Creating a Culture of Inclusion through Scientific Reasoning

BY MONA SUE WEISSMARK

WITH THE RISE OF THE BLACK LIVES MATTER (BLM) movement in 2020, government agencies, corporations, and universities and colleges began scrambling to show their support by instituting diversity and racial sensitivity training programs, not dissimilar to what Starbucks did in 2018 when they closed 8,000 stores to put 175,000 employees through an “anti-bias” training program in response to the media frenzy after two African American men were arrested while waiting for a business meeting to begin there.

Underlying such programs is the belief in the value of diversity and inclusion, and many organizations have taken steps to implement diversity training programs that subtly insist on ideological conformity and often silence open discussions. Neither measure is inclusive. The seemingly noble intention of encouraging inclusion is often subverted by agenda-driven trainings that leave little space for different perspectives or nuanced conversations.

This approach contradicts the very essence of the values they are trying to promote.

Most diversity and racial sensitivity training programs are not up to the task of developing truly inclusive environments because they do not foster psychological safety among their participants. I learned this the hard way at Harvard where, as a clinical and social psychologist, I brought adult children of Holocaust survivors together face-to-face with adult children of Nazis, as well as the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of African American slaves and slave holders, I documented the results in my 2004 book Justice Matters (made into a documentary in 2006) and more recently in my 2020 book The Science of Diversity.

The preponderance of diversity trainings begin with the assumption that we need to eliminate bias and prejudice by purging our “wrong” beliefs, such as those related to historical injustices, power differentials, race and gender differences, and so forth.