How science proves killing DEI won’t turn the U.S. into a color-blind meritocracy

[ResidentialBusiness]

Over the past few years, the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has taken on an almost mythological resonance. Although it describes a set of recruitment tactics and employee resources aimed at creating a vibrant, respectful work culture, critics have tried to paint it as a mechanism for elevating unqualified people to prominent positions solely based on race or gender.

In politics, DEI has become an all-purpose boogeyman, blamed for any number of tragedies in the United States. The anti-DEI hostility has reached a fever pitch at the top of Donald Trump’s second term, with an onslaught of executive orders meant to surgically remove DEI policies from both government and the private sector, and supposedly “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.”

[Image: Abrams Press]

But a new book, The Science of Racism, demonstrates just how pervasive racism is in society. Author Keon West, a professor of social psychology at the University of London, didn’t set out to write his book—due out later this month—with the current circumstances in mind. His goal at the outset was just to provide anyone flailing in conversations about racism a set of objective facts about what’s actually happening on a macro level. (As opposed to relying solely on personal experience, podcast banter, or vibes.)

It’s a statistics-packed tour through the rigorous world of scientific studies about racism in the workplace and beyond. It also happens to be a timely antidote to a set of beliefs that are on track to becoming conventional wisdom in the U.S.

“The recent executive orders banning DEI movements say they will create an America where everyone is treated with equal dignity and respect,” West says. “And they wouldn’t be able to say it if they had a population who knew that’s absolutely nonsense. It’s not even close to true.”

Researching racism

West can confidently make such statements because he’s spent years both conducting and digging through international scientific experiments that reveal how racism manifests in society. These experiments, he argues, boil down all the nuanced discussion and noise around race into a simple question: In a given situation in which a Black person and a white person are otherwise identical, would one of them receive detectably favorable treatment?

To test that prediction, West lays out a wealth of randomized, controlled trials—experiments in which every detail is exactly the same, except for the race of the person at its center. The most common of these is “the CV test,” where researchers send out hundreds of résumés in two batches that are identical save for a name that appears to indicate the applicant’s race—to determine which one gets more and better responses.

Like clockwork, a news story about the latest CV test will go viral every year or so, but as West points out, researchers have been conducting these tests since at least the 1950s. Rather than rely on findings from any one trial, he plumbs the results of dozens—including a 2017 meta-analysis of 28 studies, which found white applicants in America receiving, on average, 36% more callbacks than Black applicants with the same qualifications.

If such statistics seem surprising in their bluntness, perhaps it’s because they’re too often omitted from conversations about race in favor of more sensational points of contention.

“In America, there’s always been a vague tendency to ignore these studies, and that’s what I find interesting,” West says. “It’s not that people talk about them and refute them, they just don’t talk about them. And because of that, I wasn’t terribly surprised at how powerful and how swift the DEI backlash could be.”

The myth of color blindness

As a result of that backlash, whatever meager safeguards against racial bias U.S. offices have cultivated over the years are currently being dismantled. Instead of achieving Trump’s stated goal of becoming “color-blind,” ending DEI gives companies and managers permission to ignore white people receiving favorable treatment.

“Color blindness is incredibly attractive because it allows people to stop thinking about racism,” West says. “It localizes a problem internally—If I don’t notice race, then it’s done. But of course, you do notice race. Everybody does.”

West’s statements are backed by reams of research. An entire chapter of The Science of Racism explores just how color-blind people actually tend to be—and the results do not bode well for a coming so-called meritocracy. In a 2006 experiment, for instance, a group of white people were recruited to play a game similar to the board game Guess Who?. Teams of two were positioned across from each other, each looking at an array of 32 faces in photos. The object of the game was to determine which face their partner had chosen, using as few questions as possible. The results were rather telling. 

Whenever a participant was teamed with a fellow white partner, they mentioned race in one of their clues 94% of the time. When one was paired with a Black partner (a ringer who was in on the experiment), they mentioned race only 64% of the time. As West notes, what experiments like this one reveal is the opposite of color blindness—an impulse in white people to create an illusion of color blindness in the presence of a Black person.

Everyone is aware of race—some people just know when it’s advantageous to pretend not to be. 

Now that DEI is firmly in the crosshairs, the way that workers, managers, and executives either notice race, or pretend not to notice it, is bound to change. Of course, nothing yet suggests that the ideas behind the controversial acronym have been snuffed out for good. As a sociologist who has studied behavioral patterns over time, West is confident that a similar movement will come along to replace DEI in due course.

“I think a reframing is inevitable,” he says. “The problem remains that we don’t live in a meritocracy. When people do the same work, they don’t get the same pay or the same rewards. And so whatever the name becomes, we’ll have to come up with another way of fighting [bias].”

“When we do, though,” he adds, “I hope we’re better at presenting the evidence for why we have to.”

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