Capitalism is getting all sorts of makeovers these days. There’s woke capitalism, crony capitalism and now there’s also the burgeoning industry of woke crony capitalism. Basically it’s a nexus of corporations, government bureaucrats, public universities, and lawyers working to push expensive mandated diversity and anti-racism training on as many workers and students as possible. With President Donald Trump recently calling critical race theory training “un-American propaganda” and blocking funding for it at any federal agency, the subject is more topical than ever.
Anti-racist training generally consists of a day-long or multi-day session and focuses on combating implicit and explicit racial (and sometimes gender and sexual-orientation) bias at an organization. Themes like white privilege, unconscious bias, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and systemic racism loom large as topics for presentation and discussion. Much of the training rests on now scientifically discredited ideas such as “implicit bias,” developed decades ago by psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji. The theory argues that 90 to 95 percent of people are subconsciously biased and must be disentangled from the “unconscious roots of prejudice.”
Although anti-racism training has rocketed to national prominence following the death of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, it had already been surging for decades. The current moment is simply an intensification of what’s already been going on: the basic teaching that white people are inherent vessels of racial prejudice and oppression and that minority individuals are an inherent victim class.