By Mike Gonzalez via The Daily Signal | December 01, 2024
Diversity, equity, and inclusion has made society meaner—mean enough to accept Hitlerian terms when describing out-groups and seeking to exact revenge on perceived oppressors.
This was all common sense to many of us years ago, but it’s nice that we now have a study that substantiates our perception.
The report, released Nov. 25 by the always-good Network Contagion Research Institute and titled “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias,” describes how groups that were exposed to writings by DEI retailers Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo reacted compared to control groups that were instead given anodyne texts on technical material.
Every time, members of the groups under the spell of Kendi and DiAngelo or similar writers looked for discrimination under every bed, found offense in “microaggressions” that did not exist, and, more worryingly, sought to penalize those they wrongly identified as having committed these transgressions.
Lest we forget, this comes from an approach that promised “better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone,” according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. DEI is “the key to growth,” according to activist Jesse Jackson, and something that “creates safer and fairer workplaces,” according to Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif.
However, as the Network Contagion Research Institute’s report confirms, none of these things are true.
Interestingly, the Network Contagion Research Institute study focused “on diversity training interventions that emphasize awareness of and opposition to ‘systemic oppression,’ a trend fueled by the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement and popularized by texts such as Ibram X. Kendi’s, ‘How to Be an Antiracist,’” the report says.
This was important because the claim of “systemic racism” forms the basis of the attempt to have a revolutionary systemic overhaul of society that is at the heart of much of DEI. While the assertion of “systemic racism” goes back to the origin of critical race theory, the discipline’s foundational book speaks of the “exercise of racial power” as being “systemic and ingrained.” It was not until the arrival of BLM, and especially its 2020 riots, that America’s cultural gatekeepers began to accept the claim as fact.
“While not representative of all DEI pedagogy, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘anti-oppression’ pedagogy and intervention materials have seen widespread adoption across sectors like higher education and healthcare,” says the report.
The Network Contagion Research Institute study surveyed reactions to three characteristics: race, religion, and caste. For race, it used writings from Kendi, DiAngelo, and others of their ilk. For religion, it subjected those under study to “content from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, commonly used in sensitivity training on Islamophobia.” For caste, it featured writings from Equality Labs, a North American group that provides training on caste discrimination among people with origins in South Asia.
“Rhetoric from these materials was excerpted and administered in psychological surveys measuring explicit bias, social distancing, demonization, and authoritarian tendencies. Participants were randomly assigned to review these materials or neutral control material,” said the report’s writers of the methodology they used.
Here’s how it worked in the racial group scenario: While one group was given passages by Kendi and DiAngelo, the texts given to the control group had to do with corn production. After reading the texts, both groups were asked to evaluate this racially neutral scenario: A student applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2024. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer. Ultimately, the student’s application was rejected.
The participants in the experiments were given questions designed to see how much they perceived racial bias, but the questions themselves were neutral and avoided “any mention of either the student’s or admission officer’s race or ethnicity and provides no evidence of racism. Thus, if they perceive racism in the interaction, they are introducing something that is objectively absent.”
Surprise, surprise, those subjects of the experiment that read Kendi and DiAngelo “developed a hostile attribution bias.”
“They perceived the admissions officer as significantly more prejudiced than did those who read the neutral corn essay. Specifically, participants exposed to the anti-racist rhetoric perceived more discrimination from the admissions officer (~21%), despite the complete absence of evidence of discrimination. They believed the admissions officer was more unfair to the applicant (~12%), had caused more harm to the applicant (~26%), and had committed more microaggressions (~35%),” says the report.
The Kendi/DiAngelo readers also turned more punitive: “Compared to controls who read about corn, respondents who read the Kendi/DiAngelo intervention were 12% more willing to support suspending the admissions officer for a semester, 16% more willing to demand a public apology to the applicant, and 12% more willing to require additional DEI training to correct the officer.”
The same results were obtained in the religious group, where those who read the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding material looked for Islamophobia everywhere, and in the group that was tested on caste-based discrimination among Hindu Americans by reading material from Equality Labs. In that case, the control groups read dry academic texts from professors at Cambridge, Berkeley, etc.
The Equality Labs material was thick with the language of activism: “Shudras and Dalits are caste-oppressed; they experience profound injustices, including socioeconomic hardship and brutal violence at the hands of the upper castes. Dalits live in segregated ghettos, are banned from temples, and are denied access to schools and public amenities. The 2,500-year-old caste system is enforced by violence and maintained by one of the world’s oldest, most persistent cultures.”
The passage they were asked to analyze was completely bereft of any mention of oppression. However: “Raj Kumar applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2022. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer, Anand Prakash. Ultimately, Raj’s application was rejected.”
Those who read the Equality Labs material again had a much higher perception of microaggression, harm, and bias. Not only that, the caste-study group read a passage from Hitler where the word “Jew” was substituted with “Brahmin” (the upper caste in Hinduism).
“Participants exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements, agreeing that Brahmins are ‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%),” says the report, adding that, “These findings suggest that exposure to anti-oppressive narratives can increase the endorsement of the type of demonization and scapegoating characteristic of authoritarianism.”
Sadly, this is precisely what we have seen happen in America in the past decade—a process that has accelerated in the past four years. Our society has turned meaner and more willing to inflict pain and punishment on those perceived to be oppressors.
Something else has happened: media complicity. National Review reported that the Network Contagion Research Institute study “was set to be covered by Bloomberg and the New York Times, although both publications axed their articles just before publication, according to communications reviewed by National Review.”
“Unfortunately, both publications jumped on the story enthusiastically only for it to be inexplicably pulled at the highest editorial levels,” a Network Contagion Research Institute researcher told the outlet. “This has never happened to the NCRI in its 5-year history.”
This is the state of affairs that the American voter has asked President-elect Donald Trump to fix. Here’s hoping he can.
Mike is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
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