Carl Borg-Neal was fired after 30 years by Lloyds Bank in the United Kingdom because he committed what his employers saw as an unpardonable offense. Had he been unreliable? Rude to customers? An embezzler? No. His crime was to have said the wrong thing at an anti-racism training session.
Borg-Neal, who has just been awarded 500,000 pounds in a wrongful dismissal claim, is the latest example of how diversity training sessions often end up doing more harm than good. In an online session on “intent vs. effect,” he asked how he was supposed to react if he heard inappropriate language from an ethnic minority co-worker. The trainer did not understand his question, so he gave the example of a black colleague using the N-word. Except he actually used the word, causing the trainer such distress that she had to take a week off.
Oddly enough, Borg-Neal was inadvertently demonstrating the problem EDI’s approach to “intent vs. effect.” Most of us understand the difference between pushing someone over and accidentally stumbling into them so that they fall. But the premise of the grievance-industrial complex is that that distinction is false, that it is no defense to have meant well, and that failing to take offense in some situations is itself a moral failing.
The N-word illustrates the problem. I wrote here seven years ago about awkwardly trying to explain to my then-8-year-old why it was not acceptable to use a disgusting word that, she told me, she had heard only from black people. Back then, most people’s concern was about civility. Using a word that caused offense, especially on the grounds of someone’s ethnic background, was understood to be degrading, stupid, and cruel.
Since then, though, we have gone beyond worrying about treating people properly. We no longer distinguish between shouting racial abuse and, say, quoting a 19th century novel or asking an EDI trainer what to do in a hypothetical situation.
The sacralization of identity politics since 2015 has left us with what is best understood as a blasphemy code. We object to certain words regardless of context because they are seen as impious. The first sign of Britain’s new intolerance of sacrilege was the conviction of a teenage girl in 2016 (later overturned) for posting the N-word as part of some Snap Dogg lyrics on Instagram. No one was offended, but sacrilege had to be punished.
The syllables themselves are deemed evil — even if they are spoken in another language, as a professor at the University of Southern California found when he was suspended for using a similar-sounding Chinese word in an online lecture during lockdown. No wonder Borg-Neal’s course facilitator, steeped in the faith, had to take a week off work.
A similar phenomenon can be seen when people inadvertently use the wrong pronoun or, worse, the name that a transgender person used to go by. Again, I hope we can all agree that misgendering someone in a taunting way is rude and repellent. But the horror aroused by “deadnaming,” even when the offense is accidental, owes less to politeness than to superstition, a sense that words carry some metaphysical power.
Given how widespread diversity training has become — U.S. firms were spending more than $3 billion a year on it going into lockdown — there is surprisingly little interest in whether it works. Big corporates trot out its supposed benefits as if reciting a catechism, but the few credible studies into its effectiveness suggest that it may end up making workplaces less harmonious. Employees from minority backgrounds can start taking offense at phrases they had previously not minded — the assertion, for example, that America is “a melting pot.” White employees can become withdrawn and defensive. Negative racial stereotypes that had never occurred to anyone can become embedded.
“We have been speaking to employers about our research for more than a decade,” sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev said, “with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around.”
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We all know what makes a good boss: leadership, approachability, consistency, courage, decency, vision. Someone with those characteristics will not want to waste employees’ time on a course that is likely to stir up tensions over things that have nothing to do with their workplace.
Then again, DEI is not primarily about a happier working environment. Rather, it is a demonstration of ideological conformity, like the political sessions that communist dictatorships used to organize in factories. Just imagine how much more productive our countries would be if we reallocated that time and money to something useful.
