Does the DEI Paradigm Do More Harm Than Good?
Our new report at the Network Contagion Research Institute sheds some light.
More than half of American employees have “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) meetings or training events at work, costing an estimated $8 billion annually. In 2020, books by DEI superstars Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo were number 1 and 2 bestsellers. But is DEI programming creating more intergroup understanding and empathy?
In our newest report at the Network Contagion Research Center, titled, Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias, we examined whether ideas and rhetoric foundational to many DEI trainings foster pluralistic inclusiveness or exacerbate intergroup and interpersonal conflicts; whether they increase empathy and understanding or increase hostility towards members of groups labeled as oppressors.
Our findings indicate that the foundational themes underlying the DEI paradigm itself might do more harm than good.
One of the most obvious problems is that the DEI paradigm assumes racism is “systemic” — that racism is the norm rather than an aberrant violation of liberal democratic norms and ideals. DEI trainings might be teaching people to avoid wondering whether racism was present in a given scenario and instead believe that racism is present everywhere.
We found that on average, those exposed to anti-racist materials saw more racial bias in ambiguous scenarios where there was no evidence of bias than those who were not exposed to such material. They were also more likely to support requiring DEI training and even punishing perceived offenders.
Our paper was written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Times of London, The National Review, The New York Post, The New York Sun, Fox News, USA Today, and other news outlets as well as in social media posts, including by Marc Andreessen, Bill Ackman, and Elon Musk.
Once our research was made public, Kendi responded to Fox News:
“It comes as no surprise that Fox News would broadcast this pseudoscience that isn’t peer-reviewed, misrepresents my work, and is based on anchoring bias... This so-called study will end up in the historic landfill of pseudoscience alongside other attempts to bring scientific legitimacy to racist propaganda that anti-slavery and civil rights then, and DEI and antiracism now have been harmful.”
To my knowledge, Kendi has not undertaken any scientific examinations of the efficacy of his programs — or anything else for that matter — let alone authored a peer-reviewed scientific paper. So I’m not sure he’s the best arbiter of when peer review is necessary or what counts as “pseudoscience.” (As far as how faithfully we represented his work, we quoted him verbatim.)
Like those we studied who were presented with his work, Kendi perceived racism where no evidence of racism existed. To the contrary, we want to eliminate racism and intergroup hostility, and we don’t want organizations to promote programs that increase the likelihood of hostile attribution bias. So we looked into the effects of various DEI themes and programming.
Biologist Colin Wright did a deep dive into our findings on his Substack, Reality’s Last Stand. You can read it at the button below.
Happy Holidays! May 2025 be the year of increased compassion and the death of DEI as we know it.
(By the way, if you’re looking for a last-minute holiday gift, there’s always A Year of Kindness.)
More to come…
Wonderful! I lost my job for continuing to push back on DEI. My questions were:
What data supports the efficacy of these programs? What evidence of anti-black and racist systems are we going off of? Isn't a Land acknowledgement cultural appropriation? Why are we training on Implicit Bias when the IAT is not an effective tool and there is no proof of IB? What is AntiRacist about people telling me they know who I am based on my sex, race, and able-ness?
I said no to the KenDiAngelOkun paradigm and was forced out. Tema Okun is the author of White Supremacy Culture, It's Characteristics and its Antidotes. Terrible work. It claims.'Either, Or thinking' is White Supremacy. The same people using this say, you are 'either racist or antiracist, an oppressor or the oppressed' So the people who implement DEI have defined their own work as racist and white supremacist. So incomprehensible.
These two are the new sharpton and Jackson but with far greater arrogance and Ray cis ism. They are to intelligence what Luigi mangoni is to pacifism. Like all nonsense based on a need to grift, this dei silliness will soon go the way of the 1990 Consultancy Class that damn near ruined business with outsiders being paid fortunes to lead meetings on writing mission statements and other useless nonsense.