Coca-Cola has egg on their face, not egg whites though
Racism Score: 4.0
If you have not attended a pandering, patronizing, eye-rolling, corporate diversity and inclusion training, consider yourself lucky. The unfortunate part about diversity and inclusion trainings is that some, when done correctly, are necessary and beneficial. However, some seem to miss the mark entirely.
Diversity and inclusion trainings go too far when they demonize a race of people. The opposite of the desired effect takes place as Coca-Cola recently experienced. Word on the street is Coca-Cola conducted diversity trainings utilizing LinkedIn Education’s “Confronting Racism” course.
The course apparently encouraged employees to be “less white” or “try to be less white.” We are not world-renowned scholars or sociologist, but it does not take a PhD to determine implying directly or indirectly to be “less” of a certain race is a terrible idea. Like, it is a shockingly awful idea. The subject matter originated from the infamous author of White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo.
The backlash has been well-documented which you can view in a variety of news sources except CNN. One of the biggest questions flying under the radar is what is going to happen with the polar bears? Those white polar bears. What about the bears?!
Luckily, we are not the only ones curious about them.
Distractify astutely ventures into the proverbial North Pole to address the belief by conspiracy theorist who surmise Coca-Cola stopped using the bears to enhance the “less white” message.
Then you have the memes, the lovely memes. HITC did a great job tracking seven white bear jokes. Here are a couple.
This one we found by reading replies to Coca-Cola’s Twitter.
There is no good way to spin this for Coca-Cola, or LinkedIn for that matter. Fox News reports LinkedIn was so embarrassed by the curriculum, they removed the “less white” training material, albeit with a haphazard explanation.
None of this helps Black people. This also does not help the other new age colored people acronyms overly used today. If you are triggered by our use of ‘colored people’, understand we are using the term how the NAACP utilizes ‘colored people’ in their organizational name.
Dear corporate diversity officers, please stop this non-sense because telling people to act “less white” does not enhance equality, it does not help fight racism, it does not bring people together as it only creates a deeper divide. Do better!
