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Is unconscious-bias training the new Brain Gym?

July 14, 2020 by Kanto WP Leave a Comment

More and more people are recommending that unconscious-bias training should be brought into schools to tackle racism. This is a mistake, says Kevin Rooney.

Racism is real. I have spent a large part of my life fighting it, and understand it is often deeply rooted in our social structures, and therefore hard to tackle.

So, when Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer announced that he is to have unconscious-bias training after criticism of his language around the Black Lives Matter protests, many welcomed it. Starmer’s endorsement of unconscious-bias training for himself, and for others in the Labour party, seems to demonstrate a new determination to root out racism, even from the darker recesses of our minds.

It follows on from the Channel 4 programme, The School That Tried To End Racism, in which a class of Year 7 pupils was filmed taking a scientific test to detect unconscious racial bias, and then given a three-week unconscious racial-bias training programme.

The narrator of the programme told viewers that the Implicit Association Test (IAT), “is now widely accepted as an accurate measurement of unconscious racial bias”.

Click here to read the full article.

Keep critical race theory out of the classroom

July 14, 2020 by Kanto WP Leave a Comment

Re-printed with the kind permission of Spiked.

Channel 4’s The School That Tried To End Racism revealed the backwardness of racial thinking.

In 2006, for my sins, I helped make a short film designed for use as an educational resource for eight- to 11-year-olds in Essex primary schools. Our client – the local authority – labelled the project Watch Out for Racism and told us that we would be working in schools experiencing frequent racist incidents. It wanted a film that would explore the damaging effects of racism and fulfil that ubiquitous objective of ‘celebrating difference’.

But for me at least, the immediate impression of these schools was of happy, ethnically diverse and integrated children. Neither pupils nor staff spoke of any problem around racism in or outside of class. Headteachers reminded us that the ‘incidents’ they had logged were trivial things like friendship fall-outs at break times collapsing into time-honoured exchanges of insults. Name-calling incidents like ‘white trash’ and ‘chocolate bar’ were typical. Staff reminded us that the local authority obliged them to apply zero tolerance to racism. And the guidance they followed emphasised that a good school is one that submits regular incident reports.

For the anti-racism trainers I was working with, the appearance of a good school was presumed to be deception. I spent break times filming playgrounds of kids which demonstrated a picture of multi-ethnic, multicultural harmony, while inside school the trainers planned their next exercise designed to reveal the exact opposite. For the trainers, these provincial schools were ‘in denial’. From this standpoint, racism lay under the surface and the purpose of this intervention was to make children wake up to it.

In 2007, using a phrase oddly prescient of ‘woke’ that would emerge a decade later, a former government ‘ethnicity adviser’ coined the phrase ‘Getting It’, referring to ‘the sharp focus one gets when one puts on glasses for the first time’. ‘Getting It’ articulated the objective for anti-racism trainers, who, in the mould of a psychotherapist or sales expert, imagined their task as one of coaxing their subjects toward a pendulum swing from denial to realisation.

After the publication in 1999 of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry report, government guidance reflected this approach and the anti-racism trainers on my team had absorbed it in full. Therefore, irrespective of how the Essex pupils behaved, the approach reinforced the belief that they still needed to be made aware of their racial identity and their daily co-existence with racism – be it as victim or perpetrator.

When filming the children, despite assurances we would give that ‘there are no right or wrong answers’, cheating was afoot. For example, when it was time for each child to take their turn in the video hot-seat, one of the trainer questions was, ‘We sometimes identify ourselves as white or black or Asian or mixed – how would you identify yourself?’ One lad mumbles his answer. ‘Ah, a dark skinned person’, says the trainer’s voice off-camera. ‘No! a DANCING person’ comes the reply.

Back then, in the early years of this new century, it was palpably obvious that racism – reflected in social attitudes and social systems – had receded dramatically. Those of us who had been working in London schools since the 1990s greeted this shift with growing optimism. With a new mixed (and mixed-race) diversity exploding in playgrounds, it felt as if – if only we could leave them to it – this generation had the potential to rise out of the quagmire of ‘race’ identity.

It is all the more troubling, then, to witness the sudden expansion of an influential (albeit minority) outlook determined to reinstate ‘race’. I am not referring to those who rallied under the banner of Black Lives Matter following events in Minneapolis. But attached to BLM is an ideological mission encouraging almost religious reinterpretations of societal and personal relationships. It does this through the lens of ‘white privilege’.

For me, Channel 4’s two-part documentary, The School That Tried To End Racism, was especially troubling. The programme showed what Implicit-Association Testing (IAT) and a revamped ‘white privilege’ version of racism-awareness training looks like. And it made clear the unprecedented dangers this poses to children and schooling.

One of the organisations demanding anti-racism training in schools along these lines is the Chartered College of Teaching. This is presented as a commonsense response to anti-racism protests. However, critical race theory (CRT), a long-established creed posing as anti-racism, lies at the heart of these demands. A June 2020 post on the CCT’s website offers teaching resources for examining ‘whiteness and privilege’, for instance.

Critical race theory originated in the United States. It argues that ‘racism’ should not merely refer to explicit acts of racial hatred or discrimination, but to the ‘hidden operations of power’ deeply ingrained within a culture of white privilege. Here, the condition of ‘whiteness’ describes the ‘shared power and dominance of white interests’. Amid this spectre of racial domination, ‘racism’ need not refer to explicit acts of hatred or discrimination: it simply floats in the ether permanently signalling its presence to the oppressed ‘other’. As such, the spectre of this free-floating racism – racism without racists – sets itself up as an indisputable truth. So long as there are white people there will be ever-more work for these race missionaries to do.

In The School That Tried To End Racism, CRT practitioner Dr Nicola Rollock and social psychologist Professor Rhiannon Turner watch over an experiment involving 11- and 12-year-olds at Glenthorne High School in South London. Before splitting a classroom of 24 pupils into white and non-white ‘affinity groups’, the three-week programme begins with a technique developed two decades ago at Harvard University called the Implicit-Association Test (IAT). Using iPads, the pupils have to make snap decisions based on images or words flashing on to the screen. They tap different icons to show their association of faces or names with good or bad connotations. ‘This is the most fun racist game I’ve ever played!’, exclaims one black pupil, Bright.

The result of the test is that 18 of the 24 pupils, including many non-white pupils, are said to have an apparent preference towards white people. Professor Turner explains: ‘While the results might seem shocking, it’s what we expect in a majority white country like the UK… We’re exposed from an early age to white people in a position of power.’

Once divided into white and non-white ‘affinity’ groups, the white group becomes sullen. In a nearby classroom, missing only the requisite white lab coats, our academic observers Rollock and Turner watched on a TV monitor as it cut from glum white pupils to the noisy exuberance of the non-white group next door. ‘The white group feels like a funeral’, observes Dr Rollock. Afterwards, the white group is asked how it feels. ‘We want their group to know we don’t feel like we’re better than them’, says a crestfallen Lauren. Henry (who when asked his identity came up with ‘ginger, European boy’) tears up. Later, when filmed at home with his parents, Henry says, ‘if I had a choice I’d be with my friends not my race’. Henry’s best friend is Bright. ‘Since the start of my life I’ve always been told that race didn’t matter’, Henry remarks.

The voiceover by actor and rapper Ashley Walters (aka Asher D) plays a key role throughout. One of the most startling moments in the show is a clip of Martin Luther King’s 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech. King’s evocation of a colourblind future is overturned. Just as King describes how his children might one day be judged ‘not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’, Asher D’s voice takes over: ‘But now many experts argue that colourblindness is itself a form of racism.’

Dr Rollock then takes over to contemptuously dismiss the ‘colourblind’ aspiration to see past race. CRT holds that the problem with anyone taking a colourblind approach is, as Rollock then explains, ‘you’re erasing my experience as a woman of colour, you’re erasing my history, you’re erasing the fact that I experience racism’. Peppered throughout the documentary voiceover and scholarly sounding one-liners is a thinly veiled insistence that anti-racism must reinstate the existence of race. If it ever were the case that the British population had gone backwards, and that society’s race-tinted lens had fully returned, leaving Martin Luther King’s dream dead in the water, we can only say to Dr Rollock and her fellow critical-race theorists, whose fault is that then?

In one scene, the cameras enter a biology lesson reflecting how the Glenthorne School experiment has modified existing lessons ‘to improve awareness of racial difference’. Here, paradoxically, our guinea-pig kids learn something useful. They learn about DNA and genetics in exactly the manner that would, in normal circumstances, counter the divisive concept of race.

But before any universalist, myth-busting conclusions are drawn, Dr Rollock is on hand to steer these away: ‘Although they [the affinity groups] may be biologically similar, how does society see their skin colour?’ To which the CRT answer is: unconsciously, through society’s white privileged, racist lens.

After a ‘racist’ sports day and a trip to the National Portrait Gallery, the three-week experiment reaches its conclusion with a group debate and a resit of the IAT. By this point the group is now ‘aware’. The debate on ‘Is the UK racist?’ appears to conclude unanimously that it is. A pupil calls out, ‘It obviously is! It’s so obvious!’

As they retake the Implicit Association Test, a black girl comments, as if observing the weather: ‘We’ve been living in a place where white people are more superior – we never knew that until the first test – because that has been embedded in us for 10 years.’ The pupils reverse the errors of the first test this time. As if selling the experiment to the Department for Education and every headteacher in the land, Dr Rollock makes her plea: ‘We can’t leave addressing race and racism to chance.’ ‘These children are going to be running the country, employing people in years to come’, she intones, ‘and we want them to have the skills and the awareness around race and indeed racial justice’.

We need to be clear and outspoken on what this development means. IAT’s micro-developmental psychology has been totally debunked. And what does it claim to prove? The fact that we hold ‘implicit associations’ such as darkness equals ‘bad’, lightness equals ‘good’ doesn’t mean we translate these associations into our daily lives. The colour-coded outlook of white-privilege theory manufactures conflict from a world reinterpreted as endless unconscious slights and microaggressions.

The old anti-racism witnessed black and white workers campaigning for the right to be treated equally under the law – to be treated as the same. The hardcore racists of that era were confronted. For some time now, anti-racism has been inverted and redefined as a demand for the right to be different – as different races – and to be treated differently as a consequence.

CRT, Channel 4’s film and what looks like the imminent adoption of a racialised curriculum by schools will wind the clock back decades. To the government our message should be: Don’t do it. Don’t divide us.

Adrian Hart is the author of That’s Racist!: How the Regulation of Speech and Thought Divides Us All.

Picture by: Channel 4.

Channel 4 – ‘The School That Tried To End Racism’

July 7, 2020 by Kanto WP 8 Comments

Last weekend, I watched both episodes of a Channel 4 documentary called The School That Tried To End Racism which was broadcast recently.

Within the first few minutes I became uneasy about this experiment which had been conducted with a class of 11-year-old pupils in their first year at a Glenthorne High School, a state secondary School in Sutton, Surrey. The viewer was told that the class of 24 pupils had volunteered to participate. What followed over the following 90+ minutes raised my concerns about this documentary in several respects:

The programme presents a deeply-contested theory as scientific fact; the ethics of using children below the age of consent as participants for an experiment; and errors through omission.

In view of these concerns, I also questioned Channel 4’s decision to broadcast it.

Theory as fact

Throughout the programme, the academics running the experiment, Rollick and Turner presented assertions supported by the narration as incontrovertible facts. The Implicit Associations Test (IAT), developed at Harvard for use in the US, was used as the primary tool for measuring unconscious racial bias. The narration stated that “it (the IAT test) is now widely accepted as an accurate measurement of unconscious racial bias”. This is not so. In 2015, an author of the IAT stated that:

“the psychometric issues associated with various IATs “render them problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination”. Indeed, these days IAT evangelist and critic alike mostly agree that the test is too noisy to usefully and accurately gauge people’s likelihood of engaging in discrimination — a finding supported by a series of meta-analyses showing unimpressive correlations between IAT scores and behavioral outcomes (mostly in labs).”

(See The British Psychological Society Digest link below)

[https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/12/05/psychologys-favourite-tool-for-measuring-implicit-bias-is-still-mired-in-controversy/]

Although a brief visual from US television indicated that the American programme then incorporated into the experiment was controversial, no reference was made to this in the narration or by the academics and it was not discussed.

On numerous occasions the academics running the experiment, Dr. Nicola Rollick and Professor Rhiannon Turner made assertions that were presented as facts: e.g. “We pretend that we don’t see race”; “intervening at this age is crucial if we are to target children’s views before they become crystallised in adulthood”.

This was compounded by a presentational style that was completely inappropriate to a psychological experiment, the academics congratulating themselves through smiles, knowing glances and patronising asides when the responses of the participants were as they had predicted.

At no time during the documentary was there any reference to any other perspective and the absence of any peer review or of any alternative hypotheses was notable.

Ethics

Is it ethical to present identifiable participants in a psychological experiment who cannot legally give their consent? Channel 4’s Working and Filming with under 18’s Guidelines¹ states:

“As a responsible programme-maker and broadcaster, it is crucial that careful consideration and measures are put in place to safeguard the physical and emotional welfare and dignity of contributors under the age of 18, as well as ensuring that their involvement does not cause them to suffer unnecessary distress or anxiety. A child’s resilience and vulnerability can vary significantly depending on factors such as their age, gender, maturity, cultural, ethnic and religious background as well as their previous life experiences.” [https://www.channel4.com/producers-handbook/c4-guidelines/working-and-filming-with-under-18s-guidelines#:~:text=It%20is%20clear%20that%20both%20adults%20and%20children,requires%20an%20appropriate%20degree%20of%20responsibility%20and%20care]

Were these guidelines followed, and if so what specific measures were put in place to protect the children? To this viewer, it was very apparent that the children’s involvement did cause them to suffer unnecessary distress and anxiety.

It appears that the guidelines of The British Psychological Society as set-out in its Code of Human Research Ethics have not be followed [https://www.bps.org.uk/sites/www.bps.org.uk/files/Policy/Policy%20-%20Files/BPS%20Code%20of%20Human%20Research%20Ethics.pdf] in several regards:

The claim made in the documentary that the IAT is “now widely accepted as an accurate benchmark of unconscious bias” is simply not true. This claim could lead viewers to believe the results it produces are reliable and uncontested. One of the children, of black ethnicity, commented at the end of the documentary “Everyone’s been living in a place where white people are more superior. We never knew that until the first test, how that has been embedded in us for 10 years”. This suggests that the test itself plays an active part in the process of changing minds thereby invalidating any results for an experiment claiming to be scientific.

The experiment was described in the documentary as “controversial”. Were the children, their parents and teachers/Head Teacher made aware of this and offered an explanation as to why it was considered controversial and what impact it might have on the children? Were the children and their parents given the option to withdraw their child from the project? No information was offered regarding any measures taken to protect these children from the possible effects, both short- and long-term that they might be subject to.

It is interesting to note that when announcing the documentary in January 2020, Channel 4’s working title was The Segregation Experiment which I suggest better describes what was finally shown.

Inviting children to reflect on the ways in which they may currently be or become racist towards their friends and others, is inevitably going to lead to self-doubt and, in this instance, there was clear evidence that it did. One white pupil became tearful on more than one occasion and another of mixed heritage experienced stress, confusion and anger about the way she felt she was being forced to choose between black and white.

This experiment caused the children obvious discomfort and stress. Their personal values and beliefs were exposed and challenged on national television and one, in particular, expressed concern that his personal friendships were under threat by being separated into different groups. I wonder if if any risk assessment was done prior to or during the experiment?

Neither was it clear how informed consent was sought and from whom. Although it was stated that the class had volunteered to participate (although it was not clear whether the 24 participants constituted the whole class), no mention was made of who had given consent: was it their parent(s) or was it Steve Hume (Head Teacher)? It is notable that of the 24 participants shown, 14 were BAME and 10 were White British which does not correspond to the ratio of “nearly half the school’s intake is BAME” as quoted in the narration.

Numerous media reviews have already been published identifying individual participants and commenting on their appearance, attitude and responses. These children were 11 years old – was any consideration given to the possible effects of this exposure on their well-being and future prospects?

Aside from these specific child protection issues, the programme laid itself open to an accusation of manipulation: it initially depicted a situation where previously there wasn’t an apparent problem and through a series of ‘consciousness raising’ devices created a problem (using the contested IAT test) and then presented a neat solution.

Errors through omission

Here are just two examples:

The failure to disclose the contested value of the IAT test was crucial, since the test formed the whole basis of the experiment. This is akin to trying to taking somebody’s temperature with a bicycle pump.

The sequence in Episode 2 in the National Portrait Gallery gave significant dramatic emphasis to the revelation that money was paid to the slave owners rather than the slaves but failed to explain why reparations were paid to slave-owners. Abolitionists recognised that the only way to emancipate slaves was to pay their owners in order to expedite the release of slaves and prevent further suffering. This crucial fact was not mentioned by either the NPG staff member or the narrator. Slightly later the narrator says “…finding positive examples of those who represent them is proving easier for some than others.” In fact, this only applied to one of the participants (Henry) and the narrator failed to point out that, just as there were very few images depicting black faces, there was a similar dearth of images of poor, working-class white faces.

The decision to broadcast

How was this programme commissioned? Did the programme idea come from Channel 4 which then sought out a suitable case, or was it commissioned as an ‘off-the-shelf’ idea presented to it by the production company or the authors of the study? Whatever the answer is to these questions, the decision to produce and subsequently broadcast the documentary should be questioned. It also highlights Channel 4’s inability to follow its own guidelines (based on those drafted by Ofcom, their regulator) and seriously undermines the trust that viewers can reasonably expect of a national broadcaster.

Summary

Professor Turner and Dr Rollick made it very clear from the outset that they have a particular agenda. These politicised views and value judgements combined with contemporary interpretations of racism, social justice, identity politics, critical race theory, theories of oppression and current tropes about slavery were, with the assistance of a diversity practitioner from the US, relayed to the children over a three-week period. As noted above, assertions were presented as facts and no attempt was made to present an alternative perspective. It is, therefore, no surprise that at the end of the experiment, the pupils came to the conclusion that they live in a racist society. It felt as though this was what the academics had hoped for all along – this makes me uneasy as their methods could be construed as indoctrination.

In the context of the many flaws and errors outlined above, perhaps the programme-makers should have more carefully considered the implications of the unattributed statement in the narration that “if successful, the school’s ambition is to build it into the curriculum”

“It’s (the anti-racism project) something that really needs to be integrated into the whole school system so that issues of race and racism and inequality are discussed the whole way through children’s school career” (Professor Rhiannon Turner)

What degree of editorial control did the academic consultants have? It seemed at times as though they were directing the documentary. This blurs the crucial distinction between a documentary programme-maker and their subject. The resulting lack of perspective could lead to the programme being seen as little more than a campaigning polemic.

This programme was so badly flawed that it should never have been broadcast. The experiment’s hypothesis was tested using a problematic methodology which appeared to be engineered to produce a desired result. The failure to provide context and the errors through omission throughout were blatant. It was not so much a psychological experiment as a manifesto for social engineering driven by flawed science. Worse still was the exploitation of children to provide entertainment dressed-up as documentary. The editorial process (particularly the narrator’s script and editing) failed in its primary responsibility to maintain sufficient distance from its subject to provide an objective view. As such, it fell way below the standard expected and deserved by viewers of a programme presented as a documentary.

Howard Sherwood,

Graphic Designer and Photographer

The School That Tried To End Racism can be viewed at: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-school-that-tried-to-end-racism/on-demand/67448-001