What's Our Problem?, page 34
The Spinoff: The many problems with Auckland University’s racist coffee (2020)
The New York Post: Why your swipes on Hinge and OKCupid might be racist (2021)
BBC: Is Italian fashion racist? (2020)
As we’ve seen in other places, what happens in the marketplace of ideas is often mirrored in the world of academic research. We looked at the usage of those same SJF terms in scholarly abstracts:66
What makes this especially concerning is the fact that many papers that fit the SJF narrative have been shown to lack the rigor and accuracy of other published papers.
For example, a paper published in 2020 in the reputable journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS) analyzed 1.8 million hospital births and came to an eye-opening conclusion: The Black-white newborn mortality gap (the difference in mortality rate between Black and white newborns) is smaller when Black newborns are under the care of Black physicians than when they are under the care of white physicians. The authors called this “a robust racial concordance benefit for Black newborns” (racial concordance meaning the doctor and the patient are the same race) and finished their paper with this recommendation:
Taken with this work, it gives warrant for hospitals and other care organizations to invest in efforts to reduce such biases and explore their connection to institutional racism. Reducing racial disparities in newborn mortality will also require raising awareness among physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators about the prevalence of racial and ethnic disparities, their effects, furthering diversity initiatives, and revisiting organizational routines in low-performing hospitals.67
The findings went viral online. CNN wrote that the findings “laid bare how shocking racial disparities in human health can affect even the first hours of a person's life.” Science News wrote that “for these babies, care from a Black physician does indeed matter.” One doctor wrote on Medium: “New evidence reinforces the case that a largely white medical establishment is failing children of color,” which may suggest that “recruiting, training, and retaining pediatricians of color is much more than a corrective to centuries of racial inequity; it is literally a life-saving intervention for our patients.”
Much less viral were the people pointing out that these headlines were grossly misleading.
A single study should always be taken with a grain of salt, and this one in particular had some serious limitations. First, the researchers assumed babies were paired with doctors quasi-randomly, but it could be that wealthier Black families are more likely to have the option to choose to work with a Black doctor. A phenomenon like this, not controlled for in the study, could corrupt the results.
Second, there was what one doctor described as the challenge of “ascribing the outcome of the child to one of many doctors who plays a role in the care of that child. Health care is a team sport.” In other words, it’s not clear in many cases whether the official “physician of record” was even present for the birth. Each hospital also has their own way of organizing personnel—something the study did not take into account.
Finally, there was the inherent difficulty in any attempt to determine the race of doctors in a large study like this. Here, the authors’ dataset only provided information about the babies—the race of the doctors was determined by looking at their online photos.
Those who criticized the study didn’t mince their words. One doctor told Katie Herzog, anonymously, “It’s some of the most shoddy, methodologically flawed research we’ve ever seen published in these journals, with sensational conclusions that seem totally unjustified from the results of the study. It’s frustrating because we all know how hard it is to get good, sound research published. So do those rules and quality standards no longer apply to this topic, or to these authors, or for a certain time period?”
To be fair, the study’s authors acknowledged many of these shortcomings, underscoring the need for further research. But none of these qualifiers made the headlines, which presented the story as a set of groundbreaking findings and amplified the paper’s call for changes in educational and hiring policies at hospitals.
Another anonymous doctor made a comment that perfectly sums up the two connected phenomena we’ve been talking about:
“Whole research areas are off-limits,” he said, adding that some of what is being published in the nation’s top journals is “shoddy as hell.”
A healthy marketplace of ideas (or research institution) has two basic rules: 1) all ideas are free to be expressed, and 2) all ideas may be criticized. To make it to the biggest stages, ideas have to be persuasive enough win people over and sound enough to survive a gauntlet of criticism.
“Whole research areas are off-limits” is a violation of Rule 1. Instead of subjecting SJF-unfriendly papers to criticism, SJF activists have subjected their authors to punishment, using fear to prevent such research from happening in the first place.
When research is published that is “shoddy as hell,” it means something is off with Rule 2. It means SJF-friendly research that would fail to make it through the normal gauntlet is getting a free pass. In the case of the paper we just looked at, on race and infant mortality, one doctor believes that most of the standard criticism was left unsaid: “I am aware of dozens of people who agree with my assessment of this paper and are scared to comment.”68 This is how shoddy research ends up with a gauntlet-free path to publication (and media amplification).*
And it’s happening across industries. Whether we look at the world of newspaper op-eds, internal company memos, published books, or medical articles, we’ve seen “whole areas off limits”—areas that conflict with the SJF narrative or sensibilities. Meanwhile, the radical ideas of SJF are suddenly being amplified across society, often in ways that lack rigorous standards—even though only a small portion of people subscribe to them.69
Using low-rung, coercive tactics, SJF has manipulated American society’s Speech Curve, creating two sizable gaps between what people are thinking and what they’re saying about social justice topics.
Social Justice Fundamentalism isn’t unusual as a movement that wishes to strongarm society’s Speech Curve to match its own Echo Chamber. What’s unusual is that it currently has the power to do so.
Movements with a Power Games mindset, like animal species in an ecosystem, don’t have an “okay we’ve gone far enough” setting. If the high-rung immune system isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, they will push the envelope further and further until something stops them.
Illiberal Staircase,
Step 2: Forced Listening
With Step 1’s Speech Curve manipulation, at least any citizen is welcome to check out. Maybe people are scared to speak their mind, and maybe they’re seeing a lot of SJF in news headlines, on social media, and elsewhere, but they can ignore it if they so choose.
Down on Step 2, checking out is not an option.
Forced Listening for Grown-Ups: SJF Professional Trainings
In March of 2022, conservative staff members at The Walt Disney Company issued an open letter about the rapidly changing political atmosphere at the company. Disney, they argued, should remain apolitical, as it “is uniquely situated to provide experiences and entertainment that can bridge our national divide and bring us all together.” But they said the company had become “an increasingly uncomfortable place to work for those of us whose political and religious views are not explicitly progressive. We watch quietly as our beliefs come under attack from our own employer, and we frequently see those who share our opinions condemned as villains by our own leadership.”
It’s in this kind of environment, increasingly common at large companies across the U.S., that a new kind of (usually mandatory) training has emerged.
Since 2020, according to internal company materials,70 Disney employees from departments across the company have participated in antiracism trainings, where they’re instructed to “take ownership of educating yourself about structural anti-Black racism.” They’re told to “challenge colorblind ideologies and rhetoric” and “work through feelings of guilt, shame and defensiveness to understand what is beneath them and what needs to be healed.” They’re taught about America’s “racist infrastructure” and the importance of going beyond equal treatment to strive for “equity” and “equality of the outcome.” Employees are told that it’s not okay to say “politics don’t belong at work” and instructed to “be a change agent by calling out microaggressions and other racist behavior when you witness them.”
American Express employees were told in mandatory trainings to create an “identity map” by writing their “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity, citizenship” in circles surrounding the words “Who am I?”71 Verizon employees were taught about intersectionality, microaggressions, and institutional racism, and asked to write a reflection on questions like “What is my cultural identity?” with “race/ethnicity, gender/gender identity, religion, education, profession, sexual orientation” beneath.72 CVS Health hourly employees were sent to a mandatory training where keynote speaker Ibram X. Kendi explained that “to be born in [The United States] is to literally have racist ideas rain on our head consistently and constantly … We're just walking through society completely soaked in racist ideas believing we're dry.”73 Employees were asked to fill out a “Reflect on Privilege” checklist and told they should “commit to holding yourself and colleagues accountable to consistently celebrate diversity and take swift action against non-inclusive behaviors.”74
You can read dozens of eerily similar stories about trainings in corporate America—an estimated 80% of which are mandatory.75
These kinds of trainings have also swept through the public sector, from the Department of Homeland Security, where employees were warned about “color blindness” and the “myth of meritocracy,” to the federal financial agencies like the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, where white employees were advised not to “perpetuate white silence” or “shy away from using language like ‘whiteness,’ ‘racism,’ ‘white supremacy,’ and ‘allyship,’” to the City of Seattle, where employees were taught about “internalized racial superiority” and “internalized racial inferiority” and told that white people’s “anger, self-righteousness and defensiveness mask fear, shame and guilt for the harm of [their] actions.”
Less publicized are the many similar stories at smaller companies. One former employee of an arts non-profit talked on a podcast about a year-long series of DEI trainings at her company—which she said were “very, very mandatory.” No one dissented during the trainings, she said, because doing so would put their jobs in danger. As she put it: “We’re being told that there’s only one very specific way to have that conversation, and if you don’t happen to agree with it, then it feels like you can’t have the conversation, you’re not included. There’s no room for dissent.” This included employees of color, one of whom was immediately “shut down” by the instructor when she said she had not experienced racism.76
The same trainings are happening at hospitals across the country. One doctor at a New England hospital sent me a portion of a mandatory training he was attending that included a very specific definition of racism:
Racism is a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks (which is what we call “race”) that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources.
After the training —which, by the way, he said took the place of “our most useful teaching conference”— he and his colleagues had to answer a multiple-choice quiz about the presentation. One question, for example, stated “Focusing on race and racism just makes the problem worse” and offered two options: “true” and “false.” What would happen, I asked him, if you believed the answer was “true” and clicked that option? He replied, “I don’t know but I definitely don’t want to find out.”
Over in the United Kingdom, mental health nurse Amy Gallagher found out. She tells the story of training to be a psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust (the NHS is England’s publicly funded healthcare system). The training included lessons based on Robin DiAngelo’s work, on concepts like “white ignorance” and “white fragility.” In one of the lectures, the trainer told students “to let go of the myth of our white innocence and purity and acknowledge the darkness at its heart.”77
At the time of this writing, all we have is Gallagher’s story: She says she expressed her discomfort with the trainings to the program leaders, telling them: “I personally don’t agree with these views, and we need to be aware that patients might not agree with these either.”78
After speaking out, she says, “the Tavistock staff threatened, suspended, harassed, bullied, victimised me and tried to destroy my career over a 2-year campaign of abuse which is ongoing.”79 She was told she was “not fit to become a therapist” and that “if I continued to speak inappropriately about race, I would be suspended, I would be barred from entering the profession of psychotherapy.”80
When I’ve discussed these stories with people, a common response is: “What’s the big problem with this? Is it so bad for white people to be made more aware of the subtler aspects of racism?”
There are two problems:
1) Diversity trainings are usually ineffective and often backfire
Diversity trainings have been around since the 1960s, with noble goals like, according to sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, “rectifying inequalities, improving the organizational climate and employee morale, increasing collaboration across lines of difference, fostering free exchange of ideas and information, enhancing the hiring, retention, and promotion of diverse candidates, and more.”
The problem is that diversity trainings aren’t very effective. Al-Gharbi writes:
Unfortunately, a robust and ever-growing body of empirical literature suggests that diversity-related training typically fails at its stated objectives. It does not seem to meaningfully or durably improve organizational climate or workplace morale; it does not increase collaboration or exchange across lines of difference; it does not improve hiring, retention or promotion of diverse candidates. In fact, the training is often counterproductive with respect to these explicit goals.81
Study after study after study have come to the same conclusion: there is little evidence that diversity trainings work.*82
On the other hand, there is significant evidence that the trainings can be counterproductive. Diversity trainings can reduce sympathy,83 reinforce bias and stereotypes,84 cause claims of discrimination to be taken less seriously,85 drive a wedge between demographic groups,*86 and decrease morale.87
Al-Gharbi points to mountains of research that suggest ways to make diversity trainings more effective and less damaging. Rather than focus trainings on the broader problems in American society and American history, or on often controversial progressive stances like equality of outcome or the myth of meritocracy, “training should instead be tightly connected to specific organizational objectives and the specific tasks different team members are responsible for.” Rather than discuss bias and prejudice exclusively in the context of how privileged groups perceive oppressed groups, he says, discuss these phenomena as what they really are: general cognitive tendencies that all people are susceptible to. Rather than training people to avoid conflict—by teaching members of minority groups to be extra sensitive to perceived slights and leaving members of privileged groups walking on eggshells—trainings should teach people how to manage conflict. While conflict can bring people together and drive innovation when managed constructively, trying to rid the workplace of conflict is not only futile, it stifles creativity.
If diversity trainings are not effective and often counterproductive, and if we know what would make them more effective—why are they proliferating?
This is a question that has exasperated many researchers. Writing about implicit bias testing, professors Gregory Mitchell and Philip Tetlock emphasize that it is “difficult to find a psychological construct that is so popular yet so misunderstood and lacking in theoretical and practical payoff.” Harvard social scientist Frank Dobbin, who has spent decades studying diversity trainings, laments, “We’re doing a lot of things that are pretty well known not to work. … If we know that the existing modules we have aren’t really doing anything, I’m just perplexed as to why we keep doing them.”88
The most charitable explanation for why the bad programs persist is some combination of inertia and ignorance about their ineffectiveness. But there are other explanations as well. Having diversity training in place provides companies with critical legal protection against discrimination lawsuits. It provides the company with positive PR, suggesting to the world and to their staff that they care about diversity and are doing something about it. The diversity industry is now also worth billions of dollars, with popular trainers making millions per year. If the companies and the trainers are both getting what they need from maintaining the status quo, why would they do anything to change it?
2) Modern diversity trainings are mostly SJF trainings and violate the principle of secularism
Reading through documents from recent diversity trainings across society, I was struck by how they use the same wording, the same materials, and the same exercises. Some common themes:
Racial oppression is encoded in America’s DNA and permeates every aspect of American life
Efforts should focus on achieving not merely equality of opportunity but equality of outcome
All white people contribute to racism, no matter how they act or what they believe about themselves
