I vehemently object to my taxes being used for, and the town forcing “diversity” or “inclusion” training on, its employees, volunteers, and schoolchildren. It is essentially reverse racism, and it is destroying our constitutional freedom of speech. Our town workers’ opinions should be their own, and their privacy respected. All this “training” does is fuel class hatred and divisiveness.
The PC police are no longer satisfied with virtue-signaling and moral shaming; now they run encounter sessions where they force everyone to pretend to hate themselves and their country and mouth insincere platitudes under the threat of being accused of racism—strangely reminiscent of the Two Minutes Hate in [George Orwell’s] “1984.” Like Orwell’s characters, modern participants know that if they don’t go along, they will get punished. The news lately has been full of people fired from their jobs or failed in school for not going along.
Furthermore, it has the opposite of the intended effect: You chase away the people you should keep and reward the ones you shouldn’t, because strong, honest people object to thought police, and you shouldn’t want those who are willing to lie just to go along.
American public discourse has completely lost perspective on racism. In my opinion, we are probably one of the least racist countries in the world, and certainly the one that works the most conscientiously to eliminate the last vestiges—as we should. We will never completely get rid of it, however, because there is no field of human endeavor without at least a few bad apples. Too many Americans don’t understand that real racism (not the manufactured, self-flagellatory version here) and even outright slavery are still accepted in some parts of the world, and that slavery is not necessarily tied to race; there are slaves of many races, and many are the same race or tribe as their captors. In our own history, many of our early European settlers came here as slaves, some involuntarily, and some voluntarily as long-term indentured servants to pay for the ocean passage.
Reverse racism training, no matter what euphemism you call it by—“inclusion,” “diversity,” “anti-racism,” or whatever—is a terrible idea.
Bonnie Chandler
Prospect Hill Road
