What I Learned From My DEI Training Session
I just watched Matt Walsh’s “Am I Racist?” movie this week. It was funny and good; if you have never run across a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) adviser or proponent, you will understand their ideology by the time the credits start rolling, and well before. I myself was watching the screen through laced fingers during some cringeworthy sections, but I still got the message.
The movie brought back old memories, specifically one day in August of 2020. My graduate school had made the unfortunate decision to hire a DEI adviser to run a sort of training session with me and the rest of the class of 2022. We were all masked up, sitting six seats apart in the auditorium, and our enlightened instructor, Dr. Warren Chalklen, was presiding via Zoom.
Chalklen was an alumnus of our school, but more importantly, he was an immigrant from South Africa. In his mind, this gave him a sort of authority to speak about racism in America, a country far different (and far less racist) than his own. I knew the talk was going to go down like a lead balloon when he began by describing that, during his time in grad school, he was always worried for his black friends who had to walk home late at night, lest they be subject to…the whites. This tale of woe only revealed Chalklen’s supreme ignorance of the character of our college town. As soon as you left campus — something I doubt Chalken did — the community was very heterogeneous.
After (poorly) establishing his bona fides, he continued by discussing Dr. David Campt’s R.A.C.E. framework. The heuristic stands for Reflect, Ask, Connecting, and Expansion and is an integral part of dismantling racists not with facts and logic, but with feelings and active listening. Soon we would put our feelings weapons to the test, but we had to put first things first. We had to reflect.
Reflecting included finding and naming our trigger words. It involved taking a moment to breathe and center ourselves before venturing into this uncomfortable conversation we were about to have with our peers. It seemed like we had to prepare for this discussion about race with the same gravitas as if we were Seal Team Six about to bust through the door to Osama bin Laden’s compound.
Reflecting didn’t last long, thank God. Then we were on to the real meat and potatoes of the R.A.C.E. framework: Asking. If you thought this was going to involve actual methods of debate and dialogue such as the Socratic method, I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed. Our worksheet, and the good doctor on Zoom, expressly discouraged rebutting our interlocutor’s (supposedly) faulty assertion that “we don’t see color, we just see people.” Instead, we were encouraged to shift the topic of discussion from the person’s belief to the experience underpinning their beliefs.
If you haven’t been exposed to the fallacies of a long-dead white cisgender male philosopher by the name of David Hume, then this idea of discussing experience rather than belief may seem compassionate, even salutary. But it just isn’t, not when it prioritizes fallible sensory data at the total expense of logic or appeals to the divine law and its giver. But that’s a rant for another day. Just know that Dr. Chalklen was attempting to smuggle in some anti-truths that shred the fabric of Western (and therefore Christian) thought into his workshop.
The first exercise Dr. C made us do was to discuss with our neighbors if we had ever been the victim of a racist attack. Me, another American student, and an international student from Africa gathered in a definitely-not-socially-distanced huddle and awkwardly went around the horn, racking our brains for a time we had been signaled out due to our race.
Every example that floated in front of my mind’s eye involved mild quips about my sex, not my race. The two male students opposite me also came up with a big donut. In the remaining minutes of our discussion, we elected to chat about our class schedules and how much of a blowhard the speaker was. I told them that I was pretty sure Martin Luther King Jr. would rather get shot again than attend this session, and that I was thinking about getting up and leaving.
Ultimately, I stayed to gather as much dirt as possible and we moved on to the Connecting and Expansion steps. By then, it was clear that my neighbors and I had nothing we needed to build anti-racist bridges on — we all seemed to think race was visible, but not important — so we just patiently waited for the Q&A section. After he enjoined us to continue to practice the R.A.C.E. framework with “trusted allies” in the future, we had to suffer through a few more anecdotes.
Chalken told us about a so-called traumatic experience in his own life that occurred during his time at our very institution. He claimed, “People did not want to be in a group with me because I had an accent.” Even worse, his classmates often directed the phrase “Bless his heart” his way. Chalken claimed that the well-worn Texas phrase was a microaggression and that they were targeting him not because he was a jerk (which was my guess), but because he was South African. I could scarcely keep myself from guffawing.
Blissfully, the Q&A time was finally upon us. Many of my fellow students jumped up and asked the burning questions I also had. One of them concerned “colorblindness” with regard to race. In essence, one student asked why we shouldn’t adopt Martin Luther King Jr.’s view that people should, “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Before answering, Warren Chalken, PhD literally paused for a few seconds, breathed deeply, and exhaled to recollect himself so he did not get triggered. In the palpably awkward silence, I am sure my jaw was at least slightly agape: “Is this guy for real?” After sufficiently recovering from his battlefield injuries, Chalken stated that he once also touted his colorblindness, until one of his students confronted him and said, “If you don’t see race, you don’t see me.”
Warren was forever changed by this event. He realized that “race is an integral part of people” and that not caring intimately about it was akin to not seeing the person in front of him as a human being. In other words, we should hyper-focus on skin color, and MLK was an old fogey who would probably be called an Uncle Tom today. Great.
Another student set Chalken up for disaster by asking, “Should we talk differently based on race?” Before thinking sufficiently long and hard about his response, he stated, “Yes, we should use different language when speaking to people of different races. We use different language with our peers and with children.” My eyes went wide at this: “Did this guy just compare minorities to children? Did he just encourage us to discriminate based on race? WTF?”
The only wise thing Chalken did that day was to wrap the Q&A section up quickly and finish his talk. Perhaps he could finally detect that he was treading on ambivalent and even downright hostile territory. For your enjoyment, here are some other key quotes and paraphrases from two hours that I can never get back:
“I’m a huge feelings person.”
“Disrupt racism-denying language.”
“Expect the worst from people.”
Racism skeptics are people who believe that George Floyd’s death might not have been completely about race.
The police force as we know it today was based on slave patrols.
Reading White Fragility is not enough to be a good anti-racist.
We shouldn’t force black people to engage in dialogues.
I am a deconstructivist.
I left this talk exhausted, but furious. I was furious that full-blown racists like Warren had a socially sanctioned platform to spread their poison. If I was not such a coward, I would have raised my complaints with the administration. But I didn’t. It was a dicey time to be complaining about DEI sessions and mask mandates then, and I kowtowed, to my great shame.
I wish I hadn’t bent the knee. I wish I had made a stink. After all, this ideology can only spread because people of good will do not stand up against it. That is why grifters like Chalken still have a job. If you think sessions like his are not happening at your child’s high school or university, think again. If you think they are not occurring at some of the largest companies in our nation, think again. To prove that point, in “Am I Racist?” Robin DiAngelo — famed author of White Fragility — listed just a few of the companies she had worked with — Netflix and Google were among them.
DEI is not going away anytime soon. While there have been a series of corporate defections from the moniker in recent times, many corporate commitments to diversity are still in place behind closed doors. It is our job as regular citizens to use our voices and our purchasing power to make this divisive ideology that still runs amok in academia, the government, and the private sector so unpopular that it is relegated to the dust heap of history. Going to the “Am I Racist?” movie may assist that effort.
Ultimately, only authentic, Christian love will be the soothing balm to the prejudicial impulses we all have to confront. Dr. Warren was right about one thing — racism is a problem and always will be, but it is a human problem, not just a problem for white people, and a problem that will not be solved by self-flagellation and reparations. In fact, racism is solved mostly by not talking about it. Dr. Chalklen would disagree with me, of course. He said that by ignoring race, “you’re saying race is not important.”
Exactly so.