Don’t Be White: Be a Plagiarist

You’ve prob­a­bly heard the ker­fuf­fle about Coca-Cola telling their employ­ees to “Be less white.” And they did, sort of, but the full sto­ry offers more schaden­freude than two whole weeks of Dai­ly Duhs:

Seems Coca-Cola paid Dr. Kar­lyn Bory­senko, Ph.D., MBA, a lot of mon­ey to host a LinkedIn Learn­ing online train­ing pro­gram for Coca-Cola employ­ees, with nifty Pow­er­point slides and charts and stuff, all of which encour­aged them to feel bad for being white.

(By the way: How does that work? Did they send out a memo that said, “If you’re white, stop work­ing after lunch tomor­row and watch this train­ing video for the rest of the day. If you’re not white, keep working”?)

It gets bet­ter: Dr. Bory­senko put togeth­er her expen­sive slideshow by steal­ing it. Yep! Robin DiAn­ge­lo, Ph.D. and author of White Fragili­ty: Why It’s So Hard for White Peo­ple to Talk About Racism, had no idea what was hap­pen­ing until she start­ed get­ting requests for com­ments about the train­ing sem­i­nar, and she had lots of com­ments, such as “I did not cre­ate this sem­i­nar,” “I did not give any­one per­mis­sion to use my work like this,” and “This sem­i­nar does not rep­re­sent my views or the views expressed in my book at all!”

(By the way 2: Why are all these peo­ple white, but some­how also experts on what it’s like not to be white?)

So Coca-Cola hasti­ly announced that although they paid for the train­ing video they had no idea what was in the train­ing video, and LinkedIn Learn­ing hasti­ly delet­ed the train­ing video, and DiAn­ge­lo devot­ed the entire home page of her site to a mes­sage say­ing, “I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE STUPID TRAINING VIDEO AT COCA-COLA!”, and Dr. Bory­senko’s home page says noth­ing about the sem­i­nar (although it does say “Donate & Sup­port My Con­tent,” which takes almost as much gall as the guy who mur­dered his par­ents, then plead­ed for mer­cy dur­ing his tri­al because he was an orphan). 

My favorite slide from the sem­i­nar says, “Research shows that by age 3 to 4, chil­dren under­stand that it is bet­ter to be white.”

No they don’t. 3- and 4‑year-old kids are too smart to buy into all this crit­i­cal race the­o­ry crap. To get that stu­pid you have to rack up at least an MBA and a Ph.D.

To end on a hap­pi­er note: Bud­dy Brown wrote us a hilar­i­ous song about the whole mess.