In his most recent New York Times column David Brooks spends more than 700 words explaining that the science tells us that racial sensitivity training doesn’t work before getting around to his point:
People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways we will never understand or be able to plan. Decades ago, the social psychologist Gordon Allport wrote about the contact hypothesis, that doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds. It’s how new emotional bonds are formed, how new conceptions of who is “us†and who is “them†come into being.
The superficial way to change minds and behavior doesn’t seem to work, to bridge either racial, partisan or class lines. Real change seems to involve putting bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood. That’s national service programs. That’s residential integration programs across all lines of difference. That’s workplace diversity, equity and inclusion — permanent physical integration, not training.
This points to a more fundamental vision of social change, but it is a hard won lesson from a bitterly divisive year.
I want to disagree both with his conclusion that racial sensitivity training doesn’t work and with his proposals for improving things. The training is working fine. It’s employing people at good wages who would otherwise be waiting tables or serving through the drive-up window of a fast food joint. Those people then form a nexus for political organization.
And his proposal that national service would solve our problems founders on the reefs of reality. Our military has been integrated for 70 years. There is ample scientific evidence that there’s still racial and ethnic bigotry in our military.
Perhaps he’s starting with the wrong people. I propose that the people who need to be re-educated are the people who are making the policies rather than the poor shmucks who are following them. Many of them are the same people whose definition of a “better school” is one with fewer blacks and Hispanics. That’s the reason being located in New Trier Township boosts the value of a house by six figures.
Brooks seems to infer that people who save their money to move away from bad people or dangerous neighborhoods are defective or deceptive in their motives.
He laments that professional persuasion isn’t strong enough to bring them around to his way of thinking and recommends coercion.
Thank you, Mr Brooks.