Why Diversity Training Isn’t Enough | The New Republic 09/01/2020, 02:43

Why Diversity Training Isn’t Enough

Addressing inequality requires more than
consciousness raising.
J.C. Pan January 7, 2020

If you’ve consumed liberal media at any point over the last two decades
or so, you’re likely aware of the growing attention to (and outrage over)
the lack of racial diversity in: Hollywood movies, tech, journalism,
Washington, Young Adult books, modeling, college course syllabi,
Forbes’s annual list of billionaires, socialist organizations, museum
curators, museum exhibitions, the faces on U.S. currency, podcasts,
Trump’s Cabinet, luxury brands, the cannabis industry, and so on. In a
multiracial America that’s forecast to become majority minority in a few
decades, critics have pointed out, it’s shameful that so many business
sectors and cultural venues—and in particular, the most prestigious of
them—remain disproportionately white.

Growing public outcry over the whiteness of these fields and others has
pushed university deans, studio executives, and corporate boards to
adopt a battery of diversity initiatives, inflating a cottage industry that—
between anti-bias and cultural competency educators, consultants,
workshops, and trainings sold to companies, schools, and other
institutions—is today worth close to $8 billion. Diversity training is
currently mandated at most Fortune 500 companies and about half of all
midsize firms in the United States. In addition, nearly two-thirds of
colleges and universities use diversity trainings, and about 30 percent
require their faculty to attend them. And, of course, in the wake of race-
related public relations disasters, it’s now standard practice for
corporations to conduct nationwide company sensitivity trainings, like the
ones hastily rolled out by Sephora and Starbucks after instances of racial
profiling at their stores.
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Despite this rapid growth, today’s

diversity industry has largely failed
to usher in the diverse workplaces
and schools it promises. A growing
number of empirical studies suggest
that anti-bias training (also known as
implicit bias training) and other
diversity initiatives don’t work. A
recent study by sociologists Frank
Dobbin at Harvard University and
Alexandra Kalev at Tel Aviv
University, surveying more than 30
years of data collected from over
800 firms, found that diversity
programs not only failed to increase
workplace diversity, but in many
cases even reduced diversity or
exacerbated participants’ biases. A DIVERSITY, INC: THE FAILED PROMISE OF A
2016 meta-analysis of nearly 500 BILLION-DOLLAR BUSINESS by Pamela Newkirk
Bold Type Books, 272 pp., $27.00
studies on implicit bias interventions
similarly found that while such sessions sometimes briefly and slightly
diminished participants’ implicit biases, they had no significant long-term
effects on people’s behavior or attitudes. And in 2019, another study of
diversity training programs by a team of behavioral scientists further
confirmed that onetime interventions designed to reduce implicit bias—
the type used by the vast majority of employers and institutions—tend
not to change very many minds at all.

How, exactly, should we reconcile the vast sum of money and energy
poured into diversity training with its lackluster results? Two recent books
argue that a more thoroughgoing accounting of racism is needed to
correct our society’s deficiencies. In Diversity, Inc: The Failed Promise of
a Billion-Dollar Business, NYU journalism Professor Pamela Newkirk
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argues that diversity is likely to

remain elusive until we address the
larger context of our nation’s history
of racial segregation and violence.
This kind of reckoning is also the
subject of White Fragility, a runaway
hit that has spent over a year on the
New York Times bestseller list and
amassed an array of favorable
reviews since its 2018 release. In the
book, author Robin DiAngelo—a
sought-after speaker and former
professor who’s worked for decades
as an anti-bias consultant—
describes the phenomenon of “white
fragility,” a condition that renders
white Americans unable to discuss
race and racism without succumbing WHITE FRAGILITY: WHY IT’S SO HARD FOR WHITE
to defensiveness and emotional PEOPLE TO TALK ABOUT RACISM by Robin
DiAngelo Beacon Press, 192 pp., $16.00
distress, and that thereby
perpetuates our racial hierarchy. Overcoming this hostility, DiAngelo
argues, requires sustained self-reflection, humility, and vigilance from
white people.

Although Newkirk is critical of the diversity industry, whereas DiAngelo

works squarely within it, both authors view altering white consciousness
as the key to social transformation. And while this is a perspective that
has found quite a bit of traction, it strikes me as the type of righteous-
sounding injunction that poses little actual threat to current, historically
high levels of inequality. The rich are perfectly capable of embracing the
vocabulary of racial justice while simultaneously segregating schools,
union-busting, and rending the social safety net. A politics of
introspection does not work toward policies to combat any of this. Which
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suits our current economic order—and the diversity industry that

operates within it—just fine.

Diversity, Inc. surveys the state of chronic racial underrepresentation

across several elite spheres, including Hollywood, academia, and
corporate America—historically racially homogeneous sectors that, to
this day, have struggled to diversify their ranks. In Hollywood, for
example, a recent industry report on the top films of the last 10 years
found that only 4 percent of directors were women, only 6 percent black,
and around 3 percent Asian. Just under 4.5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs
today are black, Hispanic, or Asian, though those groups make up a
combined 38 percent of the population. And, at colleges and universities,
supposedly liberal bastions, whites continue to hold 83 percent of full-
time professorships.

Must-reads.
5 days a week.
Newkirk proposes that diversity initiatives have met so little success in
these areas because they diverge in ideology and intent from civil rights–
era programs that sought to put the nation on a track to racial equality.
Rather than agitating for social reform, today’s massive diversity industry
functions instead to shield institutions from discrimination litigation and
public scrutiny. Diversity training might be expensive, Newkirk notes, but
requiring employees to take an hour-long online anti-bias course or even
hiring trainers to conduct in-person seminars still costs significantly less
time and money than a discrimination lawsuit, like the one that cost

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Texaco $176 million in 1996 or the one that cost Coca-Cola $192.5 million
in 2000.

According to Newkirk, for-profit companies, higher education, and

cultural institutions alike will only achieve true and sustained racial
diversity following a broader cultural shift in which Americans, particularly
white Americans, come to terms with the nation’s history of white
domination, which began with the enslavement of Africans and the
displacement and mass murder of Native Americans, and continued
through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries via exclusionary
immigration laws and imperial excursions abroad. In Newkirk’s view, even
most of the scholarly research on the shortcomings of diversity training—
such as Dobbin and Kalev’s study—fails to capture the way the diversity
industry has come untethered from a larger project of accounting for this
ugly history. “While many recent studies raise legitimate concerns about
diversity practices,” she writes, “most have overshadowed the extent to
which these initiatives ceased to be seen as a moral imperative linked to
centuries of systemic racial oppression.”

By contrast, she argues, Great Society programs such as the Civil Rights
Act and Higher Education Act led to significantly increased numbers of
African Americans in many public schools that had once been almost
exclusively white, as well as within colleges and universities. Though
that’s true enough, it’s also here that her diagnosis of the diversity
industry’s deficiencies falters. Simply put, while Lyndon Johnson and
other architects of Great Society reforms may have sought to create a
“racially just and inclusive nation,” as Newkirk puts it, the actual
measurable successes of those programs weren’t the result of a “moral
imperative” so much as they were the result of public policy. And the
former without the latter, which is essentially what Newkirk offers, poses
little threat to today’s ineffective diversity industry. In fact, the work of
facilitating the broad “paradigm shift” Newkirk wants to see in lieu of the
diversity industry’s empty “pledges, slogans, or well-compensated czars”

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is increasingly a central part of that very industry.

Encouraging white Americans to come to terms with both the country’s

history and their own complicity in perpetuating present-day injustice is
precisely the goal of Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility, which was
released to much discussion and acclaim last year. As it happens,
DiAngelo has been a longtime facilitator within the diversity training
apparatus that Newkirk critiques, and her analysis of white fragility is
drawn largely from personal observations gathered during the workshops
and seminars she’s run.

Over her years of conducting trainings on race, DiAngelo has observed

that white people reliably (and usually immediately) erupt into
defensiveness and discomfort when asked to consider the persistence of
racism—a response that she calls white fragility. White fragility is itself a
product of racism, namely a national history of segregation that has kept
whites comfortably protected from the reality of the nation’s racial
hierarchy; as a result, DiAngelo argues, most white people find it
extremely difficult to talk about race. Examples of white fragility in action
include workshop attendees who insist on their color blindness, bring up
their own hardships, and even women who cry during discussions of
racism. “These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium,” writes
DiAngelo, “as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and
maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy.”

Her book is a recent addition to whiteness studies, an academic

discipline in which DiAngelo is a professor. While earlier works by W.E.B.
Du Bois and other black scholars laid the ground for the development of
the field, whiteness studies took off in the 1990s with the publication of
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, David Roediger’s The Wages of
Whiteness, and Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race,
among other influential texts. These works have provided critical
historical interventions over the last 30 years, particularly regarding the
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construction and evolution of white identity in the United States; they

were never imagined as manuals for the transformation of corporate
America. From a practical point of view, the political scientist Cedric
Johnson has recently argued that whiteness studies promote a fatalistic
view of white workers as too hopelessly committed to their racial identity
to be won over to a multiracial left coalition. Such a perspective, he
writes, inevitably prioritizes reeducating such workers over attempting to
organize them.

Indeed, the major shortcoming of White Fragility is that it offers almost

nothing in the way of concrete political action. Though solving
societywide inequality isn’t the goal of her book, DiAngelo notes—and, of
course, it would be unrealistic to expect her to single-handedly
accomplish such a thing—even her practical suggestions for what white
people might do to combat racism amount to little more than personal
introspection and self-improvement. That includes learning to cultivate
feelings of gratitude and humility (even excitement) upon learning that
one has done something racist, listening and “processing” in the
aftermath of such an event, and a variety of other vague endeavors, such
as challenging “our own socialization and investments in racism.”

Self-reflection is ultimately a much easier

undertaking than working to build a durable political
coalition.

This style of whiteness training, Johnson writes, “encourages sharing

one’s origin story, failings and sense of torment, but beyond charitable
giving, it does not necessitate sharing resources at the level of
redistributive public policy.” It is therapeutic rather than policy-based. In
this sense, DiAngelo writes from the same lineage as other white anti-
racist educators, including White Like Me author Tim Wise (who blurbed
her book) and Peggy McIntosh, writer of the widely shared “Unpacking
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the Invisible Knapsack” pamphlet on white privilege. While ruminating on

one’s internalized prejudices may require some psychological heavy
lifting, there’s little evidence that it helps produce or sustain material
change. And though whiteness educators like DiAngelo may employ the
radical-sounding language of critical race theory, self-reflection is
ultimately a much easier undertaking than working to build a durable
political coalition that actually has the leverage to remake society.

For all their emphasis on discomfort, the kind of racial reckoning

advocated by both Newkirk and DiAngelo today exists without much
difficulty under capitalism. That is to say, it’s entirely possible—even easy
—to advocate for racial diversity and white self-examination while
simultaneously endorsing (or at least ignoring) economic inequality.

This conundrum was most famously articulated by the professor and

critic Walter Benn Michaels in his controversial 2006 book, The Trouble
With Diversity. “The commitment to diversity is at best a distraction and
at worst an essentially reactionary position,” he wrote, to the horror of
many on the left at the time. What he meant wasn’t that diversity in and
of itself was bad or undesirable, but that the preoccupation with
achieving it usually came at the expense of attacking economic
inequality. For quite a few (if not most) people whose primary
commitment is championing diversity, the underlying assumption is that
our current lopsided distribution of wealth and resources would be
justified so long as racial (and gender) disparities were eliminated. That
is, it would be acceptable if the top 1 percent of the population reaped
the majority share of economic gains and exerted undue influence on the
political system so long as that 1 percent was 50 percent female, 14
percent black, 18 percent Latino, and so on.

This is the metric that allows Newkirk to praise Coca-Cola’s diversity

programs—which managed to increase the number of African Americans
at the senior executive level from one to 49 people over the course of a
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few years—as the “gold standard” for corporations, while CEO James
Quincey earns nearly $17 million annually, or over 1,000 times what the
average employee makes. It’s what allows Coca-Cola to proudly advertise
its strides in “representation” while also backing Trump’s 2017 tax cuts,
including publishing an interview in which chief financial officer Kathy
Waller (an African American woman) praised the bill’s “potential to
reinvigorate job growth and help U.S. companies be more competitive.”

Even more insidiously, the vocabulary of inclusion has lately been wielded
to undermine or dismiss broad-based universal policies that would,
ironically, disproportionately help people who aren’t white. “If we broke
up the big banks tomorrow,” Hillary Clinton asked on her doomed
campaign trail, “would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would
that end discrimination against the LGBT community?” Strictly speaking,
probably not. But as Michaels has written, “A serious and entirely race-
blind transfer of wealth to poor people (even just the $15 dollar an hour
minimum wage and even though the majority of people working for
minimum wage are white) would do more to benefit poor black people
than would the most rigorous and effective enactment and enforcement
of every possible antidiscrimination law.”

Overturning our existing hierarchy—rather than just playing musical

chairs with its demographics—depends on ending exploitation. The good
news is that the kind of universal programs that Michaels and others
advocate would go a long way toward doing just that, particularly for
black Americans and other historically marginalized groups (recall
Newkirk’s own assessment of Great Society initiatives), and they also
happen to be relatively popular. The bad news is that powerful political
actors—including the Democratic Party elite that just so happens to be
quite well-versed in the rhetoric of diversity—are fighting such reforms
tooth and nail.

The question, then, is whether you believe that people’s attitudes can be

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transformed through common struggle or you think that psychological

transformation needs to happen before that struggle can take place.
There are arguments for and against each possibility. But you can see
why those who earn a paycheck informing people of their latent biases
might feel compelled to insist upon the latter.

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