Cohousing-L Mailing List: Diversity, Inclusion, Bias

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

This is a link to an article that may convey more successfully what I’ve been 
trying to say less successfully. 

"I’m a Black physician, and I’m appalled by mandated implicit bias training. 
The message conveyed by such training is harmful both to physicians and 
patients, " by Marilyn Singleton. It appeared in the NYTimes and this is a gift 
link so everyone should be able to open it.

https://wapo.st/3Y4j69j

Some excerpts:

> When I graduated with a medical degree in 1973, a Black woman in a class of 
> mostly White men, there was a real sense that the days of obsessing over skin 
> color and making race-based assumptions about our fellow human beings was 
> finally fading — and, hopefully, soon gone for good.
> 
> Apparently not. That racial obsession has come rushing back — in academia, 
> politics, business and even in my beloved medical profession. But now it’s 
> coming from the opposite direction. The malignant false assumption that Black 
> people are inherently inferior intellectually has been traded in for the 
> malignant false assumption that White people are inherently racist.

> [It] includes other bias targets, including gender identity, age, and 
> disability. But in practice, such training — a mainstay of the diversity and 
> inclusion industry, worth an estimated _$3.4 billion in 2020_ — is 
> overwhelmingly about race.

Singleton is vehemently opposed to the assumptions on which this training is 
often based because it has serious implications for clear thinking. I would 
disagree that “all" such training is sending harmful messages, but the 
unintended effects are often ignored and part of what is taught is taken as 
fact when it isn’t based on any scientific evidence. 

I think everyone can learn from another person’s experiences, but that is not 
the same as believing that those experiences prove conscious or unconscious 
bias in cohousing. Cohousing communities have been started and formed by groups 
of predominantly white professionals. That is not proof that they were biased 
against people of color. Those people are the ones who have had the resources 
to start cohousing communities because overt systemic discrimination has 
afforded them privileges is not the same thing as evidence or proof of concept 
that cohousers are biased. 

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org