Uber has placed Bo Young Lee, its head of diversity,
on leave after she moderated a couple of employee events that made the horrifying
mistake of including the perspectives of white female employees.
After several years of diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings, making it clear
that the inclusion part is really meant to exclude the participation of white women,
some employees at Uber didn't take kindly to the sudden paradigm shift.
Backlash from Uber workers who felt the topic was insensitive spooked
the company's execs, who immediately decided to place Lee on leave, now
the future of their longtime Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Chief is uncertain.
The New York Times writes that employees' concerns centered on a pair of events that
were billed as diving into the spectrum of the American white woman's experience and
hearing from white women who work at Uber with a focus on the Karen persona.
They were intended to be an open and honest conversation about race,
according to the invitation.
Employees turned to the company's Slack to complain and express that
they didn't like that some of their white colleagues saw Karen as a derogatory term.
But as we all know, Karen absolutely is a derogatory term,
are we really gonna pretend like it's not?
Employees felt the event organizers were minimizing racism and the harm white
people can inflict on people of color by focusing on how Karen is a hurtful word,
according to messages and an employee who attended the events.
Well, it's a derogatory term, that's why it's used in a derogatory
sense after someone is perceived to have engaged in bad behavior.
Now the controversy didn't die down,
weeks later the Karen conundrum was aired in a companywide meeting.
Several weeks after the first event, a Black woman asked during an Uber
all-hands meeting how the company would prevent tone-deaf, offensive, and
triggering conversations from becoming a part of its diversity initiatives.
Lee replied, arguing that while the discussions can sometimes feel
uncomfortable, they were important and necessary to have.
Sometimes being pushed out of your own strategic ignorance is the right thing
to do, that's what she said.
Now as you can imagine, that comment did not really do much to calm the situation
down and instead sparked additional outrage and complaints to executives.
So Lee decided to hold a second event, which was intended to be a dialogue
where employees could express how they felt about what they heard during
the first event, tut that led to even more complaints.
In Slack, groups for Black and Hispanic employees at Uber fumed that instead
of a chance to provide feedback or have a dialogue, they were instead being
lectured about their response to the initial Don't Call Me Karen event.
One person wrote, I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting.
Another employee took issue with the premise that the term Karen shouldn't
be used.
Look, I'm gonna be honest with you, in the workplace you shouldn't be calling your
coworkers Karens, it's just not a good idea.
And by the way, just let that sink in for a moment, employees were openly
angry that they couldn't use a derogatory word against some of their colleagues.
This type of work environment is just fantastic, I mean it's not hostile at all.
[LAUGH] Now in response to the apparent uproar, Uber's Chief Executive and
Chief People Officer sent employees an internal email and asked Bo Young Lee
to step back and take a leave of absence while they determine next steps.
The email also let employees know that, quote, we have heard that many
of you are in pain and upset by yesterday's Moving Forward session.
While it was meant to be a dialogue,
it's obvious that those who attended did not feel heard.
Look, I gotta be honest, simply treating employees equally and
providing a space for some to gently push back on the Karen narrative
is nothing compared to the several years people have been consuming
speeches like the one Dr. Aruna Khilanani gave at Yale in 2022.
>> I had a fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person
that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away
relatively guiltless, with a bounce in my step like I did the world a [BLEEP] favor.
>> Yeah, I just wanna reiterate what you heard there, the audio wasn't great so
just in case you didn't hear it.
During a speech at Yale in April of 2022, Dr. Aruna Khilanani said,
and I quote, I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head
of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and
wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless
with a bounce in my step, like I did the world an effing favor.
Okay, now that might seem like a bizarre, isolated incident, and
to be honest the rhetoric there is rare, I haven't heard rhetoric that extreme.
But there is an entire industry where authors and academics make a killing
conducting trainings that simply tell white workers to shut their mouths and
take kindly to hours of being told they're all the same, they're all racist,
they're all hateful, they all deserve what's coming to them.
And it should come to no surprise that DEI trainings like this have led to lawsuits,
because they include discrimination.
In 2020, at least half a dozen people who had been employed by
the New York City Department of Education filed lawsuits or
won settlements in cases relating to mandatory DEI trainings.
What I'm also not surprised about is how lucrative this industry is.
After George Floyd's murder, as companies faced pressure to demonstrate a commitment
to racial justice, interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion exploded,
the American market reached an estimated $3.4 billion in 2020 alone.
Take Saira Rao and Regina Jackson as just one example, they run a business called
Race2Dinner and wealthy white women across the country pay them handsomely to
come to their dinner parties to bash the host and her white friends as racists.
They do this without knowing anything about the dinner guests,
without ever having interacted with them.
All they know about these individuals is the color of their skin, and automatically
they assume these white women have anti-Black prejudice in their hearts.
How much do they charge?
Well if you ask me, a lot, each dinner party initially cost $2,500 total,
but the rate increased to $5,000 in 2020, gee, I wonder why.
The funds cover a two hour dinner,
which includes support from Race2Dinner's business developer, planning,
travel for Jackson and Rao, and when applicable a post-event consultation.
The cost of food was not included in the original dinner party fee.
This is the perfect example of a DEI related grift that allows economically
privileged women to engage in performative acts to feel like they're
doing their part to fight racism.
Of course, they're not actually doing anything to fight racism at all, and
if they want to pay for that, great.
But the Race2Dinner ladies have also published books, and
even put out a movie called Deconstructing Karen, as a result their simplified
portrayal of white women seeps into the public consciousness and discourse,
their words, as void of evidence as they may be, are treated as fact.
But don't worry,
they also think immigrants to America are automatically anti-Black racists as well.
>> Saira will generally say that she is anti-Black, and
everybody will pivot towards me, and I go, well and Black people know it.
The gig is up, we know that every person who comes to this country
as an immigrant believes themselves to be better than us.
>> Based on what, what evidence is there that immigrants come into the country and
automatically see themselves as higher up the food chain or
the hierarchy than Black people, there's no evidence of that.
Look, I think this discourse has had a devastating impact on the country.
Because when you mix business interests with the branding of social justice,
chances are the objective is really about profit rather
than actually addressing systemic issues.
And if the main problem is systemic racism,
why are we all engaging in this toxic witch hunt?
Sussing out people we perceive to be problematic does nothing to address racism
in our criminal justice system,
it does nothing to improve educational curriculum in our schools, and it fails to
ensure that people of color have equal opportunities to wealthier white people.
We've been conditioned to think that generalizations about entire groups of
people is somehow okay, as if it doesn't contradict the fight against racism.
We've taken the bait in this extremely successful divide and conquer strategy.
And to be honest,
I've been struck by how effortlessly callous the online discourse has become.
Any out of context viral video that features a conflict with a white woman is
automatically considered evidence of a racist act,
even before we have all the details.
The latest example involved a pregnant hospital worker named Sarah Comrie in
New York.
She was captured on video during an argument she had with a Black man over
a city bike in Manhattan, the man claimed that he paid for the bike rental but
Comri disagreed.
>> Record it, record it.
>> Help, help me, please help me.
>> This is not your bike.
>> Please help me.
>> This is not your bike.
>> Please help me, help.
Please get off.
>> What the [BLEEP], what's going on?
>> The dominant online narrative was that this racist pregnant woman tried to steal
a bike from a Black man and
then made herself out to be a victim with her white tears.
Her attorney later provided receipts claiming that she in fact paid for
the bike, but it felt like no one thought it might be a good idea to just wait and
see what the truth was before attacking her.
Her employer at Bellevue Hospital was immediately contacted,
she was placed on leave pending an investigation.
Now her attorney is looking to potentially sue media outlets that propagated false
allegations about his client.
But we still don't know the full story, and it's better to wait and
see how this develops before people try to destroy a stranger's life and livelihood.
So do we feel better about racism in America today?
It certainly feels like we're becoming more divided.
We're definitely more obsessed with whipping out our phones
to surveil one another,
because God forbid we fail to capture one of our peers in their worst moments.
Simply put, I absolutely loathe this crap, and I can't pretend like I'm
above it because I engaged in a lot of it myself and I have deep regrets about that.
Karen hunting is a destructive symptom of the powerlessness people feel as
they're more atomized and alienated from those around them.
It's the abscess that forms from the lack of an organized movement that values
the humanity of individuals,
while fighting institutions that propagate inequality.
It's what happens when society fails to understand the critical nature of
solidarity in fighting systems of oppression.
The Karen narrative flattens an entire category of people, white women,
as malignant members of society whose toxicity lay dormant until they're
in the presence of people of color, it's ridiculous.
But back to DEI trainings, is there any evidence that they even work?
Well over the years,
social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for
diversity training have frequently come to discouraging conclusions.
Though diversity training workshops have been around in one form or another since
at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation,
and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects.
The lack of evidence is disappointing, wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck
of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article,
considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge
in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.
In fact, there are, unfortunately, even some studies that indicate these trainings
could be causing more harm than good.
I mean certainly if you're being told by your colleagues that you're automatically
a bad person and you're very likely racist because of the color of your skin,
gonna cause some hostility in the workplace, no?
Now in the case of DEI, Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity training that
is mandatory or that threatens dominant group's sense of belonging or
makes them feel blamed may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate biases.
Yeah, I mean no surprise there.
So if employers insist on DEI trainings,
they shouldn't shun discussions that are actually inclusive.
But personally, I'd rather encourage employees to go out and
grab a drink together after work, they should bond and get to know each other
without a third party mediator making money off of their interactions.
An employee should understand that any effort to improve their working conditions
and to do something about actual systemic racism as a whole is reliant on solidarity
with their fellow coworkers.
Despite the protests, I think Uber's diversity chief had the right idea.
If you're going to implement diversity, equity, and
inclusion trainings at the workplace,
they should be inclusive of everyone's thoughts, feelings, and participation.