Coca-Cola Wants Employees to ‘Try to Be Less White’
Recent diversity training for Coca-Cola employees is raising eyebrows because one of the things they want their staff to do is, 'try to be less white.' To be fair, the training itself was reportedly provided via LinkedIn, but I was unable to find the training module while researching for this article.
Slides from the training were Tweeted by an employment lawyer Harmeet K. Dhillon, who called the training, 'blatant racial discrimination.'
Dhillon's post contained a retweet from an organizational psychologist in New Hampshire going by @DrKarlynB who posted slides allegedly obtained from the diversity training obtained from an internal whistleblower at Coca-Cola on February 19, 2021.
If you're following me so far, Dr. Karlyn Borysenko also posted a 'tell all' video to YouTube the same day.
Fox Business reports that Coca-Cola told them that the slides were not a part of their training program. However, did they instruct their employees to take the training via LinkedIn? Looks like...
Newsweek confirmed the training took place, but was not originated by them and is publicly available.
A Coca-Cola spokesperson confirmed that the course is "part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace," but also noted that "the video circulating on social media is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company's curriculum."
Here's the statement regarding the training from Coke.
In case you were wondering, some of the steps given to 'try to be less white' included:
- be less oppressive
- be less arrogant
- be less certain
- be less defensive
- be less ignorant
- be more humble
- listen
- believe
- break with apathy
- break with white solidarity