Is Compulsory Race and Bias ‘Training’ Legal?

Discuss and debate among yourselves.

Big Al

I don't feel like this is a safe space for that discussion.

This is the type of discussion that I find nearly impossible to have in an online environment.

But I have been having it with people IRL.

I’ve stopped having this sort of discussion at all. It’s tedious at best, and accomplishes nothing.

Seems everyone is a lot smarter than I am so I let them do it.

Oh please.

Any subject can be taught badly, and it sounds like this instruction may have been poor.

There is no need to teach the conclusion (that white peoples are the oppressors or whatever). You can just stick to the undisputed historical facts about colonialism, slavery, internment, segregation, and modern white supremacy, and any student who can connect the dots gets an A.

We've put forth a lot of bias training at my place of employment. Some of it us not so great, but the best basically lays out the historical and/or research basis for bias and avoids browbeating.

Example: we do a lot of hiring, and have our search committees participate in unconscious bias training. As part of that, they talk about research showing that the exact same resume but with an "ethnic" sounding name, will be scored lower on a scoring rubric than the same resume but with a non-ethnic name. Same with man v woman. End of story. It doesn't accuse anyone of overt racism/sexism, just says "hey, this is out there." People take it or leave it.

FWIW, we're also seeing a lot of companies removing names (and in some cases dates) from resumes before initial screening, and many companies are now doing initial phone interviews with the camera off--something that is a pandemic/lockdown side benefit. Similar to the blind audition process.

Is it perfect? nope. But I think it's an improvement.