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This week there is once again a fierce competition for El American‘s “Idiot of the Week” award. This time we find two of the most powerful companies on the planet, Coca-Cola and Disney, competing to get the system to support even more the leftists who call themselves anti-establishment.
Coca-Cola, or how to appear anti-racist while being racist
A Coca-Cola employee revealed that one of the company’s diversity training courses urged its workers to “be less white.”
Delivered by Robin DiAngelo, a facilitation consultant specializing in “Critical Discourse Analysis” and “Whiteness Studies”, the course sought to explain to Coca-Cola workers how to be less racist. To do so, it compelled them to “be less ignorant”, “less oppressive”, “less arrogant” and, in short, “less white.”
We do not know if the way to be less white proposed by Coca-Cola is the way Justin Trudeau used in 2001, appearing at a costume party with his face painted black with shoe polish, although we imagine it is not. What is certain is that if a consultant had told Coca-Cola’s black employees to try to be less black, the shockwave of outrage would have reached from Atlanta to the farthest corners of the globe.
The reaction of Coca-Cola and Robin DiAngelo has been to disclaim responsibility for the content of the course. This DiAngelo seminar, available until recently on LinkedIn Learning, but conveniently now removed, according to Coca-Cola, “is not part of their educational curriculum.” Although they later add that their “Better Together global training is part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace. It is made up of a series of short vignettes, each lasting a few minutes.” We guess that for Coca-Cola racism is only serious if it exceeds a certain number of minutes.
Robin DiAngelo has attempted to justify herself by saying that “the LinkedIn Learning online training that was circulating was not a course by Dr. DiAngelo, but a series of interview clips that had been edited without her knowledge and presented as an educational resource.” And that “she had no part in it being presented or marketed as a training session, did not approve its distribution, did not know it was being used in corporate settings, and as such, it has been removed from the site and voluntarily suspended by the groups that created and distributed it.”
Perhaps Robin DiAngelo, born in California to a working-class family, could stop trying to be less white and be more careful with her content. What is certain is that her academic and professional career, with books such as White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for Whites to Talk About Racism, is very much in line with the seminar she now wants to disengage from.
According to her, her “experience of poverty would have been different if she had not been white,” and that while she feels she faced “class oppression,” she also benefited from “racial privilege.” In other words, she feels oppressed, but only a little, just enough to develop a lucrative academic and professional career exploiting exploitation. We suppose she thinks she could have been worse and been black.
In any case, it appears that for this blatant “reverse racism” scandal Coca-Cola is not going to receive any scrutiny from the supposedly anti-racist media left. It remains to be seen whether they will take action beyond replacing their iconic polar bear with a less white one.
“As an idea to combat racism, we propose that they replace it with a panda bear, which is white, black and Asian at the same time, in order to boast diversity and inclusiveness.”
It is also worth reminding Coca-Cola that its workers and consumers cannot change the color of their skin and stop being so white, but they can stop drinking Coca-Cola.
Disney, or how to appear anti-fascist while censoring as fascists
This week Disney has once again placed warnings about offensive content at the beginning of one of its programs. This time it was the turn of The Muppets Show, also known as El Show de los Teleñecos in some Spanish-speaking countries.
“This program includes negative portrayals and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” can now be read at the beginning of some episodes of The Muppets, such as the one in which guest Johnny Cash sang with a Confederate flag in the background.
The Muppets have been the latest victims of Disney’s historical revisionism, trying to ingratiate themselves with the left after having done the same with classics like Peter Pan, Dumbo or The Aristocats.
“Apparently, Antifa and Black Lives Matter people are very strong and brave when it comes to smashing and looting cities and businesses, but very sensitive and fragile when it comes to watching stuffed puppets and cartoons from years ago.”
But Disney is not only limited to raging against puppets and cartoons, but has also deployed its censorship whip against real people like Gina Carano, the actress who played Cara Dune in The Mandalorian until her fulminating dismissal a few days ago.
The progressive, inclusive and feminist Disney, in a display of tolerance and respect for diversity, decided to fire Gina Carano for being a strong, independent and critically thinking woman who does not agree with the ideological steamroller of the left.
After a post in which Carano explained how the terrible persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany could have happened thanks to the dehumanization of the different that the government and the system encouraged and protected, and that the same could be happening now with the Republicans in the United States. Faced with this, Disney decided to prove her right by firing her for not being a leftist, arguing that “her publications on social networks, denigrating people because of their cultural and religious identity, are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
Since Disney insists on treating its audience as idiots, perhaps it would be convenient to warn at the beginning of its films that animals do not talk, that lions do not usually make friends with wild boars or that rats and mice, far from wearing antiseptic gloves, are often carriers of diseases, almost as difficult to cure as idiocy.
We leave it up to our readers to decide who is this week’s idiot, Coca-Cola with its racism towards whites in the name of anti-racism, or Disney with its censorship rage in the name of tolerance.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm