In the typical scenario, students, staff, and faculty submit themselves to hectoring lectures and demeaning demonstrations that purport to reveal white privilege and the oppressive conditions faced by “underrepresented populations” in their institutions.
Those interested in understanding it should reflect on the history of diversity training.
On April 5, 1968, Jane Elliott, an Iowa third-grade teacher, conducted an experiment intended to inform her students what it was like to be non-white in America.
Elliott staged a world in which her radical view of race relations in the country was produced within her class of white students.
Brown-eyed students were collared, ostracized, insulted, and bullied by their teacher and the blue-eyed students. Then the process was reversed, and blue-eyed students became the targets.
Elliot’s intention was to parallel the operation of racial inequality in American society and thereby counteract and eliminate the prejudice undergirding it.
But research on the efficacy of Elliott’s method at reducing the propensity of children to play the deeply ingrained game of in-group/out-group has shown no conclusive results.
Some studies show incremental reduction of attitudes of preference for racial in-group and distance from some out-groups, while others find very little or no change from baseline attitudes, and still others indicate that diversity re-education may simply encourage whites to emphasize their own hardships to avoid classification in the dominant group.
Elliott quickly adapted her experiment for adults, and the level of psychic bullying was significantly amplified with the older subjects. Any of the several films of these experiments (The Eye of the Storm; A Class Divided; How Racist Are You?) can instructively be consulted for evidence of the sharp cruelty at the origin of the diversity training ritual.
If the goal is simply to ridicule whites, then Elliott’s method is adequate to the task.
But her assumption, and that of her disciples, is that this training will reduce discriminatory behavior, foster cooperation across groups, and advance the work of educational institutions to produce and disseminate knowledge.
Alas, there is little evidence to support those claims.
Musa al-Gharbi, a fellow in sociology at Columbia, summarizes a great deal of research and concludes here that mandatory diversity training often reinforces any existing biases that people may have and is “demonstrably ineffective or even counterproductive.”
The films of the Elliott experiments reveal the emergence of the Manichaean view on race that has come to dominate elite American culture: Racial identity is everything, individual will and behavior are nothing, and the history of American society is little more than group-based oppression.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/05/the-origins-of-the-cruel-ritual-of-diversity-training/
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