Comments on: Training Is Not Enough

By: kali

kali — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:14:27 +0000

No sign of the second printing minus offensive illustrations (of the Jungle Book) yet – was it just a delaying tactic on Seal’s part?

By: Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:59:48 +0000

It’s no coincidence that the one place I worked at that was pretty diverse was a California state agency that was required by state law to review the resumes of a minimum number of people from each ethnic group (white, black, Latino/a, Asian, etc.) And, wonder of wonders, you ended up with a lot of people in leadership positions who were not white. In the department I worked in, the head of the department was an Asian woman, the two sub-heads were Mexican-American (one man, one woman), and the rest of the staff was pretty evenly divided. I think that out of a staff of 15 people, three or four of us were white. It’s not a “quota,” or whatever the current scare phrase is. It just required that you throw your net out further for applicants than you might otherwise be inclined to do, and once they got a good reputation, they got more and more applicants from minority groups.

My current company (one of the top 100 of the Fortune 500) has its problems , but fortunately my division depends a lot on raw talent and they finally figured out that they can’t afford to discriminate against talented artists anymore if they want to stay competitive. It’s still majority white (especially in the upper ranks) but there are more and more young faces hired every day that are not.

By: Round and round and round « Brown Shoes Don’t Make It

Round and round and round « Brown Shoes Don’t Make It — Sat, 10 May 2008 02:37:09 +0000

[...] and round Starting my new job was exhausting this week, so I have had little to say, but then Donna on The Angry Black Womanbrought this to the attention of [...]

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:07:56 +0000

That diversity training or racial sensitivity training doesn’t seem to be doing them any good…
http://www.sealpress.com/blog.php?p=http://www.sealpress.net/blog/2008/05/today-and-expat-harem.php

By: Katie

Katie — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:48:33 +0000

A certain Claire has left an amazing refutation of the Seal Press editors’ comment on the “Tales from the Expat Harem” thread. It’s worth checking out. Just…brilliant.

By: revbob

revbob — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:40:42 +0000

katie, if Seal Press expects to be treated differently from Stormfront they have to earn it for a long, long time.

By: ripley

ripley — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:51:10 +0000

what’s inherent in your (great) argument, of course, is the existence of POC in senior, or at least not bottom-of-the-barrel positions, with job security. people who have weight within the company structure (if you’re talking about an employer), and who won’t be fired for their pointing this stuff out.

which brings it all back to the material reality rather than going through the motions

also raising some interesting issues w/r/t employment law. The presence of training and offices to deal w/diversity is often used, in court, to argue against a company being racist. Judges have come to look for these formal but symbolic institutions as proof the company is not racist. If companies had to explain why they had no POC in senior positions, instead….

By: daisydeadhead

daisydeadhead — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:34:45 +0000

Katie, OH GROSS!!!!

Some people don’t learn a fucking thing. (((sighs loudly)))

By: Tom Head

Tom Head — Sun, 04 May 2008 19:38:59 +0000

Radfem writes:
“when shopping around for how to do diversity training, or they want to know how to work with a community of color, they very often go to a White ‘expert’ on that community rather than working with the community itself.”

And speaking as a white guy, I’d argue that these “experts” tend to have VERY toxic ideas about how whites should feel about POC. They tend to promote unproductive guilt, shame, and discomfort (turning antiracism into some weird monastic tradition of narcissistic self-flagellation), and not a whole hell of a lot else. For that matter, some POC who give diversity/antiracism trainings do the same thing, though in my experience such classes tend to be much much more useful when they’re actually taught by POC.

Whites who make inflammatory remarks don’t just need to become “sensitive” in some weird segregationist lawsuit-avoiding sort of way. They just need a good strong megadose of reality. In the case of Seal Press (and I hate to keep singling out Seal Press), for example, I’d say to the editors: “Why are you thinking of taking antiracism classes when you’re getting perfectly good antiracism training FOR FREE courtesy of the WOC bloggers you’re not listening to?”

By: Katie

Katie — Sun, 04 May 2008 16:59:31 +0000

Oh the hilarity. Check out the latest post on the Seal Press blog – it’s for a book called “Tales from the Expat Harem.” It’s apparently about living as an expat in Turkey. The choice of words for the title, the cover art, etc. – just UGH.

I left a message on the entry. Doesn’t seem like their diversity training has happened yet, because, y’know, when it does, they’re not going to do stuff like this anymore. Right? Right?

The level of entitlement and white privilege/supremacy there goes to 11.

http://www.sealpress.com/blog.php