Trump is Right…about one thing

by Richard Pooley

Photo: Nathan Dumlao, Unsplash

“Unnecessary and stupid”, said Poland’s Donald Tusk of the other Donald T’s initial imposition of tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China and soon anybody else who sells more to the USA than it buys. I agree. But amidst the plethora of Trump’s executive orders and lunatic proposals, and enforcer Musk’s rants and illegal firing of government officials, one necessary and smart decision has been taken: to remove D.E.I. from the US body politic and corporate.

“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives are essential to fostering a positive work culture. Through exposure to diverse perspectives, you can improve employee morale, promote business ethics, and drive creative problem-solving and innovation.”

So wrote Harvard B.S. on 3 October 2023. I can’t be the first who has often wondered whether B.S. stands for something less polite than Business School. Harvard has been peddling this nonsense for decades and making good money from doing so.

Five years ago I wrote two articles entitled “I am prejudiced. So are you.” In them I argued that Diversity training (or Unconscious Bias training as it is often called) is not just worthless; it is counter-productive.

Central to such training, especially in the USA, is Harvard University’s Race Implicit-Association Test. Don’t worry; you don’t need to understand what ‘Implicit-Association’ means. Focus on the word ‘Race’. It’s a test designed to show you if you are racist or not. I took the test three times over nine days. The process was the same each time but the games I was asked to play changed. Harvard insist they are measuring the same thing however many times you repeat the test. My third test result stated: “Your data suggests a strong automatic preference for White People compared to Black People. Well, I’m White; so maybe this is true. Except the first time I did the test, I was told “Your data suggests a moderate preference for Black People compared to White People. Well, maybe my time in ex-colonial Africa made me a wee bit ashamed of my pinko-white skin. And the second test? I was deemed “neutral”.

Millions of people, the majority of them US American, have taken this test on Diversity courses ever since it was invented by US social psychology researchers in 1998. Around 80% have been told that their test data suggests they are at least mildly racist, even if they think they are not. They are being conned. And when people realise they are being conned, as they increasingly are, they not only reject the test results, they reject all that they have been taught on these courses. And they are convinced they are not racist when in fact they may be.

Stereotyping of others is as old as the human race. Nigel Nicholson, evolutionary psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, had this to say in How Hardwired is Human Behaviour? in the July-August 1998 issue of the Harvard Business Review:

“To prosper in the clan, human beings had to become expert in making judicious alliances. They had to know whom to share food with, for instance – someone who would return the favour when the time came. They had to know what untrustworthy individuals generally looked like too, because it would be foolish to deal with them. Thus human beings became hardwired to stereotype people based on very small pieces of evidence, mainly their looks and a few readily-apparent behaviours...People naturally sort others into in-groups and out-groups – just by their looks and actions.

Yes, you read correctly: that was in the Harvard Business Review. Nicholson is not saying that we are born racist or biased in a specific way. But we are born to fear and distrust. If raised to fear and distrust people of a different colour, then we will do so. Research in the last fifteen years by neuroscientists and psychologists repeatedly shows that we are all prejudiced in some way, though they seem to prefer the word biased. But we are not all racist, not even 80% of us. We all have subconscious (or, if you prefer, implicit) biases. And explicit ones too. Accept this and we can start trying to solve the problems that such biases cause.

Most of the Diversity training on offer doesn’t work. University College London neuroscientist Lasana Harris had this to say about such training in an article entitled “Exposing Unconscious Bias” in an August 2020 issue of the New Scientist,: “...it doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. One is that it is usually mandatory, which means people are not motivated. The second reason is that it usually serves a legal checkbox function... they think ‘I’ve done unconscious bias training, so I’m not biased.’”

I have long known that Diversity training and the associated “initiatives” don’t make people less prejudiced. That’s because I was involved in a different kind of training for some thirty years from the late 1980s. This was cross-cultural training for business people.

Unfortunately human resources managers assumed that this was really the same as Diversity training and by the time I stopped running courses in 2017 cross-cultural training had been gutted of all that made it so effective. What had made it so potent and useful was my and my colleagues’ acceptance that people are, as Nigel Nicholson said, “hardwired to stereotype people”. Our job as trainers was to make our course participants understand why the stereotypical image that they might have of, say, the British, Germans or Chinese probably contained more than a grain of truth but was nevertheless of no value to them when working with people from a different culture. If they were to make a success of their relationships with these people, they had better know what, in general, made them tick, why they behaved and communicated in the way they did, and what they considered important. This was not about learning the do’s and don’ts of other cultures. Knowing that you shouldn’t show the sole of your shoe to your Arab colleague is not going to place you at an advantage when trying to persuade him to send you that report he promised weeks ago. Knowing how to use his own company’s hierarchy and his place in it is much more likely to have that report in your inbox by tomorrow.

Key to the success of this cross-cultural training was the use of role-play. On my Working with the Japanese courses I would ask the participants to describe a current problem they were having with their Japanese colleagues or clients. I would then choose an especially difficult case and ask the relevant participant to deal with the Japanese person causing them so much heartache. After they had said a few words about what their strategy would be, I would, in heavily-accented English, with lots of throat-clearing, interrupt with “Smith-san, you said you want meeting this morning…” and the gaijin would suddenly find herself in Tokyo having to deal with the problem she had so irritably outlined. Even in the early days any Training Manager watching would visibly cringe at my ham acting. But seldom the participants. It wasn’t unusual to get someone saying “That’s exactly what I have to deal with. How did you know?” Answer? “Because I had to cope with that kind of behaviour myself when running our Japanese office or negotiating with a Japanese client.” But increasingly I and my colleagues were told by training managers, especially US American ones, to stop all this acting. It was racist.

Not every participant appreciated my way of teaching either. A Dane criticised me heavily throughout a two-day course for exaggerating the difficulties he might face when working as Finance Manager for Novo Nordisk’s Japanese subsidiary and accused me of being racist. I had lunch with him in Tokyo three months later. He admitted that the course had been useful but I really had failed to get across just how difficult the Japanese were to work with. Fortunately, I have some knowledge of Danish culture and so had no hesitation in telling him very directly what I thought of his criticism. Novo Nordisk remained a client.

I was introduced to Diversity training before most Europeans. BP America were pioneers of it in the late 1990s and I was asked by BP in the UK to go over to Cleveland to sit in on a two-day Diversity course being run for their American staff. I was tasked to see if it could be run in the UK for BP’s staff there, suitably adapted for British sensibilities and issues. The twenty or so participants in Ohio were all White. Our trainer was a vast Black Texan. The course blurb told me I could expect all my prejudices to be examined. But, it was soon clear that there was only one prejudice that was on the menu for us White participants – racism. I didn’t object and nor did anyone else. Best to focus on the prejudice which has surely blighted more American lives than any other. Our trainer was charismatic, informative and very persuasive. We took no dodgy tests (IAT was in its infancy). We got a lot of statistics. We played games, most notably Prisoner’s Dilemma, though the relevance to racism of any of them was unclear. At no point were any of us made uncomfortable; forced, for example, to put ourselves in the shoes of an African American on the receiving end of discrimination at work. I asked our trainer at the end of the first day if we were going to do some role-play with him. “Too dangerous. People will get angry and upset” was the gist of his reply.

Was any of this training going to make a meaningful difference to the working lives of BP’s UK staff, especially those working out on the oil and gas platforms in the North Sea? Not unless the training did make people angry and upset by getting them to feel what it’s like to be at the wrong end of discrimination. “Too dangerous”, said the HR people in BP. “Not for us then”, I said. I never regretted walking away from what would have been a lucrative and prestigious training contract.

So, is there any kind of Diversity training which could make people less prejudiced, more willing to question their ingrained assumptions about The Other? Yes. But it would have to deal with people’s emotions, not just their intellect. Groups would need to be small and diverse, making it easier to confess being biased or being on the receiving end of discrimination. Realistic case studies should not simply be discussed and correct behaviour agreed upon. Participants should be made to deal with skilled actors playing the part of the prejudiced boss, the biased interviewer, the racist colleague. The key is to get people out of their own shoes and into those of someone who they may be biased against. Such a course would at least make the participants question their prejudices. 

Companies can do a lot to deal with discrimination in the workplace. Anonymised curriculum vitae and diverse interview panels can make it easier for the best people to be hired regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, class etc.. Being prepared to work abroad in different cultures should be encouraged and rewarded. It’s already well-known how much more productive teams are if their members don’t all look and sound the same (though only if they are well managed). But to really lessen the strength of one’s prejudices, there is one clear answer: get to know people in those “out-groups”. 

I was brought up to hate the Japanese. My father’s Royal Navy ship, seconded to the New Zealand navy in World War Two, was torpedoed by the Japanese in the Pacific. It didn’t sink but my father watched as many of his shipmates who had jumped into the water were strafed and killed by Japanese planes from a nearby aircraft carrier. My parents had close friends who had suffered terribly in Japanese PoW camps in south-east Asia. So, when asked in late 1989 to go and run my company’s Tokyo subsidiary, I initially refused. In the end I realised how stupid I was being. Here was a chance to live and work in an utterly different culture, something I usually relish doing. So, I went. Do I hate the Japanese now? Certainly not. Have I lost all my prejudice towards them? Not entirely; the values and world view of my Japanese friends are so different from mine. They admit openly to their prejudices towards foreigners. We should be as honest about our biases but keep questioning the assumptions that underlie those prejudices. In other words, stop prejudging people and their behaviour and ask yourself why they behave in the way they do. Be curious.