The Office Diversity

I watched an episode of The Office for this assignment. I chose this one because I remember when it came out there was a lot of hype around how good this series was. I don’t watch a great deal of television, but decided this would be a suitable time to finally see what all the talk was about. The Episode I watched was on diversity where Michael Scott, the office manager for Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, holds his own version of what diversity training should be. The show is a spoof on what life is like in an office in America where a camera crew documents the behaviors that go on in the office. While this show was supposed to be a comedy I actually didn’t think it was particularly funny and took offense to the humor. I learned that even …show more content…
Brown down to hold a diversity meeting specifically for Michael about demographic diversity. His training was specific to the visible characteristics such as race that were being poorly managed in the office. When Michael sees the representative, coming out of his office, he starts talking to one of his employees named Oscar, asking him how his weekend was. He then introduces Oscar to Mr. Brown and when Oscar says his last name is Martinez, Michael says, “See, I am on a first name basis”. Here he is making an inference to someone’s last name tying him to a specific race or culture. Once they are in the room having the diversity meeting and Mr. Brown explains what diversity means, Michael makes another statement saying it’s, “a color-free zone.” He immediately turns to an African American employee and says, “Stanley, I don’t look at you as a different race.” Michael and a large number of companies may find it difficult to manage diversity properly. Not only did his mishandling lead to a formal complaint to his home office but also it could eventually lead to an EEOC complaint that would cost the company …show more content…
Brown held his diversity meeting so upon his departure, Michael devised his own version of what cultural diversity means to him. He stated that cultural diversity is how other countries, including ours, are similar and different in everyday life. Europe, Asia, Africa and other countries all have different ways of greeting one another and eat different foods, and those differences make us unique or culturally diverse. Michael thought he could express this by asking all the employees to tape an index card to their forehead that had a different race written on it. They would then go up to each other and say something about that race to the other person they thought was a stereotype of that race to get them to guess which race they were. This created a social perception within this exercise, making several employees uses stereotypes to describe their race that was very discriminatory. Michael was encouraging this behavior by pushing the envelope with racial slurs. One African American associate had black on his forehead and the other associate had Jewish on her forehead. Both were trying to be polite and Michael jumped in and said, “Come on, Slavery vs. the Holocaust.” Another example was an Asian race on an employee’s forehead and the employee was extremely uncomfortable and mentioned that what she was about to say a stereotype and not true and said, “You may not be a very good driver”. The employee guessed, “Am I a woman?” Both