Harvard Bias toward Rainbows and Harmony

Phooey.

Lets posit the unthinkable.  Let's imagine that, just possibly, something that should work and something that just feels right, backfires.    

What if celebrating diversity doesn't actually work?

Southern Oregon Multicultural Fair:  Celebrate Diversity

We can even raise the stakes of the unthinkable disaster even higher.  We can note that my wife is a leader in the local Multicultural Commission in Southern Oregon and is busy at this very moment organizing yet another annual Multicultural Fair, devoted to celebrating the diversity that exists in southern Oregon.   She believes in this.  I believe in this.

I am briefly visiting Harvard again and Harvard is a place of academic learning and it represents symbolically some things:  academic rigor, establishment power and privilege, and a studied and conscious effort to exhibit virtue.   Fifty years ago they wanted the virtue of geographical diversity, which is perhaps why I was admitted, along with racial diversity as they understood it then, which was to be certain to admit Afro-Americans.  Today their signaling of virtue leads them to bestow JFK School honors onto Chelsea Manning, a transgender soldier who released secret documents and became simultaneously honored and prosecuted for it.  Transgender is part of the new diversity.

Harvard celebrates diversity.  Liberals celebrate it.  We know the doctrine: Humans are different and it is OK, and we are stronger for it.

Emphasize differences, or emphasize similarities

I attended an intensive presentation of data at the JFK School by race and gender researcher Ashley Martin from Columbia University.   She reviewed other studies and carried out some of her own, using anonymous interviews with hundreds of men and women.  Some were "primed" for the questionnaire by being informed that--at bottom--everyone is really pretty much alike and equal, and that the differences between kinds of people--races or gender--are trivial, especially compared to variation among people.  This is the "We-are-all-alike" group.

Other people were told the rainbow story, that different groups of people have different skills and attributes and perspectives they bring to the table and that organizations are stronger when we include these various people.   This is the "celebrate-diversity" group.

The results of the studies were confounding and frustrating to the Harvard audience.  She reported that on matters of race there was a modest reduction of racial biases when diversity was celebrated, because respondents concluded there were different environmental and cultural differences between groups.  People had different life experiences, which were useful to include.    Yet on issues of gender the reverse happened.  When the differences between men and woman were noted it increased gender bias among both male and female respondents.  People concluded the differences were inborn.  Men are men and women are women, and men lead and women follow.  Men are strong and women are cooperative.   When asked to make potential hiring decisions the respondents who were primed to consider gender diversity preferred to hire men for jobs requiring leadership.

Men are men; women are women

Yikes!

The data was credible, but unwelcome.  The researcher's extraordinary professionalism and deft manner of describing her research technique and statistical analysis was hugely credible, but her conclusions are counter to policy, practice, and assumed virtue.  Besides, how can there be a rainbow of vive la difference on race, but not gender?  Go back to women-only colleges, but racially integrated?  Can businesses in their HR diversity training praise racial diversity but glide over gender?   It is a mess.  Operationally, it doesn't work.  And if consciousness of differences backfires then the one big virtuous solution, inclusion and celebration, is actually counterproductive.  

To pick up on the theme started in yesterday's post, my own observations--anecdotal and undisciplined and un-verifiable--is that emphasis on differences, both gender and racial, backfired, at least in the political realm where the swing voters on the margin are low information, low engaged people.

There are a great many people, those living in coastal cities and in diverse workplaces, for whom the rainbow-diversity idea works.  They vote blue.  They are culturally liberal and modern.  But for people who are culturally conservative exposure to diversity appears to have the opposite effect.  They hunker down.  They close in.  They have heightened sense of their own identity.   Trump's discussion of immigration and scary Muslims and job-taking Mexicans resonated.  They identify with white policemen, doing a hard, frightening job, not with the dark-skinned person at the traffic stop.  

My own observational takeaway:  Reminding people of differences is not a reliable way to create racial and gender justice.  Ashley Martin's data suggests I am only half right, but I have the 2016 election result on my side. Plus, this information, just released from Reuters.  People say they oppose white nationalism, but in significant numbers they share suspicion that inter-racial marriage is a bad thing, they think whites are discriminated against and they are eager for America to preserve its white Christian heritage: Reuters Poll

Meanwhile, back at the Multicultural Fair, I will attend with enthusiasm, I will be proud of my wife for organizing it, I will continue to help underwrite it, and I consider it important and worth doing.   Gentle, earnest people meet and are exposed to different religions and cultures.  Mexican, Central American, Native American booths; food venders with Greek, Peruvian, Korean cuisine; music from all over.

Maybe it helps create a more fair, just world, at least among the people who choose to attend.  It displays the rainbow and it celebrates it.  I suspect it preaches to the choir.

Fox News Story

This view of harmony is not what everyone experiences.   Even peaceful, celebrations celebrate differences.   Strange food.  People speaking foreign languages.  A tapestry, not a melting pot, because the lumps in the pot differ, and are unfamiliar.

And there are institutions with an interest in keeping the anxiety amped up.  Conservative TV, talk radio, an anti-immigrant chorus.   They have a core audience, but they show images and ideas that go out beyond that core.

Those people see strange things and they see violence, and they close ranks.