Matthew Yglesias makes the point that I've made before: There is not a lot of evidence that DEI training actually works. Some of this, I believe, is because a great deal of DEI training is coming from Education Departments that aren't - shall we say - tremendously rigorous in their methodology.
Yglesias points out that the single best way to overcome racism is to have people actually meet and interact with people of other racial, ethnic and gender groups. There is a lot of shit given to (mostly) Republican politicians who respond to some sort of sexual crime with "As the father of a daughter...", because theoretically, you shouldn't need to have a daughter to know that sexual assault is wrong. However, the traditional doubts about false accusations tend to melt away, when you consider someone you know either surviving a sexual assault of being vulnerable to it. So...I get it. They should be more empathetic to a theoretical person, but the reality is, we aren't wired that way.
Yglesias goes on to mention the very real possibility that not only does DEI training not work, but it might actively make prejudices worst. Most corporations undergo DEI training for the purpose of avoiding getting sued. I've always felt that we have a certain formula at our school for responding to these issues, that seems more about "doing something" than solving the actual problem.
The insight that people who are told that stereotyping is bad wind up stereotyping more, because - after all - stereotyping is prevalent does not seem far-fetched to me.
Thing of it this way: the modal person you are trying to reach with this training in a school is a white boy or girl who has very little personal experience with people of color. In our school, these young people are usually the very picture of privilege. You tell them, repeatedly, that they are privileged and that they have benefitted from racism and that they walk around with unconscious biases. It seems likely that you are subtly instructed them that this is simply who they are. At the very least, you activate the native oppositional streak in teenagers.
Tell a person that they are unconsciously racist enough and they will eventually come to agree with you.
On the other hand, there is some evidence that focusing on progress leads to more progress. I center race and slavery in my US History class during the first semester. There are basically two main events - the Revolution and the Civil War - that function as focal points for causation thinking. Slavery is fundamental to the latter. In the second semester, the focus is on change. Tracing the actual history of racism, Jim Crow and the "Second Reconstruction" of the Civil Rights Era, shows progress. I have to be clear that this progress is incomplete, but if I simply harp on the negative aspects of race in America, I will eventually lose the very students I'm trying to reach.
Both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass focused on the Declaration of Independence over the Constitution when opposing slavery. This is the paradox of Thomas Jefferson: the slaveholder, who loosed the ideals that would eventually end slavery.
When studying the arguments during the Civil Rights movement (for African Americans and others) the essential insight was universalist arguments when over particularist arguments. King, especially, simply wanted a seat at the table, whereas X and Carmichael explicitly talked about throwing the table over. Similarly, "same sex marriage" or "gay marriage" was how George W Bush won Ohio and a second, disastrous term. "Marriage equality" currently enjoys a 64% approval rating, including a 50-50 split among Republicans under the age of 45.
It's unclear what - exactly - would constitute an effective form of DEI training. I know that my immature attitudes towards homosexuality changed completely, simply by being around homosexuals. The small Georgia town that my parents lived in went out of their way to protect the Mexicans living in their community without documentation, because they knew them and liked them. There is a presumption in America - and this is new - that racism is wrong. It's not a universally held belief, but close enough. (This is why Republicans freak out when they are called racists. It does sting.) However, we could be activating biases through the very efforts we are taking to make racism and bias unacceptable.
Anthony Bourdain used to say that the only solution to the world's problems was for everyone to have sex and make babies with everyone else until we were all the same color. He was joking, but the idea that simply hanging out with those different from you is not a joke and seems the most effective way to combat the worst effects of racism. Not sure how you scale that up, but that's the clearest way forward.
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