This is a statement taken from Coca Cola's "Confronting Racism" employee training. A whistleblower made it public Friday.
Getting past the shock of the wording, one can try and understand the purpose of the training and meaning of this statement: That since whites in America have perpetrated many atrocities as the dominant power, it's best to shed those patterns of behavior.
But this doesn’t justify those words.
In their defense, people say it doesn't literally mean all white people are exploiters, murderers, etc. It's just labelling these behaviors as "white" because of the racial group dynamics.
This blind spot here misses a whole other aspect of racism in play: Using the label of a people to define something negative.
This is the same argument people justifiably raised when it was trendy 20 years ago to call lame things "gay." Defenders of that use of the word said it wasn't about not liking gay people. And that was mostly true. But that wasn't the point. It's damaging to equate an entire group as something negative by using their label to define that negative. It's an indirect slander toward the group, and it communicates to members they embody the negative—that it's inherent to their kind.
This isn't a new lesson. The harms of this phenomenon have been drilled into Americans' brains for a long time regarding such phrases as "Jewing" down someone when trying to get a better price.
So, how can such use of language now have widespread promotion?
Believe it or not, it's because it's masked behind the intention to reduce racism—to "confront” it as the name of that training states, which, by the way, is available to any company through LinkedIn.
The past nine months in America has seen an enhanced desire to compensate for past race-based atrocities. Part of this process, naturally, is recognizing the perpetrating group. It is this recognition that has been exploited.
It justifies the use of "white" to mean oppressive, arrogant, apathetic—and as many other faults as one wishes. It stands to reason, then, that to be less "white" is to be a better person. Thus, it's simply best to be less “white.”
This opens the door further to less-cloaked versions of racism. At Middlebury College in Vermont, they held an event Jan. 21 to “Facilitate the Demilitarization of White Bodies” … “so that bodies designated as ‘White’ might become human.”
-from using a group’s name as a negative adjective
-to asking people to stop “being” this group
-to coming right out and saying this group is less than human
This rhetoric on par with that which is offered by the far-right. The difference today: These words are offered under the guise of progress. (The extreme political right and left are mirror images of one another.) Today this particular manifestation has become so normalized, advocates can claim resistance is just part of one’s “whiteness”—even if they’re not white.
Something telling about this radical approach to racial equity: It’s still all about white people. Where is the focus on trying to help other groups? The priority seems to be about targeting the majority group—their behaviors, their guilt, their privilege—rather than working to help other groups have the same privileges. It’s a movement of pulling some people down, not lifting others up.
This movement exemplifies two major roots of societal problems.
-The tendency to over-correct: In the attempt to reduce racism, institutions across the U.S. are indoctrinating racism.
-The inability to hold two seemingly competing ideas simultaneously: In this case, 1. there has been systemic injustices perpetrated by the collective white populations in the U.S., and 2. it’s wrong to create a racial prejudice toward whites today.
This isn’t a prejudice with consequences equal to those experienced historically by other groups of Americans. Such prejudice is nonetheless harmful to all. It dehumanizes one group while deflecting attention away from the work needed to help other groups.
It deflects attention from righting racial atrocities altogether, focusing less on the actual harms themselves by assigning guilt for simply being white.