Many public and private institutions and workplaces are turning to alleged anti-racist training materials and providers that endorse the idea of unconscious bias, which is itself based on a scientifically discredited concept of implicit association tests. The result, argues Carrie Clark at Spiked Online, can only be more resentment:
The test seemed to show that vast swathes of people were still ‘unconsciously’ racist, in spite of the dramatic decline in racist attitudes over the past 25 years.
The diversity industry has grown to be hugely profitable. It is now worth a cool $8 billion a year in the United States. Assisted by the IAT’s veneer of scientific respectability, unconscious-bias training has been marketed as an essential tool for any business serious about addressing racial inequality.
But reams and reams of research have discredited the IAT, undermining the entire premise of unconscious-bias training in the process. Time and again, meta-analysis has failed to find a correlation between a person’s score on the IAT and how discriminatory their behaviour is.