Every new British lawmaker is required to take one obligatory course. Can you guess what it is about? How to move an amendment, maybe? Correct etiquette in the chamber? The proper registration of your financial interests? Election law?
Of course not. The sole mandatory training course is called “Valuing Everyone Equally.” That doesn’t really surprise you, does it? Identity politics has been sacralized, lifted out of the realm of reasoned debate, and turned into a question of faith. We are expected to invoke “diversity” as a prelude to anything we say — a bit like those Muslims who preface every statement with, “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.”
In 17th-century England, admission to town corporations and universities was subject to what were known as the Test Acts. To be allowed in, you had to declare, under oath, that you did not hold the belief that the bread and wine used in communion became the body and blood of Christ. To modern eyes, it seems an extraordinary precondition for being allowed to, say, study languages. But that’s the thing about these moral panics: When you’re in the middle of one, you accept all sorts of things which, with perspective, seem utterly bizarre.
Which brings us to the current obsession with anti-discrimination workshops. It so happened that, at the same time that I was taking my compulsory course on Valuing Everyone Equally, my teenage daughter was being made to take an Unconscious Bias Test so as to be allowed to study French and linguistics. If you think that is any more relevant than asking her to abjure the doctrine of transubstantiation, I’m afraid you are inside the woke matrix.
You think that I am overstating my case? That encouraging respect for minorities can hardly be compared to anti-Catholic prohibitions? Then ask yourself the following question. Is there any evidence that diversity training actually works?
More and more people are making a living out of it. But logically, there ought to come a point when they become redundant. After all, if workshops eradicate prejudice, then, eventually, there will be no prejudice left.
Curiously, almost no one bothers to measure the effectiveness of these sessions. Because we are dealing with sacred values, their intrinsic worth is assumed. Yet, the few academic studies that have sought to evaluate their utility have come up with a striking finding. They are not just ineffective but counterproductive. In other words, they don’t simply waste everyone’s time. They actually implant negative feelings where none previously existed.
Columbia University’s Musa al-Gharbi carried out a comprehensive review of the data and found that, while diversity training tended not to feed through into more harmonious workplaces or more diverse hiring strategies, it did produce unintended and harmful side-effects. For example, the scenarios would often introduce participants to new stereotypes. (“Really? Is that what Koreans are supposed to be like?”) Some would become more comfortable expressing bigoted sentiments, having been told that these views were normal and widespread. White people, especially those who saw themselves as educated and liberal, would become prejudiced against poor whites. People from minority groups would start feeling wounded by supposed micro-aggressions that they had previously seen as wholly inoffensive.
This last aspect, the negative affect on minorities, strikes me as underexplored. Literature on anti-racism, while it tells white people how to change their attitudes, often treats black people as a kind of passive, inert mass, subject to discrimination but lacking in agency. Even small children are subjected to this well-intentioned but potentially debilitating message. What is the effect of telling people, from a young age, that they are oppressed and victimized?
Eric Kaufman, a professor of politics at London University, published a study this month that explored the paradox that, as racism becomes less prevalent, people become more concerned about it. He found, for example, that an astonishing eight in 10 black people believe that a black man is more likely to be killed by the police than in a traffic accident. (Obviously, that is nowhere near to being true.)
In one exercise, two sets of black participants were asked to read different passages. One was about the history of Africans as conquerors and, indeed, slave traders; the other was by Ta-Nehisi Coates and concerned the supposed impunity with which black people can be mistreated or murdered. Guess what? Among the group that read the first passage, 83% agreed with the statement, “When I make plans, I am almost certain that I can make them work.” After reading the second passage, that number fell to 68%.
There is, in short, growing evidence that the diversity-industrial complex is not a waste of time and money but an active source of the very problem it purports to tackle. Who will challenge the racket?
