If you have done nothing wrong, do you want to be treated like a criminal? That was always the failure of Social Justice Social Science efforts like the Implicit Bias test; you’re a racist, the test will show you how racist you are. 

You may not hate anyone so it would be perfectly understandable if you resented being told you are a terrible human being and that if you believe you are not, you are a Fascist.

Mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts may likewise do more harm than good. Nearly everyone believes that people should succeed on merit. Nearly everyone accepts that merit is not perfect, bias can exist, and institutional bias should be filtered out.(1) Most are not prejudiced despite what Harvard social science academics monetize, so being talked down to like they are bigots may make them resent being targeted.

A suite of experiments sought to test how well DEI worked and instead it showed it did the opposite.

If Adolph Hitler, the most successful progressive eugenicist of the 20th century, statements were shown to people but “Jews” were replaced with “Brahmins” and the topic was the caste system, they didn’t know it was Hitler and were more inclined to agree.

These are college students, and the giant problem psychology and the other social “sciences” face is that they are really only attempting to be a science of surveyed undergraduates – the real world is sketchy/expensive – so these results are only EXPLORATORY but the concern is that 52% of people in corporate America are forced to undergo DEI training. If even a fraction are negatively impacted by being told they are bigots, then not only is diversity and inclusion not moving forward, it will have regressed from the 1970s and ’80s.

The New York Times and Bloomberg both predictably told journalists there to stop covering the study and that is no surprise. There is a lot of cultural pressure to defend the tribe in progressive media.

The same pressure that kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from getting the criticism he deserved, and got here, for 17 years – until he helped a Republican, and now progressive science communicators are coming out of the woodwork to claim they knew it all along. 

Like this guy, who was in middle school when we started telling Democrats Bobby Jr was ruining the reputation of their party and thinks Obama, who suggested vaccines cause autism, was not behind giving his key fundraiser a position. He was, until the same blowback we created against Kennedy in 2017. Democrats were anti-vaccine – does anyone think Hollywood celebrities and the coast of California are right-wing? – along with harboring anti-science beliefs against food, cell phones, all medicine, and energy. But he thinks everyone else did nothing while he is suddenly doing God’s Work ranting on Twitter.

So maybe the only way to stop corrosive efforts, using DEI to promote hatred and sow dissent, will be if a Republican says it is a good thing.

NOTES:

(1) Nearly everyone agreed in the 1960s “shackled man” hypothesis that if we are all in a race, and one person has shackles on, taking the shackles off a 100 yards down the track does not mean things are fair. To make them fair, we had Affirmative Action, which helped people of color, especially those in the south who had been punished by the Democrats who lost the Civil War using “Jim Crow” laws they wrote, catch up. Yet three generations later Affirmative Action was clearly off the rails. Asians who had “white” last names were told to check white on university admission boxes, because white people were discriminated against by elite schools less than Asians. Latinos, Blacks, and Native Americans, much larger minorities than Asians, got secret benefits in admissions. We wrote about that discrimination 15 years and finally the Supreme Court put an end to it. Progressive universities still do it, they just can’t brag that they are doing social justice now.