#die training

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: Roland Fryer

Published: Jun 20, 2022

I have spent hundreds of hours in diversity training over the past two decades–from descriptions of federal anti-discrimination laws to academic-style seminars on the perils of implicit bias, microaggressions, or misgendering.

Advocates of this kind of training have their hearts in the right place. We are all familiar with comparisons showing that Black people earn 50% less than white peers and women earn 70 cents for every dollar that a man earns.

However, the most popular tools used to combat disparities in the workplace have produced almost no measurable results.

The average impact of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training is zero and some evidence suggests that the impact can become negative if the training is mandated.

“Statistical Snapshots,” which describe how employee outcomes differ by demographic group, are another popular tool. These numbers cannot provide proof of bias. Simple averages often mislead and, importantly, crafting strategies based on misleading data often does more harm than good.

Some business leaders, in their determination to increase diversity, leap directly from observing raw disparities to removing some information from application forms, another common practice meant to make workplaces more equitable. However, hiding information on applications often leads to worse outcomes for those it was intended to help–likely because hiring managers use race itself as a proxy for the information they’re no longer allowed to see.

Our intuition for how to decrease race and gender disparities in the workplace has failed us for decades. It’s time to stop guessing and start using the scientific method. Remember when we thought that the Bubonic Plague was caused by a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius?

Here is a three-step approach that can turn earnest intentions into good science.

Understand disparities

For decades, social scientists have shown that raw gaps in employment outcomes like hiring or wages–the type of data typically provided to C-suite executives–misstate the amount of actual bias in an organization. This data omits many factors that are key to personnel decisions, factors that often vary by group, owing to disparities in society at large. Business leaders can and should work to address inequality in their communities, but they should not mistake society-wide gaps for bias by their own employees.

One of the most important developments in the study of racial inequality has been the quantification of the importance of pre-market skills in explaining differences in labor market outcomes between Black and white workers. In 2010, using nationally representative data on thousands of individuals in their 40s, I estimated that Black men earn 39.4% less than white men and Black women earn 13.1% less than white women. Yet, accounting for one variable–educational achievement in their teenage years––reduced that difference to 10.9% (a 72% reduction) for men and revealed that Black women earn 12.7 percent more than white women, on average. Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, and William Johnson were among the first to make this point in 1996: “While our results do provide some evidence for current labor market discrimination, skills gaps play such a large role that we believe future research should focus on the obstacles Black children face in acquiring productive skill.”

Recently, I worked with a network of hospitals determined to rid their organization of gender bias. The basic facts were startling: Women earned 33% less than men when they were hired and their wages increased less than men once on the job. Yet, accounting for basic demographic variables known about individuals prior to hiring, these differences decreased by 74%. A problem remained, but it was an order of magnitude smaller than the unadjusted numbers implied.

Find the root causes of bias

Social scientists tend to categorize bias into one of three flavors: preference, information, and structural. Preference bias is good old-fashioned bigotry. If company A prefers group W over group B then they will hire and promote them more even if they are similarly qualified.

Information bias arises when employers have imperfect information about workers’ potential productivity and use observable proxies, like gender or race, to make inferences (gender stereotypes are a classic example).

Structural bias occurs when companies institute practices, formally or informally, that have a disparate impact on particular groups, even when the underlying practices are themselves group blind. Employee referral programs can fall into this category.

Over the past fifty years, economists and other social scientists have developed brilliant ways of statistically distinguishing between different types of bias. Gary Becker, in his 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, outlined one such statistical procedure known as the “outcomes test.” It operates by comparing the success rate of decisions across groups and then inferring whether different decision rules were used for different groups. For example, if women CEOs statistically outperform male CEOs, all else equal, that would suggest that a higher standard was applied to women in the selection process. This type of statistical test can be used for hiring, promotions, and attrition across an organization.

In 2013, collaborators and I developed a similar test to detect information-based bias. Our approach uses the insight that if employers have information-based biases at the time of hiring, but then learn more about an employee’s productivity once they are on the job, one would expect to see the returns to tenure within the company to be higher for the group that faced the initial bias. Using a nationally representative dataset of thousands of individuals, we found that there was a significant gap at the time of hiring for Black candidates relative to white peers but that, as predicted, Black candidates experienced a 1.1 percentage point higher return to tenure.

With the aforementioned hospital network, the data pointed to a structural bias in scheduling. Women and men who worked the same number of hours earned exactly the same wage, but men worked more hours due to how the company assigned schedules, not women’s desire to work less.

This is the key step that is missing in every DEI initiative I have seen in the past 25 years: a rigorous, data-driven assessment of root causes that drives the search for effective solutions. In other aspects of life, we would not fathom prescribing a treatment without knowing the underlying cause. Hiding information on resumes when information bias is present is as effective as using alcohol baths to treat fever.

Evaluate

We must rigorously evaluate what works and what doesn’t. The old cardiac test–where you “feel it in your heart”–is not good enough. Once we know where potential biases exist, determine what caused them, and curate a set of solutions to test, we must meticulously evaluate what’s working and what’s not.

Solutions that yield measurable results can be substantiated into company policy, while those that don’t should be discarded. In the case of the hospital network, once a small change was made to the structure of their scheduling, gender differences were reduced. Despite countless hours spent in training and seminars, their results were unchanged for years. The solution was hidden in plain data.

This will seem heretical to some–but it barely scratches the surface of what’s possible with a data-first approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion. More corporate leaders should be trying to solve diversity challenges in the same way they solve problems in every other aspect of their business: through intelligent use of data, rigorous hypothesis testing, and honest inference about what is working.

Roland Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard University, founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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It cannot be overstated that ideologically-driven trainings, such as those derived from the mental diarrhea of Robin DiAngelo and Henry Rogers (Kendi), not just don't substantiate or quantify their effectiveness, but can't.

It's much like measuring the effectiveness of prayer. Not only is there nothing to substantiate any kind of effectiveness, but you're not allowed to "test god." Similarly, actually expecting definable, measurable results from "White Fragility" or BLM training makes you an istaphobe, too focused on white empiricism and not on the presumed feelings and trauma of PoC... even if they've expressed nothing of the sort.

It's a faith.