Faculty are not required to undergo such training
The rest of that story. (I got too exasperated to do it all in one bite.)
Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.
The faculty are not required to undergo such training.
Ah so it’s only the peons who have to be brainwashed reeducated trained.
The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”
“I was accused of being the racist,” Mr. Patenaude said. “To be honest, that just knocked me out. I’m a 58-year-old male, we’re supposed to be tough. But I suffered anxiety because of things in my past and this brought it to a whole ’nother level.”
He recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”
There are a lot of kinds of privilege. White is one, but it’s certainly not the only one.
As for Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, stress exacerbated her lupus and she checked into the hospital last year. Then George Floyd, a Black man, died at the hands of the Minneapolis police last spring, and protests fired up across the nation and in Northampton, and angry notes and accusations of racism were again left in her mailbox and by visitors on Smith College’s official Facebook page.
This past autumn the university furloughed her and other workers, citing the coronavirus and the empty dorms. Ms. Blair applied for an hourly job with a local restaurant. The manager set up a Zoom interview, she said, and asked her: “‘Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?’”
“I was pissed,” she said. “I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, nothing. And she said, ‘Well, we’re all set.’”
She did nothing wrong, she lost her job, she can’t get another. What branch of privilege is that?
I’m sort of surprised at this, since at our school faculty have to undergo training for every little transgression of any employee – transgressions real or imagined. In addition, we have to have training on racial sensitivity every year; it includes training about sexism, supposedly, but never mentions women. No surprise there.
Sounds a lot like “cis-privilege” where we are privileged to be able to get cervical cancer, to have periods, and to get mansplained…and so on an on and on.
I worked as a food service worker for a number of years, and I was sort of like the boss that shrugged it off; I never expected manners. Whenever a customer treated us like we were even human, we were extremely pleased, and it was a noteworthy occasion. And these were not the elite, because it was places like McDonald’s and Wendy’s. Even the working classes will look down on the service workers who wait on them. Everyone wants someone lower to stomp on.
We have required training at my institution for faculty too. Currently the mandated trainings focus exclusively on unconscious bias, microaggressions, lgbt etc. Other than the university-wide training on sexual harassment and hostile work environment, there’s nothing on sexism per se that I’m aware of. I think they can be useful if you’re someone who is reflective and cares about diversity, but I feel like they tend to reduce the problem of racism in universities to individuals rather than, say, discrimination in schooling/housing and class, and I think admin likes it that way. The trainings certainly don’t eat into the administration’s bottom line like, say, tuition reductions and spending on outreach programs in disadvantaged schools might. Then there might be no money left for luxurious University dorms/gyms/resort-style pools or a surfeit of new petty administrators, and we can’t have that.
On a related note, I don’t think I’ve ever had one of these trainings that wasn’t administered by a woman, and often they were women who were not white. Where I’ve been at least it tends to be the women and employees from underrepresented backgrounds that do the gruntwork on diversity and inclusion but the higher ups get all the credit.
Studebaker, we also have that sexual harassment training every year, and it never touches on sexism, just on actual sexual misconduct. Which is important, but the sexism is what underlies that, so how can you possibly deal with sexual harassment if you don’t deal with the root cause? And it’s interesting to see how many of the “case scenarios” they use these days are men being harassed by women. Yeah, it happens, and it’s good to note that and how to deal with it. But the man harassing the woman is by far more common. And there is also the possibility of males being harassed by other males, which is NEVER mentioned in our training.
I’ve been trying for a decade now to get them to have something on sexism, preferably on what Susan J. Douglas calls “enlightened sexism”, because I see oodles of that oh, so liberal sexism that pretends it isn’t sexism. Of course, in deep red Trump country, I see plenty of the other kind, as well.
Iknklast I’ve seen the same thing. I think the only example I can think of from trainings I’ve taken where it was a male-male scenario was one guy was making inappropriate jokes that another man found offensive.
I’ll have to look into enlightened sexism, thanks for the info. I’ve never read Susan J Douglas’ work. Her 2020 book on ageism and sexism looks pretty good. Might have to order that when I’ve gotten through all the other depressing nonfiction I have on the docket.
Studebaker, I love Susan J. Douglas’ work. And she knows how to use commas, semicolons, apostrophes, and articles. Too many writers these days have very little clue how to write, and don’t care much, either.