Juno News - Does anti-racism training make people more racist？

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show

00:00:05.920 we at the tail end of our show yesterday had some gremlins in the system i i try to normally

00:00:14.260 blame anything that happens on bill c11 and the liberal government's internet regulation i'm not

00:00:19.160 sure i can squarely lay the blame at their feet on this one but it was in an effort to get our

00:00:24.240 good friend david haskell on who is a professor at laurier university and associate professor of

00:00:29.280 digital media and journalism on the show because he had penned a phenomenal study and a very

00:00:35.580 revealing study on dei or diversity equity and inclusion and we are very grateful we were able

00:00:42.360 to get him back on to kick us off today i i gave lots of my thoughts yesterday when i was filling

00:00:47.500 time while we tried to sort out the tech issue so we'll get right to david now david always good to

00:00:51.960 talk to you thanks for coming on today i'm really i'm really glad that we were able to get rid of

00:00:55.800 those gremlins yeah so am i let's just start before we get into the conclusions why did you

00:01:00.920 want to dig in dig into this in the first place uh well i think that the most recent reason i i guess

00:01:09.020 my my overarching region reason for anything that i research is i want to be able to tell the truth

00:01:14.360 and sometimes when it seems like what i'm hearing really doesn't jive with what the reality of the

00:01:23.000 situation is then i want to dig into it but but i had a friend um who was a high school principal

00:01:29.280 out of toronto and um he took his own life and and when he did it was after he'd been at part of

00:01:38.220 some dei training sessions now i'm i'm not trying to make false equivalencies here i just know that

00:01:45.400 his lawyer said that it was after those dei training sessions that he he had to take they

00:01:53.160 were mandatory that his mental health deteriorated um his he was he was really berated in in these uh

00:02:02.200 in these sessions um and it just demoralized him well anyway uh after his death it it was um on the

00:02:11.400 website of the consultant the dei consultant that she seemed to want to cover her herself and uh she 0.85

00:02:21.720 said that you know she was trying to make the world a better place and that that richard's death it was

00:02:29.080 my friend uh it said richard's death was being mobilized and and uh weaponized and and so anyway

00:02:39.160 i wanted to challenge her claim does dei make the world better because that's what she said is her

00:02:43.720 explanation and so i started looking into the research on that and and i was grateful for the

00:02:48.440 aristotle foundation for public policy they said that they would commission that work and so that really

00:02:53.640 led me down the path and then uh i found some startling conclusions well let's let's go into that

00:02:59.720 what did you find well what i found was that there is no empirical evidence that it does anything good

00:03:09.080 dei instruction this mandatory exercise that's we see in businesses government all our educational

00:03:16.360 institutes no empirical evidence that it does anything good but there's clear evidence that it can

00:03:21.800 do harm and and this wasn't my own original research incidentally this is research that is out there and

00:03:29.160 this is really good stuff it's coming from harvard and princeton and uh well just all these elite

00:03:35.800 institutions and it's known but it's not popularized for some reason it gets swept under the rug so i

00:03:44.120 simply am bringing it back so that people can take a look at it and uh and it's pretty damning so let's

00:03:51.560 let's go back and drill into this a bit because the premise of dei is that it is a tool against all of

00:03:58.600 these biases biases that we all hold in ourselves i mean i'm assuming there are a number of premises but

00:04:04.360 if it were working what would the data show well we that's a great question the effect would be so we

00:04:12.840 talk about effect size that's one of the major measurements we use as social scientists so the

00:04:18.280 effect size would be great and and it would go like this you go to dei training and uh if you had

00:04:25.960 prejudices they would be eliminated or lowered if you had um a predilection not to work with people

00:04:34.600 of other racial or uh minority groups then then you would be more likely to work with them but what

00:04:42.360 we've seen through again meta-analysis after meta-analysis so this is where you take hundreds of studies

00:04:49.480 and you statistically aggregate those findings what we see is the effect size is about zero and i say

00:04:57.560 about zero it becomes zero the more rigorous the methodology so the better the study the more it

00:05:04.600 was able to prove that dei does nothing good so that that i find to be quite interesting because i ideally

00:05:13.800 you would have people that are invested in this that are motivated by what on the surface could be

00:05:18.840 a very pure thing we don't want racism we don't want bias we don't want prejudice so you're left with

00:05:24.680 do they either not care about these data do they not care about these findings or is the motivation

00:05:31.320 actually something else now i i'm inclined to say it's probably the latter but i'm curious where you land

00:05:36.360 on this i've given it a lot of thought and and i really like you i think that there are some people

00:05:42.200 who who truly are coming at this from a very good spot they want to see racism eliminated as we all do

00:05:49.560 or any right person person should uh they want to see people getting along and those are noble ideas

00:05:56.120 right so i'm sure that there are some people who really do think that that's the case but they have

00:06:01.720 to i'm thinking about the people who are setting policy i'm thinking about the people who are the

00:06:06.760 researchers they have to know this research i mean i was able to find it and so we do have to look at

00:06:11.800 other motivations because the empirical the empirical proofs just aren't there so why do they keep

00:06:17.960 advancing advancing this and so i would i would go through some other motives uh one is financial i mean

00:06:25.800 as it stands now after the george floyd riots dei is an industry just exploded i mean it was already

00:06:33.640 huge but now it's a multi-billion dollar industry so there's an expression that there are none so blind

00:06:40.920 as those whose paycheck depends on them not being able to see so there might be some of that going on

00:06:46.360 there the people writing books on this stuff like uh ibram x kendi and uh d'angelo robin d'angelo

00:06:55.160 they're making millions on their books promoting dei ideas so they have a vested interest also

00:07:03.000 consultants they're making a ton of dough for example um in toronto at the toronto district

00:07:10.280 school board the the woman the dei consultant uh i spoke of who berated my friend richard she made

00:07:18.520 around 61 000 for four days of workshops and that was a sole source contract that's really good money

00:07:26.360 uh you don't want to find reasons why what you're promoting are wrong when you're making that kind

00:07:31.880 of money but from from a business stand standpoint as well i think there's motivation among corporations

00:07:39.240 to really push dei because it diverts attention from other things i i remember when the the there

00:07:47.160 were the one percent riots or the the occupy wall street riots going on and they were looking at

00:07:53.720 corporate corruption well it was shortly after that that dei suddenly became something very favored

00:08:00.200 among corporations it was like don't look over here but i want you to look over here look how good we

00:08:05.400 are we could virtue signal so from a corporate point of view it makes a lot of sense to turn attention to

00:08:11.720 something else that has a lot of popular appetite but then you come to those people who maybe maybe

00:08:20.520 they know that it does do harm and again we can talk about the studies that actually show it does do harm

00:08:26.840 and maybe they're okay with that maybe they are motivated by revenge maybe they are motivated by

00:08:34.120 a desire to see society unravel so they can remake it in an image they like better you know one of the

00:08:42.040 things i remember from my old you know research methods classes in university if i'm recalling correctly is

00:08:48.120 this this idea called conceptual stretching where you kind of morph and uh you know move around a concept so

00:08:54.920 it fits what you're researching now maybe there's a justification for this but one of the most

00:08:59.560 extreme examples that you bring up in your piece is the idea of changing what white means to adapt to

00:09:06.200 the pre-existing conclusion now normally in in a course of scientific research you uh test a hypothesis

00:09:12.200 if you are finding that's not true you uh go back and you can question why but you don't start changing

00:09:17.720 around the language to make your conclusions fit what you want we see this with asians who are ethnic

00:09:23.880 minorities there's no denying their ethnic minorities they tend to have very very high

00:09:29.320 performance scores in academia in society they're very successful they make a lot of money so that

00:09:35.880 doesn't really fit with the dei mold so we have to find ways to call asians white yeah yeah we actually

00:09:42.360 white adjacent you say in your study that's right well again you begin digging into this stuff and you see

00:09:47.560 that there have been school boards in the united states that have actually removed the category of

00:09:52.520 asian and they just lumped them in with white and and that's dei uh writ large because what it

00:09:59.480 essentially is doing it's saying that we're going to create groups of oppressor and oppressed and as

00:10:05.800 soon as you perform beyond beyond whatever the expectations are of the average or or however they

00:10:13.240 define it suddenly you get into trouble so we see that these asian students in high schools across or in a

00:10:20.440 a couple uh school boards in the us they got lumped in with whites but we also saw it just recently in

00:10:27.080 the last year with the elite schools like harvard and um uh north carolina they were also being

00:10:36.040 discriminatory against asian students they were making sure that they couldn't get in to it couldn't

00:10:43.720 enroll at places like harvard they had to have almost perfect test scores and the rationale again this is

00:10:50.120 coming from the dei office was there

00:10:57.400 oh we have uh we we made it for the first uh few minutes but we've had a freeze on uh david's end

00:11:03.480 there we'll try to get that sorted out and get him back on but it is fascinating and this was again

00:11:09.320 something we saw specifically in the context of u.s academia where the idea of again just lumping asians

00:11:16.280 in with white because otherwise you can't actually find a way to to let the conclusion work we have

00:11:22.360 david back david that's all for it yeah sorry about that again something's going on we made it through

00:11:27.400 the first 10 minutes i was happy fair enough uh i'm just talking about uh what was happening at the

00:11:33.480 elite universities like harvard where they were actually making it more difficult for asian students

00:11:38.840 to get in they had to have a near perfect test score in order to get in uh the the people involved

00:11:45.960 in this actually took the supreme court and won they said you can't discriminate against us like this

00:11:51.000 but the notion that they could be discriminated against was pumped directly out of the dei offices

00:11:56.680 at these elite universities and what what their justification was we can't allow merit alone

00:12:04.840 to allow the to to let these uh asian american students in because there would be too many and 1.00

00:12:10.920 that wouldn't be the right kind of diversity well that begs the question what is the right kind of

00:12:16.440 diversity is there this this uh golden mean or golden model that's in the heads of these dei

00:12:23.880 professionals that they get to decide who gets to to be part of something and who doesn't so that's a

00:12:30.520 real worry uh that we saw and it was definitely uh a good decision by the supreme court to say that

00:12:37.000 this shouldn't be happening i think now we just need to have more universities realizing that all dei

00:12:42.760 based on the evidence needs to go one of the the dangers that i would see in in this is that some

00:12:49.560 people could look at the findings and say the problem isn't with the core premise the problem is

00:12:55.000 just with it's like the real communism hasn't been tried approach to this say no no real dei

00:13:00.360 hasn't been tried yet we've got to tweak and fine tune it but i think there are two issues there

00:13:04.680 number one you mentioned that there's this massive demand for dei right now i don't really think

00:13:10.760 there's any rigorous uh investigation into the qualifications of the people that are doing these

00:13:16.760 programs i think if you say the right things and you put up a splashy website it's probably pretty

00:13:21.160 easy to get a major contract from you know coca-cola which doesn't want to be accused of being racist

00:13:26.360 just to you know pull a company out of thin air but also i think you have people that are in this

00:13:32.200 space that are really making it up as they go along and and and i fear that the takeaway from some of

00:13:37.960 the studies you've pointed to and even your own work is okay we've got to try to find a way to make

00:13:42.680 this more rigorous instead of going back to the basics and saying maybe this is just a fundamentally

00:13:47.160 flawed premise yeah and i would just go back to the basics because the basics were actually working

00:13:55.000 so if you look from the 1960s up into the 1980s there was a significant drop in real racism and

00:14:03.640 and and now dei it can be uh it can look at race or it can look at uh gender and sexuality but let me

00:14:11.400 just talk a little bit about what we know about the reality of racism any sociological data that you

00:14:18.360 look at from the 1960s into the 1990s into the 2000s in fact showed every measure was going down

00:14:29.000 in terms of racism and going up in terms of acceptance between racial groups and some of the

00:14:34.840 things that uh were evidence of that we often ask questions as sociologists would you mind if someone

00:14:40.600 of a different race lived next to you year after year after year after year people more people were saying

00:14:48.600 no problem absolutely then another question we ask is would you be all right if your son or daughter

00:14:54.760 married someone of another race again year after year after year we were seeing that uh go up that 0.97

00:15:01.080 people were very accepting accepting so these are real measures that racism was going down

00:15:08.120 and what were we doing at those times to make it happen we were simply saying treat each other equally

00:15:13.800 judge people by the content of their character that was working and now we've got a dei industry

00:15:21.640 that is actually encouraging discrimination we have people like uh ibram x kendi who wrote how to

00:15:27.720 be anti-racist actually saying that the only cure for past discrimination is present discrimination

00:15:35.400 that's madness wow well fascinating research published by the aristotle foundation for public policy the

00:15:42.520 study is called what dei research concludes about diversity training it is divisive counterproductive

00:15:48.600 and unnecessary uh all things that do not describe david millard haskell the author of that who joins us

00:15:54.440 now david always good to talk to you thanks so much it was a real pleasure andrew thank you

00:15:58.440 thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north

00:16:03.080 andrew lawton show support the program at www.tnc.news

Juno News - February 18, 2024

Does anti-racism training make people more racist？

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