The beverage giant Coca Cola has come under fire. In a diversity training on social media, employees were instructed to be “less white”.
After dissatisfied Coca Cola employees leaked pictures and videos of an online training course, a shit storm hit the US beverage giant. In the online training, which was available on the social media platform Linkedin, the employees of Coca Cola were to be trained on topics such as diversity and racism.
“Try to be less white,” said a slide in this course. “To be less white means to be less oppressive, less arrogant, less ignorant,” on another. Instead, “white employees” should try to listen more and be more humble. “To understand what it means to be white means to understand to be racist”, so the literal core message of the training. This is reported by the US magazine “Newsweek”.
Outraged Coca Cola employees see it as reverse racism. After the well-known US psychologist and Youtuber Karlyn Borysenko shared the training materials, Coca Cola reacted. The relevant teaching materials can no longer be found on LinkedIn.
“The video was available on a third-party website. But it was not part of Coca Cola's own training plan,” the company says. The uproar was great on social media. A user posted a picture of her emptying Coca Cola into the toilet. She wrote: “I will never try to be less white. I am what I am. Accept that.”
The training on LinkedIn, which is also used by other larger companies, goes back to the American cultural scientist Robin DiAngelo. In her research, this advocates the thesis that all white people are racist, even if they don't want to.
