Does Antiracism Training Work?

See ‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work? Robin DiAngelo’s best seller is giving white Americans a new way to talk about race. Do those conversations actually serve the cause of equality? by Daniel Bergner of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"One critique leveled at antiracism training is that it just may not work. Frank Dobbin, a Harvard sociology professor, has published research on attempts, over three decades, to combat bias in over 800 U.S. companies, including a 2016 study with Alexandra Kalev in The Harvard Business Review. (As far back as the early ’60s, he recounts in his book “Inventing Equal Opportunity,” Western Electric, responding to a Kennedy-administration initiative to enhance equity, presented lectures by Kenneth Clark and James Baldwin to company managers.) Dobbin’s research shows that the numbers of women or people of color in management do not increase with most anti-bias education. “There just isn’t much evidence that you can do anything to change either explicit or implicit bias in a half-day session,” Dobbin warns. “Stereotypes are too ingrained.”

When we first talked, and I described DiAngelo’s approach, he said, “I certainly agree with what she’s saying” about our white-supremacist society. But he noted that new research that he’s revising for publication suggests that anti-bias training can backfire, with adverse effects especially on Black people, perhaps, he speculated, because training, whether consciously or subconsciously, “activates stereotypes.” When we spoke again in June, he emphasized an additional finding from his data: the likelihood of backlash “if people feel that they’re being forced to go to diversity training to conform with social norms or laws.”

Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia, and Betsy Levy Paluck, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, have analyzed almost 1,000 studies of programs to lessen prejudice, from racism to homophobia, in situations from workplaces to laboratory settings. “We currently do not know whether a wide range of programs and policies tend to work on average,” they concluded in a 2009 paper published in The Annual Review of Psychology, which incorporated measures of attitudes and behaviors. They’ve just refined their analysis, with the help of two Princeton researchers, Chelsey Clark and Roni Porat. “As the study quality goes up,” Paluck told me, “the effect size dwindles.”"

"Leslie Chislett, who is white and has attended around 10 antiracism workshops since 2017, was, until last year, an executive with New York City’s Department of Education. Some of the trainings she took predate the city’s current schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, but he has been their strongest advocate, in the belief that the compulsory workshops given to teachers and administrators throughout the system are essential to improving the education of Black and Hispanic children. Chislett filed suit in October against Carranza and the department. At least five other high-level, white D.O.E. executives have filed similar suits or won settlements from the city over the past 14 months. The trainings lie at the heart of their claims.

Earlier in her career, in a suburban school district outside Denver, Chislett led an effort to get more students of color into gifted-and-talented programs. More recently, in New York City — whose public-school system educates, or fails to educate, more children of color than any other in the nation — she was co-director of a drive with the goal of getting a broad slate of Advanced Placement courses into all the city’s public high schools. “The availability of A.P. classes,” she told me, “communicates to kids that it is possible for them to exceed the regular curriculum and can help teachers see that many kids have the potential to succeed at college-level course work. It’s about creating a culture of high expectations.”

Some lessons of the antiracism trainings weren’t easy for Chislett to embrace. Colleagues on her multiracial A.P. for All team accused her, during and outside the workshops, of hindering exercises and refusing to acknowledge her own white supremacy, her own racism. Hostility ran high, and in 2018, according to Chislett, one white team member handed her a copy of DiAngelo’s original “White Fragility” journal article, suggesting that she needed to study it.

During a training in January 2019 run by Amante-Jackson, which Chislett recorded, Amante-Jackson sounded notes that were anti-intellectual by mainstream standards, declaring that “this culture says you have to be most expert; you have to be perfect; it has to be said perfectly.” She continued, “The more degrees you have, the more expert you are. I think back — the most brilliant people in my life don’t even have diplomas from middle school. But we have been taught that you can only value people when they’ve got letters behind their name. All of that is coming from the water” — the water of white supremacy. “Eighty-eight percent of the entire world are people of color,” she claimed earlier in the session, “but 96 percent of the world’s historical content is white.” She went on to present “some characteristics of whiteness,” prominent among them “an obsession with the written word. If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.”

According to Chislett, during a June 2018 Courageous Conversation workshop that she attended, Ruby Ababio-Fernandez, a designated co-facilitator, who is also a D.O.E. official, proclaimed, “There is white toxicity in the air, and we all breathe it in.” The trainees were instructed to work with their tablemates, list qualities of white culture on a sheet of poster-size paper and hang their paper on the wall for everyone to read. Chislett felt she knew well by then the sorts of things they were meant to be writing, values that were critiqued at previous sessions: “individualism,” “Protestant work ethic,” “worship of data,” “worship of the written word,” “perfectionism,” “ideology of whiteness,” “denial.”

She told her group that she wasn’t going to take part; this derailed the table’s effort, and they wound up displaying an almost-empty sheet of paper. A young, white assistant principal at the table started to cry, Chislett recounted, and announced to the room, “I don’t want to be affiliated with this poster.” Chislett told everyone that she took responsibility for the barren sheet of paper. A Black principal at another table called out to her, “I feel you’re a horrible person.” Many of these details are outlined in Chislett’s lawsuit. A Chislett colleague and critic who was at this workshop confirmed most of Chislett’s account but contested the use of the word “toxicity.” The colleague noted that the Black principal was “extremely triggered” but didn’t remember exactly what the principal said. Ababio-Fernandez also confirmed the tenor of the session but disputed Chislett’s recollection of specific language.

Chislett eventually wound up demoted from the leadership of A.P. for All, and her suit argues that the trainings created a workplace filled with antiwhite distrust and discrimination. Some of her distress about the workshops is keenly personal, and if you listen to her complain about being “stereotyped” as a white product of a supremacist society, it’s possible to hear her as DiAngelo surely would: as fixating on her wounds to evade self-reflection.

When I spoke with several members of her former team, they praised the workshops. Courtney Winkfield, a white colleague and sometime facilitator, talked about her own “dysconsciousness,” a term antiracist educators use in discussing mind-sets that preserve oppression. She said that the trainings “gave me the opportunity to unpack my own socialization as a white person — socialization that has been really subversively hidden from me.” And there were plenty of lancing words about Chislett’s leadership. “It was her way or the highway,” Deonca Renée, a Black team member, said of Chislett’s peremptory style, claiming that Chislett favored white colleagues.

Yet whatever the merits of Chislett’s lawsuit and the counteraccusations against her, she is also concerned about something larger. “It’s absurd,” she said about much of the training she’s been through. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees, and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values? How do all these people not see how inconsistent this is?”"