Even after that, we're still all free to disagree with Anita Sarkeesian, and we're free to think of racism in other terms. At the point we're creating ideological boogeymen and launching anti-intellectual crusades against them, it's really just a variant of demanding that people shouldn't be allowed to say what we disagree with.
I've never said that anyone shouldn't be allowed to say something. But to borrow a phrase, "I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."
Sarkeesian is free to state that women cannot be sexist. The world is free to agree or disagree with her. I personally don't agree with her, because if we define sexism as "prejudice based on gender," then that claim doesn't hold up.
And I'm not automatically going to assume its bad because 'all diversity training is bad', like you
I dunno if I said "all diversity training is bad," but all I can say is that based on reading actual diversity training documents, plus what academic articles have been stating for years, I can either:
a) Listen to the academics
b) Don't listen
Usually, I choose a. For instance, I can't prove by myself that climate change is occurring, but since a lot of people who study climate for a living are saying that it is, and people on the ground have observed shifts in rainfall patterns, Arctic sea ice melt, land erosion, and everything else, I have to assume that it is. If you want to prove that it isn't happening, then you'd need to give me convincing data.
Of course, the difference is that diversity training hasn't affected me or anyone personally yet, but trust me, local government has plenty of ways to get me to spend hours on useless shit, with those people having triple digit salaries. Still, what happens in the United States affects the rest of the world.
I think if individual companies want to do this sort of thing that's fine but the federal government is supposed to represent everyone and that includes people who don't care for such training so you shouldn't be forcing them to support something they disagree with on the grounds that it's totalitarian and uses critical race theory which they disagree with.
Personally, I would enjoy such training because I like being exposed to things I see as dumb and I disagree with, I get a kick out of seeing people say dumb things. Though I do agree that spending all this money to entertain workers is probably not wise.
I don't think there's any scenario where it would be optional. If it was, there wouldn't be a problem. But these kinds of things are never optional.
This isn't just diversity training, it's how organizations operate. For instance, at work, I have to do a quarterly work plan - everyone hates it, everyone agrees it's a waste of time, everyone begrudgingly uses the same weasel words ("I will reflect the values of the Council in my everyday activities") but it has to be done all the same. And the thing is, a lot of the time, we have to do it on our own time (ergo unpaid work) or do it on our shifts, which means actual productivity goes down. Everyone knows it's wasting our time, but we have to do it anyway, because people who don't actually work on the ground so to speak insist that it's required.
IThey need to do this as well as track and gauge effectiveness of implementation so they can identify problems as they arise and address them and remove those who repeatedly refuse to address their own issues being impacted by unconscious bias.
I know this isn't how the world works, but ideally, that's what an organization should be doing anyway. Of course, not sure how you actually track uncncious bias, but in theory, there's a system of accountability.
Capitalism, democracy, and Rights are faulty too. None of them remotely match reality. Should we get rid of them too?
Some people are seriously calling for those things, so that isn't entirely a hypothetical.
The question isn't getting rid of something as to whether it's perfect or not, it's whether it's cost effective or not. I certainly wouldn't mind losing capitalism if a better system replaced it (frankly, I think we really need to replace capitalism or alter it, but whatever it is, it wouldn't be communism or socialism) for instance. But again, the question is this:
"Is bias training cost-effective?"
Again, a lot of what I've read has indicated that it isn't, that it generates short-term gains at best, or backfire effect at worst. If I go into bias training, and come out of the training even more biased, then something's gone horribly wrong. This shouldn't be that difficult a question, because we make trade-offs all the time.
