many people are being exposed to Dei trainings that are very similar to the social justice curriculum I encountered in my graduate counseling program these Dei trainings tend to focus heavily on race and they can cause a lot of guilt and shame in trainees and for people who have concerns or objections or or criticisms of the material and there are lots of reasons why you might this can be very confusing and cause a lot of anxiety and it can be really intimidating to know how to or whether to challenge what you're being taught and the reason
it's so intimidating is that there is a a an automatic response baked into the ideology behind Dei that Rejects your concerns on the basis of some flaw with you so if you are a white person and you are raising concerns about how you're being taught to think about race then it's because of your white fragility and if you are a person who's not white and you have concerns about how they're teaching you to think about race then it's because of your internalized white supremacy so either way there's some flaw in you that prevents you from
accepting the truth that you're being told by by this ideology or by your trainer and um this prevents you from engaging in a logical manner with the material and there are a number of rhetorical fallacies being employed in order to dismiss your concerns I want to talk about a couple of those and then I want to talk a little bit about the logic behind the the trainings on race and why I think that it it falls apart on itself under examination so um first looking at rhetorical fallacies just a couple and if you can think
of more of them there are I'm sure there are many uh and you want to add them in the comments below this video I would love to read what you think because um I just these are just some of the really obvious ones that stand out for me the first one is circular reasoning circular argumentation so that looks like in this case uh your you are objecting to this because of your white fragility that says you object because people like you object we object because white people are fragile and they object or if you are
not white and you object then you object because people like you object because people like you have absorbed um the white supremacy and you're oppressing yourself so it's again you object because people like you object and anytime you account encounter something like that in an educational setting or in a training that's a huge red flag because you're not able to um to significantly or substantively discuss or examine the material in a logical Manner and and that should just be a huge work flag so the second um major uh rhetorical fallacy that stands out for me
is the Kafka trap and the Kafka trap is a rhetorical fallacy in which denial of something is taken as proof of that thing so in this case if they say you're a racist and you say yes I am then you're a racist but if you say no I'm not then that means you're a racist and and that's actually the way that that their their material teaches you so if you deny it it's because you're so racist that you're denying it so there's that's the Kafka trap being employed and a another um rhetorical fallacy here that
that's it in use here is the ad hominem attack and that's one in which instead of if you raise an argument instead of responding to the content of your argument the other party attacks something about your character so in this case uh whatever your objection is whatever your concern is is dismissed and sidelined and instead they just look at you and it's it's because something's wrong with you you're either white or you're internalized um racist or white supremacist so that's just three of probably many again please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments
I'd love to read more of these but um I want to also just take a moment to look at the logic that underpins the Dei trainings on race and I wrote an essay a little while back for critical therapy antidote called the future of counseling is racist where I went into some of this and if you'd like to read that I'll link that below I'm going to draw from it a little bit here um but I it's a longer essay if you're interested so looking at what what racism is and why it's harmful and if
we want to just go on the conceptual level here so racial discrimination could be looked at as the Assumption or Association of unwanted or negative stereotyped characteristics with a particular racial and and or ethnic group and the subsequent prejudicial Behavior against individuals based on those assumptions who are perceived to belong to that group and the reason that it's harmful is that it's or that or it's harmful for lots of reasons but the reason that it's wrong is that it's unfair to apply stereotyped negative assumptions about Behavior or characteristic to characteristics to individuals based on demographic
characteristics that are outside of their control and treating individuals differently based on those assumptions can create negative outcomes for the individuals that they've done nothing to deserve so this is being experienced on on the level of the individual when racial discrimination is widespread in a culture it can create negative impacts that are magnified and they uh they can have broad societal or intergenerational outcomes and the many experiences of racism in a culture form social patterns that can and should be considered on a sociological level but most importantly each of those experiences those harmful impacts impact
they impact an individual who directly feels the negative outcome of racism or racial discrimination so even at the group level we're still talking about an aggregation of individual Harms and so the simple answer to why is racism wrong is that it's unfair for individuals to be persecuted for negative feelings other people may have about people who look like them or who they associate with them and put another way the essential reason why racism or racial discrimination is wrong is because it's anti-individualist it values group identity over everything else that makes up a person and so
the Dei or or critical social justice or critical race or whatever you want to call it this this ideology is essentially using the exact thing that it it says it wants to uh it wants to fight it employs those same methods in the addressing of the problem that it sees it's it's I prefer to think of it more as applied demography it's it's demographic um it's sociology but it's applied to the individual level and so there are ways in which it makes sense to look at demographic patterns and so sociological patterns it really does it
and it's it's important to address these things and to understand them and to have conversations about the context from which different people different people come if you and to use one of their favorite words if you live in a Multicultural Society which we do it it makes sense to understand the different contexts from which other people around you may come and to have conversations about those things but what doesn't make sense is this distillation of the the group aggregate back down to the individual and this treatment of the individual as a representative of that group
and even though Dei explicitly tells you that that's not what they're doing that is exactly what they're doing that is exactly what they're doing so the antidote to racial discrimination is not more racial discrimination but recognition of the value of the individual and so as far as I see it um the Dei framework falls apart logically because if the harm of racial discrimination is experienced on the individual level and groups are just Aggregates of individuals but Dei says that individuals don't matter then what is it that they're seeking to address I think they're throwing the
baby out with the bathwater in my opinion and I would love to see your thoughts so if you want to share any thoughts or responses or or um or add to the list of rhetorical fallacies please feel free to comment and thanks very much for watching
