The trainings I'm familiar with have the opposite intent: to help people who don't believe they are racists (or believe racism doesn't exist) understand the unconscious mental processes that feed into racism and the nature of structural discrimination, even when unintended.

Exactly what the Chinese government says about Uighur reeducation centers. They only want to help them to understand the unconscious mental processes that feed,...

We have been teaching people about unconscious bias for years without these theatrics.

But what have we been teaching them?

"there is no good evidence that people are unaware of their biases. While people do often express surprise at the score they get on the Implicit Association Test, that often reflects the labels that are used to express the degree of bias rather than the presence of some difference in attitudes toward different groups"

-- https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/ulterior-motives/201...

The IAT is only one measure. https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...

I mention the IAT specifically b/c it can be used in "teaching people about unconscious bias" as a coercive tool to prove to people that they are racist i.e in the context of OP: "to help people who don't believe they are racists".

I have no problem with teaching accurate information wrt bias; but on the other hand, that metric doesn't impel people to label themselves racist, which seems to be a goal.

The IAT is pseudoscience.

The Implicit Association Test at Age 21: No Evidence for Construct Validity [0]

> The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is 21 years old. Greenwald et al. (1998) proposed that the IAT measures individual differences in implicit social cognition. This claim requires evidence of construct validity. I review the evidence and show that there is insufficient evidence for this claim. Most important, I show that few studies were able to test discriminant validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit personality characteristics and that a single-construct model fits multi-method data as well or better than a dual-construct models. Thus, the IAT appears to be a measure of the same personality characteristics that are measured with explicit measures. I also show that the validity of the IAT varies across personality characteristics. It has low validity as a measure of self-esteem, moderate validity as a measure of racial bias, and high validity as a measure of political orientation. The existing evidence also suggests that the IAT measures stable characteristics rather than states and has low predictive validity of single behaviors. Based on these findings, it is important that users of the IAT clearly distinguish between implicit measures and implicit constructs. The IAT is an implicit measure, but there is no evidence that it measures implicit constructs.

The Creators of the Implicit Association Test Should Get Their Story Straight [1]

> The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.

Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job [2]

[0] https://replicationindex.com/2019/02/15/iat21/

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...

[2] https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...

How well has that worked?

Pretty much every civil rights victory that has been achieved had been done through appeal to universal principles.

People in America really don’t understand what the alternative is like. Academic theater seems workable, or at least harmless at best so long as we’re standing on solid bedrock. But that’s a framework that exists so long as you maintain it. What society really looks like absent this framework is what happened in Iraq after in 2005. The first time people voted, they did so strictly along ethnic lines and then tried to annihilate each other. Or in my home country where we went to war to separate ourselves from people who had the same skin color and same religion, but spoke a different language.

The United States is the most successful multi-ethnic democracy in the world. For example, while Muslim immigrants to the US achieved economic parity within a generation or two, in countries like France they’re facing multi-generational poverty. We are not perfect. While we have successfully integrated (socially and economically) wave after wave of immigrants. We are doing it again right now—income mobility among Hispanic people is similar to white such that within a few generations incomes for these groups converge. Our persistent failure has been our inability to fix the legacy of our shameful history of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. But nobody else has figured out how to do that either. In countries like the UK, the Black-white income gap is just as large as in the US. The gap in maternal mortality rates is even larger. And in most of the rest of Europe, it’s not even legal to keep statistics about these disparities.

Maybe some professors have figured out a better replacement for our universal values that will work better—one that replaced a broad, shared commitment to equality with individual white people admitting complicity in perpetuating systemic racism. But they probably didn’t.

I believe you are conflating quiet with success.

The United States is currently undergoing a massive upheaval in multiple major cities about its willingness to sweep racial discrimination under the rug and call it "success." It's an unstable equilibrium; it works until it doesn't.

How is that not the same as forcing people to stay in an unpleasant class until they confess to racism?

I believe the fact some people perceive it to be is the root of, perhaps, quite a bit of consternation on the issue.

But I see it is the same as forcing people to stay in an unpleasant class until they understand type theory. We teach people things they need to know so that they know them, because knowledge is useful. We're certainly not calling the question of "having education seminars" into question, are we?

But the 'knowledge is useful' stance presupposes that these classes have value, that what they're teaching is actually true or useful. That's precisely what many of us don't believe.

Suppose we were discussing a risk management seminar which you had reason to believe was teaching a flawed methodology, one likely to cause serious harm if widely adopted. Would you be similarly sanguine in that case?

> That's precisely what many of us don't believe.

With respect, I'll defer to the career sociologists and psychologists on the topic, much as I'd defer to the risk management PhD on the topic of risk management.

I've known too many tech-savvy folk who think humans can be reduced and deconstructed like a computer, declare humanities research bunk because it doesn't fit their mental model, and get profoundly surprised when their mental model doesn't fit actual human behavior. The psychologists and sociologists have a better track record on modeling and predicting human behavior.

> With respect, I'll defer to the career sociologists and psychologists on the topic, much as I'd defer to the risk management PhD on the topic of risk management.

This isn't a good heuristic, without some way of judging the entire field. Would you defer to expert career scientologists about E-meters? Would it help if they published papers on the topic and held conferences and you picked only the best-cited ones from that process? Why not?

I think the relevant question is: If they were completely wrong about how the world actually works, would this have had any negative consequences for them?

This would lead you to some degree of skepticism of risk management professionals, too. If the risks are small and frequent (like estimating how many car crashes per month) then you can trust that people & methods that are badly wrong will have been weeded out. But when the risks are of rare events (like, say, housing market crashes, or nuclear war) then professionals can pass an entire career without being tested against reality. So you should be wary that the most prominent voices are chosen for reasons other than actually predicting the risk.

And career sociologists, of course, aren't heavily rewarded for accurate predictions.

With respect, these careerists subscribe to journals that will literally publish translations of Mein Kampf so long as a few buzzwords are exchanged. On a less sensationalist but more quantifiable note, 70% of the research comprising the field can't be replicated. I think my scepticism is warranted.

Even still, my Bayesian priors suggest that techies get worse than chance results on second-guessing them.

Psychology and sociology departments are radicalized echo chambers. No one in he street has any of the imaginary problems they concoct.

Morgan Freeman (black) has said it years ago: "Stop talking about it".

Having to publicly humiliate yourself is pure Maoism. How can you compare it to learning type theory?

It's only public humiliation if people perceive it to be public humiliation.

what's humiliating about having the same problem that basically everyone does?

That's a funny stance given the context in which the material was introduced: as evidence that powerful people are racist "by their own admission". Doesn't sound like the no-big-deal definition of racism they might have thought they were confessing to.

It also suggests it's up to session-organisers to decide what justifiably humiliates a person.

Humiliation is in the eye of the beholder. I don't see them as humiliated. They don't appear to think they are humiliated.

Perhaps it's just not humiliating.

> They don't appear to think they are humiliated

How do you know? It doesn't sound like the kind of session where honest (dissenting) exchange is encouraged.

We don't have a lot of signal on what kind of session it is. It's not the conclusion I'd jump to from one Free Beacon screenshot.

Do you think multiple people would naturally volunteer to say those things in a regular session?

I don't have nearly enough insight into the inner workings of the minds of Northwestern University Law School administrators to guess.

Most people (luckily) perceive racism to be a bad thing. Being forced to publicly confess to being something you should be ashamed of is the definition of humiliation.

If it's true and uncomfortable it's still true.

My point is that public humiliation is much more likely to create resentment than to remove unconscious bias.

> understand the unconscious mental processes that feed into racism and the nature of structural discrimination, even when unintended.

I wonder how scientific this understanding is

UCSF has a useful overview on the topic.

https://diversity.ucsf.edu/resources/state-science-unconscio...

Quite biased. At least the Wikipedia page includes a Criticism section. Also, as with most psychology, the prior should be that all these studies are a result of p-hacking and publication bias (i.e. that the effect is actually noise).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Crit...

Also pretty obvious biased cherry picking on that page. Counterexample:

Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481

I don't see how the provided counterexample is a counterexample. It appears to indicate unconscious bias favoring women in STEM faculty positions for hiring.

No evidence is given about whether the bias is unconscious.

I believe it can be inferred that it's not conscious, because if women were actually being hired intentionally at a 2 to 1 ratio, that would be an obvious violation of law against gender discrimination.

Doing "X" intentionally would be illegal, therefore it could be inferred that whoever did "X" wasn't doing it consciously.

>The trainings I'm familiar with have the opposite intent

The person who ties you to a stake and burns you alive to cleanse the devil from you can sincerely intend to save your soul, but what they are doing is still horrible. Intent is vastly overrated.

If you go around asking who the "real racists" are, you'll never find any. Turns out self-reporting is dubious.

If you declare everyone a racist then finding the actual racists becomes a much harder problem.

Firstly, if everyone is a racist then the word racist loses meaning. So when you have an actual racist and say this person is racist, it's meaningless. Everyone is racist.

Secondly, the amount of false positives will just be crazy high. How can this possibly ever work?

I don't know what they think they are achieving?

>I don't know what they think they are achieving?

They don't think they're actually hunting down people who hate others based on race. They're self-consciously building class power that serves themselves as individuals and the material interests of their class.

The alternative is hardly declaring people such based on skin color.

Are you a real racist?

Klansmen and neo-Nazis are perfectly happy to call themselves racists.

He signed the document to stay at the institution. I wouldn't call it "dodging a bullet" I'd call it "securing his own yoke".

And their friend was fired.

We talk about an institution that will only hire people as long as they came out as racists first. Wow!.

Looks like the type of workplace to avoid at any cost.

(It feels important to point out that my post is based on the text above, not based on having read the document being referred to nor the full context of the document. A company that would, say, require 100% of the employees to sign a document saying, in effect, that "everyone has inherent predilections towards folk they most relate to" and that "here we expect everyone to rise above that" would be pretty cool but what was described seemed weird to me.)

God forbid large firms employing people from diverse backgrounds require employees to take training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.

What you’re doing is called a motte and bailey fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

You’re defending diversity training, which nobody is attacking. We’re talking about a particular kind of rhetoric where people take personal responsibility in behalf of their race and label themselves with words that, in ordinary usage, have extremely inflammatory meanings.

I’m from a “diverse background.” I think diversity training and making organizations more diverse is great. But this rhetoric is an explosively bad approach to race relations, and as a non-white person I am very worried about what the result will be.

You'd have to nail down what rhetoric you mean for me to have any response to that.

The example is in my OP: It's a session where white people acknowledge that they take personal responsibility for participating in a system of "white privilege" and admit to being "racist" and "gatekeepers of white supremacy." (That's the bailey.)

By contrast, your motte: "training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.

Honestly, I don't see much distinction between teaching people about structural privilege and suggesting they admit they benefit from it. Difference of degree, perhaps, but not much.

You trusted your alma mater when you were taught there; not trusting the direction it's taking now? Is it possible you're not seeing the picture the way they are?

But do you see the difference between teaching people about structural racism and having them stand up and declare "I am a racist" and "I am a gatekeeper of white supremacy?" Two things about that are outside acceptable norms:

1) Having people declare personal complicity for a general social ill; and

2) Using words that have widely-understood connotations to mean something different in order to achieve shocking rhetorical effect.

It's not just inconsistent with social norms, it's alienating to many non-white people. I don't think the well-meaning white people doing this (and almost everyone involved in this is white) really understand that we have to actually go on and try to interact normally our professors and administrators after this.

How does that change the normal interaction dynamic?

I generally try to avoid racist people, because they'll treat me and many of my friends poorly. That's what "racism" meant in the culture I was brought up in - a racist person was by definition one who treated certain races poorly.

Because of that, it's very hard for me to have normal interactions with people who explicitly identify as racist, even if they say they're a special kind of racist who intends to treat me well.

So it's a matter of definition, not behavior. Because the point of unconscious bias training is to help people see the ways in which they are racist even if they don't think of themselves as racist.

In other words, there's no magically non-racist person out there. Everyone's a little bit racist.

It's a magical, shifting definition that means whatever the high priests need it to mean at the moment.

Making people confess to being 'racist', at institutions where being Racist gets you fired, is a power-move.

Those of us who can see that aren't objecting to the idea of unconscious bias, we're objecting to the power move.

If only there were some kind of, I dunno, training to help clarify and de-magic these words. ;)

Do you believe racists should be shamed and fired?

I don't believe people should be shamed and fired for having unconscious bias and confronting it.

There's a world of difference between confronting one's unconscious bias and unapologetic, willful racism.

And, we're back to the magical shifting definition.

If there's such a world of difference, why conflate the two using the same word?

That's a question for the English language and dictionary authors, not for me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/merriam-webster-racism...

Any thoughts of your own on the matter? We're way in the sidebar, don't worry about downvotes. Tell me why.

Benefitting from structural privileges is very different from being a racist though.

In computer security, we often talk about the lack of distinction between malice and ignorance---if the security system is bad, it doesn't matter if the attacker is intent on causing harm or merely innocently curious and hack-sawing away through your computer security for fun. The outcome is the same.

I think the same principle applies here. Malicious racism and passive racism have the same effect.

"Ism" is a suffix that implies a philosophy. An ism is a suite of beliefs. Anything that is unconscious is, by definition, not an ism. Racism refers to people with a philosophy of racial hierarchy, or ideas about race that evoke or imply such a philosophy.

For instance, Buddhism is a suite of beliefs about enlightenment and transcendence. We don't refer to people as "structural Buddhists" simply because they have equanimity.

I'll bite, what the fuck is passive racism?

The unconscious biases people walk around with in their heads. They're things people pick up without realizing it that lead to friction for minorities in society.

Studies have shown that people who don't think themselves to be actually racist still act in race-discriminatory ways. For example, people with non-ethic-names get more callbacks for their resume controlled for qualifications on the resume (https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...).

So a bad way to say unconscious racism.

> suggesting they admit they benefit from it

Not "suggesting" - demanding, and specifically labelling themselves "racist" - not just admitting that they benefit from it.

I don't think specific examples are really useful here. At the end of the day, either I'm allowed to say "I am not a racist" at work and be left alone for making that statement, or I'm not. If I'm not, it's a cryptofascist struggle session.

Without specific examples, I have no idea if I am committing a motte and bailey fallacy because the specific examples I have in my mind are the weaker example, the specific examples the speaker has in their mind are a different example, I've never experienced their example (but have experienced people experiencing my example and treating it as something more draconian that could, perhaps, approximate their example).

So not much more to say on this topic without specific examples.

There's nothing wrong with bringing privilege and systemic racism up and taking a "course" as a way to make it poignant. Forcing white people to say "all white people, including myself, are racist P's of S" is garbage and I would get up and walk out at that point, no amount of money or "this position is cool" would convince me to do otherwise. If you don't have standards then why even be alive or call yourself an individual? Sure if you're racist speak up and would like to fix it, otherwise it's blackmail and you are working with garbage people.

Are you suggesting it's required to "confess that you're a racist" in a Mao-style struggle session to work with people from diverse backgrounds?

I'm definitely not. I also hold such descriptions of these trainings in high skepticism, because I've been through a similar training and had a coworker describe it as such when all the training was doing was surfacing the scientific evidence suggesting unconscious bias is a real phenomenon that people aren't aware of.

The fact my colleague took it so personally says more about them, I think, than the training.

You might have visited different seminars than the ones this thread was originally about, or you might just experience them differently given that you appear to be a staunch believer in white privilege & the post-modern theory of racism.

Religious rituals seem totally normal to the initiated and strange and cult-ish to others.

Conflating trainings derived from theory based on research and evidence with religion is also strange.

I think research & evidence is vague when you include gender & diversity studies in sciences. There's a lot that's barely above an essay, it'll stick for a few years and then get retracted (gender pay gap anyone?) The cultish behavior surrounding it ("I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning, I'm worthless, oh please, Lord, forgive me, I submit myself before your will") makes it look like a replacement for religion, not anything stemming from science.

I don't believe the similarity to Maoist struggle sessions is an accident, it's born from the same general school of thought.

There's also the similarity of the class alignment behind today's "neo-Maoist" stuff and the actual Cultural Revolution. https://www.thebellows.org/the-new-cultural-revolution/

The "school of thought" behind the cultural revolution was twofold:

1) Mao had been frozen out after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, and this was his way of discrediting his enemies and getting back on top.

2) Young people full of fervor are fucking vicious.

None of it really had much to do with marxist philosophy in general or with the things Mao in particular had said before he'd been frozen out. But it says a lot about power.

> None of it really had much to do with marxist philosophy

Nonsense. The Cultural Revolution had much to do with Marxist philosophy. For goodness’ sake, read the May 16 Notification and Sixteen Points.

> "I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning"

The entire point of the courses I've seen is to bring people awareness of unconscious bias and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of error to awareness of the potential for such error. And unconscious bias doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior.

Disclaimer: I realize the below could be interpreted in an inflammatory manner. I DON'T MEAN IT THAT WAY. I just find it absolutely unbelievable that someone could honestly claim not to see the clear religious parallels here.

The entire point of the [bible camp] I've seen is to bring people awareness of [unconscious sinning] and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of [sin] to awareness of the potential for [sin]. And [unconscious sinning] doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior [since we're all born in sin]. (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-the-biblical-ev...)

The parallel is obvious and I fail to see your point.

Original sin is a concept couched in Christian mythology. Unconscious bias is a concept derived from statistical study and observation. The similarity is that unconscious bias, like original sin, appears to be innate to the human existence---a byproduct of the way we think about the world, the thousands of quick decisions we make subconsciously to go about our days. The parallel doesn't make it untrue.

The entire point of some exhibits in science museums I've seen is to bring people awareness of optical illusions and help them transition from not knowing that the human eye has some fascinating corner case failure modes to awareness of the existence of those failure modes. And the eye being imperfect doesn't make it "worthless," it's a pretty ordinary side effect of evolution in the context where those failure modes are rare to observe.

In my experince, the true believers find the diversity courses validating.

You don't have to believe the description of the session--there are screenshots in the article.

Nothing about the article suggests that text was forced. I'm not going to trust the Free Beacon's interpretation of some out-of-context screenshots.

The statements standing alone are damning, whether forced or not. That's not how faculty and administrators should be speaking in front of students.

Agree to disagree