“An elite private college in Southern California is facing a barrage of allegations that racism is running rampant at the school — even though the institution is led by a black woman,” reports The College Fix:
Pomona College leaders are grappling with accusations from black students that the $90,000-per-year institution is enabling a racist environment….The college’s Black Student Union recently held a town hall attended by hundreds of students alleging black students have been “subjected to hateful experiences…that range from microaggressions to explicit hate speech”…students “focused their criticism on black Pomona administrators, including the President and Dean of Students.”
The president is G. Gabrielle Starr, who…previously served on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California Higher Education Recovery with Equity Taskforce…The college’s dean of students is…also black.
Among the racist incidents flagged by protesters is the “use of the n-word by student-athletes…and alleged vandalism in the First-Generation and Low-Income (FLI) student lounge….the FLI lounge incident was a misunderstanding; students left trash behind in the room, which was interpreted by FLI leadership as a targeted incident.”
The BSU’s list of reform demands for Pomona include…Mandatory bias training for staff and faculty…as well as increased funding for black affinity groups and the Office of Black Student Affairs.
Diversity training and sensitivity training typically don’t work. That is discussed in a 2012 article in Psychology Today. In it, Peter Bregman notes, “Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it,” by dividing people into categories and promoting a belief in inherent differences; “Categories are dehumanizing. They simplify the complexity of a human being. So focusing people on the categories increases their prejudice.” Indeed, “researchers — Frank Dobbin of Harvard, Alexandra Kalev of Berkeley, and Erin Kelly of the University of Minnesota — concluded that ‘In firms where [diversity] training is mandatory…training actually has negative effects on management diversity.” Similarly, in 2007, Time magazine ran a story titled, “Employee Diversity Training Doesn’t Work.”
