DEI Training: Harmful, Phony, And ExpensiveEvery company has a DEI program. They cost serious money. But there's no evidence they work, and some evidence that they make things worse
Rod Dreher
Jan 17, 2023
Image above is a screenshot from this UK DEI propaganda training film. In a NYT op-ed, Jesse Singal says that DEI training sessions are expensive, and either don't work or are even counterproductive. Excerpt:
Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for diversity trainings have frequently come to discouraging conclusions. Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is “disappointing,” wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, “considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.”
Dr. Paluck’s team found just two large experimental studies in the previous decade that attempted to evaluate the effects of diversity trainings and met basic quality benchmarks. Other researchers have been similarly unimpressed. “We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade,” wrote the sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in 2018, “with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around.” (To be fair, not all of these critiques apply as sharply to voluntary diversity trainings.)
If diversity trainings have no impact whatsoever, that would mean that perhaps billions of dollars are being wasted annually in the United States on these efforts. But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them.
That’s partly because any psychological intervention may turn out to do more harm than good. The late psychologist Scott Lilienfeld made this point in an influential 2007 article where he argued that certain interventions — including ones geared at fighting youth substance use, youth delinquency and PTSD — likely fell into that category. In the case of D.E.I., Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity trainings that are mandatory, or that threaten dominant groups’ sense of belonging or make them feel blamed, may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate pre-existing biases.
Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary re-understanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are intentionally designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression trainings are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these trainings run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.
Of course they do. Anybody with a lick of sense knows that these things are about two things: 1) assuaging the consciences of white liberals in power, and 2) laying down markers for how power works within the organization, to justify disempowering whites on the basis of their skin color, and calling it virtue. Besides, 3) these things are never about true diversity, true equity, and true inclusion; people who don't fit the bourgeois progressive's idea of a demographic in need of special treatment don't count. After I went through one DEI program at my then-newspaper, the white woman who oversaw the program asked me what I thought of it. I pointed out that it valorizes sham diversity. For example (I told her), there are more than a few religious conservatives in our readership area, but the only religious conservatives in this newsroom are the black Pentecostal secretaries, and me. Nobody in authority here cares about whether or not there's a diversity of ideas in this newsroom. Whether you're white, black, Latino, or Asian, straight or gay, male or female, everybody pretty much went to the same colleges, and everybody pretty much thinks the same (liberal) way. It was phony, the whole thing. And I'm sure that white liberal diversity tsaritsa went away thinking that my objections were what you'd naturally expect from a white male whose power was threatened, and therefore my views were dismissable.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dei-training-harmful-phony-and-expensive/
