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Antiracism Campaigns: Twenty Years of Making Racism Worse
Antiracism is like bloodletting: it makes the problem worse.
If you google “is diversity training effective?” the first hits are about how it’s not or how it might be changed in the hope of making it effective. It continues to be an enormously profitable industry despite decades of failure.
Studies over twenty years come to the same conclusion: Antiracism fails because it reduces complex problems to race, which strengthens the idea that race matters enormously.
In 1998, a government study in Australia found,
The problem with anti-racism campaigns is that there is no clearly understood or agreed method of changing people’s prejudices, values, attitudes or behaviour. What is known is that direct confrontation is likely to be counter-productive. … In 1997 the Council of Europe coordinated a year of anti-racism campaigns and activities throughout Europe. A survey at the end of the year, conducted in European Union countries by the polling organisation Eurobarometer, found that rather than a decline in racism, it had been marked by a growing willingness on the part of Europeans to openly declare themselves as racist.
A 2011 study at the University of Toronto found a similar result:
Aggressive anti-racism campaigns might…
