4.03.2007

Crazy Ol' Sensitivity Training

So just a few minutes ago I heard something pretty stupid uttered from the mouth of a white male (not that surprising).

I'm in the journalism lab right now uploading pictures for the newspaper on a speaker who came to campus who is the South Asian reporter for the Washington Post.

While uploading the photos my photo editor Gina came into the lab to talk to one of the designers who is designing a page for this Thursday's issue. There was an article on a pow-wow held by SKINS, a local San Francisco State Native American group. The pictured being used was of Native American students in their traditional tribal regalia and dancing in a circle.

Gina told one of the designers that they were putting up a new photo for him to put into the paper because "We never cover SKINS in this paper and the fact that the only picture we have of them is them in stereotypical traditional native dress and having them dancing in a circle is not OK. So we have a better picture of this one girl getting ready for the event."

He seemed to have got the point but as she was walking out he said in a sarcastic voice. "I bet this has something to do with the sensitivity training."

She shot back. "No it doesn't. And don't be a jackass."

Ooooohhh, that gave me quite the wide grin.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Typical. It really burns me when people ridicule sensitivity or multicultural training. In some of my classes when the topic comes up you can see in the White males faces that they are annoyied. They say things like shouldn't so-and-so who is Chinese do the part about Chinese culture, or if we want to be treated equally then why do we need separate Black History or Literature departments. They look at it as an inconvenience instead of an opportunity to learn and to change the negative stereotypes they have. If you don't fit into their picture of how the world should be then you don't seem to matter.