#dei training

By: Ryan Ruffaner

Published: Jul 11, 2025

When Donald Trump recently declared the death of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), sensible-minded Americans across the country—myself included—applauded. At last, the great juggernaut of identity politics, that machinery of race-based preference cloaked in the language of justice, had met its end.

Only, it hasn’t. Not yet.

Trump’s executive order restricting DEI initiatives in the federal government was a landmark decision, a long-overdue pushback against the institutionalization of racial essentialism. It was arguably the most significant victory since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. But the fight is far from over.

Yes, states like Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Kentucky have passed legislation defunding DEI bureaucracies, and many universities have shuttered their diversity offices. But media declarations of DEI’s demise are premature. In reality, the movement is not retreating—it’s rebranding.

DEI has always been a master of linguistic disguise. Today’s strategy is not to fight in the open but to retreat into ambiguity. Titles are changing. Staff are being reassigned. Programs once openly framed as “equity initiatives” are being folded into offices with softer names: “Student Success,” “Well-Being,” “Access and Opportunity.”

Take the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It eliminated 20 DEI-related positions, but quietly reassigned 27 others. The $5.4 million in savings? Redirected toward “student success” and “professional development.” These benign-sounding categories still harbor the same ideological content—training in “cultural competence” (a euphemism for critical race theory), sessions on “microaggressions,” and the like. This pattern repeats across campuses. At UNC Wilmington, the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion was shut down only to have its cultural centers absorbed into Student Affairs. The Chief Diversity Officer simply found a new title elsewhere at the university.

The University of Oklahoma claimed it had closed its DEI office in April 2024. What it did instead was rename it the Division of Access and Opportunity and reassign the staff. The University of Louisville made a similar move a year earlier, renaming its DEI office the Office of Institutional Equity. Nothing changed except the sign on the door.

In Texas—yes, Texas—I encountered a new undergraduate course titled “Psychological Thinking,” which ostensibly aims to introduce students to the basics of psychology. In reality, it offers the same DEI dogma: lessons on “white privilege,” “microaggressions,” and the social construction of identity.

This is not accidental. The DEI establishment is being advised, often by professional consultants, on how to adapt and survive in hostile political climates. In a 2024 webinar hosted by grant platform Fluxx, nonprofit leaders openly discussed how to keep race-based programming “under the radar.” One speaker, LaToya Ratlieff, the grants director at Hello Alice, explained how simply changing a grant requirement from “only open to Black entrepreneurs” to “preference for Black entrepreneurs” can help avoid legal challenges. “You can’t get a lawsuit for giving ‘preference,’” she said. Ratlieff even suggested using AI to sanitize DEI-related language on websites to ward off lawsuits claiming anti-white discrimination.

Major corporations are playing the same game. Eli Lilly removed “racial justice” language from its 2023 proxy statement and stopped publicly reporting its DEI progress. And yet that same year, executive compensation was still tied to diversity goals. Their website still promotes a robust commitment to DEI. Pfizer was forced to open a race-exclusive fellowship to applicants of all backgrounds after a lawsuit, but its internal structure remains dominated by racially segregated “colleague resource groups.” Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks—all have doubled down.

The acronym itself is now fluid. Companies swap “DEI” for “IDE,” placing “inclusion” first in the hopes of softening public reaction. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), with nearly 340,000 members worldwide, changed the name of its annual conference from the “DEI Conference” in 2023 to “Inclusion 2023.” The agenda, however, remains the same. Their 2025 conference website still touts a commitment to “inclusion, equity, and diversity.” The acronym may have changed order. The ideology hasn’t.

Some companies conservatives claimed had abandoned DEI are still hiring for DEI positions on LinkedIn. In some cases, those job postings appeared after they publicly claimed to have terminated those roles.

And while “red” states play whack-a-mole with their DEI departments, “blue” states are charging ahead. In 2023, Washington State mandated DEI training in K-12 public school standards. Maryland required its public retirement system to hire a DEI director. Oregon allocated $50,000 for new DEI initiatives.

Even anti-DEI laws passed in conservative states often include loopholes. Provisions carved out for “accreditation or compliance with state and federal law” allow schools and agencies to continue race-based programs as long as they can justify them under bureaucratic compliance.

It therefore comes as no surprise that an April 2025 report by Parents Defending Education found that 245 universities still maintain institution-wide DEI offices. Another 180 colleges or departments within those universities do as well, including Stanford Law and UC Davis’s College of Engineering.

So no, DEI isn’t dead. It’s shedding its skin.

Whenever you hear that a university or corporation has “eliminated” its DEI programs, ask yourself: is the ideology gone? Or has it simply found a new room to inhabit, a new nameplate, a new acronym?

What victory is there if DEI vanishes in title only, while continuing to push the same grievance narratives, the same race-based preferences, and the same worldview of victimhood and perpetual redress?

Real reform won’t come from word games. It requires structural change. Swapping “equity” for “inclusion” does nothing if the underlying assumptions remain unchallenged. Redacting a DEI report doesn’t mean DEI metrics are no longer shaping hiring, promotion, and curriculum.

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DEI is a malignant tumor.

This needs a bounty program where people can earn, say $1000, for a substantiated, successfully investigated and verified case of DEI bureaucrats rebranding themselves to avoid being surgically removed.

By: Colin Wright

Published: Nov 26, 2024

In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.

The NCRI study investigated the psychological effects of DEI pedagogy, specifically training programs that draw heavily from texts like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. The findings were unsettling, though perhaps not surprising to longstanding opponents of such programs. Through carefully controlled experiments, the researchers demonstrated that exposure to anti-oppressive (i.e., anti-racist) rhetoric—common in many DEI initiatives—consistently amplified perceptions of bias where none existed. Participants were more likely to see prejudice in neutral scenarios and to support punitive actions against imagined offenders. These effects were not marginal; hostility and punitive tendencies increased by double-digit percentages across multiple measures. Perhaps most troubling, the study revealed a chilling convergence with authoritarian attitudes, suggesting that such training is fostering not empathy, but coercion and control.

The implications of these findings cannot be downplayed. DEI programs have become a fixture in workplaces, schools, and universities across the United States, with a 2023 Pew Research Center report indicating that more than half of U.S. workers have attended some form of DEI training. Institutions collectively spend approximately $8 billion annually on these initiatives, yet the NCRI study underscores how little scrutiny they receive. While proponents of DEI argue that these programs are essential to achieving equity and dismantling systemic oppression, the NCRI’s data suggests that such efforts may actually be deepening divisions and cultivating hostility.

This context makes the suppression of the study even more alarming. The New York Times, which has cited NCRI’s work in nearly 20 previous articles, suddenly demanded that this particular research undergo peer review—a requirement that had never been imposed on the institute’s earlier findings, even on similarly sensitive topics like extremism or online hate. At Bloomberg, the story was quashed outright by an editor known for public support of DEI initiatives. The editorial decisions were ostensibly justified as routine discretion, yet they align conspicuously with the ideological leanings of those involved. Are these major outlets succumbing to pressures to protect certain narratives at the expense of truth?

For Joel Finkelstein, the NCRI researcher leading the study, the editorial reversals are as revealing as the data itself. In communications with reporters, he described the findings as “sobering with likely impact for DEI policy, as well as congressional impacts and potentially civil litigation.” Finkelstein further stated that, “This seems like an effort to suppress research that challenges prevailing narratives around DEI and worryingly, implicates standard practices for egregious harms.”

The harm in question goes far beyond the scope of individual programs. Across multiple experiments, the study documented a consistent pattern: exposure to anti-oppressive DEI rhetoric heightened participants’ tendency to attribute hostility and bias to ambiguous situations. In one experiment, participants read excerpts from Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, juxtaposed against a neutral control text about corn production. Afterward, they were asked to evaluate a hypothetical scenario: an applicant being rejected from an elite university. Those exposed to the DEI materials were far more likely to perceive racism in the admissions process, despite no evidence to support such a conclusion.

They were also more likely to advocate punitive measures, such as suspending the admissions officer or mandating additional DEI training.

A particularly revealing aspect of the study focused on DEI training centered on Islamophobia, using materials developed by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU). The findings echoed the broader concerns of the study but offered unique insights into how DEI programming shapes perceptions of bias and fairness. Participants were presented with a scenario involving two fictional individuals, Ahmed Akhtar and George Green, both convicted of identical terrorism charges. When participants were exposed to the ISPU-inspired training materials, their perception of Ahmed’s trial was significantly altered—they rated it as far less fair than George’s, despite the trials being described in identical terms.

This discrepancy highlights a core issue with DEI narratives that emphasize systemic oppression. By priming participants to see injustice against specific groups, these trainings appear to cultivate a “hostile attribution bias”—a tendency to perceive prejudice and discrimination even where none exists. While sensitivity to genuine bias is critical, the NCRI findings suggest that DEI interventions like the ISPU materials may create unwarranted distrust in institutions and undermine confidence in objective fairness.

Another alarming aspect of the NCRI study involved DEI training on caste discrimination. Participants exposed to materials from Equality Labs—a prominent provider of anti-caste training—were significantly more likely to perceive bias and endorse dehumanizing rhetoric, including adapted quotes from Adolf Hitler where the term “Jew” was replaced with “Brahmin.” The findings suggest that these programs may not only fail to address systemic injustice but actively cultivate divisive and authoritarian mindsets.

Critics of DEI have long pointed to its lack of empirical support, and the NCRI study adds weight to those concerns. Research cited in the report highlights how many DEI programs rely on untested theories or unverified self-reports, with little oversight or accountability. A 2021 meta-analysis found that some initiatives not only fail to reduce prejudice but actually exacerbate it, fueling resentment and perceptions of unfairness. The NCRI study’s findings echo these conclusions, suggesting that far from fostering inclusion, DEI programs may perpetuate a cycle of suspicion and punitive retribution.

Yet, as troubling as the study’s findings are, its suppression may be even more consequential. The decision to withhold this research from public discourse speaks to a larger issue: the growing entanglement of ideology and information. In a moment when public trust in institutions is already fragile, the media’s role as a gatekeeper of information becomes all the more worrying. When powerful outlets like The New York Times and Bloomberg withhold stories of such significance, they fracture trust with the American people.

The public deserves to know if the tools being deployed to foster “equity” and “anti-racism” are instead causing harm. The NCRI study raises urgent questions about the real social consequences of DEI programming, but it also underscores the need for transparency and accountability in how we address these issues. Suppressing this research does not further the goal of making society more inclusive and accepting—it undermines it.

As DEI programs continue to expand across schools, workplaces, and governments, the stakes could not be higher. Whether this research sparks a broader reckoning or remains buried will depend on whether institutions—and the media that hold them accountable—are willing to confront uncomfortable truths.

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https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Instructing-Animosity_11.13.24.pdf

Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias

DEI programs purport to cultivate inclusive environments for people from diverse backgrounds and encourage greater empathy in interpersonal interactions. A key component of DEI offerings lies in diversity pedagogy: Lectures, trainings and educational resources ostensibly designed to educate participants about their prejudice and bias in order to eliminate discrimination (Iyer, 2022). As institutions across corporate and educational sectors increasingly embed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) into their foundational strategies, it is crucial to evaluate the effectiveness of common aspects of this pedagogy.

A 2023 study by the Pew Research Center found that 52% of American workers have DEI meetings or training events at work, and according to Iris Bohnet, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, $8 billion is spent annually on such programs. Despite widespread investment in and adoption of diversity pedagogy through lectures, educational resources, and training, assessments of efficacy have produced mixed results.

A meta-analysis by Paluck et al. (2021) found that too few studies in the field have investigated real-world impact on “light-touch” interventions or seminars and training programs. Taken together, the limited evidence suggests that some DEI programs not only fail to achieve their goals but can actively undermine diversity efforts. Specifically, mandatory trainings that focus on particular target groups can foster discomfort and perceptions of unfairness (Burnett and Aguinis, 2024). DEI initiatives seen as affirmative action rather than business strategy can provoke backlash, increasing rather than reducing racial resentment (Kidder et al., 2004; Legault et al. (2001). And diversity initiatives aimed at managing bias can fail, sometimes resulting in decreased representation and triggering negativity among employees (Leslie, 2019; Kalev, Dobbin, & Kelly, 2006). In other words, some DEI programs appear to backfire.

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DEI is cancer.

By: Anne D’Innocenzio

Published: Nov 26, 2025

NEW YORK (AP) — Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is rolling back its diversity, equity and inclusion policies, joining a growing list of major corporations that have done the same after coming under attack by conservative activists.

The changes, confirmed by Walmart on Monday, are sweeping and include everything from not renewing a five-year commitment for an equity racial center set up in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd, to pulling out of a prominent gay rights index. And when it comes to race or gender, Walmart won’t be giving priority treatment to suppliers.

Walmart’s moves underscore the increasing pressure faced by corporate America as it continues to navigate the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2023 ending affirmative action in college admissions. Emboldened by that decision, conservative groups have filed lawsuits making similar arguments about corporations, targeting workplace initiatives such as diversity programs and hiring practices that prioritize historically marginalized groups.

Separately, conservative political commentator and activist Robby Starbuck has been going after corporate DEI policies, calling out individual companies on the social media platform X. Several of those companies have subsequently announced that they are pulling back their initiatives, including Ford, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s and Tractor Supply.

But Walmart, which employs 1.6 million workers in the U.S., is the largest one to do so.

“This is the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America,” Starbuck wrote on X, adding that he had been in conversation with Walmart.

Walmart confirmed to The Associated Press that it will better monitor its third-party marketplace items to make sure they don’t feature sexual and transgender products aimed at minors. That would include chest binders intended for youth who are going through a gender change, the company said.

The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer will also be reviewing grants to Pride events to make sure it is not financially supporting sexualized content that may be unsuitable for kids. For example, the company wants to makes sure a family pavilion is not next to a drag show at a Pride event, the company said.

Additionally, Walmart will no longer consider race and gender as a litmus test to improve diversity when it offers supplier contracts. The company said it didn’t have quotas and will not do so going forward. It won’t be gathering demographic data when determining financing eligibility for those grants.

Walmart also said it wouldn’t renew a racial equity center that was established through a five-year, $100 million philanthropic commitment from the company with a mandate to, according to its website, “address the root causes of gaps in outcomes experienced by Black and African American people in education, health, finance and criminal justice systems.”

And it would stop participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s annual benchmark index that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees.

“We’ve been on a journey and know we aren’t perfect, but every decision comes from a place of wanting to foster a sense of belonging, to open doors to opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers and to be a Walmart for everyone,” the company said in a statement.

The changes come soon after an election win by former President Donald Trump, who has criticized DEI initiatives and surrounded himself with conservatives who hold similar views, including his former adviser Stephen Miller, who leads a group called America First Legal that has challenged corporate DEI policies. Trump named Miller to be the deputy chief of policy in his new administration.

A Walmart spokesperson said some of its policy changes have been in progress for a while. For example, it has been moving away from using the word DEI in job titles and communications and started to use the word “belonging.” It also started making changes to its supplier program in the aftermath of the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling.

Some have been urging companies to stick with their DEI policies. Last month, a group of Democrats in Congress appealed to the leaders of the Fortune 1000, saying that DEI efforts give everyone a fair chance at achieving the American dream.

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Excellent news. As the big ones go, so too will the smaller ones.

It's so weird that "don't discriminate based on skin color," "don't discriminate based on sex," and "don't give kids porn" are being called "conservative" values. Five minutes ago, these were obvious and uncontroversial liberal values.

What this is, is secularism. That your beliefs are for you and not me. You don't get to impose your beliefs onto others. If you subscribe to the beliefs of the woke cult, that's fine and your business. But you don't get to force others to believe them, pretend to believe them, or make them comply with them. Any more than a Xian can force others to pray, or a Muslim can demand ham and bacon be removed from the company cafeteria.

By: Abigail Anthony

Published: Nov 25, 2024

A new study found that diversity, equity, and inclusion materials have a wide range of negative consequences, including psychological harm, increased hostility, and greater agreement with extreme authoritarian rhetoric, such as adapted Adolf Hitler quotes.

Both the New York Times and Bloomberg were preparing stories on the findings, but axed them just before publication citing editorial decisions.

The Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab released the study “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias” on Monday. The study examined whether the themes and materials common in DEI trainings foster inclusion or exacerbate conflicts, and whether such materials promote empathy or increase hostility towards groups labeled as oppressors. The study consisted of three experiments — one focusing on race, one on religion, and the last on caste. 

Although proponents of DEI trainings claim that they are designed to educate individuals about biases and reduce discrimination, the study found that participants primed with DEI materials were more likely to perceive prejudice where none existed and were more willing to punish the perceived perpetrators. In one experiment, the DEI materials made people more willing to agree with Hitler quotes that substituted “Jew” with “Brahmin,” the highest caste in the Indian caste system.

“Participants exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements, agreeing that Brahmins are ‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%),” the study reads. “These findings suggest that exposure to anti-oppressive narratives can increase the endorsement of the type of demonization and scapegoating characteristic of authoritarianism.”

In the experiment focused on race, the researchers randomly assigned 423 Rutgers University undergraduates into two groups: one control group exposed to a neutral essay about U.S. corn production, and the other exposed to an essay that combined material from Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility. After exposure to either text, participants were presented with the following race-neutral scenario: “A student applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2024. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer. Ultimately, the student’s application was rejected.”

The results showed that participants primed with Kendi and DiAngelo materials perceived more discrimination from the admissions officer, despite the absence of any racial identification and evidence of discrimination. Those participants also believed that the admissions officer was more unfair to the applicant, had caused more harm to the applicant, and had committed more “microaggressions.”

In addition to imputing bias without evidence, the participants who read Kendi and DiAngelo were 12 percent more willing to support suspending the admission officer for a semester, 16 percent more willing to demand a public apology to the applicant, and 12 percent more willing to require additional DEI training to correct the officer compared to participants in the control group.

“Educational materials from some of the most well-published and well-known DEI scholars not only failed to positively enhance interracial attitudes, they provoked baseless suspicion and encouraged punitive attitudes,” the study states.

Lee Jussim, a professor at Rutgers University and one of the study’s authors, told National Review, said researchers purposely built some ambiguity into the scenarios.

“In social psychology, we purposely study situations that have some ambiguity in order to evaluate whether and when people’s biases influence their judgments of those situations,” he said.

In the experiment on anti-Islamophobia trainings, the researchers presented over 2,000 participants with either the essay about corn or content drawn from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding organization that addresses Islamophobia. The participants were then presented with a scenario involving two hypothetical individuals, Ahmed Akhtar and George Green, who were both convicted of identical terrorism charges for bombing a local government building.

The participants exposed to the corn essay perceived Akhtar and Green’s trials as equally fair and did not indicate any perception of Islamophobia. However, those exposed to anti-Islamophobia training materials rated Akhtar’s trial significantly less fair.

“These results suggest that anti-Islamophobia training inspired by ISPU materials may cause individuals to assume unfair treatment of Muslim people, even when no evidence of bias or unfairness is present,” the study states. “This effect highlights a broader issue: DEI narratives that focus heavily on victimization and systemic oppression can foster unwarranted distrust and suspicions of institutions and alter subjective assessments of events.”

The third experiment about caste involved nearly 850 participants and used materials developed by Equality Labs, a self-described “South Asian feminist organization” that works to “end caste apartheid, gender-based violence, Islamophobia, and religious intolerance.”

Participants were exposed to either caste-sensitivity-training material from Equality Labs or an academic essay about caste, then were presented the following scenario: “Raj Kumar applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2022. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer, Anand Prakash. Ultimately, Raj’s application was rejected.” (The names were reversed between respondents to avoid the possibility that the results reflected inferences drawn from the names themselves.)

“Rather than using a purely neutral control like the corn essay, we had a more historically accurate and less politically charged, less accusatory, control essay on caste to see if we still see pernicious effects of the DEI training,” Jussim said. “And the answer is yes.” 

Compared to the group that read the neutral academic essay, the participants who were exposed to the DEI materials had a significantly higher perception of “microaggressions,” perceived harm, and assumptions of bias. Additionally, those who read the DEI materials showed a higher willingness to punish the admissions officer and assessed Hindus as more racist.

In the caste experiment, participants were interviewed and asked to rate the accuracy of the following Hitler quotes that replaced “Jew” with “Brahmin”: 1) “The Brahmin was only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples. . . The Brahmins are a people under whose parasitism the whole of honest humanity is suffering,” 2) “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Brahmin,” and 3) “Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one virus: the Brahmin! We will get well when we eliminate the Brahmin.”

Compared to the control group, the participants primed with DEI content had more than a 35 percent increase agreeing with the “parasite” statement, a 27 percent increase in agreeing with the “devil personified” statement, and a 33 percent increase in agreeing with the “virus” statement. 

The researchers concluded from the three experiments that DEI materials can “engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence for a transgression deserving punishment.”

“This research raises critical questions about how many individuals, as a result of these programs, have experienced undue duress, social ostracization, or even termination of employment,” the report reads. 

The study was set to be covered by Bloomberg and the New York Times, although both publications axed their articles just before publication, according to communications reviewed by National Review.

“Unfortunately, both publications jumped on the story enthusiastically only for it to be inexplicably pulled at the highest editorial levels,” a NCRI researcher told National Review. “This has never happened to the NCRI in its 5 year history.”

Two reporters at Bloomberg had agreed to cover the study and wrote an article. One of the journalists had described the coverage as “an important story” in communications with the NCRI and expressed being “eager” to publish the article; that journalist had further stated on November 11 that the article should be published in the next few days. 

However, an editor  — Nabila Ahmed, the team leader for Global Equality at Bloomberg News who “lead[s] a global team of reporters focused on stories that elevate issues of race, gender, diversity and fairness within companies, governments and societies”  — informed the NCRI on November 15 that Bloomberg would not go forward with the article. 

The NCRI asked for either a scientific or journalistic explanation, and Ahmed directed the researchers to Anna Kitanaka, the executive editor of Bloomberg Equality. Kitanaka told the NCRI that what stories get published and when is entirely an “editorial decision,” and did not provide details on why the publication axed the article.

A New York Times reporter told the NCRI that he would cover the new study on DEI materials, and further told the institute that an article was prepared to run on either October 14 or 15. 

However, on October 12, he told an NCRI researcher that the Times would “hold off” on covering the study on DEI due to “some concerns,” and suggested that the publication would revisit the study if it underwent the academic peer-review process.

Although the reporter disclosed that he did not have “any concerns about the methodology” and that someone at the Times’ “data-driven reporting team” had “no problems” with the study, he stated that he had concluded the study wasn’t strong enough after speaking with an editor. 

“The piece was reported and ready for publication, but at the eleventh hour, the New York Times insisted the research undergo peer review after discussions with editorial staff — an unprecedented demand for our work,” an NCRI researcher told National Review. “The journalist involved had previously covered far more sensitive NCRI findings, such as our QAnon and January 6th studies, without any such request.” (The New York Times wrote to National Review and denied that the story was “ready for publication.”)

The Times reporter suggested that the research wasn’t strong enough.

“I told my editor I thought if we were going to write a story casting serious doubts on the efficacy of the work of two of the country’s most prominent DEI scholars, the case against them has to be as strong as possible,” he wrote to the NCRI.

“Our journalists are always considering potential topics for news coverage, evaluating them for newsworthiness, and often choose not to pursue further reporting for a variety of reasons,” a spokesperson for the New York Times told National Review. “Speculative claims from outside parties about The Times’s editorial process are just that.”

National Review has reached out to Ahmed and Kitanaka with Bloomberg but has not yet received a response.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated with comments from the New York Times.

[ Via: https://archive.today/Y4pvU ]

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By: Christopher F. Rufo

Published: Nov 20, 2024

There is an old saw that, in America, every great cause begins as a movement and eventually degenerates into a racket. This is certainly true of the past decade’s most fashionable cause: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” What might have begun as a social movement has now become a business—and not just in the United States. According to McKinsey & Company, spending on “DEI-related efforts” across the globe totaled $7.5 billion in 2020. If trends continue, that figure will exceed $15 billion by 2026.

And, in another American tradition, government contractors have turned a profit on this fad. While it’s hard to determine the precise amount of money that Washington spends on DEI, a search for contracts, grants, and other outlays that reference “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and similar terms suggests that DEI principles were attached to more than $1 billion in federal contracts last year.

This represents a rapid change. In 2019, according to our search, the federal government awarded only $27 million in contracts with language related to “diversity and inclusion.” But after the death of George Floyd in 2020, the federal government and private contractors went all-in on DEI, seeking to implement the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government” equity agenda.

In a series of executive orders beginning in January 2021, Biden unveiled that agenda. The White House directed each federal agency to “implement or increase the availability of [DEI] training programs,” create “internal policies and procedures to support” employees “transitioning” to another gender, submit annual DEI plans and reports to a White House steering committee, establish “agency equity teams,” and appoint a “chief diversity officer” to oversee compliance. These directives created a sudden demand for DEI consulting and opened the floodgates of federal funding to private contractors who offered “expert” advice on diversity-program management. Consulting firms were delighted; they set about rationalizing and marketing a respectable front for both the ideology and their own cash grab.

The large consulting firms advertised the adoption of DEI as a moral imperative. They boasted of their spending on diversity to demonstrate their credentials. Deloitte, for example, claimed to have spent $1.47 billion on “diverse suppliers.” McKinsey committed to doubling spending on such suppliers, while investing $20 million in DEI research. Deloitte, meantime, published a report titled The Equity Imperative, which encouraged “businesses [to] take the lead in dismantling” systemic racism—preferably with Deloitte’s “premier cross-enterprise DEI analytics tool.”

These firms argued simultaneously that DEI was morally necessary and good for the bottom line. McKinsey published studies that claimed to have found economic benefits from diversity policies. Incredibly, it claimed that narrowing the “gender gap” would add $12 trillion to GDP. Economists have shown that these studies are misleading and potentially fallacious.

The consultant class cashed in. In early 2022, McKinsey partnered with another firm to present “a series of workshops” that would “equip federal leaders working across government with research-based insights” to improve their “DEIA work” (the added “a” is for “accessibility”). Deloitte, seizing the opportunity presented by Biden’s executive orders mandating DEI in the federal workforce, published a paper on the “Government’s equity imperative,” presenting the firm’s “government equity activation model.”

McKinsey and Deloitte were only two of the many consultancies reaping financial rewards from the executive orders, with firms securing millions of taxpayer dollars in DEI-related contracts.

Agencies across the federal government participated in the gold rush. The Treasury Department awarded $2.8 million to Accenture Federal Services for DEI “implementation.” The Department of Health and Human Services gave a $2.9 million DEI contract to Totem. The Department of Defense agreed to pay Tyler Federal $3.3 million for “(DEI) database services.” The Agency for International Development allocated $6.2 million to SSG Advisors for “DEIA buy-in.”

What do these contracts entail in practice? Consider the $4.4 million agreement between the Department of Labor and CALCO Consulting Group to “deliver diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) training” for the department’s Job Corps program—an initiative to help young people “complete their high school education, train[] them for meaningful careers, and assist[] them with obtaining employment.”

Rather than focus on helping its clients find meaningful work, the Department of Labor contract funneled millions to outside vendors to conform the program to the DEI creed. For example, a team of CALCO DEI consultants went to Montgomery, Alabama, to lead “a 3-day immersive Student-Centered Design training as part of Job Corps’ plan to adopt DEIA principles at all its centers.” The department, in other words, used the firm to engrain critical race theory principles at every level of the program’s operations.

At NASA, the government awarded $2.4 million to LMI Consulting “to incorporate and deeply engrain diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility (DEIA) in” the agency’s “culture and business.” LMI, which has “assisted NASA in transforming its workforce,” happily adapted its product to the new DEI ideology. The agency recognized the firm’s work, giving its “Group Achievement Award” to seven LMI consultants—not for advancing space travel, but for “developing innovative approaches and ways to use lessons learned when implementing [DEI] strategies.”

The Department of Homeland Security is also implementing the White House’s DEI priorities. In September 2023, the department awarded $2.1 million to the Millennium Group International for “(DEIA) professional support services,” a rolling contract that could reach $7.5 million by 2028. That contract is part of the department’s sophisticated diversity apparatus, which includes strategic plans, DEI workshops and seminars, and trainings on “the brain science of inclusion.” Instead of enforcing the law and protecting life and liberty, DHS has focused on “unleashing the power of our shared human spirit” through “inclusive diversity.”

These contracts, and the racialist ideology on which they are predicated, do nothing to serve the national interest. When Donald Trump takes office in January, he should dismantle the diversity apparatus, which threatens his agenda and the principle of equality before the law. DEI is designed to favor ideologues and consultancy grift instead of competent or public-spirited officials. The second Trump administration must put a stop to these contracts immediately, lest they become one more corrupting force in an already deeply compromised federal government.

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Full interview:

I wrote an an essay about it, you know, "Is liberalism the best way to beat wokeness?" and the answer to that ism it depends on what society you want to live in.

If you want to live in one where you don't have to pretend to believe anything you don't believe in, you don't have to fear cancellation for saying the wrong thing, then you have to aim for a liberal society.

There are other growing movements that could potentially have more power to push out liberalism, but then we would likely find ourselves in a frying pan-fire situation.

I don't want to be cancelled for criticizing the monarchy any more than I want to be cancelled for criticizing critical social justice.

So, I would ask those people, are you considering, when you're thinking about liberalism and whether it is the best way to create a society that is sound, that is just, are you using liberalism as a tool to get to something else, or is liberalism the end goal?

And for me and for liberals generally, a liberal society is the end goal.

We have we have two choices, really. If we want to defeat authoritarianism, we can either get more firmly liberal and just not - and very strongly not - tolerate impositions. There's nothing anti-liberal in saying, no we are not going to let you institutionalize your ideology, in the same way that we wouldn't let you institutionalize your Christian faith, say.

We wouldn't let you make everybody recite the Apostle's Creed, you shouldn't have to do a Diversity Equity and Inclusion statement.

So, it's perfectly liberal to put laws in place to say to defend that kind of freedom of belief.

Because the only other possibility to more strongly defending liberalism -- and I think that is the weakness, we have not defended liberalism strongly enough, we have not noticed when things are that are illiberal are getting power to deny other people freedom.

-- or we can can go and pick something else which we think will push wokeness out better and get behind that.

And then where are we? Where are we going to be? And this is what I ask people if they ask me, do you really think liberalism can work, wouldn't it be better to try something else -- they're usually talking about a form of social conservatism.

I say, well what would I have to pretend to believe in your new society? What would I not be allowed to say in public? What would prevent me from being employable? If the answer is nothing, you're still free to say and believe whatever you want, then you're still looking for a liberal society.

By: Winkfield Twyman, Jr.

Published: Nov 28, 2023

In a recent Equiano Project podcast featuring Helen Pluckrose, Helen talked about the perpetuation of racial essentialism and stereotype training. I feel comfortable referring to Helen by her first name in that I have known her since my days with Counterweight and given her early support for my book, Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America (co-authored with Jennifer Richmond).

Helen is the author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (co-authored with James Lindsey). Cynical Theories may well be the most prophetic book about the dangers of racial dogma in the past decade. Helen’s interview landed well with respect to the dark underbelly of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training.

The most important fire bell in the night shared by Helen is that people write things they do not believe. The ability to write and publish a book is a privilege, and a blessing. Less than 1 percent of Americans have published a book. As one user on Reddit calculates, the number of humans who have published a manuscript is far less than 1 percent. “Well, 6 million books on Amazon, which includes a big chunk of the self published authors, divided by 7 billion people and you get .0086%. So a lot less than 1%.”

Why does writing falsehoods pose a problem for society? When one writes a lie in print, one is reducing the sacred trust between a reader and a writer. Reality becomes distorted for the writer who must suppress the truth and for the reader who doesn’t recognise reality on the printed page. For example, someone might write that incarceration of black men is the new Jim Crow. That assertion is a falsehood. Jim Crow was a legally mandated system of laws to segregate blacks and whites in the public sphere. Incarceration occurs because someone commits a crime. Incarceration does not equal Jim Crow. But once the lie is seized upon in public discourse, people begin to live in lies and to not see the truth; i.e. criminals are incarcerated because criminals commit crimes. 

I no longer believe anything authored by writer Michelle Alexander. She has abused her sacred opportunity as a privileged writer by bringing into the world a monumental falsehood, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. We have all suffered and been injured by her distortion of truth and reality. But for Alexander’s fictional argument, the fertile groundwork might not have been present for the rise of another falsehood, Black Lives Matter. Sadly, one falsehood leads to another falsehood and so it goes.

It is the duty of a published writer to write the truth. 

The next powerful insight from Helen was this idea that DEI training causes racial minorities to assess the level of racism as higher than it should be. Doesn’t this bad consequence ring true? Berry Gordy, the heroic founder of Motown in the year 1959, was once asked the reason for his success. Without hesitation, Gordy answered the reason was “focus.” This psychology applies to Gordy and, indeed, every ordinary human. If you focus on the positive, you will welcome the positive into your life. If you can only look at the negative, one invites the negative into one’s life. The divisive structure of DEI programs prompts participants to dredge up instances and examples of racism, no matter how remote or distant or of little consequence in one’s life.

If I were in a DEI program and the trainer asked me to name three examples of racism from my life when I felt oppressed, sure, I could search my memory banks and come up with three examples. Every black person could in the Western World. But having done so, the trainer has now implanted in my mind resentment and suspicion and ill-will towards my white colleagues. Such a poisonous outcome and for what purpose other than to raise race consciousness in the minds of work colleagues? It is a shame we enable these types of corrosive trainings. 

Finally, Helen channelled the opinions of many black employees who have had enough! Around 60% of the people who reached out to Counterweight for help were black. They pleaded with Helen to stop the racialising at work. Black employees want normal relations with their colleagues, not perpetual grievance struggles about how oppressed one is and how evil oppressor white colleagues are. We should listen to these black employees who don’t like anti-racism programs, Professor Ibram X. Kendi, and all of the manipulative slogan words in the office nowadays. 

Let people work together, lunch together and laugh together. DEI training should be discarded as an unworkable scheme that does more harm than good.

By: Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin

Published: Sep 17, 2023

At least 30 states are considering legislation to defund DEI initiatives in public universities and state agencies. At the same time, conservative activists, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions, are suing companies to stop DEI initiatives. These challenges come on the heels of the growth of corporate DEI programs after the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020.  

Meanwhile, advocates for DEI—which stands for diversity, equity and inclusion—have bemoaned the fact that after decades of diversity training, many university faculties, state agencies and corporations have made little progress on diversifying the workforce.

Are the right and the left on the same page here—is diversity training a hopeless cause?

We are a psychologist and a sociologist who have been studying bias and organizational diversity programs, respectively, for decades. The research makes it clear that Americans desperately need education about bias, because even people who value fairness and equality hold biases—without being aware of it. They need to understand that bias operates systemically and must be addressed at the individual, institutional and societal levels.

Education offered on these matters is very much in the national spirit. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in “Democracy in America” in 1835: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

What research shows

The social and behavioral sciences have developed strong evidence about conscious prejudice and implicit bias. Three lines of research, together, are pertinent. One provides good news. As our colleague Larry Bobo has documented, conscious unabashed racial prejudice has fallen consistently since the 1960s. White Americans today largely believe in racial equality.

This isn’t to say that explicit expressions of prejudice have evaporated; in fact they pop up with surprising regularity. The pandemic witnessed precipitous increases in anti-Asian hatred, and according to the Anti-Defamation League, instances of antisemitism are at a record high. 

A second line of research shows that less conscious, or implicit, bias has declined more slowly. Bias against some groups has barely budged. If only explicit values and biases drove discrimination, unfair treatment of, say, Black workers would be low. But implicit bias taints employer behavior and decisions. Our colleague Mandy Palais and collaborators find, for instance, that implicit racial bias in grocery-store managers still influences worker performance.

A third line of research uses audit studies, in which matched Black and white people, for instance, apply to the same job. Who gets called in for an interview, or hired? Scores of studies show discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender and disability. These studies show, among other things, that white applicants are about 50% more likely than identical Black applicants to be called back for an interview or offered a job. Other audit studies show discrimination in real-world access to financial resources, healthcare and treatment by the law and law enforcement.    

Research by Lincoln Quillian and colleagues compares the results of audit studies over time, finding that discrimination against Black job applicants is virtually unchanged from a generation ago. And the economist Raj Chetty and colleagues not only show a shocking drop in American upward mobility over time, but also show that in regions with high levels of implicit bias, Black Americans are less likely than white Americans to move up the economic ladder.

Research by Lincoln Quillian and colleagues compares the results of audit studies over time, finding that discrimination against Black job applicants is virtually unchanged from a generation ago. And the economist Raj Chetty and colleagues not only show a shocking drop in American upward mobility over time, but also show that in regions with high levels of implicit bias, Black Americans are less likely than white Americans to move up the economic ladder. 

Research from one of us, Frank Dobbin (with Alexandra Kalev), meanwhile, shows how likely a worker in a U.S. firm is to have a management job, by group. Women and people of color see increases until the mid-1980s. But progress stalls for Black and Hispanic workers after that. Men from those groups make no progress between then and 2021, and women make almost no progress. We clearly have more work to do to equalize opportunity.

Falling short

It’s not hard to conclude from all these studies that we are not the land of opportunity for everyone we claim to be. An enlightened society should see that education about the prevalence of discrimination is imperative. In fact, it would be downright dumb not to educate people. 

But, as Dobbin and Kalev have shown, the typical DEI training doesn’t educate people about bias and may even do harm.

Most training programs fall short on two fronts. First, they use implicit-bias education to shame trainees for holding stereotypes. Trainers play gotcha, sending trainees to take an online test co-developed by one of us, Mahzarin Banaji, for education and research. Instead of training people about research that finds that bias is pervasive, trainers use the test to prove to trainees that they are morally flawed. People leave feeling guilty for holding biases that conflict with American values.

“Gotcha” isn’t going to win people over. The approach is disrespectful, and misses the main takeaway from implicit bias research: Everyone holds biases they don’t control as a consequence of a lifetime of exposure to societal inequality, the media and the arts. Trainers should introduce these ideas with humility, for trainers themselves can’t help but hold these very biases. They could easily educate themselves about the implicit bias research with resources at outsmartingimplicitbias.org.

The second problem with most trainings is that they seek to solve the problem of bias by invoking the law to scare people about the risk of letting bias go unchecked. Trainers recount stories of big companies brought to their heels by discrimination suits. They detail rigid do’s and don’ts for hiring, disciplining and firing people. They require trainees to pass tests on what the law forbids. All of this makes it clear that the CEO approved the training solely to avoid litigation. Trainees leave scared that they will be punished for a simple mistake that may land their company in court.  

Trainings with this one-two punch—you are biased and the law will get you—backfire. The research shows that this kind of training leads to reductions in women and people of color in management.

Why would diversity training actually make things worse? Making people feel ashamed can lead them to reject the message. Thus people often leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity toward other groups (“There’s no way I’m biased!”). And threats of punishment, by the law in this case, typically lead to psychological “reactance” whereby people reject the desired behavior (“Nobody’s telling me what I can’t say!”). This kind of training can turn off even supporters of equal-opportunity programs. 

A better way

It doesn’t have to be this way, and Dobbin and Kalev’s research on training points to a better alternative. Instead of using legal scare tactics, training programs should give managers a way to counter biases—namely, training in strategies for cultural inclusion. This kind of training teaches skills in listening, observation and intervention. It thus helps managers to hear employee concerns, notice when workers are feeling shunned or dissed, and intervene. It also offers skills for starting tough conversations about how to treat colleagues at work.

Those are skills from Management 101, but managers often don’t want to hear bad news, so they don’t ask employees about troubles, watch teams for signs of bullying, or speak up when they sense a problem. Reminding managers that they can use these tools to suss out problems and nip them in the bud helps them to feel capable of managing biases and microaggressions. When managers use these skills, they retain women and people of color for long enough to come up for promotion. That’s how good diversity training can boost diversity. Unfortunately, only about a quarter of diversity trainings emphasize cultural inclusion. 

Moreover, if training succeeds in conveying the findings from bias research—that bias is unseen but pervasive—it can build support for wider systemic changes designed to tear down obstacles to equal opportunity. In that sense, training isn’t designed to blame people for their moral failings. Instead, it’s galvanizing them to support organizational change by arming them with knowledge.

In the end, DEI training can’t squelch implicit bias; nothing short of changing people’s life experiences can do that. But when done right, implicit-bias education can alert students to the fact that people committed to equality nonetheless hold biases. And that knowledge can, in turn, motivate them to reshape their workplaces to counter discrimination by democratizing key parts of the career system.

That means extending recruitment visits from Harvard to Howard; offering mentors to each and every worker; and inviting all employees to nominate themselves for skill and management training programs. It means offering work-life supports to people up and down the ladder. Each of these changes has been shown to produce significant increases in managerial diversity.

The lesson here, the one that should be at the core of DEI training, is that implicit bias resides in individuals, but it resides in organizational career systems as well. And fixing those systems is as simple as democratizing them.

Mahzarin Banaji is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and co-author of “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.” Frank Dobbin is a professor of sociology at Harvard University and co-author of “Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t.” They can be reached at [email protected].

[ Via: https://archive.is/0D4kV ]

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