The Diversity and Inclusion Industry is Complete Bullshit

If you work in a corporate environment, at some point you've been forced to endure a mandatory diversity training class. They're inescapable at this point. Why does the diversity and inclusion (D&I) industry even exist? Well, basically, it's because in the 1990s and 2000s there were a ton of discrimination lawsuits that swept Wall Street and companies like Merrill Lynch ended up paying about $500 million in class action settlements. So in order to preempt lawsuits, diversity training was introduced and "diversity" became an entire industry in itself. Now they are practically ubiquitous, even in some of the most so-called progressive institutions like universities and media companies.

“A 2018 McKinsey study found that diverse organizations were up to 35 percent more likely to outperform their less diverse competitors. In organizations where diversity and inclusion are treated as real priorities, people of color are hired and then set up to contribute, succeed, and achieve outcomes equal to white colleagues. If this is truly a company’s aim, hiring a Chief Diversity Officer is insufficient. Chief Diversity Officers, or CDOs, as they are usually called, are often brought in to a company to respond to an existing problem, clean up an organization’s image, or publicly signal a commitment to diversity and equity that may not actually exist.” (Nadia Owusu, Hiring a Chief Diversity Officer Won’t Fix Your Racist Company Culture)

Can you really train people to be more accepting of diversity after making them sit through a 2-hour seminar? No. Let's be realistic. It's too conceptual. And simply outlawing bias doesn't make it go away. Never mind that almost every single training facilitator will do everything they can to avoid actually saying the word “racism".”

First of all, I dislike the word, "diversity" because it still centers everything around whiteness. Let's call it what it is: normal. Second, the diversity training industry was created to teach white people how to behave around minorities. It is completely ridiculous. It is also ridiculous that minorities are often required to attend these trainings. Most of us have just learned how to deal with white people all of our lives because they're everywhere around us. 

Let’s break down the word “inclusion” as well. Who is being asked to do the including? It’s not minorities. What message does that send? It sends the message that whites and whites alone hold the power and see themselves in a place of superiority. It sends the message that white culture is something to be “rewarded” to everyone who is non-white.

According to Nadia Osuwu, “Over and over in my role as Chief Diversity Officer, I was told that I had chosen the ‘wrong time and place’ to bring up racism; that I needed to do a better job ‘bringing people along.’ Since I already knew that many colleagues of color desperately wanted the racism in our company culture to be openly addressed, I assumed my bosses largely meant that I should focus my efforts on bringing white people along. If I had to prioritize the comfort of white employees over the clearly expressed needs of employees of color; if I had to avoid speaking in unambiguous terms about the very problems that I was charged with solving; if staff meetings were not the ‘right place’ for open, honest dialogue about these issues—then what was I supposed to be doing? ‘We want you to succeed,’ my bosses insisted. ‘Just meet people where they are.’ In my opinion, where some people were was the land of white fragility. ‘White fragility’ was a term that I was also discouraged from using.” (Nadia Owusu, Hiring a Chief Diversity Officer Won’t Fix Your Racist Company Culture)

“Do people who undergo training usually shed their biases?" write Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in the Harvard Business Review article, Why Diversity Programs Fail. Researchers have been examining that question since before World War II, in nearly a thousand studies. It turns out that while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a question about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest it can activate bias or spark a backlash. Nonetheless, nearly half of midsize companies use it, as do nearly all the Fortune 500.(Harvard Business Review)

The lucrative industry shows few signs of waning–from the spike in well-compensated diversity consultants and czars; to online courses and degree programs at prestigious schools; to professional organizations and conferences; to the commissioning of ever more studies, task forces and climate surveys. The buzzword is emblazoned on blogs and books and boot camps, and Thomson Reuters, a multinational mass-media and information firm, even created a Diversity and Inclusion Index to assess the practices of more than 5,000 publicly traded companies globally. But while business targeting diversity is flourishing, diversity is not. People of color–who make up nearly 40% of the U.S. population–remain acutely underrepresented in most influential fields. (Time)

Everybody is quick to do unconscious-bias training and not interventions. The phrase “unconscious bias” itself is completely wrong. It perpetuates white innocence. Bias is almost always conscious. It is a choice.

Unconscious bias trainings also don’t account for are the systemic and structural issues (SSI) that allow biases to be perpetuated in the workplace. These are the unfair policies, the differences in opportunities and inequitable treatment that allow bias to persist. While it is equally as important for individuals to be aware of their own blind spots and stereotypes and how these impact behaviors and decision-making, unconscious bias training and diversity and inclusion workshops should also address these SSIs that are insidious and allow bias to manifest at a greater level. (Janice Gassam, Your Unconscious Bias Trainings Keep Failing Because You’re Not Addressing Systemic Bias)

One example of how unconscious bias training has completely failed is within police departments. After the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and countless others back in 2015 when the Black Lives Matter movement began, reform meant providing Diversity and Inclusion training for police officers. We can now see the disastrous results — those trainings did absolutely nothing and police brutality against Black and Brown people has not decreased.

As much as you try to create an equitable workplace, if employees do not understand systemic racism and the many ways it manifests in the workplace, systemic oppression will continue. Many employees may have lived an experience where their race was not the focal point of their life and for them, understanding what white privilege is and how it is conceptualized can be challenging. Education can be one of the greatest tools to deconstructing structural racism. With an understanding of white privilege, organizational leaders should assess policies and procedures to evaluate whether any of them perpetuate racial inequities. Understanding how practices and policies that were once deemed as acceptable may be causing and continuing inequities can help spark the necessary shift to deconstruct these oppressive systems. (Janice Gassam, Your Unconscious Bias Trainings Keep Failing Because You’re Not Addressing Systemic Bias)

Systemic racism isn’t about getting rid of racists within the system. Even if you get rid of them, the system is still set up to benefit a small number of people, while completely marginalizing other groups. To get rid of the systemic racism, the entire system needs to be dismantled.

A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had "no positive effects in the average workplace." Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing. Attitudes — and the diversity of the organizations — remained the same. It gets worse. The researchers — Frank Dobbin of Harvard, Alexandra Kalev of Berkeley, and Erin Kelly of the University of Minnesota — concluded that "In firms where training is mandatory or emphasizes the threat of lawsuits, training actually has negative effects on management diversity. (Diversity Training Doesn't Work, Harvard Business Review)

The problem is that diversity training these days is dressed in the language of betterment and in that sense, it's disingenuous. If you're going to speak about diversity as a catchall, it really has to be about equality, regardless of race, gender or ethnicity. The language of diversity training obscures the pursuit of those things. When you talk about something like diversity, it has to come from a sincere place. Diversity training seminars and professionals fall short of any honest talk about race, acceptance and the actual pain that people have endured due to discrimination. This is so coddling of white people. It's all meant to continue to protect the white identity. Just be blunt in front of white people about the realities of race. It's the only way to be real about it and make any difference. I would love it if diversity professionals said the ugly truth in plain language and got people completely out of their comfort zones. Too often, they just want the physical presence of people of color, but not their voice.

The other major problem is that discussing race and gender in the office is supposed to be a taboo subject. But that has produced really negative results. There are psychological research studies that show that the worst thing you can do is never talk about race or gender in the workplace. Remove the taboo. That taboo only exists because white people are too uncomfortable to talk about race, which leads to them being clueless about how to talk about it and the cycle just continues. And since white people are uncomfortable talking about it, they’ve normalized talk of race as “unprofessional.” Never mind that the standards of professionalism are all based on white cultural norms.

Although the worsening racial climate appears to power the diversity industry, a number of studies suggest that these initiatives can actually make matters worse by triggering racial resentment. (Time)

Can the diversity training industry change? Absolutely. Right now it's completely outdated and ignores what's really needed in the current culture. Real interaction among individuals. Removing the taboo of discussing bias and race in the workplace. I think some of the best solutions have been designed without diversity in mind at all: mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces. 

---

Recent Posts