Diversity and unconscious bias training has been around for a while, and it’s now a major industry in the United States’ economy. 
Part of the reason was the explosion of national consciousness about racism and bias during the protests and riots following the murder of George Floyd in the summer 2020. Suddenly, it became in vogue for a company to publicly and privately express its alliance with people of color across the United States.
Publicly, these expressions took the form of commercials expressing solidarity and support for racial tranquility. Privately, they looked like diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, trainings.
Whatever the cost of these trainings and advertisements, companies have by and large paid whatever price necessary – and will likely continue to do so. In 2020, according to Report Linker’s October 2022 market analysis, $7.5 billion was spent globally on DEI training, a figure that will increase to a projected $17.2 billion by 2027.
The curious thing about the enormous size of these figures, though, is that the effectiveness of diversity trainings is dubious: Some experts believe that DEI can exacerbate biases in workplace environments, accomplishing the opposite of its stated goals.
As early as 2016, Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin and Tel Aviv University anthropologist Alexandra Kalev suggested in the Harvard Business Review that diversity programs are doomed to “fail.” Motivated in large part to avoid class-action lawsuits and more minor litigation, large companies began to invest in company-wide sensitivity trainings to demonstrate their non-complicity in office-related sexual and racial harassment.
If a company brings in a diversity trainer, for instance, managers and workers are very likely to momentarily express the right words – only to go right back to their normal attitudes and practices surrounding things like race or gender once the training is over. 
In short, Dobbin and Kalev say, “people often rebel against rules to assert their own autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.”
In another article, Dobbin and Kalev argue that “two common features of diversity training – mandatory participation and legal curriculum – will make participants feel that an external power is trying to control their behavior.”  
Another problem with DEI training is the fact that many concepts taught in diversity trainings are based upon flawed data analyses.
One of these is that of “microaggressions,” which are common verbal, behavioral or environmental practices which carry an unknown psychological negative effect on minority groups and especially people of color.
As clinical psychologist Scott Lilienfield and journalist Jesse Singal have noted, though, the very concept of, let alone the practice of teaching about, microaggressions is a sketchy prospect.
Perhaps the best example of this is the argument that microaggressions carry negative psychological effects for minority groups. This conclusion, according to the fairly extensive “scholarly” literature on the subject, never controls its collected data for those who are predisposed to negative emotions.
“In other words,” Singal says, “just because people who report experiencing more microaggressions also report worse health and and psychological outcomes does not mean that there is a causal relationship between the two; correlation does not equal causation, as snooty statistics professors everywhere say.”
And so, the reports of the harmful effects of microaggressions or other, especially verbal-based, unconscious biases in professional or personal environments may be greatly exaggerated – which isn’t to suggest that harmful words do not exist, or that one should not be sensitive and kind to others with different opinions, but only those reports of literal workplace “violence” (remember: silence can also be violence) are probably overestimated in most cases.
This also isn’t to say that achieving harmony between different ethnic groups or the sexes isn’t a worthy goal: To be sure, it is. But we should probably be questioning the methods by which we seek to attain it.
More than likely, for private companies, this means defenestrating the over-priced diversity trainings. For public institutions like LSU, it probably means slashing funding to bureaucratic diversity trainings that don’t actually seem to accomplish their stated goals. 
In fact, in the case of the latter group, it seems a responsibility of policy makers and school administrators to suspend wasting taxpayer dollars of faulty, ineffective trainings until we are surer of the utility of DEI sessions. 
Benjamin Haines is a 24-year-old graduate student from Shreveport.