Sensitivity
Training as Multiculturalism: Where to Draw the Line?
By Francis Bartus
Posted 12/17/05
The diverse
composition of the United States population has posed many challenges
throughout the nation’s development.
Today, America is fighting to overcome a history of both de facto and
de jure segregation in order to offer equal
opportunity to people of all ethnoracial, socioeconomic, and religious
groups. The foremost venue in this
battle for integration is America’s private and public universities. In
recent history, universities have come to embrace the twin goals of diversity
and integration. However, with each step
toward greater diversity, universities have faced mounting challenges and
pressing questions. How should students
who suddenly find themselves immersed in a potpourri of different ethnoracial,
socioecomic, and religious groups be prepared to cope?
This
question cannot be answered without first examining the history of diversity on
America’s campuses. Ever since the 1960’s,
when the pro-diversity movement soon to become “multiculturalism” first began
to take hold, many of America’s universities have striven to create diverse
campus environments. In order to establish
a campus community that more accurately reflected the composition of the
broader U.S. population, major universities instated affirmative action policies
that attempted to diversify classes by granting advantages to under-represented
socioeconomic and ethnoracial groups.
However, affirmative
action policies sustained numerous legal challenges from angered whites. As a result, the motives behind affirmative
action policies have been rigidly defined through a series of Supreme Court
cases. In the landmark ruling Bakke v. Regents of the university of California,
the Supreme Court established a litmus test for affirmative action programs,
concluding that such policies could be constitutionally upheld only if their
end goal was not to remedy past wrongs perpetrated against ethnoracial
minorities (particularly African-Americans) but rather to enhance the
quality of the education of all students through diversity.1 The Bakke
ruling restricted the use of quotas and the later ruling, Gratz v. Bollinger, eliminated point-based
affirmative action systems.2 In
effect, these rulings redefined on-campus diversity as an educational goal,
rather than a means to achieve greater racial equality or remedy past
discrimination.
Yet with the
creation of greater on-campus diversity came the
question of how to deal with this newfound diversity. In the late 60’s and early 70’s, interpersonal
racism persisted on many college campuses, and there was a perceived necessity
for a new kind of education—one that would take place outside the traditional
academic sphere and help reframe the issue of race. Sensitivity training was born–quickly becoming
a staple of many college’s freshman orientation programs. On college campuses all over the country, new
students participated in various activities ranging from interactive exercises
to filmed documentaries in order to help them assimilate into a newly
diversified college environment that, in many cases, replaced an all-white or
all-black high school class. As time
passed and these programs became commonplace, a wide range of intellectuals and
academics began to criticize their assumptions.
The broader ideological underpinnings of these
narrowly-focused sensitivity training programs stemmed from the larger multiculturalism
movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which established a more diverse set of
required courses, broader definitions of hate speech, and an overall movement against
“political incorrectness.” The more
extreme multicultural beliefs and policies drew the ire and eloquence of
several conservative thinkers, chief among which was Alan Bloom, who’s 1987 The
Closing of the American Mind warned of the “moral decay” of college
campuses under multiculturalism.3 Though multiculturalists often brandish
Bloom’s reactionary rhetoric—exploiting it as a “straw man” argument—later critics,
such as Dinesh D’Souza and
Alan Kors, have continued to raise legitimate, more
sophisticated concerns over multiculturalism that cannot be easily dismissed in
a nuanced discussion. Sensitivity training,
as one of multiculturalism’s boldest and most controversial manifestations
deserves close examination under this critical light, and both its limits and
its potential should be explored.
In the 1985 Frontline
documentary A Class Divided, Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliot poses a difficult
question to her third-grade students. “Do you think you know how it would feel
to be judged by the color of your skin?” she asks. “Yeah,” a young white student readily replies. “No, I don’t you’d know how that felt unless
you’d been through it,” she counters, “It might be interesting today to judge
people by the color of their eyes…4”
Thus began Jane
Elliot’s famous ‘Blue Eyed’ experiment, one of the earliest, most
controversial, most influential studies in the psychology of racism. When she first performed the exercise on
April 5th, 1968—the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s
assassination4 –Elliot recalls that she wanted to teach her
all-white students in Riceville, Iowa, a “lesson in racism.5” First,
she divided the class into brown-eyed and blue-eyed groups. Lavishing praise upon the blue-eyed students,
she rewarded them for their achievements and granted them special privileges—reminding
the class that “blue-eyed people are better people. 4” Conversely, she
forced the brown-eyed students to wear collars and sit at the back of the
classroom. Her exercise aimed to teach
the children how it felt to bear the brunt of discrimination, but it had
another notable effect—within hours, blue-eyed
students were attributing their classmate’s mistakes to the color of their
eyes. “You will notice that we spend a
lot of time today waiting on brown-eyed students,” Elliot reminded her class.4 The
blue-eyed children nodded accordingly.
In
order to drive her lesson home, Elliot reversed the roles of the students on
the following day. She told them she was
wrong, and that brown-eyed people were actually the better people in the
room. Once they were granted the praise
and privileges lauded upon the blue-eyed members of the class the previous day,
their scores on a standardized test improved significantly. Countless psychologists and sociologists
interpret this result as a confirmation of the fact that minorities live down
to society’s low expectations—concluding that prejudices can become
self-fulfilling prophecies. Dr. Brian G.
Gilmartin writes of this effect in his book Shyness
& Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment:
In Ms. Elliott’s study an exalted
role had been superimposed over the blue-eyed youngsters. They had been defined
as having all the virtues, strengths and potentials; and they believed these
definitions of the situation. A disparaging role had been superimposed upon the
brown-eyed youngsters. And they similarly came to believe what they had been
told about themselves. Many sociologists today call this process the self-
fulfilling prophecy.11
In effect, according to Elliot and
those who politicize her findings, when white society expects minorities to
perform poorly academically, socially, or economically, minorities will conform
to these expectations, even to their own detriment.
After
provoking tremendous controversy in her home state of Iowa, Elliot went on to
become one of the leading voices for “diversity education” and sensitivity
training nationwide. Yet the politically
charged lessons she teaches to adults do not seem to match those she taught her
third graders. In fact, when invited to
speak at Kansas State University, she claimed that all whites are racist, saying
“if you want to see another racist, turn to the person on your right,” and
adding, “Now look at the person on your left.5” Ironically, Elliot’s study aimed to expose
the arbitrary nature of racial stereotypes, especially the dominant and
submissive roles assigned to individuals based solely on the color of their
skin. Yet the lessons she chooses to
teach as a diversity educator—encapsulated in the documentary Blue Eyed,
shown on college campuses nationwide—reinforce arbitrary roles of their own. Elliot’s philosophy pervades her lessons, contrasting
white racism with the learned helplessness of oppressed minorities and placing
the responsibility for minority under-achievement
on the shoulders of dominant whites.
Whether or not Elliot’s
claims remain relevant in today’s society, critics disagree over whether
universities should reinforce this philosophy of racial hierarchy. One particularly outspoken critic of Elliot,
Dr. Alan Kors, criticizes her philosophy in the
article ‘Thought Reform 101: The Orwellian Implications of Today’s College
Orientation.’ Author of The Shadow University:
The Betrayal of Liberty on American Campuses and
founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Kors questions whether Elliot’s approach to
multiculturalism stifles individual freedom and liberty. 6 Implying that
African-Americans have made significant progress in our society since 1968,
when de jure segregation had only recently
been abolished with the passage of the Voting Rights act and the two Civil
Rights Acts, Kors accuses Elliot of believing that
There truly is no hope… No one can
succeed by effort. Culture, society, and
politics are all static. ‘White
privilege’ controls all agencies of power, influence, and image, and uses all
the means that arise from these to render ‘people of color’ psychologically
impotent, confused, passive, and helpless. 5
Pointing to the rigid roles Elliot’s
teachings assign to blacks and whites, Kors claims
that she teaches only “helplessness and despair to blacks and only blood-guilt
and self-contempt to whites.5” The fault with her method, therefore,
lies in the fact that her lesson reinforces the racial inequalities she
so ardently wishes to dispel.
Kors’ criticisms highlight the classic controversy between
the conservative “agency” argument, which attributes responsibility for
outcomes to individual actions and choices, and the liberal “structure” argument,
which attributes responsibility for outcomes to societal structures and
government policy—two common approaches to minority issues. Assuming the agency argument, Kors claims that by reinforcing a strict structural
approach, teachings like Elliot’s threaten to stunt minority achievement by
stifling independent thought and effort.
By blaming whites for minority underachievement, Kors
argues, diversity educators remove personal responsibility from the equation
and remove incentives for independent thought and ambition.
Despite
Kors’ uncompromising tone, his article raises valid
concerns regarding the tendency of multicultural education to reinforce
stereotypical cultural assumptions and even teach helplessness at the cost of
individual identity. He is not alone in
his views; Kors joins a canon of new voices against
multiculturalism, including the prominent conservative author Dinesh D’Souza. In his book, Illiberal Education, D’Souza tackles the issue of multiculturalism on campus by
examining the effects of anti-hate speech rules and other issues. Though he focuses less on sensitivity
training than Kors, his argument echoes Kors’ criticism when he writes
In the name of pluralism
and equal opportunity, many of the most promising minority students are being
divided from the rest of the student population. The message they often learn in the
university is not that hard work and diligence can overcome barriers, but that
any failure on their part is due to the racism inherent in a corrupt society. Integration, the once-proud goal of the
civil rights movement, is depicted by the students and administration alike as
selling out one’s cultural heritage.7 (italics added)
Interestingly, D’Souza both echoes Kors agency
argument, citing the inherent danger in overemphasizing the effects of
discrimination, and adds a new dimension—the threat that these ideas lead to
self-segregation. He claims that by
increasing the emphasis on individual ethnic identity, students are cordoned
off from the rest of the school population, which starkly contradicts the university’s
efforts to achieve integration and diversity.
In fact, he claims, at some universities “segregated dormitories, which
were considered intolerable only twenty years ago, are now considered
fashionable.7”
At first, D’Souza’s
claim that minorities will simply self-segregate when faced with a
multiculturalist university seems confusing.
Rather than distinguishing between the constructive and destructive forms
of multicultural diversity education, D’Souza simply
dismisses them altogether. His argument
represents the far right-wing view that multiculturalism should be abolished
altogether. Critics who take D’Souza’s view deny the potential educational benefits of
diversity altogether, but in doing so, they raise
valid concerns about equally extreme multicultural ideologues like Elliot.
In such a polarizing debate, few
authors take the middle ground. Yet to
better clarify the problems with Elliot’s application of her study, it helps to
look to less extreme sources, like noted Afro-American studies professor and
essayist Gerald Early. In his essay American
Education and the Postmodernist Impulse, Early explains the potentially
negative consequences of placing too much emphasis on racial and ethnic
identity writing that
Through multicultural
education, students have a ‘minority’ group identity, elevated in this climate
to the status of a political and social good because of the moral claims that
students can make as victims of the Euro-metanarrative that condemned their
ancestry and heritage to marginality.8
Early argues that universities
should be careful not to elevate these moral claims too much, for if they do,
minority students will forever assimilate to the role of victim—an argument
similar to Kors’.
Moreover, such an emphasis on minority victimization threatens the
quality of the education of the students themselves. According to Early, the problem lies in the
goals of these multiculturalist programs.
“Multiculturalism,” he argues, “does not aim to provide students with a
body of knowledge that might make them useful to society, but a certain psychological
state that would make them useful to themselves.8” Thus, over-emphasis
of racial victimization through mandatory sensitivity training redefines the university
as counselor rather than educator, providing a certain sense of minority group
identity and victimhood at the expense of an
empowering education as an individual.
Yet though Elliot’s commonly
accepted brand of diversity education appears counterintuitive to the goals of integration
and minority empowerment, would it not be more harmful to simply ignore
on-campus racism? After all, despite its
evolution into an entire philosophy of racial reeducation, the original purpose
of Elliot’s exercise was to eradicate white racism by making whites the victims
rather than the perpetrators. Yet even
multiculturalism’s proponents have come to question racial reeducation’s
effectiveness. The pro-multiculturalism Journal
of Blacks in Higher Education published a brief article entitled ‘Racial
Sensitivity Training May Be Futile at the College Level,’ which reads
Standard doctrine counts racial harmony and
ethnic tolerance as two ideals toward which a democratic society should
strive. The pursuit of these ideals has
led hundreds of colleges and universities to train students in racial
sensitivity. But such efforts may be of
limited value. A 1993 study… presented
75 white children between the ages of four and nine with stereotypic and counterstereotypic stories. …The results are striking. The children remembered 87 percent of the
story information consistent with cultural stereotypes as opposed to only 58
percent of the counterstereotypic story information.9
The article concludes that though
the eradication of racism is a noble goal, the study showed the children learn
their racial stereotypes too early in life to be affected by racial sensitivity
training in a classroom environment.
Thus, it seems
natural to conclude that Jane Elliot’s particular brand of racial sensitivity
training harms all who are involved—reinforcing social stereotypes which
encourage minority under-achievement while simultaneously failing to adequately
dispel the racism it aims to counter. Rather
than emphasize the most useful part of her study, focusing on the arbitrary
nature of racial stereotypes, Elliot simply rewrites those stereotypes to fit
her own views. By reinforcing these
ethnoracial boundaries and imposing a strict structuralist
viewpoint that leaves minorities helpless at the mercy of a hateful society,
Elliot ignores the successful agency of many prominent minorities—like Colin
Powell or Barack Obama, who
ascended the political ladder in spite of what Elliot would doubtlessly
perceive as his ‘racial handicap.’
Yet larger issues
than mere sensitivity training are at stake in this discussion. The pressing fact remains that America’s two
largest minority groups—African-Americans and Latinos—continue to face distinct
socioeconomic disadvantages in our society.
In fact, as recently as 2001, 21.4% of Latinos and 22.1% of
African-Americans lived below the poverty line—versus only 7.8% for whites.10 Clearly, members of both of these groups face
a myriad of barriers and challenges, which higher education has the potential
to address. As these socioeconomic
disparities persist in a society that has long since abolished de jure discrimination, the question of “what should be
done?” becomes more and more difficult to answer. Throughout this essay, I have enumerated the
disadvantages to Jane Elliot’s ‘Blue Eyed’ experiment in an attempt to reveal
the inherent problems in multicultural education. But the question remains—how does one
distinguish between productive and counter-productive multiculturalist
initiatives?
Recall
the Bakke decision. This landmark affirmative action case set
clear cut guidelines for public universities, the moral ramifications of which
can be applied to multicultural initiatives of all types. As it is interpreted today, the case simply
states that affirmative action must be pursued solely for the educational
benefit of every individual student.
The same must hold true for multiculturalist initiatives. One of the biggest ironies of racial
discourse in America reveals itself in any discussion of racial sensitivity
training. Despite the countless hours of
discussion and thousands of pages of books devoted to the discussion of race in
America, Elliot’s narrow-minded racial sensitivity training continues to
dominate. Rather than continuing to
teach “diversity education” that simply labels whites as racist and blacks as
helpless, multiculturalist educators owe it to their students to find new ways
to redefine preconceived notions of race through individual interaction and
real-life experience—not through hierarchical labels. It would be wise to remember always that the
role of the university should not be to right past wrongs—nor to boost the
self-esteem and self-worth of minority students—but rather to provide the best
possible education to every individual student.
Multiculturalism
will doubtlessly play a large role in higher education for decades to come, as
the perceived necessity for racial sensitivity remains. It is imperative, then, that an open, honest
discourse recognizes diversity training as one of the most problematic aspects
of higher education. Proponents of
multiculturalism must be willing to root out the “bad apples” in an effort to
discover newer, more creative solutions to a persistent problem. And rather than remaining stuck in the 60’s,
diversity educators must recognize and teach the significant progress that has
already been made toward racial equality.
Our students deserve it.
Endnotes