Idle Doodle: California's harassment training harassment
I've been putting it off, but finally took an hour to complete the harassment training session the state of California requires.
The training and quiz had the feel of a bad 1970s comic strip chock full of halftone graphics and low-budget acting in their video clips.
The entire harassment training exercise was harassment on my senses. Nearly every concept could just be boiled down to: "Don't be a dick," and right around 100% of the people would understand the training.
There wasn't really anything in there I didn't already know. I barely paid attention to it and scored 100%. The training did give some basic information on gender identity, which I suppose some people may not know, but is really something that 99% of people will not encounter at work. Given that I follow politics to an unhealthy level, none of it was news to me.
It wasn't all for naught, though. One thing the training did teach me was a bunch of new racist slurs.
A video clip gave an example of verbal harassment, painting a scenario where a Native American woman worked in an office and her coworkers called her racist names. The narrator went on to rattle off five or six racist slurs as examples.
I have never in my life, in reality or in a fictional work, heard so many different racist slurs unironically put together in such short a timeframe. Imagine a group of state workers, or at least state-contracted workers, trying to put together a training video. How did that go down?
A circle of people in a dimly lit room sit around a table, discussing how to make a training video. They decide that the best way to get people to understand how not to be racist is to give examples of how to be racist, with no introspection that they're actually making an instructional video on racism. One of them, with a big smile on his face, asks the group if he could be in charge of the racial slurs. He comes back the next day with eight racial groups and six racial slurs for each group, going over each of them with exuberance to the group. They all have a good laugh at the expense of the one minority in the group but eventually, tell him to whittle it down to one. Since the one minority in there was a Native American woman, they choose to go with that one.
Okay, maybe I embellished a little bit, but I'm having a tough time painting a more charitable picture of fundamentally how it might have gone.
Imagine if they had instead gone with another racial minority to make an example of. With slurs against, say, black people.
Imagine the outrage. People would be surrounding Gavin Newsom's gated community home on the hill. So, what, did they pick Native Americans to slur because there are fewer of them? That makes it better? How many Native Americans have taken this course and were subjected to this abuse?
The state likes to think of itself as this paragon of virtue, but they're actually Eric Cartman and the Museum of Tolerance rolled into one (link is very NSFW).
Leave it up to the state to racially harass people in one training session more than I've ever witnessed in real life.
