It really warms my cockles to see someone calling out this imported American jibberish, as a futile exercise that achieves absolutely nothing.
It’s especially pleasing that the usual defences that only Tories or Nazis would dare to cast aspersions on the incredible benefits of unconscious bias training, cannot be employed against a qualified, experienced, Black academic (and outgoing chair of Institute of Race Relations)
Unconscious Bias training is wet dream Harvard grift. Instead of solving a problem, it introduces a problem to be solved (which conveniently creates an entire industry of lecturers, publishing rights, presenters, academic materials, organised workshops etc.)
Edit: Further research I’ve looked at has shown that US corportations alone spend a whopping $8 BILLION on such courses every year. It’s the grift that keeps on giving too, as it’s *unconscious* bias its a problem that can never really be solved.
> ‘Unconscious bias and diversity training – what the evidence says’, the report highlights that ‘there is currently no evidence that this training changes behaviour in the long term or improves workplace equality in terms of representation of women, ethnic minorities or other minority groups’
Thats not to say people or organisations arent CONSCIOUSLY racist – which is a separate issue
What a delightfully simple way of looking at both the article and at the issue itself. If only reality was as simple as your outlook on things, my friend…
In the article Prescod is basically saying how too often people will do the training as an alternative to making actual (political) changes.
And to address your comment, unconscious bias training is not “American jibberish/wet dream Harvard grift”. It’s a tool that people have available to affect racism/sexism and like any other tool it can be used poorly or well.
I did UB training at the BBC a few years back, it was actually quite an interesting course, I really don’t get people’s aversion to it. However I think I agree with the sentiment of the article a lot of organisations bring in the training and see it as job done – racism, homophobia, everything else solved!
When in reality a lot of hard work needs to go into solving the systematic issues, you can’t just fix it by making people watch a few videos and ticking a sheet.
As someone who used to have conscious and unconscious racial biases I can tell you that I found training like this about 1% useful compared to my positive interactions with various people counting for the other 99%.
[deleted]
Unconscious bias training has only ever been as useful as.
You know biases?
You might have some ones you didnt realise but we cant be specific because that would probably make us sound like -ists and -phobes so lets talk about how we have an unconsious bias towards a brand of beans even though we don’t.
I have done the Harvard one, and enjoyed it.
Found some blind spots I didn’t know, which is great.
Did I skip off into the sunset declaring that is it the world is fixed? Fuck no. The course is just a tool to show where you stand, and therefore change.
Act as everyone else acts, think for yourself.
When I did the DIE courses I gave the answers they wanted to hear after beating my head up against the twisted ‘facts’ and moved on.
I tend to agree.
Unconscious bias is real, but because it is, taking a rational approach is nearly necessarily flawed.
But I guess the C suite would much rather admit that “unconscious bias” exists than institutional racism.
Unconscious biases won’t go away after a one hour training course, nor will barriers affecting employees go away by having average employees attend these courses. They might reduce microaggressions but more significant barriers will only be removed when management take the practical steps to removing barriers. Training might be part of the solution but it is not going to solve the issues by itself.
My work sent me on one like a year ago, can’t remember a thing from it
We had to do more sex harassment training at work recently… when doing it, all I could think was ‘the sex pests are not going to stop because of this’
I’d feel similar on this kinda course
UB training in an organisation where the executives are all cishet, middle aged white men is always telling.
I thought the training was great when we did it. Really opened my eyes.
What? No, he’s obviously wrong.
Look, educated white kids who went to university and got top marks and everything will tell you that the most important thing to tackle racism is to throw statues of people who have been dead for 400 years into a nearby river, stream or canal.
That made us all feel a lot less bothered about the past and there’s barely been a racist incident since it happened.
*It’s racism we want to talk about, it’s systemic behaviour we want to talk about, institutionalised racism we want to talk about*
C’mon now…it’s throwing statues in water and getting multi-millionaire successful sportspeople to kneel.
/s
It is bollocks, plain and simple. Yet another American thing that was stupid over there and now stupid over here.
We’ll have people demanding reparations next for slavery.
17 comments
It really warms my cockles to see someone calling out this imported American jibberish, as a futile exercise that achieves absolutely nothing.
It’s especially pleasing that the usual defences that only Tories or Nazis would dare to cast aspersions on the incredible benefits of unconscious bias training, cannot be employed against a qualified, experienced, Black academic (and outgoing chair of Institute of Race Relations)
Unconscious Bias training is wet dream Harvard grift. Instead of solving a problem, it introduces a problem to be solved (which conveniently creates an entire industry of lecturers, publishing rights, presenters, academic materials, organised workshops etc.)
Edit: Further research I’ve looked at has shown that US corportations alone spend a whopping $8 BILLION on such courses every year. It’s the grift that keeps on giving too, as it’s *unconscious* bias its a problem that can never really be solved.
Whilst personally, I have no issue with unconscious bias training, I am forced to note the results of a [government review](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/written-ministerial-statement-on-unconscious-bias-training) into the evidence base:
> ‘Unconscious bias and diversity training – what the evidence says’, the report highlights that ‘there is currently no evidence that this training changes behaviour in the long term or improves workplace equality in terms of representation of women, ethnic minorities or other minority groups’
Thats not to say people or organisations arent CONSCIOUSLY racist – which is a separate issue
What a delightfully simple way of looking at both the article and at the issue itself. If only reality was as simple as your outlook on things, my friend…
In the article Prescod is basically saying how too often people will do the training as an alternative to making actual (political) changes.
Which is absolutely true. However, it’s also very important to point out that [most of those trainings are the shortest possible version](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/25/what-unconscious-bias-training-gets-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it). Such version is often chosen by managers/CEOs etc only because they want to be able to say that they “did something against racism” without actually having to do too much.
And that is exactly what [this 2020 report found](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/944431/20-12-14_UBT_BIT_report.pdf). When done as an isolated episode without taking any additional steps and measures, it is unlikely that a single 30min session on unconscious bias will solve racism/sexism.
And to address your comment, unconscious bias training is not “American jibberish/wet dream Harvard grift”. It’s a tool that people have available to affect racism/sexism and like any other tool it can be used poorly or well.
I did UB training at the BBC a few years back, it was actually quite an interesting course, I really don’t get people’s aversion to it. However I think I agree with the sentiment of the article a lot of organisations bring in the training and see it as job done – racism, homophobia, everything else solved!
When in reality a lot of hard work needs to go into solving the systematic issues, you can’t just fix it by making people watch a few videos and ticking a sheet.
As someone who used to have conscious and unconscious racial biases I can tell you that I found training like this about 1% useful compared to my positive interactions with various people counting for the other 99%.
[deleted]
Unconscious bias training has only ever been as useful as.
You know biases?
You might have some ones you didnt realise but we cant be specific because that would probably make us sound like -ists and -phobes so lets talk about how we have an unconsious bias towards a brand of beans even though we don’t.
I have done the Harvard one, and enjoyed it.
Found some blind spots I didn’t know, which is great.
Did I skip off into the sunset declaring that is it the world is fixed? Fuck no. The course is just a tool to show where you stand, and therefore change.
Act as everyone else acts, think for yourself.
When I did the DIE courses I gave the answers they wanted to hear after beating my head up against the twisted ‘facts’ and moved on.
I tend to agree.
Unconscious bias is real, but because it is, taking a rational approach is nearly necessarily flawed.
But I guess the C suite would much rather admit that “unconscious bias” exists than institutional racism.
Unconscious biases won’t go away after a one hour training course, nor will barriers affecting employees go away by having average employees attend these courses. They might reduce microaggressions but more significant barriers will only be removed when management take the practical steps to removing barriers. Training might be part of the solution but it is not going to solve the issues by itself.
My work sent me on one like a year ago, can’t remember a thing from it
We had to do more sex harassment training at work recently… when doing it, all I could think was ‘the sex pests are not going to stop because of this’
I’d feel similar on this kinda course
UB training in an organisation where the executives are all cishet, middle aged white men is always telling.
I thought the training was great when we did it. Really opened my eyes.
What? No, he’s obviously wrong.
Look, educated white kids who went to university and got top marks and everything will tell you that the most important thing to tackle racism is to throw statues of people who have been dead for 400 years into a nearby river, stream or canal.
That made us all feel a lot less bothered about the past and there’s barely been a racist incident since it happened.
*It’s racism we want to talk about, it’s systemic behaviour we want to talk about, institutionalised racism we want to talk about*
C’mon now…it’s throwing statues in water and getting multi-millionaire successful sportspeople to kneel.
/s
It is bollocks, plain and simple. Yet another American thing that was stupid over there and now stupid over here.
We’ll have people demanding reparations next for slavery.