WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH MATT YGLESIAS IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Yglesias: A good way to reduce racism might be to do away with mandatory diversity training.

His second bullet point is the one that caught my eye: “Doing fewer diversity trainings would, based on the evidence, likely somewhat reduce racism.” That’s just a restatement of what he’s argued above, i.e. if anti-racism training is counterproductive then a genuine anti-racist would seek to stop requiring such training, but it’s still striking.

This is where the rubber really hits the road but instead of drilling down on what seems like a key point, Yglesias sort of moves on. But the obvious point here is that anti-racism is now big business. It’s an industry with high-profile thought leaders and hundreds of individual trainers offering variations on a theme for a price. DEI has also become a growing career path for people which often seems to amount to the same messages and approaches but delivered by people who are part of the company rather than hired guns from outside.

All of these people are committed to the concept of anti-racism and I suspect few would agree that their work is counter-productive. But what if you could demonstrate that it is? Would their commitment to anti-racism lead them to abandon their own jobs? Or would they stay on the career path regardless of what the research says? To put a fine point on it, what does Robin DiAngelo believe about the efficacy of her own work? Given that she’s now made a tremendous amount of money off her workshops and bestselling book, would it be possible to get her to admit her methods are counterproductive?

What, and give up all the opportunities for grift? White fragility writer Robin DiAngelo charges an average of $14,000 per speech and makes ‘$728K a year.’