Can We Mend Diversity Training?

Organisations such as MEND and Stonewall can no longer be allowed to dominate diversity training. The potential solution may surprise you.

Can we Mend Diversity Training

The Jewish Chronicle revealed this past week that MEND, who are known Islamists, are being hired by universities, by police forces, and all sorts of people to provide diversity training against Islamophobia. This has been criticised because MEND promotes many beliefs that are widely held to be offensive. For example, their director called Jihadi John (the Isis murderer) “a beautiful young man” and they have hosted speakers who have promoted homophobia and legitimised the killing of “infidels”. In spite of this, MEND cofounded Islamophobia Awareness Month in the UK and it is hard to find diversity training materials to do with Islamophobia that do not quote them.

Of course, as a liberal, I understand the importance of allowing people to speak even when I find their views offensive. We need an objective argument against MEND, one that can be applied consistently to other organisations and does not depend on emotional reasoning. Otherwise, it just becomes another conflict in identity politics, and trust me, Jews as a small minority can never win at that game.

In this article, I argue that there is a strong objective argument against the involvement of organisations like MEND in diversity training. This argument requires us to understand the difference between diversity training (as commonly practiced) and other sorts of training and education where we can be more relaxed about the moral character of speakers. Expressions of “offensive” and contentious views by those involved in diversity training are not equivalent to those made by academics, or by members of the public.

Moral Power

As I argued previously, within an academic setting, it is very important that people can say all sorts of things that we might find upsetting, short of actual harassment, incitement etc. The only caveats are that (1) you must respect the academic process, meaning that those who challenge you (within reason) are not punished or silenced / abused and (2) you should not engage in outright falsehoods (and if you do, rule 1 means that you can be challenged).

If somebody from MEND wanted to come and do a talk at a university, as long as there was not good reason to fear they would engage in incitement (such as threatening homosexual students on campus or encouraging others to do so), they should absolutely be allowed to speak. I would defend their right to speak, providing there were strong academic sanctions against any students who shouted down, threatened or otherwise bullied those who disagreed with the speaker.

As I have argued previously, whether your views are worthy of respect depends on how you deal with disagreement, so that the same view expressed by two different speakers may be worthy of respect in one case but not in the other. If you cannot behave in an appropriate manner for a member of the academy, then you have no business being at a university. It’s not about what you believe (again failing things such as incitement).

But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about diversity training, which is moral training. Moral training is very different from academic engagement. We are talking about being educated to make a judgment, so when we hear someone speak, we know whether that speech is or is not prejudiced. We are being educated in how we should or should not speak about a particular group - how to avoid causing offense and how to recognise what is offensive in the speech of others.

Unlike a regular teacher, a diversity trainer has ideological authority over you. You are there to be educated in the correct beliefs. Those who refuse to be educated are labelled as morally bad - they are bigots. Within an academic setting, if somebody says something contentious, you are allowed to argue back. Not so when you are being taught not to be racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic or the like. This is akin to how, in the pre-liberal West, people were taught what religious beliefs to have, and if you did not believe the right thing then you were bad – you might be damned or worse yet tried for heresy.

Of course the consequences today are not as serious (at least in the West) as in preliberal times, but people can lose friends and livelihoods for failing to agree with such training. “Hate speech” can even lead to jail time in some cases, which means that those who define what constitutes “hate speech” possess real power, which like all power can lead to abuse.

Of course you may argue back that it is good not to be prejudiced and such training is merely teaching people how to be better people. And most of the things people are taught to believe in such training may in some cases be good and correct. The motivation for such training may be entirely benign – to increase social solidarity and reduce hatred between groups. It is wrong to be prejudiced, to judge judge people by the colour of their skin or by their religion or by their sexual orientation etc. and not by the content of their character. Of course. But surely we know all that without specialised training?

Even given that the beliefs taught are good ones, we have to ask: In a liberal society, is it ever (1) appropriate or (2) effective to hold training sessions where you force people to pay lip service to a belief that you wish them to hold. Certainly, outside of insular communities, this sort of thing has limited effectiveness when it comes to religion. So many people have gone through religious indoctrination and then rebelled against it. There is now significant evidence emerging that diversity training is often ineffective or can even back-fire as people find any sort of indoctrination to be oppressive and training can even increase divisions between ethnic groups.

But leaving aside the issue of effectiveness, the power differential raises enormous red flags. We all know that power corrupts. Just this past week, Lord Ian Austin was suspended from the Midland Heart Housing Association (where he had been the chair) after MEND accused him of “Islamophobia” for calling Hamas a “death cult of Islamist murderers and rapists”. This was apparently Islamophobic because he mentioned Islam. Lord Austin insisted that the criticism itself was offensive to Muslims as he made a distinction between Muslims and Islamists, whereas MEND was blurring that distinction.

In 2021, a teacher at Batley Grammar School was accused of Islamophobia and received death threats after showing a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed in a class on blasphemy. This was an image that had been presented previously by other teachers - there was no misconduct here. This was clearly an incident of causing offense, nothing to do with hatred of Muslims. Yet to this day, MEND continues view this as incident of Islamophobia. The teacher remains in hiding.

That Islamists such as MEND have capitalised on Islamophobia prevention to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws or to silence criticism of Islamic extremism should come as no surprise.

Neither should we be surprised that organisations such as Stonewall have used “LGBTQIA+” diversity training to enforce the view that those who are homosexual in the original sense of being attracted to members of the same sex are “sexual racists” or “genital fetishists”, thus denying the legitimacy of the very group for which they were originally founded. Similarly, Stonewall has promoted the idea that it is transphobic to assert the primacy of biological sex over gender identity, a matter over which at the very least one should be able to disagree. Many organisations have now left Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme, but Stonewall remains a major provider of diversity training even now and many still accept its guidance unquestioningly.

Individuals or Institutions?

Most providers of diversity training would probably admit that the main effects of their training tend not to be on changing the minds of individuals, but rather to reduce what is viewed as institutional bias. Thus businesses receive advice on how to reduce structural racism by changing hiring practices and, for example, adopting more flexible dress codes regarding hair care so that black employees are not wrongly labelled “unprofessional”. Businesses receive advice on how to be more trans inclusive by allowing employees to dress in a manner that is comfortable to them, mandating pronouns in email bios and switching to gender neutral toilets.

Schools are encouraged to adopt flexibility for Muslim students during Ramadan to accommodate fasting (and breaking the fast). Political parties are advised on how to reduce institutional Islamophobia by among other things, disciplining party members who suggest that Islamists might have undue influence on this or that politician. Organisations are advised that the Equality Act requires them to prevent employees or participants from publicly stating a belief in the reality of biological sex because this could cause offense. And yes businesses are also advised on what reasonable accommodations should be made for Jewish employees who observe the Sabbath, and that it is antisemitic to question whether Jews are biased towards Israel and therefore less loyal to Britain.

Many of these examples appear entirely laudable, but mixed in with them is advice that constitutes a real abuse of power and even distortion of equality law. Stonewall have been particularly criticised for providing misleading legal advice that seeks to change the application of the Equality Act by default to reflect what Stonewall “would prefer the law to be, rather than the law as it is”. The difficulty here is how to encourage the good practices while preventing the abuses.

Keeping out Bad Actors

Many critics of diversity training respond to the abuses outlined above by arguing that these sorts of trainings should not happen at all. I am torn about this because I know that there is good practice out there, but how do we keep the bad actors out? Certainly, if diversity training is to occur, the appropriateness test for viewpoints and for trainers must be set very high. When you are not allowed to disagree with them, it really does matter when opinions offend you. If training is of a moral nature (rather than being standard education), it is necessary that any views expressed have broad agreement across society and are not contentious. (For example, we can all agree that children should be taught to be kind to each other etc. but again do we need diversity trainers to learn that?)

An analogy can be made to how religious organisations vet the beliefs and stated views of their leaders. Because a religious leader has the authority to tell people what they should believe, you have to study carefully such a person's beliefs and what they're going to teach, and you must check that this will be in line with the values of your religious organisation. The more moral authority they have, the more you have to vet their beliefs. Those with moral authority also learn to distinguish between personal statements and authoritative statements, so that their dependents do not feel pressurised to conform with the former (and so that they do not face complaints). Anyone in such a line of work knows the tightrope one must walk.

By comparison, a professor at a university is not treated as a moral authority and you're allowed to question them and to speak back, so one can and one must be much more relaxed about what they think. In fact it is very important to do that, because then we get multiple viewpoints and we experience interesting debates and we progress in the pursuit of knowledge. In religious settings that are ideologically liberal and more like universities, the views of the rabbi or priest or imam will be less relevant in a hiring decision, and the leader will have more latitude in what they can say publicly. One can think of a spectrum from perhaps the Pope on one end to a junior lecturer at the other end.

Diversity trainers fall on this spectrum closer to the Pope than to lecturers. They must be scrutinised in a similar manner to religious leaders, but in this case it is to make sure that they believe in diversity and buy into the core values that make our liberal society function - democracy and freedom of expression. If all is as it should be, these are the priests of Liberalism, the value system that holds our diverse society together. Otherwise, one cannot make an argument for giving such individuals such moral power.

It is critical that such trainers do not have a supremacist view of their group over other groups, that they are not just there to promote their own corner and enhance their own power at the expense of others. They must truly believe in diversity, so that they do not use their position to promote discriminatory views and stereotypes about other groups.

Islamists are therefore not appropriate people to conduct any diversity training, as their belief system intrinsically opposes diversity and (by their own admission) freedom of expression. When such individuals are in charge, we should expect that they will abuse their power to pursue Islamist aims. We should expect that they will gaslight us into enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws, for fear that if we do not do so, we are being Islamophobic. The question to me is whether it is possible to have Islamophobia training at all in the UK, given that the main promoter of such training is not fit to provide it. I want the answer to be yes, but if we push out MEND, how are we to know that the next provider will be any more appropriate? Entryism is a real risk here.

A Better Way: Religious Education as a Model

Now many respond to these questions by arguing for the abolition of all diversity training, because the risk of such training being captured by bad actors is almost a certainty and the very notion of priests of Liberalism is an oxymoron. If you take that view, where does that leave Jews who want to justify anti-Semitism training? What about antisemitism education? What about learning the history of racism and slavery? What about religious education (something I believe is very valuable in our diverse society)?

I must admit that I am actually not sure whether there is any purpose to training that specifically seeks to make people less antisemitic. I do not see good evidence that such training actually works any better than other diversity training. It did not appear to make much difference in the UK Labour Party - the worst offenders just left and when they come back they will be unchanged or perhaps worse. Again, this is something over which I feel very torn and I would need to review the evidence to come to a clear view.

However, there is something we can do, that I believe is more constructive in fighting prejudice and division, while at the same time it is less vulnerable to capture by bad actors, and fully compatible with liberalism. I earn my crust organising visits to schools. We teach them about Judaism, and about Jews and how we live. We do not do anti-Semitism training. We teach religious education (RE), which is not the same as indoctrination. All good RE teachers understand this distinction, and schools regularly vet RE speakers to make sure that they will not engage in indoctrination.

I am not saying that such Judaism lessons are irrelevant to antisemitism and play no social role. In fact, if you educate people about what Judaism is, about what Jews believe, about the historical and religious connection between Jews and the Land of Israel, then that teaching inoculates them against prejudice based on falsehoods.

If you have a good understanding of Judaism and Jews, then when Jews are treated badly, when Jews get flak for supporting Israel, people who understand what it is like to be Jewish will be less likely to take an antisemitic position on things, because their knowledge of Jewish people inoculates them against the antisemitic view. Moreover, having learned about Judaism from a Jew will humanise Jews to them so that we are less “the other” and more “the neighbour”.

The key thing about such teaching is that it does not demand ideological agreement; nor does it shame those who ask questions. Students often ask very difficult and thoughtful questions. In fact a crucial part of any RE teaching is that you are literally teaching children that it is OK that I believe one thing and you believe something else and we both respect that difference. When we do RE well, we are literally teaching liberalism by practicing it.

Similarly, if people have a basic understanding of Muslims and Islam, if they know that Muslim women often wear a hijab (and why this matters to them) and they understand Muslim sensitivities about pork products, that Muslims feel a sense of brotherhood with Palestinians so take things personally in Gaza, all of these things will help to inoculate people against Muslim-hatred when they encounter it. The best protection against prejudice is knowledge — Good judgment means that we should not prejudge people.

The same applies to all sorts of groups within society. For example, I can see the value of people learning that autistic / neurodiverse people often respond differently to stimuli from what others may view as “normal”. So particularly police need to know that if a person seems very distressed and they might be displaying autistic traits, reacting in the way that you otherwise consider normal could make the situation worse and could even have deadly consequences. This is psychological education, not training in how not to hate autistic people.

I’m pretty sure that almost all “diversity training” to do with neurodiversity takes this sensible form. I am also sure that there is some Islamophobia training that also is essentially RE as outlined above. If so, then good. That is the good practice we should encourage.

Just as schools carefully vet speakers who provide religious education, I suggest that we need to vet any organisation that seeks to provide diversity education to businesses, government departments or non-profits, to make sure that their approach is to educate and not to indoctrinate. They must respect those outside their own community or identity group, and (importantly) they must also be capable of offering a balanced view that acknowledges and respects other reasonable viewpoints within their own group.

This means that anyone providing education on LGBTQ+ issues should be able to acknowledge, both that some people are more comfortable living according to a cross-sex identity and find the concept of gender identity essential to their sense of self, and also that not all LGBTQ+ people agree with a focus on gender identity, and many understand themselves as homosexual purely in the sense of being attracted to those who are the same sex. Any Islam educator should be knowledgeable about the various strands within Islam (Shia, Suni, Ahmadi etc.) and should be respectful of those outside their own group. Similarly, a Judaism educator should be respectful of types of mainstream Judaism other than their own, even as they can explain what they themselves believe and why. Again, in the RE field we do this every day. It is not that difficult to do for those who genuinely value diversity.

A key aspect of any good diversity education is also that we can learn about our differences while simultaneously emphasising what we have in common. So for example, when teaching about Judaism, we will emphasise how different religions will have different occasions or holidays that often serve similar social purposes or express similar values. So a Christian child will appreciate the value of Shabbat dinner or an Iftar, because it is similar to Christmas dinner and vice versa. The value of family togetherness and holiness is something that Jews and Christians and Muslims have in common but express differently, and we can have different practices while valuing and appreciate those of each other. This is multiculturalism in the best sense of the word. Unity in our diversity.

Learning About Prejudice

Of course, even if we do not train people on how not to be prejudiced, learning about prejudice can be essential to understanding history. We can and must teach about prejudice in the same way as we must teach about Judaism and about Islam.

So for example, it is impossible to understand European or American history without learning about the history of antisemitism and racism. The Civil War in the USA is intrinsically linked with black slavery and its abolition. The Civil Rights Movement is a central episode in the history of the USA, and you cannot cover that without learning about racism. We also must learn about the historical conflicts between Christendom and Islam in order to understand the crusades and so that Muslim and Christian children can understand why there is often mistrust between these two religions today. Historical knowledge can also help in understanding the other who is like me and also different from me.

It can be a challenge to teach those topics neutrally (Israel-Palestine comes to mind as a minefield). But these topics are substantive by nature and important, so we cannot avoid them for fear of causing upset. We just need to make sure to listen to multiple voices, so as to avoid any group using such lessons to push their own agenda. Much of the disquiet of those who complain about “critical race theory” would also dissipate if education about the history of slavery were not regularly mixed with antiracism training that seeks not to educate but to indoctrinate. In fact, I would argue that such indoctrination interferes with real learning about history and racism, and it leads to conflict and just inflames current racial tensions in the USA.

Teaching by Example

Avoiding indoctrination does not mean that our schools and institutions should be value-free. It is absolutely appropriate to have policies about bullying and to communicate those and enforce those, to teach people to respect each other and also help them to know what to do when they experience or observe bullying by others. Most racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic and similar abuse falls foul of basic rules of decent behaviour and is not difficult to identify. We of course also need education on the basic values that we must share in order to live together as a liberal diverse democratic society. Children and adults need to learn to respect others, to listen to those who think differently from them, the importance of not bullying.

But of course any parent knows that values cannot be taught like a catechism. Rather, those in positions of authority must teach liberal values that reject prejudice by modelling these, which means of course stopping abusive behaviour, but also not shaming people for disagreeing or bullying people to agree to this or that belief, even when we believe they are wrong. When we bully people into agreement, even agreement with correct views, we model the opposite of the value we need to inculcate.

Aside from actual instances of abusive behaviour, we should answer those who express prejudice by challenging them to back their statements with arguments and evidence, which forces them to think and to question those who have taught them lies. Better this than just accusing them of bigotry, which tends just to make prejudiced people dig in their heels, allows them to play the victim, or teaches them to express extreme views only among those who think the same way, which could draw them into extremist echo chambers or worse.

I find it very difficult to imagine examples of prejudiced views for which this response is not the most effective (again aside from outright abuse that breaks other rules of conduct anyway). This is also the approach I suggested would have been a more productive response by the University of Bristol to David Miller’s extreme statements there. Miller made outrageous accusations about Jewish Students acting as agents of the Israeli State. If challenged to back up those claims, he would have been embarrassed. There were no bank receipts from Mosad.

However, we do know that there have been real cases of Chinese students literally working as spies to obtain technological secrets in the USA and the UK. Also in the USA, the Trump administration expelled some Iranian students in 2020 amongst accusations of Islamophobia, and then evidence emerged of a clear terrorism risk. These examples show us the dangers of just dismissing claims of dual loyalties and always assuming that such accusations are motivated by prejudice. It is unpleasant when people make apparently unfounded paranoid accusations, but unfortunately, sometimes, these accusations turn out to be true.

Most prejudice is the result of ignorance and intellectual laziness, combined with a lack of moral courage to ask questions and risk being proved wrong. This connection between intellectual strength and the moral strength to question prejudice cannot be over-emphasised. When people are prejudiced, they accept statements that ought to be clearly false but that seem plausible because they fail to question certain assumptions that they have learned, or they feel moral pressure to believe what their fellows also believe. They prejudge. Thus the absurd mental somersaults of Owen Jones to avoid confronting the reality of the October 7 atrocities.

This flight from reality is very different from making statements that are demonstrably true but might be hurtful or offensive because the facts are uncomfortable ones. In the latter case, it is crucial that those things can be said so that false ideas are challenged. The difficulty is to tell the two apart, and the appropriate way to do this in a democracy is open and free debate so that the truth can come out. This is why it is very dangerous when organisations such as MEND and Stonewall dominate diversity training, as they take a prejudicial view of difficult questions by banning people from stating things that are true rather than embracing open debate and discussion of issues on their merits. The result is more discrimination and prejudice, not less.

The challenge we face is how to maintain or create institutions that provide unbiased advice that helps organisations and businesses to accommodate and respect diversity. How do we do this without such institutions being captured by bad actors who simply seek to further their own aims and who do not respect the very values for which such diversity programmes were created in the first place? This will not be easy. But I do believe that the model of good RE teaching shows that with determination, and with constant vigilance to root out bad actors, the task is achievable.