Woka Cola
By Julia St John
C-Suites across America are scrambling to keep up with the latest progressive business standards: diversity and inclusion programming, mandatory employee reading of "White Fragility" by Robin DiAngelo, and staff training aimed at explicitly discouraging whiteness. Critical Race Theory has already crept into schools and universities and has now invaded the upper echelons of corporate society with major corporations like Coca-Cola.
In keeping with woke capitalism, Coca-Cola recently led a workshop on LinkedIn that urged caucasian employees to "try to be less white" to mitigate their "silent oppression" and "privilege." The company came under intense fire after an internal whistleblower released a screenshot of the presentation. In an effort to appease the group-think mob, the creator of the world's greatest soft drink reintroduced racial prejudice in another form. By targeting people for the legacies of a skin color they can't control, Coca-Cola does little to achieve the anti-racist work environment for which it so desperately aims. By labeling its white employees as born transgressors in need of reform, Coca-Cola alienates its labor force and engages in blatant racism itself.
The Coca-Cola training curriculum is littered with double standards and hypocrisy. For starters, if you replaced the phrase "be less white" with "be less black," there would be instant outrage. According to the slides used in the Coca-Cola presentation, "being less white" means to be "less oppressive, arrogant, ignorant, etc." In the pursuit of destroying stereotypes and microaggressions in the workplace, Coca-Cola generalized an entire group of its employees on the basis of their skin pigmentation with presumed guilt. What makes these companies believe that all white people have a default setting for these negative attributes? In an effort to do right by one group of its employees, Coca-Cola has completely maligned another. Coca-Cola has forged a toxic workplace by forcing its members to confess and pay penance for sins that are assumed rather than proven to have been committed.
While noble in theory, some evidence suggests that diversity training can yield unintended, adverse consequences and reactions. One 2016 study conducted by Harvard professor Frank Dobbin showed that forced corporate diversity training can spark tension between employees, fuel negative attitudes against minority employees, and even create a more hostile work setting. Required training, by definition, involves an element of control. Psychological studies have repeatedly shown that humans react negatively to perceived attempts to control them. A successful company operation depends on employees feeling content with their employer and comfortable collaborating with their coworkers. When the labels of oppressed and oppressor get haphazardly systematized within the corporate structure and a pseudo-hierarchy of privilege is imposed, employees can feel confused and upset. Furthermore, this sort of baseless top-down inequality can cause resentment between coworkers, let alone between workers and management.
"Critical Race Theory" teaches self-hate and aims to pan white people as a universal enemy to progress. It indoctrinates school children into viewing the world through a hyper-racialized lens. And now it's going after America's last meritocratic bastion: corporate America. For decades, black people pushed forward and forged paths into industries and careers previously thought impossible. Black CEOs now captain Fortune 500 companies, and companies have never been more committed to hiring black employees at all levels. However, these anti-racist seminars that pit employees against each other, use blatantly racist language, and accuse entire races of people of crimes they do not knowingly commit is regressive. Fear breeds hate and hate breeds violence. If history repeats itself, these corporate-mandated anti-white campaigns won't end in change, but in hate.
Photo via San Francisco Chronicle
