https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/coca-cola-racism-robin-diangelo-coke-b1806122.html

COCA-COLA FACES BACKLASH OVER SEMINAR ASKING STAFF TO ‘BE LESS WHITE’
"The drinks company has been accused of ‘blatant racial discrimination’

"Coca-Cola has come under fire from critics, who have accused the drinks brand of reverse racism, after it used a training video that encouraged staff to “try to be less white”.

"The content of a training session was leaked by a Coca-Cola employee who sent pictures of slides asking white people to be “less ignorant,” and “less oppressive”.

"The training session was in association with white academic Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, and was sent to staff to help build an “inclusive workplace”. [Sic]

"DiAngelo has done diversity training for businesses for more than 20 years and previously said she has experienced hostility from white people when talking about race during her training."

Just as she would from people of any other background if she pulld this stunt on them.

And here is a more convincing solution:
https://babylonbee.com/news/7-ways-you-can-be-less-white/

I think Canada should be less white. Can’t you lot go outside and catch some sun once in a while?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2021 04:14AM by Lot's Wife.

We could, but where I live the wind blows us away

Like this afternoon!

My grad school had a program in corporate training, and my feeling is that this will become a prime example of a corporate training fail.

This will open the door to other trainers and training programs. I know in my very diverse public school system, this type of diversity training would be considered unacceptable.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2021 07:15AM by summer.

I love Candice Owens response "Candace Owens added: “If a corporate company sent around a training kit instructing black people how to ‘be less black’, the world would implode and lawsuits would follow.”

She's a rockstar!

Somehow I don't think white people are repressed.

i agree !!

drink a coke get a tan

Can I get an "AMEN!"

Yes, you may.

Amen!

And amen

And if anyone follows the 'nutjobs', you can also have an 'awomen'.

It seems more a question of being the colour you visibly are. Unless you tan your white skin (which I can't, my skin doesn't like the sun). But even with a tan, you're still white.

Saucie will on occasion point out that I could stand being a tad less White, as well.

I point out that it might harm my standing in the Anglophile circles I run in, as well as the Anglophile circles I run around in.

I love Saucie; and I love you. And I hope you guys continue being exactly who you are--or who you want to be.

You are role models for many of us here.

Why do I find myself looking over my hunched shoulders, and looking for an escape route?

I'm biding my time, my little pretty.

why can't we just be human beings and treat each other with respect?
Why does skin pigment have to be the determining fctor in dealing one with another
I get so tired of hearing this go on and on and on and on
Let's form an
ANTI PIGMENT PREJUDICE LEAGUE



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2021 02:03PM by thedesertrat1.

Nicely put.

Let's get one thing straight: there is no way that I can be "less white," as there is no way that a black person could be "less black," or that a person could be "less red," or "less yellow." The color of the skin you are born with is going to be the color of your skin when you die (And no, those red folks who practice Mormonism will not see their skins turning white because of it, just in case anybody gets ideas.)

So what is Ms. DAngelo (I may have misspelled her name--sorry) talking about here. She is talking about group behaviors and group preferences. We Americans (actually U.S. citizens), especially if we are white (as I am), are raised to believe in individualism over the group, that hard work pays off with wealth, and a host of other myths about ourselves that take away from the basic fact that a lot of the advantages we have come from having pale skin. Our history teachers in public (and sometimes private) schools don't tell us how many native Americans we killed or how bad slavery really was or how policies put in place to keep both blacks and Indians in their place many moons ago still apply. Finally, because we fail to acknowledge the role of our ancestors or of some of our current policies in helping to keep others not of our group from reaching the levels of advantage that we have, we continually cry "Not true," or "Victim," when others of our group or other groups point out how we continue to raise barriers to members of other groups that prevent them from competing fairly with us for the so-called "American dream."

Finally, while I do agree with treating all individuals with respect regardless of their skin pigmentation, we must also tear down the systems put in place that continue to give Caucasians advantages that other racial groups don't have, and that is nothing that many Caucasians are willing to do, especially if it means that we have to give up some personal advantages that we took to be as part of our birthright.

It goes both ways.

I have worked for companies in countries where white people are in the minority and suffer many of the disadvantages that non-whites experience in the US. For some reason the white people in those non-white organizations are quite supportive of programs designed to remove the barriers to their power and advancement.

Sometimes Americans presume that they are the only ones that need to adjust their behavior. But this is a global problem, and given current demographic trends it is in white people's interests to take these matters seriously.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2021 05:29PM by Lot's Wife.

And I was hoping that one day the world would be so ethnically mixed it wouldn't make any difference any more...

Yeah, but then there's the whole color issue in the dental enamel realm!

Someone needs to find a way to apply cosmetic coloring to teeth!

Is suspect that if the species still exists in two or three centuries, we'll all look a lot like that those early Sardinian and British agriculturalists.

You know what I'm sayin'

I'm against Tan Lines, does that count?

I believe that color is not “the” issue.

It is cultural differences between different groups of people that causes friction. There is generally (note: exceptions always exist) a difference between city/country folks, southern/northern folks, east/west folks, mormons/catholics, etc, etc. It is inevitable that there are differences. So what? What kind of world would it be if everyone was ‘the same’?

Just learn to find common ground and get on with life.

Forget about color.

In the nineteenth century, being pale and fair skinned (i.e. "white and delightsome") was the "in" thing.


Only farmer's daughters and domestics were tanned.


As women began to work indoors in mills during the Industrial Revolution, things changed. Being tanned became fashionable.

Now it's fashionable for young white women to not only be tanned, but to be "black" or adopt "urban" hairstyles and clothing commonly worn by African-American women:


https://globalnews.ca/news/4702185/what-is-blackfishing/

https://metro.co.uk/2018/12/14/blogger-accused-blackfishing-says-nothing-wrong-braids-deep-tan-8246856/


This brings up some interesting cultural questions.

What is culture? What is fashion? Does it matter?

Many black women in the West and in Africa adopt Western fashions and European hairstyles. Some American companies actually require black women to straighten their hair and frown upon braids and cornrows. In India, use of skin lightening cremes is commonplace. In Archaic Greece, braided hairstyles that imitated Egyptian wigs worn by the upper classes were in style.

All of of this is controversial in one way or another depending on social context, but I look at it a different way.

How you look or what hair or skin colour you have doesn't matter. What matters is how you act.

So, if you are an Western woman wearing a sari or kimono, you are just wearing a sari or kimono if you aren't trying to pretend you are Indian or Japanese. In the 1970s, lots of people wore afros -- and if they were actually black or not didn't matter. Indigenous women in Bolivia wear bowler hats and native Namibian women wear 19th Century German style dresses.

The world is much smaller than it used to be and access to culture and fashion is online and global. Everybody borrows from everybody else.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2021 08:25PM by anybody.

Culture may not be an enduring characteristic of people--all humans are nearly identical genetically, and the differences within a continent like Europe are minuscule--but it would be a mistake to underestimate its significance.

A few days ago I quoted Faulkner as saying "the past isn't dead. It isn't even past." His point is that the unfolding of events leaves a lasting mark on groups as surely as the abuse of a child affects not only her future but those of her descendants and maybe even the neighbors. To proffer a few obvious examples, the Hutus and Tutsis are extremely closely related genetically and yet their cultural differences led to genocide. Equally conspicuous are the genetically nonsensical struggles between the serbs and the Croatians; the Arabs and the non-European Israelis; the Chinese in the PRC and those on Taiwan; and the Europeans who divided along sectarian lines and destroyed their homeland in the 30-Years War, then again in the Napoleonic Wars, then again in the Great War (before we learned to count them) and the Second World War. In all these cases culture trumped genetics.

I'm reminded of a seminar long ago in which a number of overweening young liberal scholars were minimizing the cultural differences between peoples and predicting that greater communication would open everyone's eyes to the fact that they are at heart the same. There was one dissenter: the famous older historian John Lewis Gaddis. He raised his had and asked, to raucous laughter, "What makes you think that if those people get to know each other they'll like one another?"

That was before the Yugoslavian and Rwandan Civil Wars devastated those countries vindicated Gaddis's judgment. How do I know? Because more than one of the participants who laughed at the old man's cantankerousness subsequently came round to his perspective and told me so. But Gaddis's was a sentiment Faulkner would have endorsed, for he knew how cultural differences destroyed the American South and left racial scars that may in fact never heal.

Americans, particularly white Americans, are generally far too cavalier about culture and its association with race and gender and other attributes. It's easy for the dominant class to assert that if others just understood them, there would be no envy or anger. We can't act as if past events have not driven wedges between people that will persist if ignored.

So don't overlook culture; don't forget history. For the past is not dead. It isn't even past.

I agree with what you are saying -- but --

Culture is not part of DNA as the racists and Nazis want everyone to think.

James Dresnok, the American defector to North Korea, had children with an eastern European woman who grew up in that closed country. Although they are white, they aren't Americans. They are culturally Korean -- even though North Korean is one of the most xenophobic nations on Earth. They may not look like most North Koreans, but that's what they are.

So, yes, the past isn't dead. Europeans slaughtered each other roughly about every hundred years until recently and they aren't all that different as in your Rwandan example. But as time passes, there will be fewer and fewer places that are so isolated nothing of the outside world influences them. Even in North Korea, the outside world gets through.

One of the earliest Nobel Peace Prize winners was a man named Norman Angell. In 1909 he published a book called the Grand Illusion, in which he argued that the peoples of Europe were growing so familiar with each other and interdependent that there could never be another major war between the various countries. The book was popular and was reprinted a few times, including in 1913.

Oops.

One of the great problems in global affairs is that interests, bequeathed by history and reinforced by culture, don't readily ebb when peoples interact. To the contrary, the European intrusion into the Middle East (great book: A Peace to End All Peace) created an enormous backlash with which we are still dealing. The same thing happened with Western colonialism in China (what's wrong with getting several provinces of another country addicted to opium so you can sell it them and gain income to buy your tea from India?), which created grievances that, cultivated by a government that likes to blame others for domestic problems, remains exceedingly dangerous today. You can see the pattern in the Middle East, too, where European Jews transformed the Palestinian community into something very unlike the previously workable Arab-Jewish coexistence. In all these cases contact between different groups did not bring them together but rather reified latent animosities.

So you and I are discussing obverse aspects of the same phenomenon: greater contact makes it harder to avoid one another, but sometimes the effect is mutual repulsion. You can see it in the United States, where Trumpism reflects a deep dissatisfaction with the possibility of globalization, complete with dog whistles about "cosmopolitans" and Jewish space lasers. I venture that it is not clear which group will win in the US or around the world: the harmonizers or the separatists who worry that they are losing their cultures, their religions, and their bodily fluids.

On that question hangs the future of the planet. Can humans progress morally fast enough to save themselves from the evil their undeniable technological progress renders possible?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2021 11:50PM by Lot's Wife.

How can someone be "less ignorant"

When as a child Gladys learned her times-tables, she was less ignorant than the day before. Like that, maybe?

I'm thinking that gaining more ignorance is harder!

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When as a child Gladys learned her times-tables,
> she was less ignorant than the day before.

Yes! That's why I know that 2X2=3.

The phrase "less insensitive, more inclusive" might have been better.

Well Said.

I love how playful words are (but don't love how deadly they also are):

How about "More Sensitive and less uninclusive?"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2021 09:16PM by elderolddog.

Or “less insensitive and uninclusive?”

Better still (reading glasses on, EOD), “less exclusive?”

Prithee cogitate upon that!

This isn't some kind of ex-British African colony thing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2021 09:29PM by anybody.

Well if my company had this training, I would film and and reveal it to the world too. I' m white and not ashamed of it. Screw this racist bullshit.

So much for MLK's dream huh?
Let's judge people based upon the color of their skin.
Screw content of character!

https://www.coca-colacompany.com/media-center/diversity-equity-inclusion-training

"The video in question was accessible on the LinkedIn Learning platform but was not part of the company’s curriculum."

https://cocacolaunited.com/blog/2021/02/26/important-message-from-john-sherman-president-and-ceo/

"First, let me clarify that the video and images attributed to The Coca‑Cola Company were not part of their learning curriculum. Rather, they were part of a LinkedIn Learning training module that was accessible to employees of The Coca‑Cola Company, as well as many other companies who have a relationship with the Microsoft-owned employment-oriented company.

That being said, the posts we saw on social media were disturbing and contrary to Coca‑Cola UNITED’s values. Let me be clear that any training that encourages someone to be less than themselves is completely unacceptable and would never be part of Coca‑Cola UNITED’s curriculum."


https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coca-cola-training-less-white/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/24/facebook-posts/no-coca-colas-ceo-didnt-say-about-conservatives/

You are suggesting that something Jordan posted is fraudulent?

That can't possibly be the case, can it?

I don't know. The story may be true and Coke is attempting CYA,or it may be that the original story is incorrect.
As for Jordan's credibility,that is another matter entirely.

Agreed on all points.

[|] Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't know. The story may be true and Coke is
> attempting CYA,or it may be that the original
> story is incorrect.
> As for Jordan's credibility,that is another matter
> entirely.

The statement you just quoted is obvious damage control:
"Rather, they were part of a LinkedIn Learning training module that was accessible to employees of The Coca‑Cola Company"

Even this isn't good enough. It doesn't answer what use this is to "learning training" (sic) or why Coke is associated with this in the first place. Note they use the euphemism "accessible" to deny any responsibility.

"a relationship with the Microsoft-owned employment-oriented company."

i.e. It wasn't us, it was Microsoft! And if you ask Microsoft they will try and say these are the personal opinions of the teacher and not those of Microsoft.

Who needs Snopes when you can read Coca Cola says in their own press releases?

So it was the work of a Coca Cola hired contractor. The buck still stops with CC, IMO.