Well how could one exactly “prove” such a thing? Polls? Come on. Everyone lies on those.
Now, after saying that. Just let me walk around a workplace for a few days, check out the break areas, watch people interact, and I can tell you which places have racial problems.
I suspect my experiences have been in a really different context than most workplaces. I’m a social worker, so arguably just the very act of attending graduate school for social work was a two-year long sensitivity class. I don’t at any point recall feeling guilt when I became more aware of my privilege. How can you feel guilty for something you have no control over? The only way guilt might come into it is if you have to face the fact that you’ve personally done some things to exacerbate the problem, which can happen. People really don’t like to face unpleasant truths about themselves.
Learning about privilege made me feel kind of liberated, actually, but I’m really influenced by Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and he talks a lot about how we’ve all got ways in which we’re oppressed and in which we are inclined to oppress. The way I think of it is not really an ‘‘either/or’’ proposition. I’m a straight white person who had access to good education - privilege. I’m a woman with an extensive trauma history who was relatively poor growing up, and I suffer from a biologically based mental illness. Not so much privilege. It’s not a competition or anything, just a paradigm for understanding how the assumptions we make about other people’s life experiences could really present an obstacle to them in certain contexts. It’s good not to be shitty to people just because you don’t understand where they are coming from and how the kinds of problems they face might be really different from yours.
So I’ve been in nonprofit work for years and this kind of talk is not new to me. I not only have attended workplace multicultural trainings, I conducted an anti-racism training as part of a required graduate school project, which placed me in the difficult position of explaining to wealthy Jewish people that there were systemic inequalities in society and within the organization. In retrospect I would have taken a different approach, but I was pretty green.
At my current place of business, which is a nonprofit for domestic violence and sexual assault survivors, sensitivity training isn’t an occasional thing you do but an expression of shared values. We have a committee that meets regularly, is composed of diverse staff, to look at the ways in which our workplace policies and approaches may perpetuate inequality. This includes things like improving services for the hard of hearing, people who may not speak English, and those in the LGBT community, as well as looking at obstacles employees might be facing too. We also look at how we relate as an organization to the community. I’m on the Development Team of my org and we have started a conversation about ‘‘donor-centric’’ vs. ‘‘community-centric’’ fundraising and how we might apply it to our work. I’d be hard-pressed to call this sensitivity training, as it is such an ingrained part of the organization’s culture and is enthusiastically voluntary.
I don’t think it is bullshit at all, but I think there are ways it can be done really badly. Putting people on the defensive or acting as if privilege is a black or white issue, something you either have or don’t have, is not helpful or effective.
I have no idea about the impact of such training on workplaces, but I can tell you that our Prevention Education team does systemic multi-session trainings in schools surrounding primary prevention of intimate partner violence and sexual assault, and we have preliminary evidence that this has reduced the incidence of these things. The focus is not on lecturing people not to rape, but on pushing students to question the assumptions they’re making, teaching bystander intervention techniques and discussing ways students can contribute more positively to the culture within the school. The response from the students and faculty has been overwhelmingly positive. I had the pleasure of seeing the Prevention Ed team in action during orientation and they are truly something special, and particularly skilled at what they do.
This is it in a nutshell. You’d like to think that the people you hire have some sort of common sense but that’s not always the case. And all it takes is one stupid employee saying the wrong thing to one person and suddenly you have litigation happy people.
Look at the recent case where a grade school teacher though it would be humorous to give kids labels like “most likely to become a terrorist”. You get a pissed off parent and they’re likely to sue the school district.
The cost of an annual training for your employees in the hopes that it may prevent even one lawsuit is pennies compared to how much that lawsuit might cost.