El Dorado County dials back on implicit bias training some see as Critical Race Theory | Opinion

On Tuesday, the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors voted to stop mandating implicit bias training for all board appointees. From now on, only those appointed to a handful of boards and commissions will have to complete the 36-minute online course, which had already been whittled down twice.

So what has changed since the supervisors began requiring the course only two years ago? Supervisor Lori Parlin, who wanted to do away with the training altogether, put it this way: “This requirement, it was a negotiating compromise to get us through some tough times. We negotiated, and it was very reactionary. It was a knee-jerk reaction.”

And now that the heat is off, no need to keep the agreement made in that negotiation?

The racist behavior that keeps making news in El Dorado County hasn’t gone away.

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. She sued the school, saying that even the girl’s first-grade classmates 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.”

Supervisors Parlin and Wendy Thomas said in a background 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.

But when asked on Tuesday exactly how many board appointees had stepped away over the training, the answer was that only two or three might have, and even they might have had other reasons. “That’s not a high number,” noted Supervisor Brooke Laine, who wanted to keep the training.

Supervisor John Hidahl said he’d heard someone who’d done the training back when it was led by a live trainer, via Zoom, complain that the trainer had linked implicit bias training to “critical race theory.”

If that misimpression, he said, is behind the opposition to the training, then “it’s a political rift,” and one that needs to be cleared up, since “to me, they’re unrelated.”

When Thomas suggested that maybe a lack of computer skills or connectivity were the problem, Hidahl scoffed: “They have libraries.” He proposed scaling back the requirement instead of ending it, and everyone but Parlin voted for that.

About two-thirds of board appointees have already done the training, but that level of compliance is sure to drop now that it will only be “strongly encouraged” for most.

As it turns out, 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 aversion is a problem.

“Come on,” said former supervisor Sue Novasel, who pushed for the training in the first place. “We’re taking major steps backwards. ...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.

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.”

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.

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

One member of the planning commission who spoke at the meeting said he had done the training, but felt insulted by the suggestion that he had any biases: “I thought when I was taking it, ‘This isn’t me.’ I took it as a form of indoctrination.”

Parlin said she didn’t want the county pushing anything that made people feel bad. But those members of the public who urged the supervisors to keep the requirement already do. “This county had a bounty on killing Indians,” one man said, and began to cry.

This story was originally published February 22, 2023 at 9:37 AM with the headline "El Dorado County dials back on implicit bias training some see as Critical Race Theory | Opinion."