Toxic Workshop

Old Folks got nominated for the diversity council at work.

He had to attend a week-long workshop on diversity.

This was Old Folks's introduction to aggressive multiculturalism.

Aggressive multiculturalism assumed that:

• American society was structurally racist. Racism would get worse, not better, if radical changes in thought and action were not implemented.
• Any apparent changes for the better were cosmetic and ameliorative. They were attempts to preserve the status quo by becoming more subtle and less blatant.
• The way the system works is the fault of white people, who want it to work the way it does, because they benefit from it, and black people who enable the process, through ignorance, cowardice, and false hope in the benificence of fate.
• White people aren't going to give up what they have without a fight. They are irredeemable. If they act right it's out of guilt, and not purity of theoretical motivation..
• Black people need to have their consciousness raised, and stop enabling the perpetuation of systemic racism. They need to act up. Speak up. Act.

White and black class members who did not measure up were insulted, attacked, embarrassed, and ridiculed. At least one black class member was shamed into dropping out because he couldn't face his black co-workers, now that his Uncle Tomism had been revealed. And Old Folks had been exposed as an unregenerate racist, a Simon Legree.

Simon Legree--Old Folks thought he was a wage-slave, like everybody else. To call Old Folks Simon Legree was to misunderstand him completely. You were misidentifying the villain. Blaming the wrong man. To call people like Old Folks Captain Charley just divided whites and blacks and kept them from uniting to confront and overturn the real Captain Charley. It was Captain Charley doing it, from behind the scenes.

The class was polarizing. It pitched blacks against whites, and militant blacks against less hostile, more agreeable blacks. More tolerant blacks.

It gave black class members an opportunity to vent their anger at their plight and to attack white people as the cause of it, with the instructor's approval.

White class members were supposed to confess their racism, and act ashamed.

Old Folks confessed, all right, but he didn't act ashamed, and he thought black people were themselves responsible for some of the troubles that befell them. This was called blaming the victim.

Old Folks couldn't win.

It was a lacerating, a tearing experience.

People he'd been friendly towards, who had been friendly back, now looked at him like he was Lester Maddox. And a hypocrite to boot.

What had Old Folks done wrong?

He admitted he used the N word, he admitted he disliked some black people, disliked their strident blackness, and he stated that many of the quality-of-life concerns he had, as an individual, a husband, a parent, and a citizen did not exist in a segregated, or white community; they came with the introduction of black folkways and mores into the social mix, black dysfunction, black pathology.

Uh oh.

He didn't care how Haitians live, in Haiti. He just didn't want to have to live around it.

And if white people were at fault, how come in Atlanta, where everybody in charge was black, it was worse, not better, than places where the whites were still in charge.

The schools were worse, public health was worse, municipal services were worse, crime, illegitimacy, gambling, substance abuse, mental health, and littering were worse.

If you live in shit long enough, it don't stink.

A corollary was you don't blame the shit on someone else, you clean it up.

"He called me a nigger."

That's how Old Folks's admission that he used the word nigger in private thought, in casual speech, among some audiences, and as a term of reference, never as a term of address, played, to blacks, or to the blacks in his class, or to some blacks in his class, or to the man who stood up and said, pointing at Old Folks, "He called me a nigger."

Old Folks saw a difference between saying he might think, or say, among friends, who used the word, "Man, that nigger is eat up with anger," and calling the man a nigger, out loud, to his face, but he could see that the distinction might be lost on the man he called a nigger, that is, the nigger.

Just as he could see that to say that the darkeys were longing for the old folks at home on the plantation was to imply that darkeys loved the plantation, and longed to treated like slaves. People could read anything they wanted into anything that was said, they did it all the time, it should not surprise Old Folks, debaters used this, demagogues used this, it was their stock in trade, indeed, Old Folks's instructor was using it here, in this very class, ain't you, boss?

What do you say to them apples, boss?

I believe you're pissing in my pocket.

Old Folks wrote a novella about attending the workshop.

He called it Toxic Workshop.

He sent a copy to Harris Sussman, who said it was the best thing he had ever read about the workshop experience, from the point of view of a participant.

He also said that part of his practice was repairing the damage that such workshops did, going in afterwards and trying to patch up the wounds, restore, and heal.

But often they did lasting damage, to organizations, to individuals, and to the reputation of diversity training.