As I write, the big day is a little less than two weeks away, and none of the mediafolk at Starbucks will say exactly how it will all come off—the reprogramming of nearly 175,000 baristas and other employees in a single afternoon, in an effort to cleanse them of racial bias.
The Starbucks event is a superior instance of American business’s approach to problem-solving. It begins with a grand gesture: the closing of the 8,000 company-owned Starbucks outlets, including those that are right across the street from each other. The ensuing program—details not yet revealed—will be presented as an act of contrition on the part of an artificial entity, the corporation, that by its very nature cannot feel contrition, or anything else. It will be an intimate and personal process staged by hired “diversity trainers” for maximum publicity. And it will be wreathed in unassailably uplifting politics to hide the creepy methods that are, we’re told, the fruit of the very finest social science. I bet the baristas can hardly wait.
Reprogramming Day was announced in a press release issued via a two-and-a-half-minute video (another sign of our times: a video is necessary in the age of tl;dr). The CEO of Starbucks, an earnest man named Kevin Johnson, stared into the camera looking woebegone and jowly. He said he felt terrible that police were called a few days earlier to haul away two black men from a Philadelphia Starbucks on the assumption that they were loitering. In pursuit of more enlightened racial attitudes, he said he will join all his partners—his genteelism for employees—in submitting to “training around unconscious bias [and] conscious inclusion.” He said that this will be “just one step in a journey.” Then he said it was the “first step in a journey.” Then he said it again.
I don’t doubt his sincerity—well, I kind of do, actually—but the safest bet is that the big day will come and go and be quickly forgotten, leaving us to return to our venti Double Chocolaty Chip Crème Frappuccinos hopeful that nothing similar will happen again, at least for a while. Indeed, this is precisely the fear of the people whom Johnson has hired to help “craft the curriculum” for the training sessions on May 29. The CEO’s genteelism for these crafters is “thought leaders,” although they call themselves “racial justice leaders.” Probably a distinction without a difference.
Three of the leaders—recruited from such pillars of the diversity industry as the Equal Justice Initiative, the NAACP Legal and Education Fund, and Demos, a diversity think tank—issued a statement shortly after they hired on:
With their help, Kevin Johnson’s journey will be a long and expensive one.
Only someone blissfully unfamiliar with corporate America will find Starbucks’ diversity extravaganza unusual. An obsession with diversity is a fixture of our business culture. Diversity training was originally adopted as a hedge against discrimination lawsuits, even, as in the case of Starbucks, after the fact. (Starbucks settled with the two Philadelphia men for an undisclosed amount before they could file suit.) A court judgment in such cases can be far costlier than hiring a diversity training company.
More than 20 years ago, at the dawn of the diversity training era, Texaco settled a discrimination suit for $176 million; four years later, Coca-Cola did the same for $192 million. Portions of both settlements, totaling roughly $70 million, went to implement diversity programs in the respective companies. For businesses it’s a bargain. In 2011, for instance, the Supreme Court rejected a huge gender-discrimination class action against Walmart; the company avoided a potentially catastrophic payout by offering its antidiscrimination policy and programs as evidence of its angelic fairness.
“Currently,” three psychologists reported in the Harvard Business Review, “diversity initiatives’ strongest accomplishment may actually be protecting the organization from litigation—not protecting the interests of underrepresented groups.”
That makes two things that diversity initiatives are good for: dodging litigation and fattening the bank accounts of people who declare themselves diversity trainers. It’s a do-it-yourself profession, requiring no particular training or certification, and enormously lucrative. Buy a shingle; hang it and they will come, all the nervous executives trying to stay a few steps ahead of trouble. A pioneer in the diversity business, Dr. Lennox Joseph, once told me the advice he gives young people. “I tell them, ‘If you want to make a large amount of money in a very short period of time, go into diversity.’ ” Race and gender entrepreneurs by the thousands have followed his lead. Time estimates the total value of the diversity industry at $8 billion. It’s nice work if you can get it.
As for the other goals that diversity training is supposed to be good for—raising employees’ awareness of their unconscious racism, nudging executives to seed their managerial ranks with more women and minorities—several surveys over the last two decades have shown it to be more or less worthless. Most recently, the Harvard psychologist Frank Dobbin head-counted his way through more than 800 midsize and large U.S. companies that had made diversity training mandatory, as Starbucks is doing. Over a five-year period he found no increase in the percentage of managers who were women or minorities. In fact, the number of black female managers declined more than 9 percent, that of Asian men 4.5 percent.
The effect of diversity training on employees’ racial attitudes is similarly unimpressive. It’s not clear that such an effect can even be reliably measured. Those who have tried have failed to see any change in attitude lasting more than a few days. The resentment, hostility, and feelings of victimization it often provokes tend to last longer.
The lack of success shouldn’t be surprising. Most diversity programs are based on the make-believe science of “implicit racism.” The phrase gained currency among American social scientists a generation ago, just as explicit racism—legal, institutional, and public—dropped close to zero. Social scientists had trouble accounting for this decline or even accepting it. It is part of their catechism that racism is enduring and endemic; if it appeared to be declining, that meant it was merely being pushed underground—or rather, pushed back deep in the unconscious mind of the racists themselves. Implicit racism is not only unconscious; often it is invisible, unspoken, and unfelt by the person it’s directed toward. Both perpetrator and victim might be clueless about the racism raging between them. Only the social scientist sees the truth. This is often how the findings of social science work: If it doesn’t look like a duck, walk like a duck, or quack like a duck, it’s still a duck. Studies show.
The discovery of this hitherto undetected kind of racism relies on the Implicit Association Test, some version of which will almost certainly be part of the Starbucks curriculum. The IAT is a computer-based exercise that is alleged to expose a subject’s hidden feelings, his racism and sexism in particular. Various heretics in social psychology have been hammering away at the test for a decade now. Reading their studies, a disinterested observer will conclude that the IAT is flimsy, incoherent, and used by everybody anyway. A vast edifice of social science has been built on the assumption that the IAT tells us something real. And its staying power does rest on something real. We each of us know that we are subject to feelings we don’t understand; we are often the worst judges of our own behavior. It took social science to grab this universal and relatively harmless intuition and weaponize it for the warriors of social justice.
Yet the test’s crippling defects won’t go away. The mechanism by which unconscious racism leads to particular results on the IAT has never been revealed, or even guessed at. The scores themselves vary wildly—take the test three times, you’ll probably get three different scores. More important, no one has discovered a link between the test results and actual behavior; your performance on the test tells us nothing about how you will behave in real life, or in a Starbucks.
Implicit racism is a will o’ the wisp, and any attempt to define it, much less isolate and eliminate it, is doomed to fail. As the authors of the largest study of the implicit bias literature wrote in 2016: “We found little evidence that changes in implicit bias mediate changes in explicit bias or behavior. Together, [our] findings suggest that implicit bias is malleable, but that changing implicit bias does not necessarily lead to changes in explicit bias or behavior.”
The world that the diversity trainers will usher the baristas into has a pristine, seamless wholeness to it. It is a world unto itself, unblemished by contact with reality, built from pure ideology: untutored trainers instructing blameless subjects in bogus science to cure a psychological defect that can’t be shown to exist, all at a staggering expense of time and money. Only a capitalist country as rich as ours could survive what its capitalists are doing to it.
