Sensitivity Training–Welcome To The Gulag Of Indoctrination And Righteous Re-education

Anyone who has worked for a living and anyone who has ever attended public or private school, has had to attend ‘sensitivity training’.  Billed as an important part of American citizenship, to create a more tolerant, accepting, and collaborative workplace, such sessions have been nothing more than divisive and punitive measures to protect corporate officers from lawsuits.  If corporate executives can show that they have dutifully and responsibly acknowledged systemic racism and the role of the deviant white majority and have instituted programs which demonstrate the means to address it, they will be less likely to lose in court as a result of frivolous lawsuits.  Such lawsuits of course are increasing, for what harm can  possibly result from a disgruntled, opportunistic employee blowing a supposed, suggestive, racial insult into a legal threat?

In the modern workplace there is automatic punishment for anyone who dares to criticize the performance of non-white employees; but those who make accusations of white supervisors or employees are listened to without question.

Of course the issue of sensitivity training is not only front and center because of corporate legal defense, but thanks to the righteousness movement which contends that the country is infected by the most pernicious and immoral prejudices. Unless and until the most ignorant of us are reformed; and until the scourges of racism, homophobia, and sexism are expunged, the country can never progress.

Not only must we suffer hours of race re-education – rote-learned, practiced, and prescribed lessons of right behavior ‘facilitated’ by trained moderators – but we have to put up with feel-good, sensitive signs.  “We love immigrants, people of color and gender difference, the other-abled, the dyslexic, and the marginal” are the newest banners of belonging.  Those who plant the signs know that such suggestions will have little or no impact, preaching as they do to the converted in homogeneously progressive neighborhoods. The signs are only colorful credentials, markers of belonging, banners to progressive solidarity.  They have nothing whatsoever to do with passing the Civil Rights Act, dismantling Jim Crow laws, or stopping the war in Vietnam – hallmarks of the effective Sixties protests.   They are incidental and insignificant.

Bobby Barrow found a way out of sensitivity training in his office.  It was easy – sign in, sit tight for ten minutes, then leave – but the damage had already been done.  The company executive order which had obliged him to sit through hours of Walden Pond idealism and corporate racial evasion drove him further to the other side.  He went from one who was at least aware of racial issues and social disparities to one who was hardened against them.  These sessions were no more than Pol Pot Cambodian re-education camps  He and only he would decide who should merit professional reward, promotion, or inclusion – criteria based on ability, ambition, talent, and general worth, nothing less.

Bobby felt hemmed in on all sides by this mania.  Not only had he and his wife been forced to attend these re-education sessions but their children, students at one of Washington’s most exclusive schools, were subjected daily to similarly politically-driven policies and programs.  Every ceremony was presided over by a black student, every prayer or reflection was a condemnatory hymn of white racism, every homily and invocation cited race, gender, and ethnicity.  The very reasons for the schools’ excellence were dismissed and disparaged. 

Christianity is now suspect or dismissed because it champions a white male society.  Moses is marginally more acceptable because of his Jewish, non-privileged roots, but the entire Jewish line as delineated in Kings I and II is no more than an elitist, monarchical Davidian dynasty.  The empires of the Mauryas, the Dravidians, and the Guptas were racist, male-supremacist, and proto-capitalist regimes built on the backs of the oppressed, the poor, and the black.

“If you classify yourself as white”, introduced Lashonda Harris, the facilitator of the sensitivity training session for employees of the Corporation for International Progress, “please raise your hands”.  As she expected the majority sheepishly and apologetically raised their hands.  They were to be the sacrificial offerings of the day, tarred and feathered and executed on the the the altar of racial righteousness; and here was the prayer exacted from all condemned, replace ‘God’ with the appropriate secular term

O my forgiving God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God Who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.

Now, most employees of this firm, created and organized to do good in the world, to help the poor, the marginalized and the unfortunate, were surprised at this prayer.  What had they been doing for all these years if not doing good, working among the most disadvantaged, poor, and lost?  

The words of criticism stung.  They loved black people and had worked tirelessly among African tribes to raise them from the abyss of poverty, political insignificance, ignorance, and social isolation.  How could they possibly be accused of systemic racism?

Africans didn’t count, they were told.  We are talking about African Americans who suffered the indignation of slavery – not the privileged, colonist African elite - and although these educated cadres might have evolved past their slave-enabling past - Africans had not only contributed to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and had been facilitators of it - they were still the knaves of white colonialism. 

In any case American racialist history began in 1619, the date of the first African slaves to have arrived was the only day of historical importance. All white people from that day forward were accomplices of the evil.

And thus was the heart and soul of sensitivity training – a movement corrupted by racial revisionism and historical ignorance and authorized and promoted by an anti-white progressive movement.

“We get it” is the meme of most white people forced to endure post-Pol Pot, Stalinist re-education.  “Can we go now?”; and so it went for the signs in progressive neighborhoods.  “Black lives matter, black lives are important, black lives are indispensable” say the signs. The critical issues of race – why most black Americans still live in dysfunctional inner city ghettoes, have the highest rates of crime, single-motherhood, delinquency, and have the lowest rates of academic achievement – are overlooked.  We must accept all comers, regardless of achievement, ambition, or desire.   Such a negligent attitude has perpetuated a culture of entitlement and an automatic socio-cultural bye. 

Enough is enough, say most Americans, hectored to death about race, gender, and ethnicity.  “We are all adults here” has been a popular and insistent meme.  We all wish for social integration and heterogeneous harmony, but how?  To favor the presumably disadvantaged at any cost? To reject early American principles of enterprise and equal opportunity?

We do not need importuning, hectoring, and self-righteous pulpit preaching.  We endorse American ideals and reject every attempt to subvert them.