In December a professor of psychology named Betsy Levy Paluck wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post titled “Does diversity training work? We don’t know — and here is why.” The gist of what she wrote is that despite massive corporate and academic investment in DEI training over the past couple years ($3.4 billion in 2020 alone) there are very few studies that show any of this training works as intended. In fact, there’s some evidence that DEI training is more likely to create resentment and backlash than peace and harmony.

Today, Jesse Singal uses that as a jumping off point for a NY Times opinion piece on the topic:

Dr. Paluck’s team found just two large experimental studies in the previous decade that attempted to evaluate the effects of diversity trainings and met basic quality benchmarks. Other researchers have been similarly unimpressed. “We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade,” wrote the sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in 2018, “with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around.”…

But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them…

Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity trainings that are mandatory, or that threaten dominant groups’ sense of belonging or make them feel blamed, may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate pre-existing biases…

For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are intentionally designed to make white participants uncomfortable.

DiAngelo’s whole framework assumes backlash is good because it proves her training is working. But what if it’s just creating a backlash and giving her and her acolytes a thrill of angering the right people. Is that something schools and companies should be paying to introduce to their students/employees? This backlash doesn’t just come in the form of criticism of the trainer or the material. In some cases is results in lawsuits.

Singal argues there is a kind of DEI work that might actually make a difference but it’s not the kind of mandatory confrontation in public that DEI trainers are best know for at this point. Instead it might require a lot more actual work to understand, for instance, why employees of different races aren’t getting along very well on the job. But that sort of thing takes more time and money than just hiring a DEI trainer to lecture everyone for an hour or two. Singal concludes:

The history of diversity trainings is, in a sense, a history of fads. Maybe the current crop will wither over time, new ones will sprout that are stunted by the same lack of evidence, and a decade from now someone else will write a version of this article. But it’s also possible that organizations will grow tired of throwing time and money at trainings where the upside is mostly theoretical and the potential downsides include unhappy employees, public embarrassment and even lawsuits. It’s possible they will realize that a true commitment to D.E.I. does not lend itself to easy solutions.

I remain skeptical of what a “true commitment to DEI” can accomplish. All of these programs seem built around grouping people into racial categories fighting for limited resources. No doubt there’s some truth to viewing things that way, though much less so than 50 or 150 years ago. And I’ll admit it’s easier to dismiss this particular lens on reality when your group isn’t the one often stuck at the bottom thanks in part to a genuine history of injustice.

Nevertheless, reinforcing those ideas of group solidarity seems like a step in the wrong direction. The problem with DEI isn’t just that it sometimes creates a backlash or a lawsuit. The problem is that it’s training everyone to see the world in terms of tribalism and categories based on immutable characteristics. There’s a tremendous risk to doing that because at some point the dominant group might start to believe it.

The long term goal shouldn’t be to better balance the interests of the competing tribes but to eliminate the tribalism that makes that necessary. Clearly, we’re not there yet but the DEI trainers who’ve given up on the whole project and reversed course are making a strategic mistake. People are ultimately individuals and to the degree that gets lost as the central fact of our experience, we all just become stereotypes to one another. How can that possibly improve the situation for anyone in the long run?