Sensitivity training has been around in some form or another since 1947. It’s easy to argue that everyone is more racially sensitive than ever before.
I don’t know if it has necessarily made anything better.
The killing of George Floyd kicked off the most destructive period of civil unrest in world history. The deaths of Tony Timpa or Nicholas Gilbert hardly raised a blip on anyone’s radar.
Neither death changed much actual policy. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals decided on 4/20/2020, that 15 minutes with a knee on your neck is not excessive force if they’re killing a white guy. The Supreme Court doesn’t see a problem see it as their business.
On 4/20/2021, a jury was deliberating on how long a cis, white, male, Chauvinist, pig, should go to prison.
The death of George Floyd did spark then former, ex-President Donald Trump to issue an Executive Order stating that police can not use neck restraints unless they feel like it.
The Floyd family received a record settlement in record time.
Timpa and Gilbert’s families received nothing.
Macro Aggression
The civil unrest following the death of George Floyd accelerated to Kenosha, in neighboring Wisconsin. When multiple white assailants were shot by Kyle Rittenhouse, who is also white and was acquitted due to a self-defense claim when the white people he shot were attacking him, this was somehow clear evidence of systemic white privilege.
Rittenhouse was taking online nursing classes at night at Arizona State University (ASU) while on trial for the shooting and killing of two white assailants. Students for Socialism ASU, rallied to protest Rittenhouse taking online classes.
The student group released a set of demands, via twitter, including that the school release a statement denouncing white supremacy and acknowledge Rittenhouse as a “racist murderer.”
ASU removed Rittenhouse from the school following these protests.
Micro Aggressions
Weeks later, two of the student protestors created a viral video when they discovered two white men displaying hate symbols in the multicultural center.
One wore an “I did not vote for Biden shirt” while drinking from a Chick-fil-A hate cup. The other displayed a Police Lives Matter sticker on his laptop and was alleged to be wearing a Bass Pro Shop cap.
The racially sensitive young women showed their righteous indignation and called campus police.
They then bravely filmed themselves educating these men out of the multicultural space on their state-funded campus.
Rather than erect a statue for their tireless efforts fighting white supremacy, the university issued them a violent, racist warning. The university required the women to write a paper on being civil when talking about race and society on campus.
At the time of this writing, the women were organizing a protest to teach ASU, “Why telling students of color at ASU to be more civil in the face of white supremacy and neo-Naziism, on this campus, is actually violence.”
A rally is planned.
It’s been 50 years since Affirmative Action and Title IX have been enforced with a presumption of guilt against the colleges, universities, federal agencies, and employers. This gave women of all races de facto preference via quotas.
America has to do something about race, but I’m not sure greater sensitivity is it.
