[rayiner]

I feel this way about “BIPOC.” I find it absolutely enraging that white people not only would other me like that in polite company, but do so in a way that lumps Bangladeshis in with Pakistanis.

I tried to explain to my parents why my daughter’s teacher recruited her into a “BIPOC” affinity group and they got very upset.

[aidenn0]

We have anti-harassment training at work, and one of the videos from a few years ago was titled something along the lines of "can you have problematic behavior against your own group" and was a confrontation between someone coded as a second-generation Punjabi and someone stated to be a first generation Gujarati.

The kind interpretation of that video is that "there are always subgroups" but it really felt to me as if they were all lumped in the same bucket of "Indian" by the video producer which seems to me to be rather problematic itself.

[rayiner]

Exactly! If the message was “we’re all American and we shouldn’t harass each other” that would be great.

But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines. All of them put white people over here and “people of color” over there. But I suspect the second strongest affinity for most “people of color”—after their own group—is white people. Because that’s who people interact with the most often outside their own group.

The culture I’m most familiar with, after Bangladeshi culture, is southern British American culture, because those are the people I grew up around. If you subdivide people into any groups more granular than “American”—which I don’t think you should do—you can’t put me over there with the Taiwanese and Latinos as “people of color.” I don’t know anything about those people and have no greater affinity for them than I do for any random American.

My sister in law is Taiwanese, and all her friends are Chinese or Taiwanese. And they seem like lovely people, but I’m more out of place in that setting than I am in a room full of white people in Georgia.

[aidenn0]

> But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines. All of them put white people over here and “people of color” over there. But I suspect the second strongest affinity for most “people of color”—after their own group—is white people. Because that’s who people interact with the most often outside their own group.

I'm not sure it's fair to criticize the trainings; part of the reason for the training is to limit the employer's liability, and there's a huge variation in the liability of "being an asshole" depending on how -- and to whom -- the mistreatment is directed, so the training is going to invariably reflect that legal landscape.

[rayiner]

Actually, there is no differential standard. The law doesn’t differentiate between who the mistreatment is being directed to. It’s irrelevant whether a black employee is harassing a white employee or vice versa. As far as I can tell, a lot of lawyers gave bad advice about this to their corporate clients over the last few years and the next few years are going to be embarrassing for them.

[aidenn0]

IANAL, but my understanding is that if you treat people differently based on one of the nine federally protected classes, you are in more trouble than if you treat people differently based on some other class (though treating people differently based upon a proxy for a protected class can also be an issue; e.g. redheads isn't a protected class, but it has correlations with both race and national origin).

Note that both of your examples given fall under the protected class of race/color. You still might have a more sympathetic judge and/or jury for one example or the other, so it might be relevant in practice, even if it is irrelevant by the letter of the law.

[mrguyorama]

Have you ever considered that you are taking the wrong message from these trainings?

"white people" isn't real. That's why there is a concept of "passing", and why the KKK in my state marched against other white people. All these groupings are arbitrary on their face.

>But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines.

How do you suggest material about how dividing people up based on the farce of "race" should be made? It needs to have some "in group" vs "out group" to demonstrate how that dynamic works. Are they supposed to use real and explicit life examples? Should every person joining your org be made to watch a training video where a white manager calls a black employee the N word?

Do you not understand the concept of film and acting and theatre? That you often demonstrate matters through allegory or metaphor?

Or do you also complain that Dr Seuss tried to educate children about racism with the "star bellied sneets" because it's just an arbitrary division?

You complain that "they were all wrapped up into the Indian category", but guess what, that's the same story for Italian Americans and the Irish and at one time that nobody seems to remember, the Catholics. "White" is also a horseshit made up group. There is as much diversity in India as there is in America.

Like I just don't get it. What would you rather have to help train adults about racism and how not to be racist?

[rayiner]

I agree “white” is a made up category that isn’t meaningful. But the same people who do the trainings will perpetuate the concept of “white” by talking about “white people” versus “people of color.”

My daughter has four “affinity groups” at her school. “Black girl magic,” “young black men,” “BIPOC,” and “LGBT alliance.” A teacher recruited her and some Turkish kid into “BIPOC” because they have no other non-black non-white kids.

It’s not just a demonstrative analogy. The people running these diversity programs think theses groups are real.