In an effort to discuss diversity, the student employees who help oversee dorm life were briefly trained using a pyramid that identifies various forms of white supremacy broken into two categories, "overt white supremacy," which is labeled as "socially unacceptable," and "covert white supremacy" labeled as "socially acceptable."
"Make America Great Again" is listed as covert white supremacy.
Other forms of socially acceptable covert white supremacy, according to the pyramid, include celebrating Columbus Day, police murdering people of color, denial of white privilege, Confederate flags, mass incarceration, Eurocentric curriculums, racial profiling and colorblindness.
Kevin Myers, a spokesman for the Portland-based private liberal arts college, said the pyramid is only meant as a conversation starter for the training.“It’s provocative, and that was the intention, was to present the RAs with something provocative and spur a conversation about the difference between implicit bias versus explicit bias,” he said.
“This is a way to provoke discussion about what people think is acceptable or unacceptable. It’s actually about tolerance, not about intolerance,” Myers told The College Fix.
The pyramid itself was not something created by staff at Reed, rather downloaded off of the internet by the college’s Office for Inclusive Community, he said. Myers said the pyramid was used for only about three minutes in an hour-long training session in January.