Diversity as an excuse for racism

 John Sexton:

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In other words, what doesn’t work is what is very popular right now, i.e. Robin DiAngelo telling people that if you disagree with her it’s proof you’re racist. Yglesias doesn’t mention DiAngelo by name but he does argue that, in general, the kind of diversity training that has become common in corporations and colleges is probably doing more harm than good.

Business executives believe that doing these programs has genuine value to the bottom line in terms of protecting them in the face of lawsuits, so they are fairly widespread. Critically, however, the lawsuit-protecting attributes of training do not require the trainings to be effective, and they generally are not. Indeed, as this summary from Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in Harvard Business Review hints, the main question in this literature is whether the trainings backfire by annoying people:

Do people who undergo training usually shed their biases? Researchers have been examining that question since before World War II, in nearly a thousand studies. It turns out that while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. Nonetheless, nearly half of midsize companies use it, as do nearly all the Fortune 500.

Some of the backlashes can be very bad. Leigh Wilton, Evan Apfelbaum, and Jessica Good find that emphasizing themes of multiculturalism can increase subjects’ belief in race essentialism (consider Tema Okun’s work in this light) while Madeline E. Heilman and Brian Welle find that when teams are assembled with an explicit diversity goal in mind, women and Black group members are perceived as less competent, and “this effect occurred regardless of the proportional representation of women or the degree of the groups’s heterogeneity.”

I don’t think many on the left are actually super enthusiastic about these diversity trainings, but the general sense is also that only a bitter crank would actually complain about them. But there is real evidence that they are at least sometimes making things worse, which strikes me as a big deal. For example, Michelle Duguid and Melissa Thomas-Hunt find that when you tell people that stereotyping is widespread, they stereotype more.

I highlighted that bit above because I think there’s a lot more to be examined there. If this training is counter-productive, shouldn’t everyone just say so? Why are so many people worried about being perceived as bitter cranks? Where did that idea come from. As it happens, I think it comes from Robin DiAngelo’s white fragility, i.e. from the same people making bank off the current approach to anti-racism.

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Many times it seems to wind up being anti-white racism and an excuse for firing older white workers.  This whole movement is suspect and should be avoided by businesses and institutions.  Jobs should be given on the basis of merit and not identity politics.