Race, ethnicity, and diversity training

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The following is from The Thomas Sowell Reader, Race and Ethnicity, p.259 - 261.

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Giving business the business

Television characters like J. R. Ewing in “Dallas” may have portrayed businessmen as Machiavellian devils but, in some respects at least, businessmen seem much more likely to be patsies than predators.

For years now, the Capital Research Center in Washington has been documenting how corporate America has been bankrolling all sorts of left-leaning groups, whose programs attack or undermine the free market in general and big corporations in particular. When developers subsidize environmental extremists, and employers contribute money to groups seeking to have government deny those employers the right to hire whatever individuals can do the job best, then something very strange is going on.

An even stranger, and perhaps more dangerous, development has been the hiring of so-called “diversity consultants” by big-name corporations all across the country.

These “diversity consultants” will come in to harangue your employees with the latest trendy notions on race and ethnicity. Or they will arrange weekend retreats where they can browbeat the staff and management. They put out brochures, videotapes, newsletters, or anything else that will send out The Word and bring in money.

These professional intimidators don’t come cheap. The more skilled or brazen of them charge thousands of dollars per day — and many will not work by the day, but insist on a long-term contract.

What are their skills? What are their credentials? What benefits can they promise?

Their skills are considerable. They have been known to reduce some employees to tears with their badgering, sneers and insinuations, just as they have been known to reduce some college students to tears when they take their act onto the campus.

They are great at laying on guilt trips or getting personal in a nasty way. Often they treat adults like children — or like guinea pigs.

Sometimes they ask the employees to line up and those who are religious to step to the right, those who believe that they are not racists to step forward, and so on. Above all, the “diversity” types do not discuss on the same plane as others. They lay down the social dogma from on high.

Credentials? Merely asking such a question is like asking to be accused of “insensitivity,” if not racism. There are no formal credentials required to be known as a “diversity consultant.” Effrontery and gall are pretty much the essentials. They are the secular versions of Elmer Gantry.

What benefits do they promise to employers? Usually nothing tangible that you can see any time soon. That would be “simplistic” — and not very profitable to the consultants.

The relationship between employees of different racial and ethnic backgrounds is supposed to be a great mystery, whose unraveling will require much time and much “re-education”.

Black and white employees who were watching the same TV programs at home the previous night, and perhaps eating the same junk food at the mall during lunchtime, are taught to think of each other as exotic creatures from other worlds — unable to understand each other, except with the painful and expensive help of “diversity consultants.”

How did businesses — or the country — manage to keep from coming apart all those years before these secular messiahs arrived on the scene? More important, why doesn’t someone demand that they put up or shut up?

Have businesses — or colleges — that go in for this kind of bombast had happier relations among the various racial, ethnic or other groups afterwards? Or is it always “too early to see the results yet”? In academia, the results seem to be that colleges which go in for this kind of brainwashing have more intergroup strife than before and more than colleges where no such programs exist.

Businesses that persist in subjecting their employees to this kind of indignity may see lawsuits for stress before they see any tangible benefits. As one who deplores the litigation explosion, I nevertheless think a few multimillion dollar damage awards would be a very healthy thing, to help restore sanity and common decency where these qualities are currently taking a back seat to being on the side of the politically correct angels.

Both the patterns of corporate philanthropy to their political enemies and the susceptibility of corporate management to such unproven nostrums as “diversity consultants” may suggest a death-wish to the more psychologically inclined.

A more rationalistic explanation might be that it is all for the sake of public relations, even if the top corporate executives themselves think it is bunk.

Whatever the explanation, it is bad business in the long run, not only for business itself but for the country.

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7 Dec 2023