"Ouch! That Stereotype Hurts": Sanitized South Park?
"Ouch! That Stereotype Hurts" is a 2007 audiovisual diversity training curriculum that has been handed out to employees at companies across the U.S for 19 years. Supervisors give trainees a manual and assigned video modules that match the "speaking up technique" exercises contained within. The curriculum was designed by SunShower Learning and had been patterned after Leslie C. Aguilar's eponymous book. The stories and videos use a variety of actors who imitate employees or supervisors at a generic company.
On examining the "Ouch! That Stereotype Hurts" manual, it can easily play like satire. Most of the vignettes are quite similar to an overly sanitized South Park episode, of all things. Did people lose their groove, their sense of humor? The manual provides no way for any of the parties involved to laugh together or just enjoy a joke. Genuinely hurtful comments are doubtless rude and unprofessional, but innocuous workplace conversations from the manual turn into lectures. There supposedly are no "right" or "wrong" parties, but in most of the given exercises, one party is secretly painted as obliviously insensitive, and the other is portrayed as more empathetic.
It changes everything when one discovers that the physical manual does not include the original context for jokes and statements actors in the exercises make to each other. A couple of the statements are entirely nonsensical without the vignettes. What exactly was hinted at when an actor said, "I'm not so sure that's a guy thing. I think that applies to both men and women?" The manual is marred by limited information.
SunShower Learning also produced a spinoff, dubbed "Ouch! Your Silence Hurts," and now has a blog. "That Stereotype Hurts" and "Your Silence Hurts" are not only hard copies, but also subscription-based online classes. The Individual subscription is a seven-day free trial, but it retails for $75 when the trial expires; the company-wide LMS subscriptions fetch significantly more money. The course is hosted on an LMS, akin to college courses. In addition, SunShower Learning's outfit is quite clearly supportive of DEI despite President Donald Trump's legislation making it less favored.
Trojan Sunshine and Rainbows: Social Emotional Learning is Not All It's Cracked Up to Be
Social Emotional Learning, also known as SEL, is the precursor to forced diversity training.
It does not appear all that bad at first, since children learn "soft skills" with an SEL-like method. Nearly everything can be explained to children through literature and visuals, even cartoons. Children can then apply what they learn from guided stories and media into conversation and pretend play, so SEL seems to have been designed so they internalize positive behaviors and process them using a class discussion. They may then mimic and reinstate the behavior through their own imaginary play when they get back from school.
SEL curricula in the elementary grades may use guided group exercises and, often, award-winning children's books to reinforce learning goals. For instance, a popular book seen in SEL lesson plans is The Rabbit Listened; it won a 2019 Dewdney Award. The Rabbit Listened is about a boy processing "big emotions" and asking for advice from cute animal friends. The chicken feels better from talking and letting out worries, but the rabbit lends a listening ear. Other beloved books, commonly packaged for Lakeshore Learning or similar "classroom library" bundles, include A Sick Day for Amos McGee (Caldecott Medalist) and Hey, Little Ant (Christopher Award winner). Live-action or animated shows, frequently curated from PBS LearningMedia, have also been used as a supplement.
However, SEL is not all it is touted as being. SEL resource analysis shows diversity training aspects depending on how it is executed. Those in STEAM disciplines are told that current means "made in the last five years" and cannot use outdated scientific papers, but SEL fell back on a 2011 study even in 2022. In addition, many argued that SEL is an "innocuous" excuse or "Trojan horse" to introduce unnecessary woke content and even dubious data harvesting.
More conservative "emotion education" curricula include Five in a Row, any works from Alpha Omega Publications or Bob Jones Press, and the original "living books" concept developed by Charlotte Mason. They have "emotional education" elements through academics and natural mother-to-child interaction.
This or That: Civilian Responders or Police?
One policing theory from the early 2020s was that assigned social workers, or “civilian responders,” should be called instead of the police when people are experiencing mental health problems but are not disrupting anyone.
People should obtain mental health help, but a fairly random person asking a patient personal questions about their mental health is not exactly the right way to help someone. These civilian responders may have used diversity training that does not relate to every problem.
It is better to only discuss mental health issues with therapists, trustworthy friends, or a person’s immediate family. What if a social worker arrives when an autistic person has a meltdown in a store, for example? The person may not even be able to answer the social worker’s questions or calm down through de-escalation techniques because of the intense sensory environment, and time is wasted for both parties. The social worker likely knows that meltdowns are not tantrums, but the person would be very embarrassed at being examined when he or she is not lucid.
“Police equity” sounds good, but Max Markham from the Center for Equity in Policing talks about replacing police with social workers in some mental health cases. There is possibly no need for social workers or police to get involved in a mental health crisis, as long as the person is not threatening others, due to the likelihood of embarrassment for both the person and the social worker.
The Obnoxious Voice: The ReVoice Conference of 2018
Has anyone ever had to listen to some unknown person speak loudly in an irritating voice? For those who listened to irritating sounds, they were probably reeling with pain from burst eardrums. These annoyed people were craving the day when that grating person would be silent. Filled with mangled theology, the ReVoice Conference was quite similar to this dynamic, but with a sinister side to it. Hosted from July 28 to July 29, 2018, in St. Louis, Mo., this caustic conference was "diversity training gone wrong" again.
The ReVoice Conference was the Christian version of generic workplace diversity training. It somehow assumed "LGBT Christians" were a Biblical concept and other Christians needed to treat the ideology, instead of simply the people themselves, more positively.
The presenter, Nathaniel Collins, was once a teacher working on Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's New Testament courses and ironically still tried to perform sensitivity training in the church environment, for church leaders. Select large Christian colleges have had similar goals to the ReVoice Conference even in 2026, according to Campus Reform articles.
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