Legal academic organizations have not shied away from diversity training, especially in the context of addressing legal academic hiring. While at the federal level, President Trump recently ordered a halt to what he described as "divisive diversity training." In fact, the president recently signed an executive order that specifically stopped agencies from participating in such training. The executive order forbade vendors from teaching critical race theory, white privilege and unconscious bias. The order states that such training that “promotes race or sex-stereotyping or scapegoating similarly undermines efficiency in federal contracting.” As a critical race scholar myself, I suspect neither the drafters of the executive order nor the President himself truly understand what critical race theory means because it is actually rare to have vendors or non-academics even address central themes of the theory.
Such is not the case in the legal academy. Indeed, the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) is hosting a virtual series "featuring law school teachers sharing their expertise on how to educate the next generation of lawyers, support students of color and dismantle structural inequality and racism in the United States." The next such meeting on October 16, 2020, at 3:00 pm, and specifically addresses "Anti-Racist Hiring Practices." The meeting features three prominent law school deans, and requires attendees to register at https://bit.ly/307SZ6M
While I suspect few that agree with the President's executive order above would find academic gatherings such as SALT's upcoming event of value, I wonder how much those that oppose diversity training would even listen to opposing views. It strikes me that in this time of political intolerance and open hostility, the last thing we should do is reject opposing views out of hand, such as the executive order attempts to accomplish. I for one hope to attend the SALT event mentioned above. Perhaps readers of this post will too. I would also personally welcome learning of presentations that are hostile to such training. Feel free to post such conferences in the comments below.
"It strikes me that in this time of political intolerance and open hostility, the last thing we should do is reject opposing views out of hand, such as the executive order attempts to accomplish…I would also personally welcome learning of presentations that are hostile to such training".
There is already sufficient literature showing why CRT is methodologically unsound (e.g., it's hypocritically and self-selectively essentialist about certain concepts but not others), and does not actually stand up to logical scrutiny. A second body of literature posits that claims about structural inequality and racism are themselves dissolved under class-based analyses. The third is just the standard milquetoast liberal critiques of CRT. There is also a sizeable literature criticizing the very notion of "unconscious bias."
A moment's effort would allow you to easily find and contact the authors of any such work. (Whether they would bother to attend a conference of acolytes, ones whose scholarly interests are not truth-oriented, rather than politics/ideology-driven, is another matter).
Two bases, which you can Google easily, are:
1. The McCarthyist quality of the UC initiative and the lawsuit against it.
2. Harvard's Adolph Reed et al's work on Leftist critiques of this diversity stuff.
"…the last thing we should do is reject opposing views out of hand…"
You do that all the time. On this very blog.
*UPenn's.
Do you have a link, Anon? I will join.
For other views, including mine, regarding this executive order, please see:
Experts Debate How Trump’s Order Restricting Critical Race Theory Funding Will Affect Higher Education
https://bit.ly/2Srdsig
To learn more about my views, consider this Webinar on Wednesday with a Q&A:
Why and How Legal Activists "Sue the Bastards":
My Odyssey From Geek to Gigolo to Good Doer
https://bit.ly/34mF8dE
A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had “no positive effects in the average workplace.” https://hbr.org/2012/03/diversity-training-doesnt-work
Implicit Bias Test https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html
Why Doesn’t Diversity Training Work? https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dobbin/files/an2018.pdf
WP https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/07/01/to-improve-diversity-dont-make-people-go-to-diversity-training-really-2/
And yet despite the growing adoption of unconscious bias training, there is no convincing scientific evidence that it works. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-04/implicit-bias-training-isn-t-improving-corporate-diversity
More:
"My view is that this is wildly premature—and potentially even dangerous. The overselling of implicit bias has, in my view, along with several other related concepts (microaggressions, stereotype threat, white privilege), contributed to the toxic environment on many campuses and in some corporations in which speech is considered “violence,” and in which, if you say the wrong thing, you can be denounced, ostracized, and even fired." https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201712/mandatory-implicit-bias-training-is-bad-idea
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-false-science-of-implicit-bias-1507590908
"To nobody’s surprise, it turns out that unconscious prejudice has little effect on human behavior." https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/01/implicit-bias-debunked-study-disputes-effects-unconscious-prejudice/
"Last week The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that researchers — including one of the founders of the IAT — from Harvard, the University of Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison had analyzed the results of hundreds of studies of the test involving almost 81,000 participants. For those who believe in the power of the unconscious, the results (to quote one of the researchers) “should be stunning.” For the rest of us, they’re unsurprising. The researchers find
that the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought. They also conclude that there is very little evidence that changes in implicit bias have anything to do with changes in a person’s behavior. These findings, they write, “produce a challenge for this area of research.”
Id.