Binghamton University State University of New York recently hosted its first “Principles of Community DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] Symposium” featuring an activist known as “The Woke Coach.”
The event took place on Nov. 13 in response to the “recent pushback against DEI initiatives in higher education,” according to Karen Jones, a top DEI official at Binghamton. The symposium featured talks by DEI officials and activists, including Seena Hodges, who is known as The Woke Coach.
[RELATED: Texas lawmakers consider strengthening DEI-ban, applying it to classrooms]
Hodge spoke about the history of the word “woke” and called on participants to take “intentional actions and a sense of personal responsibility to address the historical impacts on the current realities faced by historically excluded groups.”
Hodges is the Founder and CEO of The Woke Coach, a Minnesota-based company that promotes a view of the world that sees the “legacy of racism and injustice” as all-pervasive. The organization defines “woke” as “[t]hink[ing] about things in a racialized context” and “paying attention to social and societal injustices and . . . mov[ing] to action around those injustices.”
The Woke Coach offers several services, such as a survey that examines employees’ “attitudes and awareness” of DEI, “Executive Coaching” meetings to make business leaders and managers learn and promote DEI principles, and an “Equity Audit” to make businesses “identify opportunities to address inequities, bias, and racism across processes, policies, structures, and culture.”
Hodges calls herself a “fierce antiracist,” an “equity diversity and inclusion champion,” and an “intersectional feminist,” and she “wholeheartedly believes that racial equity is the defining issue of our time.” Her book, “From Ally to Accomplice,” which was published on Nov. 21, 2023, “invites readers to take their antiracism to the next level.”
Hodges, along with all of her team members, have their pronouns listed on The Woke Coach website.
The term “woke” has come under increasingly severe criticism in recent years, and has come to include a variety of causes and initiatives that critics have characterized as radical, divisive, and culturally Marxist.
DEI has also been receiving heavy pushback in higher education, with opponents of the ideology claiming that it promotes division and indoctrination in leftist causes instead of teaching students useful skills.
Campus Reform has reached out to Binghamton University and Seena Hodges for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
