The College Fix

A useless workshop that solves nothing

“A two-day professional development conference held recently at the University of Michigan,” The College Fix reported yesterday, “included a training session that aimed to help white employees deal with their ‘whiteness’ so they could become better equipped to fight for social justice causes.” This training session taught white people how to “recognize the difficulties they face when talking about social justice issues related to their White identity,” and instructed the white attendants how to “explore this discomfort, and devise ways to work through it.”

Thank goodness someone is finally tackling this problem.

We could make jokes about this silliness all day long—and we often do!—but in the end a simple question will suffice: who does this “whiteness” drivel benefit, and how? At least in theory, a “training session” should serve some kind of practical purpose, and should at least presume to solve some sort of problem. Does anyone—anyone at all, honestly, outside of a few identity-centric campus student organizations—truly believe that a workshop devoted to helping white people come to grips with their “White identity” will solve anything at all?

I don’t mean to be coy here; admittedly it has been some time since I have been an active participant in a higher education environment, and maybe my comprehension skills are a bit rusty when it comes to “explor[ing] the discomfort” of “whiteness.” But I am nonetheless hard-pressed to believe that such a program is genuinely meant to do, or improve, or solve, anything, on- or off-campus.

Put another way: there are a great many useful workshops and training sessions one can imagine. Teaching employees how to use a new software; educating workers on new laws or new types of office regulations; general staff meetings. These gatherings tend to assume, rightly enough, that what is instructed will be both useful and, most importantly, retained for future use. I am not sure, on the other hand, that anyone—participants or facilitators or anyone else—will retain anything of any use whatsoever from a dour, browbeating “whiteness” class. Can you imagine yourself, or anyone you know, one day saying to himself: “Now would be a good time to apply those lessons I learned in that workshop about white people.” It is quite frankly laughable; literally, the idea is something to laugh about, and at.

Perhaps, then, the only practical effect of the University of Michigan’s “Conversations on Whiteness” seminar was this: it provided a handful of employees with partial reason to justify their own employment. It is hard to look upon a phenomenon of such utter uselessness as anything other than a jobs machine. Jobs are good, of course, so in a sense the actual reason for the workshop is more commendable than the ostensible one. But it would be more refreshing if the creators and facilitators of this class were up-front and honest about it, telling participants: “We are going to lecture you about useless nonsense for a few hours and get paid for it.”

MORE: Stanford University course to study ‘abolishing whiteness’

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