When I was in my twenties, I was an admin assist for the director of a diversity department. I’m being deliberately vague, but the point is that my job was, on paper, to do typing, editing, and shit like that. It was four hours a day, five days a week. I was there for four years, and over time, job creep happened. My boss was in over her head, and to be fair, she probably wasn’t getting much help from the top, either. It wsa my belief that the powers that be (PTB) really didn’t want to do diversity, but at that time, it was a hot topic–and in the place I was working, they could not afford to look like they didn’t care.
But they really didn’t.
My boss checked out mentally fairly soon after I started working. To be honest, she was not equipped to do the job, but, again, that wasn’t really her fault. She was tasked to do something that none of the PTB really wanted to do.
She was in charge of the diversity training for the department. We’re talking five-hundred or so employees. When I started, the catalog was a single sheet of paper. My boss never said what she wanted me to do with it, exactly, but I was an overachiever. I had never used Windows…Publisher? Was that the booklet-making tool? I don’t remember, but let’s just assume that’s what it was. I had never used it before, so I had to teach it to myself.
I took that one page and turned it into a thirty-plus page catalogue. All by my damn self, thank you very much. The head of a smaller diversity department within our umbrella department began insisting that I give my template to her admin assist to do her (the department head) catalogue as well. There was no asking; there was no requesting; there was just the demand. Even worse, she wanted me to teach her admin assist how to make the catalogue. How about no and no?
I asked my boss, and she most emphatically said it was not my job and she did not want me to do that. She had beef with the other woman for several reasons, and I did not want to do anything to get in the middle of all that. Also, to be honest, I didn’t have the time nor the desire to want to teach her admin assist to do that. I mean, I taught myself; the admin assist could do the same if she so chose. And I did it in four hours a day!
It migrated to my boss wanting me to check people in at the classes (which were at the local community college). This was a few days a week when she couldn’t make it herself, and it stressed me out the fuck. I did not like to drive, and the community college was about thirty minutes from where I lived.
Doing this, I met nearly everyone in the department. I pride myself on the fact that I managed to remember everyone but two people’s names. Now, after my medical crisis, that would not be possible.
My boss did the diversity training in the department. For five hundred-plus employees. It was a two day, eight-hours a day training, and she had to have a co-trainer. It was usually someone else in the department whom she was able to cajole into doing it. There was no pay and no training for the trainers, so they were truly doing it out of the goodness of their own hearts. You can probably see where this is going.
She told me that I was gonig to be her co-trainer one fateful day. I had never had training, mind, and I had never even gone to the training, but there you have it. I had to do the training, and I was miserable every second. I was decent at it because I was a psych major; I did theater; and I knew a lot about that stuff in general. But I was miserable, and I dreaded it so much. And, more to the point, it was waaaaaaay above my station and what I was being paid to do. K said, “I bet you were good at it, though.” Yes, I was, but I never should have had to do it. And I was anxious the whole time because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.
The reason I bring it up is because it was a frustrating experience as well. The training itself was outdated and stale, but it wasn’t just that. It’s really hard to demonstrate bias to people who don’t know what they don’t know, but also who have no desire to hear the slightest negative thing about themselves. I have a whole rant about that, but this not the time nor place.
This was thirty or so years ago, so diversity training was very crude. I did my best, but I got very frustrated with how simplistic it was. I can’t get too mad, though, because it really was in the nascent times for this kind of thing. But it emphasized how difficult it was to get people in the majority to feel empathy or anything at all (other than either guilt or resentment) at minorities. At the time, I was annoyed because it seemed like they refused to see what was right in front of their faces. It took me decades to realize that some of them could not understand rather than would not understand. That didn’t make things better, but it did explain that it wasn’t just flat-out rejection of the concepts.
Because of this training, I came up with a radical training idea that is unrealistic. I knew it wouldn’t be ethical and it would be prohibitively expensive. It was to build a town in which cishet able-bodied white people were in the minority. I might throw Christian into the mix. The ‘cast’ members would be all of different genders, races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, etc. Then, they would treat the ‘minorities’ the way actual minorities have been treated.
I will write more about this tomorrow.