U.S. Government’s Woke Training!
There's training on uncomfortable subjects. Oh noes!
The WSJ Editorial Board put in a FOIA request to get training materials from various government agencies related to the Biden Administration’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program. The published editorial, “The U.S. Government’s Woke Training,” is presumably intended to demonstrate outrageousness of it all.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has a gender gingerbread person. NASA says beware of micro-inequities. And if U.S. Army servicewomen express “discomfort showering with a female who has male genitalia,” what’s the brass’s reply? Talk to your commanding officer, but toughen up.
These are details from hundreds of pages of diversity and inclusion training materials used by the federal government in 2021 and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Everyone in corporate life knows such training, lampooned in the second episode of the TV show “The Office.” Yet taxpayers might be curious how their money is being spent to instruct the federal workforce these days.
Here’s the DVA gingerbread person:
And the Army’s shower vignette:
These seem rather innocuous, to be honest. Presumably, neither of these constitutes the entirety of the training; they’re literally just one graphic.
The gingerbread person image itself strikes me as a silly way of teaching adults but the infographic otherwise really packs a lot of information into one slide. I suspect many, if not most, in the target audience don’t understand the differentiation between gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, and sexual orientation. Establishing that vocabulary is quite useful as a launching point for conversation on these issues.
The Army’s shower vignette is going to be more controversial because many are outraged and more are uncomfortable with the idea of subjecting young women to having to shower with biological males. Frankly, I’m not thrilled with it, either. But the message conveyed is decidedly not “Talk to your commanding officer, but toughen up.”
It is Defense Department policy, established by civilian leadership and reinforced by numerous federal court rulings, that servicemembers will be treated according to the gender identity they have officially registered with. That has implications for commanders, transgender soldiers, and cisgender soldiers (likely mostly women) who are uncomfortable with being housed with transgender soldiers whose body does not conform to their gender identity.
This training, therefore, serves multiple purposes. It tells servicemembers that the DOD policy in question is a reality. So is the fact that military life sometimes comes with a loss of privacy. As is often the case in the military—particularly for junior enlisted personnel—the thing to do is utilize the chain of command to address the concern. It turns out that commanders have the discretion to take reasonable measures to enhance privacy for all concerned. They can put up shower curtains, dividers, and the like. But, importantly, they can’t do so in a way that ostracizes transgender personnel.
Look, I get it if people think it’s just outrageous that people with penises who identify as women are being treated as women by the United States Army. But that’s the law of the land. Given that, it makes good sense to have training sessions to let junior personnel know what the policy is, what accommodations might be available, and the like.
There are other examples in the piece but they’re all of the same piece. The only one I find even somewhat problematic is this slide used by the National Science Foundation:
And, honestly, that’s only because there are a lot of rabbit holes down which this can lead depending on who’s running the training. In particular, I’m queasy of the White Fragility and Anti-Racism pop psychology and the way it leads to really unproductive sessions that backfire. Otherwise, this is much like the DHS training on sex/gender: it introduces some common vocabulary that would seem useful in having the necessary conversations around these issues.
The editorial concludes:
These examples are, well, non-inclusive. Many of the materials are dull recitations of anti-retaliation policies or polite reminders, for example, not to pet somebody’s service dog. But one lesson is that there is now a conveyor belt from academia to the diversity-industrial complex. The portmanteau “misogynoir” was coined in 2010 on a blog called Crunk Feminist Collective. Eleven years later it’s in a training for government workers.
This type of re-education was accelerated by President Biden’s 2021 executive order directing agencies to “increase the availability and use of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility training.” It’s a form of political indoctrination intended to impose woke values on the vast federal bureaucracy and U.S. military.
You’d think the agencies would be proud to post all of these materials online, where it doesn’t require a long wait and a records request to read them. But since they don’t, we thought readers might like to see their taxpayer dollars and government values at work.
Even aside from the ideological baiting here, this just demonstrates a misunderstanding of how this stuff works.
I’ve been in my current job with the Defense Department, for going on a decade and have worked in other jobs in and out of government going back almost 40 years now. My wife has a doctorate in education and has worked in various training development positions for the Defense Department for the past five years or so. I have seen a whole lot of government-mandated training over the years and a lot of it is just bad.
The reasons are manifold.
Mass training is typically aimed at the lowest common denominator. If millions of people have to take the training every year, the assumption that some of the people taking the training have zero background in the subject matter simply has to be assumed. Ditto that they have little formal education.
For local-level training, the people doing the training are often not subject matter experts. If some poor lieutenant or GS-12 is directed to come up with training on a complicated subject, they’ll likely get on the Google machine and see what they find. If it’s from some goofy blog, they may not know the difference.
Alas, sometimes the people who are supposed to be subject-matter experts aren’t. So they, too, might just Google up something and paste it into the PowerPoint slide deck. That’s especially true if they’re on a tight deadline and don’t have time to do proper research.
Having worked for the U.S. Government in some capacity off and on for going on 40 years now, I don’t think it’s particularly “woke.” But, because we’re paid by the taxpayer, we’re subject to all manner of laws passed by Congress and various executive orders and departmental policy directives. And, because we’re such a large and diverse workforce, this leads to all manner of annual and occasional training sessions.
Again, much of the training is bad. The amount of time I waste on annual online training that is either completely unrelated to my job or which anyone who’s not an idiot already knows is frustrating as hell. But I get why it’s mandated and why the bureaucratic Powers That Be require that it be constantly renewed. Most of it is really bad because the people who are experts in the subject matter don’t talk to the instructional designers and vice-versa.
The thing that gets me about the gingerbread person slide is the first two axes are wrong:
Transgender is not a distinct gender identity from male/female. e.g. most trans women don’t consider themselves as “between” male and female, they consider themselves fully female.
The “between” on gender expression between male and female is non-binary, which may take the form of androgyny, but does not necessarily do so.
Except the slide actually says the response was to put up shower curtains to address the privacy issues and said that while reasonable accommodations should be made, they just can’t deal with it by segregating transgender soldiers
@Stormy Dragon: I hesitate to get too worked up over the infographic itself because how that’s handled is almost entirely dependent on the trainer. It’s perfectly reasonable to introduce “transgender” as a separate gender identity as a starting point. But, yeah, just looking at the graphic one could see at as an analog to “androgynous,” which it isn’t.
I find this a more useful depiction of gender identity than the single spectrum used in the slide:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Gender_spectrum_3D.png
The whole point of the WSJ Editorial Board is not information like their journalists would attempt to convey but to generate ridicule.
None of this is terribly new in terms of training, just the content is expanded. Forty plus years ago when I entered the Air Force we had mandatory coursework called Social Actions under the auspices of the appropriately named Social Actions office. The emphasis was on race relations then but also expanded to include drug and alcohol abuse and equal opportunity. There was mockery then also ( a common sneer was to call it the Angela Davis Charm School). We also had a block on our performance report called Human Relations.
The whole goal of the WSJ Editorial Board is to join in the fun of the “conflict entrepreneurs” and the right to degrade the whole of the DIE effort. Just like the attack on “woke capitalism” or the ESG efforts in the corporate world.
@Scott: BTW, the release of similar DEI training material within the Fox Corporation is inevitable.
I would not stay in a job where I had to be trained, and re-trained. Granted I’m not normal, but I will not have a person instruct me in a hierarchical way. Now, debate with me? Convince me? Advance logical arguments for a position? Ask me nicely because someone’s feelings might be hurt? Absolutely. But you must do X, Y and Z? I’d walk.
I’ve tried twice now to watch Yellowstone, but both times I gave up at the ‘branding’ nonsense. I can have no interest in or respect for a character who’d do that to a person, and just as little respect for the character who submitted to it.
At one point, in an effort to keep me out of Vietnam, my father wanted to use his connections (at the time he was captain of the army’s yacht on the Potomac) to get me into West Point. That would not have gone well. Oppositional Defiance Disorder not a good thing to bring with you to West Point.
Interesting trends: more ‘woke’ instruction, but also less employee passivity toward employers who are abusive. More submission to authority, and also less. Or maybe you could frame it as ready submission to authority seen as moral, not so much submission to arbitrary authority.
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s interesting that you consider merely understanding how people different then you experience the world to be “submission to authority” and instead expect other people to “debate you” to be worth of merely existing.
You’re white, you’re supposed to be queasy about White Fragility. 😉
I think you don’t quite understand the nuance of the word “woke.” It is used to describe a situation where you are not allowed to openly discriminate against someone without facing some sort of negative consequence. For instance, anti-lynching laws are “woke” as are a couple of college kids complaining about microaggressions.
@Stormy Dragon:
Idiotic response.
If you must take a class to keep your job that is not ‘understanding how etc…’ No understanding is actually required, one must merely pretend to understand in order to remain employed. Actual understanding would in fact involve debate and discussion and persuasion. You know, the things I insisted on. Because it’s just possible – hear me out – that the instruction is, gasp, wrong! Even when it’s right a thinking person will have questions.
But not you.
Look, if you want a brain prepared to uncritically accept instruction from whomever, you do you. The results speak for themselves. You only seem able to think in tropes and memes and received wisdom, layered with much hair-trigger rage directed at heretics. Rather like the average MAGAt. You’re a true believer.
@Michael Reynolds:
The purpose of “debate” in our society, particularly public debate, is not to arrive at the truth, it’s to perform strength and certainty by arguing a position forever while refusing to give ground. A trans person can never persuade someone by debating the legitimacy of their gender identity, all they can do is help the other party normalize the idea that their gender identity should be subject to veto by cis people.
The only real objection I have to any of these slides is the “White Priviledge” box.
Not that what is being described isn’t real, but that the choice of language shuts people down immediately so they cannot absorb information. The people who wrote this also have “White Fragility” so they should be familiar with the concept that white people are fragile.
“White Privilege” is often simply that the boot on your neck is a little nicer than the boot on the brown guy’s neck, which isn’t really a privilege as most people think of it. The term sparks immediate defensiveness and argument with the aggrieved white guy listing every single thing they’ve had to overcome in life and how they aren’t privileged.
Possibly the single worst term to come out of DEI folks.
I don’t have a better term, but the definition of it as “inherent advantage” is also awful.
Middle of the road fragile white folks can be reached with arguments closer to “To the extent that structural racism exists, it benefits white males even if they have done nothing racist themselves.” And then showing that structural racism is more common than they believe.
White Advantage: Not having to pay the “Brown Tax” of structural racism on top of generally being screwed over.
@Gustopher:
I see DiAngelo and her ilk as grifters and the training that accompanies those sessions are performative bullshit. It’s critical race theory shorn of its intellectual rigor and used as a marketing gimmick. Note that I have zero problem with the more CRT-standard terms on the infographic like “intersectionality” or “white privilege.” (The latter is, though, a classic case of what James Carville calls “faculty lounge” terminology. It’s incredibly useful as scholarly shorthand but bound to piss people off.)
@Michael Reynolds:
That is what being employed entails. Pretending to be professional.
At a job, no one cares if you’re a white supremacist. They do care whether you can take your white supremacist shit and set it aside when you come in, and then cheerfully answer the phones without calling your customers or coworkers the n-word.
@Gustopher:
Indeed!
@James Joyner:
It’s presumably harder to get rid of someone from the Army than it is from a corporate job, but for all their uselessness these sessions do have a very clear, immediate benefit in the corporate world — they piss off the people who are going to cause expensive problems later.
Sometimes they have a temper tantrum then and there that gets them onto HR’s radar to be managed out of the company. That can be costly and time consuming, but less so than the lawsuits they will later cause.
Sometimes they complain and then find another job that isn’t so “woke.” This is best, because it’s very cheap.
In the corporate world, this isn’t about learning, it’s about showing that you can shut up and not be an asshole for an hour. A test that a surprising number of people fail.
If they could figure out how to make it part of job interviews they would.
@Michael Reynolds:
There was a time when I would have been a lot more sympathetic to this position, but once you have to manage people, even well-educated, highly intelligent ones, you find it real quick that there has to be some level of rules and standard procedures if a large, complex entity is to function.
You simply cannot have a logical persuasion session with everybody all the time. This is especially true since not all logical persuasion sessions lead to the same conclusions.
Ideally, all of it is asked nicely, and in a logical fashion, but it is inevitable that at some point one is simply confronted with: you must do X, Y, and/or Z whether you like it or think it is logical or not.
WSJ is, like FOX “News”, always looking for something to stoke partisan anger and resentment, no matter how much they have to exaggerate. I’ve worried, James, about your tendency to find something stupid in the morning news and do a post on it. This is actually a relevant post and I pretty much agree with you. But reacting to silly news stories could come to consume all your time. Also too, silly government/military/corporate training. And don’t get me started on PowerPoint slides. I’ve got a whole book around here somewhere on how PowerPoint corrupted presentation skills. I’ve looked at too many slides that look nice and seem to say something, but once examined, make absolutely no sense.
Christopher Rufo was able to take a silly Seattle city government training presentation and blow it up into a whole movement fighting essentially imaginary CRT in K-12. We watched real time as they turned nothing into an effective political issue. The problem isn’t CRT (or defund or BLM or groomers) but our inability to counter their propaganda machine.
@Steven L. Taylor: And don’t get me wrong: I am not, and never was, a fan of being told what to do. One of my long-standing quips is that I became an academic rather than join the military for a reason.
And yes: these trainings tend to be pretty dumb, but if, say, the annual cybersecurity training really wasn’t needed, we wouldn’t see people across the country falling for the gift card scam, for example.
The scam in question. Not only has it been reported at schools across the country, but I have also seen it several times at my own university. In fact, at least twice, someone has pretended to be me. No one feel for me as bait, but we did have an adjunct fall for it when someone impersonated one of the chairs.
@Gustopher:
It’s more about creating a paper trail so that if they get sued later, they can claim they TRIED to prevent it. e.g. Sexual harassment training is less about stopping sexual harassment and more about making sure that the corporation can’t be held responsible for whatever harassment does occur.
@Michael Reynolds: “If you must take a class to keep your job that is not ‘understanding how etc…’ No understanding is actually required, one must merely pretend to understand in order to remain employed. ”
Well, yeah. Because all these trainings really aren’t intended to change the way you think, they’re meant to change the way you act. No one really cares what goes on in Michael Reynolds’ head, since there’s no way of knowing that. They care how he behaves at work.
That’s why this is called “training,” and not “re-education” or “indoctrination,” no matter what the idiots at WSJ say. It boils down to “these are the issues you might face in the workplace, here are our policies on the way you should respond to them.”
That’s why it’s not up for debate and why they’re not going to lay out a series of logical arguments to get you on their side. They don’t care if you’re on their side. They care how you act in the workplace.
Surely even you can’t have an ideological problem with that.
@Steven L. Taylor: “You simply cannot have a logical persuasion session with everybody all the time. This is especially true since not all logical persuasion sessions lead to the same conclusions.”
Personally I think MR should sit in on a faculty meeting in just about any department in any university. There he could see exactly what happens when everybody in the room believes that no one should simply be able to tell them what to do, and instead every idea or plan or problem that comes up must be debated richly and fully between equals, until a meeting of the minds is reached and everyone shares the common goal with no deviation.
Spoiler: Nothing. Ever. Gets. Done.
Hmmm… I’m not queasy about white fragility. Does that mean I’m not woke enough? Or too woke?
I have never had white fragility. Too many times I watched the system bend in favor to my straight white male ass. I came of age in the 70s and no, I do not believe anybody who grew into adulthood in those years did not experience the same, they just found a way to pretend they earned their rewards.
@wr: I wouldn’t put it quite like you did. For example, meetings that I went to where the participants worked on checking the grading rubrics for writing classes to see if every reader came up with approximately the same grade worked fine. But for the most part, I’ve never been to a faculty/department meeting that couldn’t have been accomplished with an email.
@OzarkHillbilly: Exactimundo!
About just ignoring the WSJ editorials which are simply pandering to the rage addicts out there.
@Michael Reynolds: The “no one is the boss of me” mentality really sounds a lot like the MAGA crowd, with the antivaxxers and the pronoun haters. (They tend to all say it in unison, and about things like respecting minorities, etc., so there are differences, but there’s also a lot of overlap)
Sometimes people are the boss of you. Either literally and explicitly in terms of having the power to fire you, or just figuratively in that there are rules and expectations set that you either follow or deal with a lot of shit. And stupid hoops to jump through*.
“Ain’t nobody gonna tell me what side of the road to drive on!”
*: I’m bad at the hoops if I have to put any effort in. A boss at one of my jobs discovered that I had used the exact same self-eval for performance reviews for four years running. They were not amused. I claimed the text was “ever-green,” which was a popular buzzword at the time.
@Gustopher: I think a lot of the government “teaching” stuff is also so that later down the pipeline, when some idiot gets accused of sexual harassment, he/she doesn’t get to whine “but nobody told me what I did would be wrong!”
It’s simply preempting a possible defense on the part of the idiot.
(I think it’s also a way of attempting to get through to older geezers that “what you may have thought acceptable because you did it earlier in your life and got away with it is not acceptable now.”)
@wr: Indeed.