For example, if a show has a black character and a white character, and one has to do something wrong to advance the plot, it will be the white character, because that won't cause outrage, while the reverse will.)
"You are eating lunch in the employee kitchen when a
group sits down near you. One person comments
loudly “If I ate that, I’d be as big as a house!” A
higher-weight coworker is sitting nearby and can clearly
overhear."
It's not clear who's talking to whom here. If it's someone commenting on the lunch of a coworker with whom they're not sitting, well, I've never seen behavior like that in any workplace, nor have I heard of anything like that happening. If it's someone commenting on one of their lunch-mates' lunches, then it's none of the "higher"-weight coworker's business.
"Higher weight people face workplace discrimination,
particularly women, regardless of ability to do the job
Body size is falsely equated with virtue: self-control, hard
worker, in good health"
Body size is correctly associated with self-control, energy, and good health. The proportion of overweight people who couldn't reach a normal weight if they ate sensibly and exercised is tiny. The "healthy at any weight" meme is absurd.
"Black people face a much a higher bar than white
people during hiring (and in general), and white people
often get a pass or exceptions to the process"
Bullshit.
"A co-worker shares an article on your work Slack
claiming that white men are biologically more suited to
STEM careers, saying "I don't agree with all of it, but it
has some good points." Another co-worker replies,
saying that they disagree with the article but we have
to be tolerant of co-workers with different political
views because diversity of thought is important too."
Men are biologically more suited to STEM careers, on average. You have to be willfully blind not to see that this is true. Why does this make people so angry?
""Office housework" is necessary but unrewarded work
(taking notes, organizing parties, tidying, etc.)
People of color and women of all races are expected to do
more of this work and punished for not doing it"
Bullshit.
"On a company mailing list, someone writes “How would
you explain this [technical thing] to your grandmother?”"
Old women (and, to a lesser extent, old men) are much more likely to have trouble with technology than are young men (and, to a lesser extent, young women). Again, why does this make people so angry?
Intersectionalism is just borderline personality disorder in ideological form.
Half the stuff you called "bullshit" on have been scientifically tested (and proved) in reputable journals.
You're projecting emotion on your perceived opponents ("why does this make people so angry") because your dismissal of their arguments depends on it. If you instead took this discussion seriously, you'd lose the ability to be sure you were right.
I don't expect you to have a revelation overnight, but sit down and think sometime about why this topic is so scary for you.
"Half the stuff you called "bullshit" on have been scientifically tested (and proved) in reputable journals."
I called two claims bullshit, so I presume you believe that one of them has been proven. Which one? Citation?
I'm not projecting anything onto anyone. I--like many other reasonable people--am bewildered by the intersectional left's refusal to accept reality. They are in fact the ones who become enraged when you point out obvious truths, such as that men and women are different.
The topic doesn't scare me, but if the discourse in the West continues down its current path, intersectionalism could become a dangerous thing. The core of the ideology is resentment, and history has shown that these resentment-based ideologies often have horrific results. (See, e.g., the the Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution, etc.)
^^^ privileged white male