To score a North Face discount, just sit through a woke indoctrination class
March 6, 2024
Time to get outdoors with a side of social justice – The North Face now offers 20% off for those brave enough to endure their latest venture into the realm of racial inclusion – or as critics dub it, “woke indoctrination.”
As Fortune reports:
The North Face was once a simple one-stop shop for hiking gear. But today, having upped its TikTok game, you’re more likely to spot a Gen Z urbanite sporting its puffer jacket than a countryside trekker. Now, The North Face is aiming for further approval from the socially conscious cohort by offering customers 20% off if they take a racial inclusion course.
Racial inclusion course sounds pretty weak for what this is. We would describe it as indoctrination. Certainly, it’s woke propaganda. We did some of it – all we could face – so that you don’t have to.
As part of this course, you will:
- Build awareness and knowledge of people of colour in the outdoors
There is an amusement to this. The spelling is colour, because this is aimed at Brits. But the British do not say “people of color” at all; that’s an American phrase. Over there the description is “ethnic minority,” or perhaps BAME (“black and ethnic minority”).
There wasn’t that much of it we could face, to be honest, given that The North Face is citing a 2017 study about people who spend time in the countryside of England.
Essentially, their claim is that non-whites don’t use the British countryside very much. But that misses that the non-white population is hugely, vastly, concentrated in the large towns, most especially London. The rural population is still largely white (the racial situation in Britain is very different from the U.S., mass immigration is a very recent phenomenon, last few decades only).
It’s an obvious explanation for why there are different from national proportions of ethnic groups wandering around the countryside. The rest of the course never does manage to rise above that sort of level of misunderstanding. For what’s really happening here is the projection onto Britain of the very different racial tensions of the United States. A very common woke and progressive mistake, we’d point out.
Quite how different – in WWII, many American troops went to Britain to take part in the liberation of Europe. The American army was still segregated by race at this point and a number of Black regiments were included in that Army. In one town, the American officers were upset that drinkers in pubs were not required to be segregated.
The next day, all the pubs in the town were segregated. All had signs saying “Coloureds Only,” and of course, those only applied to Americans. Britain is a different place with a different history. Different racial tensions, too.
But then, that’s what the real problem is with these woke and progressive ideas. They’re constructed from theory without understanding the real world. They’re an imposition from that theory upon that real world as a result, not a reflection of reality.
Tony Young, founder of a UK nonprofit, told the Sun, “The irony is that The North Face is implicitly acknowledging here that all its customers are white.
“After all, why would black customers need to take a course about ‘white privilege’ to get a 20% discount?”
Of course, there’s no point in you bothering to go through this propaganda session. If you’re in North America, you don’t get the 20% discount coupon anyway.