Finding Value in Diversity Training: the Case of Microaggressions

“That is why in my work with schools and non-governmental organizations I try to model an open and judicious approach to CSJ orthodoxies, one that sifts through the kooky stuff in order to highlight the important parts.”

For all of its insistence on allyship, Critical Social Justice (CSJ) activism creates a lot of enemies. Its stridency, dogmatism, and dystopian excesses practically beg critics to respond with wholesale dismissals or mockery, allowing CSJ’s most extreme, incoherent, or idiotic assertions to stand synecdochally for the whole.

Yet most of us agree with the underlying premise that our diverse society, communities, workplaces, and schools should be fair and inclusive places, where everyone feels welcome.

That is why in my work with schools and non-governmental organizations I try to model an open and judicious approach to CSJ orthodoxies, one that sifts through the kooky stuff in order to highlight the important parts. It takes some mettle. The open part is difficult because, as CSJ activists love to remind us, reckoning honestly with prejudice and patterned unfairness is uncomfortable. The judicious part is even harder because the activists brook no dissent and have a well-developed arsenal of shaming tactics with which to shut it down.