Live Push-Back Against an HR “Microaggressions” Session

I was pleased to see someone push back against a "microaggressions" session in a recent meeting at work. It wasn't an in-person session, so I couldn't see people's faces or gauge their reactions. It felt extremely uncomfortable initially, but a number of other participants chimed in in support of the push-back.

The person leading the session wasn't being rude or laying on the material especially thick. It was, as far as I can tell, a pretty standard introduction to the concept of microaggressions. She gave the examples of 1) the only woman in the meeting being assigned the task of note-taker and 2) a colleague using a heavy accent when impersonating the voice of another (who was Indian...more on this later). 

A brave person piped up with some comments. It was, after all, supposed to be an interactive session. He wasn't rude. He stated his point very respectfully, which the organizer of the session acknowledged. He started by saying, yes, we should all be respectful of each other and avoid giving offense. We should give some thought as to how our actions and unthinking biases might be affecting our behavior. That much is common sense. But what does this "microaggressions" concept add to that? And what is the limiting principle on this concept? Do minor grievances really "pile up" in the minds of those who are micro-aggressed against? Isn't there some threshold below which these events just cease to register? Or become quickly forgotten? Don't we have a duty to charitably interpret the behavior of those around us, rather than assume a sinister thought motivated them? (Not his exact language; these are my own paraphrases and my expounding on what I heard.) In explaining how we should be forgiving of minor or unintended slights, he repeatedly used the word "grace," which has almost religious overtones. I'm not particularly religious, but I thought there was something classy (you might say graceful) about this use of language. It's perfectly fine to say, "Hey, this behavior bothers me" or "This thing is really a pet peeve of mine." But let's not invent this concept of a growing ledger of microscopic slights that add up to a substantial whole. Everyone experiences these. The typical reaction is to round the off, truncating them to zero. (Computationally speaking, you might refer to this as setting a high tolerance.)

Specifically he riffed on the organizer's example, asking if it was never okay to ask a woman to take notes. The organizer said of course that wasn't her intended take-away, you'd expect a task to sometimes be assigned to a woman by sheer chance. If it's a pattern, if it's always a woman, and more to the point the woman tends to be chosen even if there are more junior employees in the room, then maybe there's an unhidden assumption that "this is women's work" or "women don't mind doing these menial administrative tasks." Point well taken, but I don't know if you need the concept of microaggressions to get there. She also said that until recently, it's been the majority group who got the privilege of defining what is and isn't offensive. What we're seeing now is that other voices are recognized in that space. Again, this is a totally valid point to make, but I don't know if it requires the concept of microaggressions or if this is just common sense decency. Taking offense that your ethnicity is the butt of many jokes seems like a different thing entirely from minor perceived slights piling up over time. 

The person who spoke up was a white male. (I assume hetero white male, because he mentioned needing to be understanding of one's wife to successfully communicate and navigate relationships. It sounded like he was speaking from first person experience. He was pointing out that we're all dealing with different kinds of people all the time, and we're somehow navigating that space without microaggression seminars.) But several people with heavy foreign accents joined in and seconded his point. My employer has a worldwide presence, and even among American collogues the foreign-born are heavily represented. Very cosmopolitan in terms of demographics, and I was pleased to hear that many of them had a cosmopolitan worldview. 

I've heard about cases of wokeness infiltrating HR departments and inflicting terrible "training sessions" on employees. Racially segregated training, humiliating struggle sessions, instructions to "be less white" (note that Coca Cola denies using those training materials, though it was accused of doing so to much furor), explicit indoctrination with CRT. The session I attended was much milder in intent, and yet there was firm but polite pushback. I have no doubt there are some committed fanatics trying to infiltrate the culture by inserting themselves into the bureaucracy layer of society. I'm just not sure how far they will get. The person who spoke up in that meeting was exceptionally brave. Maybe you can't always count on having one of those guys around. (I, for one, have no such inclination to speak up in front of a crowd.) Then again, for all I know there is some kind of punishment in store for him, explicit or perhaps subtle. And certainly there are companies that have a more woke monoculture, where such "outbursts" would not be tolerated. Apropos of my previous post, maybe this is a case of "They would be causing havoc if they could, but they are being held in check by forces outside of their control." Maybe all it takes is some respectfully worded pushback. It certainly changed the tone of the meeting from "We're all on the same page here" to "Some of us aren't buying into this paradigm." 

_______________________________________

We'll see how it plays out, but there seems to be a kind of "diversity and inclusion" power play happening at the professional organization that I'm a member of, see here. I got a long, strongly-worded e-mail with more details on Friday, which was responding to an earlier e-mail from the CAS (which had barely registered with me). I count it as another example of pushback, not so gentle in this case. 

On the example of doing an Indian accent for an Indian colleague. I have no idea what actually happened, so I'll take the lady's word for it. But I can't let this go without saying something. I had a lot of Indian friends and teachers in grad school. I would sometimes do their voices, as would everyone. No, I was not doing a generic Indian accent. I was doing the distinct voice of my friends and colleagues, trying to accurately capture their actual mannerisms and voices. Just as I would often do for my white colleagues, just as we all did all the time. (Guys like to mock each other. Sometimes this took the form of impersonating voices and accentuating the distinct features of their speech. "Matt Damon.") One Indian friend had a very slow voice, and if I were "doing" him you might think I was doing the voice of a native American rather than an Asian Indian. There was an Indian girl who had a kind of breathy, melodic voice. Another friend of mine was always doing her voice, and there was nothing obviously Indian about it. But there were some colleagues whose voices were decidedly more Indian. If I were to "do" one of them in isolation, it might sound racist. But what if I were reciting a conversation between these people, afterwards to an audience who wasn't present? Would I do an accurate impression of everyone's voice, but suddenly stop when I get to the guy with an Indian-sounding accent? Would I have to suddenly drop the voice acting and make him sound like a white guy? If the person who did the voice heard this HR lady talking about him, I wonder if he'd respond with something like, "I wasn't doing a generic Indian accent, I was 'doing' Samir! What, do they all sound the same to you or something? Seems all the HR training has worked on you. It's actually made you incapable of discriminating."

I also have to recall an early season of The Ultimate Fighter in which one of the contestants was a deaf guy (Matt Hamill). The other guys were doing his voice. At one point, one of them turns to the camera and says, "It might sound mean, like we're making fun of deaf people. But we're really just 'doing' Matt." I think it would be more offensive if the guys left Matt out of this male ritual of gentle teasing and hazing. Like, if they didn't want to seem mean in front of the cameras, so instead they just left the deaf guy out of the game. Still, I see how this looks to an outsider who lacks the full context or can't imagine the counterfactual. If you picked this out and showed a bunch of guys mocking a deaf guy's voice in isolation, I understand that this would look bad. 

If Left Unchecked…

 There is a thread in current political thought that I'm trying to put my finger on. I think I might have figured it out. It's a question of whether you're more concerned by the crazies on left or the right. Who is likely to do more harm? Who is a bigger threat right now? This conversation with Bret Weinstein, Jesse Singal, and James Lindsay embodies the conflict I'm talking about. 

Some look at the Trump phenomenon and the crazies who stormed the capital building as a new kind of existential threat. Here's a different kind of populist politician with a base of hardcore fans ("fans" in the true sense of "fanatics"). Certainly there was an intent to overturn the outcome of an election. There was a shocking public display of this intent on January 6th. But I would argue that there was never any serious chance that this changed the outcome. I just can't see that scenario. Even if the rioters really dug themselves in and it was hard to physically displace them. "There are a bunch of crazy people occupying the capital building. Darn, I guess Biden can't be president." Sure, if the angry mob kept growing and seizing government property and nothing ever checked their advance, I guess I could imagine a series of events where a right-wing coup takes over the government. But the "left unchecked" part is doing some heavy lifting here. The police presence was initially inadequate, but it was enough to keep them in check. As I read it, ultimately Trump's pro-cop sensibilities led him to call off the riot and tell his fanatics to go home. (I recall him being remorseful about seeing police officers being assaulted, but maybe I'm misremembering some flash-in-the-pan news report from that day.)

Likewise, some observers look at the rioting in major cities and see an encroaching end to civilization. It wasn't just peaceful protesting, and the non-peaceful protests were not strictly in service of a noble policy change. Some of the protesters wanted to completely abolish existing institutions, and they weren't shy about saying so. A mob of rioters in Portland were advancing nightly on a federal courthouse. The cop-free CHOP/CHAZ zone in Seattle regressed into warlord-ism. Angry mobs were wantonly destroying property, and pseudo-intellectual defenders were apologizing for them. Once again there was an angry mob with the intent of overturning our institutions and seizing power. And certainly there were public displays of this intent, which were sometimes quite frightening. But how far they actually get depends very much on whether these shows of force are checked or unchecked. Would the police cease to form a protective perimeter under the assaulted courthouse, allowing the rioters to literally occupy it and possibly burn it down? Would moderate cities, whose leadership isn't completely captured by woke insanity, start tolerating similar behavior? I think the mobs of wokesters, antifa, and left anarchists (sometimes distinct groups who have different agendas) would come into contact with an opposing force eventually, even if they are successful in the short term. For those people who aren't particularly concerned about the riots, I wonder if this is what they're thinking. (Obviously some people are actively sympathizing with the mobs. I'm not addressing them here; I'm discussing "Overton Window" moderates who disagree with the rioting but can't seem to find the voice to condemn it.)

Back to the conversation with Weinstein, Singal, and Lindsay. It starts with them saying who they voted for and explaining themselves. Weinstein cast a write-in vote for Gabby Gifford, which I think is a fine choice. Lindsay explains how he begrudgingly voted for Trump because he was the only force in public life standing up to Woke madness. Singal voted for Biden. He explains that he's also concerned about how Wokeness is getting into our culture, but the threat of Trumpism is just orders of magnitude more dangerous. (He compares Lindsay's vote to worrying about a mosquito bite while ignoring a bullet wound, if I heard him correctly.) 

Singal has been assaulted by the woke mob, so he has authority to speak on this topic. He wrote an excellent piece on the research on "implicit bias" tests, suggesting that they aren't really measuring what they're supposed to be measuring. In fact, given that the test is not consistent from day to day for a given person, it's not really clear that they're measuring anything at all. (Great podcast with Singal here on Rationally Speaking, where he discusses the article and the backlash it received. He even concedes that implicit bias is probably a real thing, it's just that these tests don't actually measure it.) Apparently this was some kind of sacred cow among "anti-racists." Implicit bias tests were this crystal ball with which to divine hidden racism. By smashing it, he deprived the woke movement of one of their tools. He was mobbed on Twitter for it, so I'll give him some deference when he says these cultural threads are not as threatening as Lindsay and Weinstein make them out to be.

Singal asks, I think quite fairly, what concrete policies have the woke mob achieved? Abolition of police is not a mainstream idea, and any time it's come into confrontation with democracy it gets voted down. And the ultimate selection of Biden (the "moderate" candidate) rather than a Sanders or a Warren signals where the American polity is. Singal is basically pointing out that there is a check in place on the insane woke culture that is making so much noise on Twitter and in universities. The check is sufficient that wokeness is confined to those habitats and is not making inroads into the broader world. 

Weinstein and Lindsay both answer with some version of "That's not how this works." Weinstein points out that he did, in fact, have the police abolished on him while as an angry mob of students were searching car to car for him. (See ~14:00 in this video.) This was in 2017, well before anyone had heard about George Floyd and before "abolish the police" became a popular hashtag. Wokeness doesn't require democratic approval or official ratification. A committed core of ideological radicals can seize control of institutions, as they did at Evergreen State College. Weinstein's encounter with the Woke mob was more physically dangerous than Singal's, and it turned out to be a career ender for him. I don't know if that means Weinstein has special insight into the danger they pose, or if maybe it means he's deranged by a hazard that's not really likely to manifest itself elsewhere. He definitely takes the view that this isn't just a few crazies on college campuses. If this ideology is gaining a foothold on campus, it'll soon be elsewhere in the world as those radials graduate and insinuate themselves into institutions in the broader society. 

Lindsay has extensively read from the works of the ideological progenitors of wokeness: the post modernists and the critical race theorists. His book Cynical Theories, coauthored with Helen Pluckrose, is a great exposition on these threads of academic thought. (He, Pluckrose, and Peter Baghosian understand this ideology very well apparently. The three of them managed to publish several hoax papers in "serious" academic journals, without the editor realizing they were being played.) I've listened to his podcast New Discourses for a while, and I understand why he is concerned. Some of the precursors to today's woke movement talk explicitly about what tactics they will use to take over institutions, and Lindsay points to parallels in today's world. They make no bones about their plans to recast language so certain thoughts become inexpressible. They are explicit about their desire to overthrow norms of open discourse so as to favor particular kinds of discourse. Maybe in today's world that's manifesting as once-a-year hour-long human resources-mandated "sensitivity" sessions, with the occasional innocent victim getting railroaded for a misinterpreted "insensitive" comment. Obnoxious, but not exactly civilization-shattering. But if it's left unchecked? If it grows without bounds and nobody stands up to it? I can imagine a scenario where this hyper-racialized ideology just keeps gaining ground and a critical mass of resistance just never rises up to oppose it. I can also imagine a scenario where nobody cares, people laugh off the stupid HR mandated struggle sessions, and everyone just ignores the obnoxious voices on Twitter because almost nobody is paying attention to it anyway. 

I don't think Lindsay is wrong to be worried, but Singal's question about "Where is this actually happening?" is a fair one. Lindsay's answer (if I heard him right) is that woke activists are inserting themselves into the bureaucracy layer of society. Biden himself might not be speaking the woke lingo, but maybe he appoints someone to a cabinet position, who then appoints some staff members, who then manage to affect policy and do some damage. They can also insert themselves in HR departments of private companies, or perhaps they can run sensitivity seminars where they hector and castigate their audience for deviating from the ideology. Weinstein's telling of the downfall of Evergreen is that new management came in and tried to ally itself with the woke movement. Instead of acquiring a useful ally, the college's administration ended up being taken over by it. If I'm reading him right, he's saying the Democratic party is going down the same path. Biden is winking and nodding at them without explicitly endorsing their policy platform. (Listen to their conversation for examples; Weinstein and Lindsay offer a few. Singal is having none of it. Indeed, a few of the examples Lindsay gives are weak. You could say he's reaching. Still I think Singal is too dismissive of the dangers.)

Anti-liberal ideologies are indeed quite dangerous if left unchecked. A right-wing populism that actually succeeds in overthrowing the liberal order would be a disaster, and shame on anyone who takes part in it. An all-consuming left-wing ideology that succeeds in overthrowing the liberal order would be an equal disaster. I see both as having made successful inroads. (Electing a president being a significant example. Achieving hegemony in the discourse being another.) I'd be curious to know if I'm just way off base here. Obviously someone who's an active Trump supporter would say I'm wrong, because Trumpism is actually good for America. I'm not interested in hearing from you, sorry. Obviously someone who's pro-woke would scold me for criticizing wokeness, because obviously it's actually a good thing and comparing it to a bad thing and asking which is worse is a non sequitur. If that's you, I'm not particularly interested in hearing from you, either. I'm more curious about the people who fall in the space between Lindsay, Singal, and Weinstein, who are concerned about both wokeness and Trumpism but see one as overwhelmingly more threatening. Is it that "X isn't a threat because it's being held in check"? Or is it that "X isn't a threat, because it wouldn't be a bad thing if X got its way?" I feel like people are so deranged by one kind of threat that they are willing to ally themselves with anything that opposes it. (One might call such derangement a "syndrome."). And it's leading some of them to keep some "interesting" company. I wonder if this is just a function of the news sources people are consuming?