Guest post: Avoid the poopy-heads
Originally a comment by iknklast on A protean concept.
DiAngelo is following the pattern of other consultants. In corporations, and in academia, it has been a pattern for a long time to hire consultants who tell people if they are unhappy, it’s because they “let” themselves be. Not making enough to buy food for your family? Just think positively! It isn’t the fault of the boss, or the system, but you for finding that problematic.
Bosses ate it up, and hired these consultants to come tell their employees what was wrong with them – the employees, I mean. Wage too low? Don’t ask for a raise, that’s complaining. Figure out why you think it’s too low, and realize it is you making it too low, not your boss, not the system, not the fact that food and gas prices have increased.
I have sat through dozens of these. It’s infuriating. Don’t get at the root of the problem, just make people uncomfortable about being part of the problem. As one speaker put it, just don’t hang around with “poopy people”. First, I can’t believe anyone would hire a consultant to use kindergarten language to university faculty. Second, that would mean I couldn’t hang around with myself, since I would fit her definition of “poopy people” – anyone who thinks something in the system is broken and should be fixed.
That approach works until enough people see through it, and whose interest it is serving. It brings to mind the relationship between being and consciousness as set out by Marx in his famous aphorism: “It is not mens’ consciousness that determines their being, but their being that determines their consciousness.”
Or as Mandy Rice-Davies famously put it with reference to Lord Astor’s denial that he had had an affair with her or of having even met her: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” (often misquoted as “Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mandy_Rice-Davies_applies
Nice.
Diversity consultants have a very special additional role: they’re the ones who help HR lay down a due diligence paper trail. That way, if an employee DOES try to bring an action for racial discrimination, the organisation can prove they aren’t a racist workplace – after all, they did the course and everything! Nice work if you can get it.
We all know that shit-disturbers cause workplace misery, and employers take advantage of that knowledge in order to “encourage” us to be Shiney Happy people. Of course, faking it until you make it only leads to stress. If a shit disturber has a legitimate issue, it should be addressed, of course. But also employers need to provide employees with the means to address aspects of the workplace that lead to unhappiness.
Up until a few years ago, my employer sent out annual surveys, but we knew that our managers were rated on our survey responses. If we were happy with our managers but saw systemic issues that weren’t addressed and over which the manager had no control, we were stuck with a conflict. Also the surveys provided no space for comments, so they really didn’t have much value to me. We really didn’t have a way to share our voice after all. That has since changed, but following each survey the team meetings to analyze the results led to “think happy thoughts” solutions. Highly frustrating.
I don’t have these sort of meetings to deal with any more and I am thankful.