One of the great challenges that brands face today is to enforce additional policies and eliminate sexist, petty, and racist practices, both in their internal operation and in the image they project for their company. For this reason, Coca-Cola believed it was convenient for its workers to participate in an anti-racism course to avoid most of these confrontations.

For over a week, Coca-Cola has been facing an extreme amount of backlash from conservatives online about the promotion of an online training seminar that urged employees to “try to be less white” in order to combat racial discrimination.  The seminar entitled ‘Facing Racism’, given by Robin DiAngelo, was presented through LinkedIn Education publicly, although not free of charge. The company admitted that it was made to encourage its workers to take the course, but they clarified that it was not mandatory. Despite its good intentions, Coca-Cola now faces a reputational and image crisis. While the firm viewed the seminar as part of a diversity strategy, the approach to the training was highly controversial. After an internal whistleblower leaked screenshots of diversity training materials that encouraged staff to “try to be less white” the international company decided to finally respond to allegations of anti-white rhetoric.

Photographs of the training seminar shared online featured tips on how to tone down whiteness, but the material was offline torn following a viral whistleblower post. The tips to “be less white” included: “be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble, listen, believe, break with apathy,” and “break with white solidarity.” Another slide tells viewers that in order to confront racism, they must understand “what it means to be white, challenging what it means to be racist.” A spokesperson for Coca-Cola has just verified that this curriculum is “part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace,” but also declared that “the video circulating on social media is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company’s curriculum.”

So in other words a company employee would be able to log into a Coca-Cola LinkedIn account gaining access to the videos to watch that are mandatory for their diversity training but then navigate, within LinkedIn Learning, to “Confronting Racism,” which need not be required viewing in order for them to access it. This would give employees the opportunity to create screenshots that feature slides from the course, alongside a Coca-Cola logo in the top right-hand corner. So, in contrast to Borysenko’s claim, the presence of the logo was not proof that “Confronting Racism” was required viewing for company employees, merely that someone at Coca-Cola had viewed it.

Antiracism training has become a divisive topic in America. In response to the police killing of George Floyd, liberals and progressives ramped up efforts to address systemic racism and view such training as necessary. Supporters of critical race theory have called for white people to acknowledge the advantages of being white for a more equitable society. On the other hand, some conservatives deny the impact of widespread institutional racism and others believe that diversity training is being weaponized against the American people. Many took to Twitter to criticize the “be less white” language used in the LinkedIn diversity training materials used by Coca-Coca. “Try to be less black. Try to be less Asian. Try to be less Indigenous. Can we say that? No? Then why can Coca-Cola tell their staff to be less white?” Twitter user @JPLuis1 wrote.