Thursday, January 26, 2006

The pluralism police

City of Portland Diversity Development Strategic Initiative
OBJECTIVE: Management models a positive attitude regarding diversity in general, and multi-culturalism in particular, by action and participation in the development of standards of acceptable staff behavior.

Require all staff to attend city-sponsored training and require additional training for supervisors as necessary.

Provide time and resources for staff to participate in diversity training and multicultural events.

Time (time = money) and resources (resources = literal money) for diversity indoctrination. Remember, the new tax is for the kids...

OBJECTIVE: At this stage, the goal should be “institutionalized diversity
development” and “enthusiastic multi-culturalism.” Failure to embrace these issues
and to be an active participant should not be tolerated by the City at a management
level.

Everything is tolerated except failure to embrace “enthusiastic multi-culturalism.”

Directors hold managers and supervisory personnel accountable for hiring, promoting and maintaining a diverse workforce through performance evaluations.

This means that minorities and women get better performance reviews.

You can read the rest of this nonsense if you want to scare yourself, you get the idea from these highlights.

4 comments:

MAX Redline said...

Oh, this is the latest "in" thing. It appears that most people weren't "celebrating diversity" hard enough. So, they tried the old carrot approach and it didn't work. People just didn't go for the warm and fuzzy, touchy-feely celebration of racism. Lately, they've been breaking out the sticks. You WILL practice politically-correct racism, or else!

Anonymous said...

Exactly just how do you measure how well someone is "Celebrating" diversity? It is such bullcrap and if you want my opinion it is just a wee bit patronizing to minorities. Like "You are special because you are darked skinned, so I am going to be especially nice to you and I am fully aware of how unique your culture is".

It might seem far-fetched, but what exactly does the city expect from it's workers? To jump for joy in the presence of a black, hispanic or gay?

Daniel said...

Celebrating diversity is subjective enough to be able to fire conservatives simply for their beliefs.

Why do you think that teachers, bus drivers, and other public employees say they are scared to death to let out the fact that they are Republican?

Robin said...

at my last job, we were forced to sit through one of these diversity training seminars put on by Lane Community College.

I'm not putting down the presentation because the guy did try his best to make a presentation, however, what was encouraging, is that the 22 people in my group DID NOT want to label people as his program tried to make us do.

For example, they showed us head shots of a group of people one of the time and we were supposed to give our first impressions

One guy had a leather hat, leather coat, striggly beard... if you guessed biker, you are wrong.

The only thing I can say about that training, the muffins that they provided were good.