In ‘major steps backward,’ El Dorado County may do away with implicit bias training | Opinion

On Tuesday, the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors will vote on whether or not to do away with the mandatory implicit bias training for all board appointees that they only voted to start requiring two years ago.

So what has changed since then?

Not the need to confront and combat the racist behavior that keeps making news in El Dorado County.

Last month, a mother who said her daughter, who is half-Black and was a student at El Dorado High School in Placerville, had been subjected to increasingly violent racist behavior sued the school. Even the girl’s first-grade classmates, she said, had called her daughter the N-word and had singled her out for a game in which any children who tagged her had to “turn Black.”

El Dorado Supervisors Lori Parlin and Wendy Thomas said in a memo posted online last week that there is so much opposition to doing the implicit bias training that they are losing board appointees over the requirement, and are having a hard time recruiting others for the same reason.

If that’s true — and some in the community who oppose doing away with the training doubt that it is — then El Dorado County may be even more averse to acknowledging or working to ease racial and other tensions than we realized when we wrote about the supervisors’ unfortunate effort to disband the county’s Human Rights Commission.

And that hostility, more than whether the county continues to mandate the training, is a problem.

“Come on,” said former supervisor Sue Novasel, who pushed for the training. “We’re taking major steps backwards” in pulling back from the online course, which takes about two hours and can be accomplished from the comfort of one’s couch. “I’m so disappointed” to see this is even a question. “If you don’t think you need it, you probably need it.”

There is nothing onerous or frightening about implicit bias training, which can help people who are interested in knowing more about their own unconscious biases learn how to grow beyond them.

There is nothing insulting about it, either, despite the umbrage that’s apparently being taken. We all have biases, about race or ethnicity, age or gender, ability or other differences, and becoming more aware of these can make them easier to overcome.

There’s also nothing magical about such training, which research suggests only works to the extent that you want it to, and can in some cases make things worse.

A 2020 article in Scientific American, headlined “The Problem with Implicit Bias Training,” said “bias training done the ‘wrong way’ (think lukewarm diversity training) can actually have the opposite impact, inducing anger and frustration among white employees.” It could, said the piece, “exacerbate the very issues it is trying to solve.”

But the alternative can’t be wishing problems away, or even worse, denying that they exist. The alternative is tackling structural racism structurally, which is a lot harder than mandating a brief training.

Neither Parlin nor Thomas responded to messages. But since the supervisors mandated the training in February of 2021, Parlin and Thomas said in their memo, “the Board has seen unintended consequences from that action, such as resignation of appointees and difficulty in recruiting new appointees due to the Implicit Bias Training requirement.

“Enforcement of the Implicit Bias Training requirement has been a challenge for the Clerk of the Board staff and has resulted in a lot of time and energy into encouraging compliance. Compliance has stalled at approximately 67%. … Some Supervisors have made it clear that they will not enforce compliance while others have indicated that they will strictly enforce compliance and remove appointees for noncompliance. As such, the Board has inadvertently created an inconsistency in this requirement that could cause further confusion and consternation among our appointees.

“Additionally, for various reasons concerning the Implicit Bias Training requirement, several appointees have resigned from Committees, Commissions & Boards and left a void of their knowledge with their departure. Since these are valued volunteers in our community and the Board wants to streamline their training to best use their time, it seems reasonable to remove requirements that are not enforceable and may or may not attain the Board’s original intent.”

The larger question that needs to be addressed is why this training is seen as such as so threatening by so many, if that’s in fact the case. And if it’s not having the desired effect, what are elected officials planning to do instead?

This story was originally published February 21, 2023 at 5:00 AM.