The Office Episode 2: "Diversity Day"

It was diversity day at the office, and with Michael Scott as the boss, of course craziness ensued. To give a quick summary, in this episode Michael and the employees of the office are forced to go through a diversity training seminar, which we later find out was required due to a controversial imitation of one of Chris Rock’s comedy routines that Michael has done several times in the past.  Michael, being ignorant and thinking he knows everything about intolerance, decides to do his own diversity training seminar after the corporate mandated one is over and the “diversity trainer,” Mr. Brown, leaves. Michael’s training seminar included an exercise in which his staff randomly picked index cards with different races written on them, put those index cards on their heads, and tried to guess what race they chose by having their co-workers use stereotypes to describe that race. While Michael thinks what he is doing is a powerful way to address the issue of racism, the rest of his staff obviously doesn’t think the same thing (which was indicated by one of the characters, Kelly (who happens to be Indian), slapping Michael in the face after he did a poor, and pretty racist, impression of an Indian man).

With “Diversity Day” only being The Office’s second episode, the show made a very bold move in tackling the issue of racism. In reality, however, the show was very strategically using this issue as a platform to set up the character of Michael Scott for the rest of the series. In a review of this episode, Paul Thomas makes the point that Michael is a character that “we can laugh at but at the same time sympathize with.” Essentially, Paul argues that Michael isn’t the racist that he seems to be at first glance in this episode, but is instead “just a moron who doesn’t understand what racism really is or why it hurts others.” I completely agree with the point Paul tries to make in his article. As most Office fans know (at least those who have seen the whole series), Michael is, for a lack of a better term, a lovable idiot. He doesn’t realize what he is doing may be wrong until it is too late (in this case, it was when Kelly slapped him).