Diversity Training Makes You Stupid

For people under 40, it must seem as if the institutionalized Diversity crusade has always been in place. In fact, that madness entered the office world in force in the late 90s. At that time, the huge Diversity bureaucracy barely existed.

During that era, I worked for a variety of corporations, developing content management systems for online courses, as well as publishing and maintaining those courses.

To my never ending amazement, I played a role in institutionalizing Diversity Training. The impetus for this shit was lawsuit avoidance. In the midst of the economic boom of the 90s, filing a lawsuit against one's employer for any and all types of discrimination was considered by many employees to be the way to win the lottery. Managers became desperate to immunize themselves against liability and they came to a sort of group consensus that this could be accomplished by demonstrating that they had instructed their managers not to practice any sort of discrimination.

So, everybody wanted an online Diversity course, which they hoped would provide some kind of immunity for managers against discrimination lawsuits. What, my bosses wondered, would such a miraculously effective course look like?

Really, nobody knew.

I attended conferences with CEOs and groups of managers of a variety of corporations who were my clients. They knew they wanted something. The kids coming into the workplace in that era were all rigorously indoctrinated in college in Diversity ideology and thought they had the answer. It might seem odd to you, but the great proponents of Diversity training were usually cute young women fresh out of grad school working in the HR department.

HR managers and CEOs loved these young women and often became sexually involved with them.

So, where was the content for the great Diversity online course to come from? Remember, at this time the huge bureaucratic corporate Diversity superstructure had not yet been erected. There were few, if any, "diversity consultant" businesses that had developed such courses and pre-packaged them for distribution.

Managers and CEOs didn't know where else to look, so they looked at me. Since I was developing the content management system and the online courses, I seemed like the obvious candidate to develop the content. So, my bosses delegated that task to me with vague directions to "look up" the research and publishing on the subject.

So, I did. And that was a nightmare. HR bureaucratese may be the dumbest, most impenetrable writing humans have ever devised. Diversity literature, so far as I could see, consisted of about three paragraphs of explanable ideas surrounded by an ocean of fluff. And the concrete ideas were just about all wrong.

I realized quickly that fluff was the point of the entire endeavor. My development team decided, in the great tradition of the dot-com era, to fluff up the online courses with "bells and whistles" to keep our students from falling asleep with boredom from the numbing emptiness and stupidity of the courses. "Eye candy" was thought to be important as well.

The CEOs and managers thought the courses were quite impressive and well produced. Yes, they were nicely crafted from a visual perspective and we made sure they were "interactive" and "user friendly." That there was no substance to the course didn't seem to bother anybody and I got paid, so what the fuck?

There you have it. My role in launching the great Diversity Crusade on a corporate level. 

Kids who have grown up with this shit dominating their educational and professional lives must think that this shit is self-evidently true and substantive because every establishment institution tells them so. Kids, it's all bullshit. Started out as bullshit, and since then has been embellished by shoveling on successive layers of bullshit.

Diversity training makes you stupid. And, that's the intent.

Comments

[Dad Bones]

Thanks for the confirmation that I did the right thing by not using my B.A. to be an HR guy. Paint fumes and the after work antidotes will make one stupid, too, but at least I could form my own ideas about diversity.