WSJ 39 year nurse fired for refusing to confess racism
Elon Musk is right, Wokeness destroys the brain as surely as Mad Cow disease.
Confess and be punished or be punished anyway.
First it was in academia and government, and now it is spreading into medicine.
And the world laughs at us.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
“And the world laughs at us.”
You may be laughing. Putin sure is. Who cares?
This woman was not being accused of being a racist. She was not required to confess. She was asked to participate in a training course to address a demonstrably real phenomenon – unconscious bias that affects outcomes for non-white patients. Would it have been better to single people out and say YOU need this training? Obviously not. So it was required of everyone. That is how management training works in every other area.
But, people eager to be offended do not care about the simple truth.
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The presumption of the course is that if you are white, you are racists, conscious of it or not.
Accepting the premise is a coerced confession.
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“The presumption of the course is that if you are white, you are racists, conscious of it or not.
Accepting the premise is a confession.”
What part of “unconscious” is so hard for you to understand?
Man oh man do you people work overtime to be offended! And, by the way, were only white people required to take this course. The story does not say that and I sincerely doubt it.
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Who cares if everyone takes it. If that is the case then not only do white people have to suffer completely false accusations of “unconcious” oppsessors but sit next to black people being told they are “unconcious” victims. The whole thing is sheer stupidity being foisted on weak minds black and white.
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It is a well-documented fact that “unconscious bias” drives negative healthcare results based on race, gender, weight, and age. This has been known for decades. It is not an accusation. It is stating a fact about the way the mind works in social interactions. Everybody’s mind. A problem is not solved by ignoring it. Clearly this organization is trying to make people more aware of the issue. And that is a bad thing to you people because you so want to be accused of something that you have become blind to reality. NOBODY was accused of anything. They were just required to enhance their knowledge in a tricky area highly germane to their work.
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I don’t believe the assumption is that Whites are racists. The point is that there is a built in racial bias in our societal structures. And that is probably true in many countries that have a dominant race. In countries like Japan, which had a reputation of being very biased against non-Japanese peoples, the country has very few non-Japanese people and the impact might not be discernible except, of course, to the handful of gaijin, or non-Japanese.
We are a very multi-cultural society. Perhaps one of the most since we are literally a nation of immigrants. Immigrants founded the republic, built it and thrived in it. From all over the world in various waves often based on unbearable conditions in the homeland such as pogroms, famines or wars. Eventually, a few generations or maybe more, the immigrants become part of the American fabric.
This never happened with slaves. At least not until 1965 when the laws changed to accept the descendants of slaves as Americans. And that acceptance has not come easily, nor is it complete even today. Every law, contract, accommodations, restaurants, sports teams, schools, jobs and housing were racially divided for centuries. That culture was passed on as normal to people still living and working today.
A reckoning with that is really what the study of biases is all about. No one is blaming Whites for slavery. Or even necessarily for the biases. They are part and parcel of our culture, businesses, medicine, and education. Awareness is a good start and will pay dividends for later generations. But awareness is not easily accepted by many. Heck, just see how difficult it is to change simple habits in daily life.
This negative reaction to finding and eliminating bias is a big part of the conservative agenda. Not because they are racists, but simply because it has always been so. And, of course, it is politically useful to assume victimhood. We love underdogs, just look at college football.
We do have people who are racist. But that is not the problem. In the medical field, there is research that shows a simple thing as pain management is skewed by a passed on bias that believes Blacks are more tolerant than other races, particularly White. In law, there is solid evidence that Blacks get harsher penalties than Whites with comparable crimes and backgrounds. In housing, both valuation and creditworthiness, again compared with comparable economic status in other races, Black will often get lower valuation and higher interest rates.
It is a tough nut to crack, no two ways about it. But I believe that in the long run, efforts to do so, even if unpopular, will pay huge dividends generations down the road.
IMO
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In this article, we’re only hearing the nurse’s side of the story. I suspect there’s more to it than is told. If you are giving up a 6-figure salary for refusing to take a course titled “Overcoming Unconscious Bias.” you probably have some bias you aren’t admitting, even to yourself.
Everybody has bias of some sort and, if they are telling you upfront, this is about UNCONSCIOUS bias, that’s not calling you a racist.
Here’s an example of unconscious bias:
When I worked at Fort Gordon, all of our Project Officers were required to attend a similar course for sexism. One of our officers came back from training, totally upset because of an example the instructor gave him.
He said there was a group of soldiers loading cargo into a truck. One of the female soldiers couldn’t lift the 50 pound boxes up to the cargo bed. The Sergeant in charge yelled, “Can’t life a 50 pound box? That proves women have no place in the military!” The Sergeant was written up for a sexist remark.
Our Project Officer was ticked. He said, “The Sergeant was right! If you can’t lift 50 pounds, you’ve got no business being in the military.”
I pointed out that the remark was sexist because the Sergeant didn’t say “YOU” have no business being in the military. He said, “WOMEN” have no business being in the military. He equated the weakness of one woman with the entire female population. That is unconscious sexism.
I can promise you there are a great many men in the military who can’t life 50 pounds. I know because a lot of them got transferred to the Adjutant’s Office and I worked with them for years. We had one Staff Sergeant who was 5’4″ and might have weighed 125 pounds soaking wet. He had to have help moving boxes of typing paper, forget 50 pound boxes of ammo. I’ve also known female MPs who were 6’3″ and would scare Conan the Barbarian if he met ’em in the dark.
Taking a course in “Overcoming Unconscious Bias” is not admitting you are a racist. It’s saying you want to be sure you don’t have any unconscious biases.
Refusing to take a course in”Overcoming Unconscious Bias” is saying you don’t care whether or not you unconsciously say and do racist things.
And, for the unconscious Elon Musk, “wokeness” is a racist, sexist slur. Not that he would care.
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Odd you would mention that. Years back when I practiced in Colonial Heights, one of my Corps of Engineers patients was tasked with redesigning a portable water treatment plant. It was made in two parts about 70 to 80 pounds each, intended as 2 man lifts, He had to change it to 3 parts of no more than 55 pounds to accommodate the move to bring women into the military. The result was less reliable but that didn’t matter.
Not a big thing, but there must have been hundreds of similar redesigns required.
But recognizing the lower average upper body strength of women is not a bias. it is just reality. You can’t base designs on the hope that an unusually strong woman will be present.
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Water treatment?
And your point is?
Modern warfare is not about upper body strength. It is about intelligence, initiative, courage, and technical abilities. It would be stupid to exclude half the people who might want to serve based on anachronistic ideas about the roles of men and women.
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Some jobs in the military do not require physical strength, some do.
The requirement that all jobs must be put within the reach of every woman places our military at a disadvantage.
I have no problem with women serving in the military, but physical standards must not be lowered to accommodate them, as you point out, there are plenty of ways they can serve.
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I don’t know why your Engineer patient would have been required to redesign anything. Most women can lift and carry 40 pounds. If you don’t believe it, check out the weight of those children they’re carrying on their hips with one arm while they’re shopping. When I worked at the Presidio stables, me and one other female stablehand used to toss around 50 pound bales of alfalfa like they were Kleenex boxes. We also stacked 75 pound sacks of feed with no trouble. And we weren’t anywhere near as fit as most of the female soldiers. We were not “unusually strong women.”
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I don’t know what the reasoning was, but that was the specification, 55 lbs max.
I would guess there’s a difference between dead lifting a sack of feed and lifting an unbalanced piece of machinery onto the bed of a 10 by
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Sounds like poor planning to me. All they needed to do was require soldiers with specific MOSs to do the job. And anyone with that MOS, whether they were male or female, would have the required physical abilities.
When I worked in a Field Artillery unit in Nuremberg, we had the best PSNCO I ever worked with. He came to Germany as an artilleryman but he was too small to load the big guns. Apparently, it required a certain arm length to jam the shell into the barrel and he didn’t have it. So, our Colonel changed his MOS and sent him to the Personnel Office… and everyone benefited from the change. Good officers know the weaknesses and strengths of all their soldiers and are able to put each one to good use. Sounds like the Engineers lacked good management.
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Paul, the system isn’t letting me reply directly under a comment tonight, but this is a true story that makes your point.
When I worked at the Transportation Motor Pool at Ft Lewis, my boss was a guy named Mac, one of the biggest male chauvinists I ever worked with. One day, the head of the local MPs came in to pick up one of his patrol cars that had had the undercarriage ripped out and we had repaired it. He and Mac got to talking about how the car came to be wrecked. One of the female MPs had been driving it. Mac asked if that wasn’t the reason the car got wrecked. The Chief said, “Oh, heck no. In fact, we’re going to be giving her a medal.” Mac was astonished. “WHY?” Turns out they had been having a problem with the pay trucks getting robbed in the fields on payday. The perp would stickup the paymaster and run off into the woods before anybody could catch him. Once he was in the woods, he vanished. But on one particular payday, the call went out that the paymaster was getting robbed and a female MP got the call and hightailed it to the site. She got there in time to see the perp running for the woods. She knew she’d never catch him on foot, so she gunned the engine and jumped the ditch (Dukes of Hazard style) and that’s when she bottomed out the patrol car. But she was still mobile and she shouted at the guy to stop. He didn’t. so she gave it the gas and ran over him. When she looked in the rearview mirror, he was getting up. So she yelled at him to get down, but he got up and started to run again. So she threw it in reverse and ran over him again. That time he stayed down.
Mac was unimpressed.
He said, “but that doesn’t mean you want more female MPs, right?” The Chief said, “I’ll take every female MP they’ll give me!” Mac wasn’t expecting that answer. He said, “Okay, what happens when there’s a bar fight downtown and they call you to break it up? You don’t send in the females then, do you?” The Chief said, “Oh hell yes! Every time!” Mac was in disbelief. The Chief said, “If I send in my male MPs and they so much as bruise a guy’s wrist putting on the cuffs, I’ll be filling out police brutality paperwork for three months. But I can send my female MPs in there, swinging their night sticks and beating the shit out of every guy in the place and I’ll never get a single complaint. No guy is going to go before a judge and say, “Your Honor, that little lady over there beat me up.”
So, to your point, upper body strength isn’t the only job qualification. You have to have the right people doing the right job. And you have to have management that knows who can do the job.
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