It's gotten a little too non-political around here – so let's talk about harassment training! Yay!
I had mine today at work, finally, after quite a while of ADP not knowing what its job was.
I find most of what is talked about in harassment trainings to be ridiculous. I find most of what is in the laws and amendments that found the harassment training to be ridiculous. And I know that part of this is because at the end of the day, different people respond to verbal interactions differently.
But a lot of it is because you should never make laws based on how anyone feels. I feel.
No, I mean of course I understand that harassment isn't okay. I've been there, I've experienced that. No one should have to go through that from a moral perspective.
But that's as far as it goes for me, in the workforce. The government shouldn't be involved in social settings. Each company should have a right to their own policies, and at the end of the day the companies that foster the best workplace environment will retain their employees better, and turnover will shorten, and profits will go up, and loyalty will be achieved. Companies without these policies will not survive. Word will get out that that's where you go if you want creeps to follow you into the bathrooms.
Anyway. Today's training involved a self-proclaimed disabled latino-american, a self-proclaimed woman (wow), a self-proclaimed atheist black man, and a self-proclaimed transgender woman.
Lots of stuff I have a problem with here. None of which are these people's categorizations (ok, I have a problem with one of these).
I have a problem with anyone who can't find a perfectly good reason to dislike someone.
I do not have a problem with people disliking other people. You're allowed to do that. You should still be respectful of them to the extent that they are also human beings who have the same rights as you do, but no one has the legal right to your approval.
It's okay to have standards. It's okay to look down on certain types of actions. It's best if you can differentiate between a person's actions and their physical traits, but sometimes that's hard to do without a lot of experiences and data points to work into your vision.
I like how Ben Shapiro explains what a lot of people perceive to be racism these days – or at least, I like how I explain how Ben Shapiro explains it (i.e, this is a total paraphrase but it's how I understood it);
People don't commit crimes because of their skin color or other physical characteristics. People commit crimes because of a number of factors, which can loosely be defined as their culture; the circumstances of their upbringing, their economic status, their values, their education level and where it was gotten, etc.
These things often correlate with a person's physical characteristics, because people of the same physical characteristics tend to share similar culture (of course there are outliers and areas of the world where this is less true, but this is the general trend). Black women are many times more likely to be single mothers than white women, although it's not because they're black – it's usually because of the culture surrounding them and the values they ascribe to. Likewise, single mother families in the U.S are extremely likely to fall below the poverty line regardless of race. A white single mother is more likely to fall below the poverty line than a black family with two parents in the household.
But the culture of black people in the U.S is encouraging the fathers to leave their families. The governments and welfare states they tend to support (democrats) discourage two family homes by rescinding funding if there's a father in the home.
This has not happened so much with white families for many other cultural reasons, which in turn has made it less likely for children raised in white families to grow up with only one parent and therefore disadvantaged (Jordan Peterson talks a lot about the disadvantages of growing up with only one parent in the household in his many books and lectures, which I highly recommend).
So: I don't look down on people for what their physical characteristics are, but there are a lot of choices a person can make that I think are awful. I think it's awful to leave your family and your children. I think it's awful to molest kids. I think it's awful to steal.
I think it's awful to idolize casual sex.
I think lots of stuff is awful, and I think you probably do too, and I think we all know that different groups of people do different things at different rates. And sure maybe if we didn't say “Black people commit a disproportionate number of crimes” and said “People who are poor or in a single family home commit a disproportionate number of crimes” and tried to beat around the bush a bit, we could appease some of these groups.
But even among the poor, certain groups act out more than others.
Some value systems are better than others. Some are more successful. Some are wiser and bring more people through to the other side.