The Old School Lunch

Those two words pretty much say it all when you’re sitting in a training session with everyone at your workplace and you’re wondering how much they paid for this. The Heads at my job hired a local agency to do “cultural competency” training for our staff. It’s a 4 (or 5?) part series and since I wasn’t hired until after part one, I jumped right into 2 and that was to put it mildly, a really bad way at presenting terrific material and talking about important issues.

The good about the woman (and her agency) that they had speaking to us was that she tried to gear everything very much to the org’s mission. She wasn’t shoveling out general advice or reading some template because she did her homework and she knew what it was that we do and catered (or tried to) the presentation to that. But at the same time, she spoke only in general terms and repeatedly cited herself as an example for all of the “checking yourself” moments when it comes to racism, classism and gender bias (I don’t think she used the word “sexism” once). Actually, the only real interesting part that I got out of it was when she talked about herself because then she was actually being specific. She talked about being a TRA and stereotypes about Asian folks and such and at times, it was informative. The rest was just bland. There’s no point in attempting to do what is in essence anti-racist training when you’re not going to talk extensively about perceptions and reaching out to the communities that you’re trying to build relationships in (AND when the main problem your org has is in it’s perception from different communities). Instead, we had tapioca discussions and small group “workshops” about privilege and yet again “checking yourself” without any sort of real presentation or consult about the culture that created this perception and what we needed to do about it. At moments I felt like this entire thing was meant to just make the staffmembers feel better about themselves and think that they’d really made moves for themselves and the org to be anti-racist.

Each staff member was given a folder of different worksheets, books to check out and, of course, the old “white privilege” handout by our friend Peggy. I was a little stunned that she would just so casually put this in there without any explanation and when I asked a coworker if they’d gone over privilege and white privilege at training one, the answer was “we glossed over it” which to me says it all. Talking about privilege and namely white privilege is something you can spend two academic quarters talking about and you’d still have a ways to go. It’s an emotional topic that deserves more than just the “extra reading material” treatment and it’s pretty irresponsible to just throw it out there during a training without fully getting into it.