How modern diversity training betrays Dr. King's vision

Martin Luther King Jr. got some bad publicity this week regarding his sexual behavior. Why do we revere him? Chloé Valdary writes in City Journal,

King sought to defeat injustice by embracing love over hatred.

Underpinning King’s philosophy was his belief in the sanctity of the individual and the “amazing potential for goodness” within human beings. “We do not wish to triumph over the white community,” he wrote. “That would only result in transferring those now on the bottom to the top. But, if we can live up to nonviolence in thought and deed, there will emerge an interracial society based on freedom for all.”

Unfortunately, most major institutions’ diversity and inclusion programs ignore these lessons and betray King’s vision. Robin Di Angelo, an academic and diversity consultant who counts Amazon, Unilever, the YMCA, and the City of Oakland, among others, as clients, coined the term “white fragility,” calling it “inevitable” that whites are racist.

...In “The Current Crisis in Race Relations,” King wrote that “the important thing about a man is not the color of his skin or the texture of his hair but the texture and quality of his soul.” For Di Angelo, no distinction exists between skin and soul. She and other purveyors of such thinking embrace a reductive and repellent vision of racial guilt.

...What is the aim of diversity and inclusion training? Should it embrace the beloved community and its transcendent vision of human beings working through conflict—racial or otherwise? Or should it bring about a hierarchical inversion, in which one group of people is favored over another, which is perpetually castigated for sins, real or imagined? How we answer this question may shape our institutions, and the workplace, for decades to come.

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