U. Michigan Teaches White Employees to Get Over Discomfort of Being White
“unpacking Whiteness”
Change the race in this story from white to any other and imagine the reaction.
The College Fix reports:
University teaches white employees how to overcome the ‘discomfort’ of being white
A two-day professional development conference held recently at the University of Michigan included a training session that aimed to help white employees deal with their “whiteness” so they could become better equipped to fight for social justice causes, according to organizers.
Participants who took part in the “Conversations on Whiteness” session, held December 5 during the university’s Student Life Professional Development Conference, were taught to “recognize the difficulties they face when talking about social justice issues related to their White identity, explore this discomfort, and devise ways to work through it,” the university’s website states.
The goal was to help participants in “unpacking Whiteness” to support students and staff with issues and efforts “related to identity and social justice,” the website added.
The “Conversations on Whiteness” session was one of more than a dozen workshops offered at the conference, held Dec. 4 and 5. The whiteness session utilized the “Privileged Identity Exploration Model” to help white participants explore the “discomfort” of their “white identity,” according to organizers.
First introduced in 2007 by University of Iowa professor Sherry Watt in a College Student Affairs Journal article, the model purports to be a method for understanding how people react to stimuli that alert them of the privilege they hold. The model is to be used by “facilitators” to “engage participants in discussions about diversity,” according to Watt.
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Comments
More thoughtcrime training.
They should get over the discomfort for being white, as this is an unjustified guilt. However like randian above I think the intention is to foment more guilt amongst whites not less, and they will then be told what they must do to ease this ‘discomfort’ that will look a lot like affirmative action and unending payments to minimise that ‘discomfort’.