Online platform LinkedIn has removed a staff diversity training course posted by Coca Cola after an internal whistleblower leaked screenshots of material encouraging staff to ‘try to be less white’.
The slides came from an 11-minute video titled ‘Confronting Racism with Robin DiAngelo’. DiAngelo is a sociologist, and the author of ‘White Fragility’. She argues that white people are complicit in racist structures unless they actively work to be anti-racist.
Coca-Cola this week faced a mounting backlash after Karlyn Borysenko, an activist who supports banning critical race theory, shared images from an internal whistleblower of the company’s online racism training. The slides included tips to learners on how to be “less white, less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant and more humble.”
‘In the U.S. and other Western nations, white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white,” one of the slides reads. ‘Research shows that by age 3 to 4, children understand that it is better to be white.’
A Coca-Cola spokesperson confirmed that the course was ‘part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace’, but noted that the video ‘is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company’s curriculum’.
‘Our Better Together global learning curriculum is part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace,” the spokesperson said in a statement. ‘It (comprises) a number of short vignettes, each a few minutes long. The training includes access to LinkedIn Learning on a variety of topics, including on diversity, equity and inclusion.’
On Monday, however, LinkedIn said it had pulled the controversial course.
Nicole Leverich, vice president of corporate communications, told Newsweek in an email: ‘The Confronting Racism course featuring Robin DiAngelo is no longer available in our course library, at the request of the 3rd party content provider we licensed this content from.’
According to an earlier Newsweek report, antiracism training has become a divisive topic in America, with some arguing for greater efforts to ‘address systemic racism’, and others, who contest the impact of widespread institutional racism, saying that diversity training ‘is being weaponized against the American people’.
Political commentator Candace Owens said in a tweet: ‘If a corporate company sent around a training kit instructing black people how to “be less black”, the world would implode and lawsuits would follow. I genuinely hope these employees sue @CocaCola for blatant racism and discrimination,” she tweeted.
Others found different ways to contest the ‘try to be less white’ rationale: