The New York Times Opinion Section recently published an article titled, “What if Diversity Trainings are doing More Harm than Good” by Jesse Singal. The title alone is doing a lot of work. As someone who leads DEI trainings and workshops, I’m familiar with this type of article and the inane approach they usually take. But I couldn’t help myself. As expected, the author quickly reminds us there is little nuance or complexity in the broader DEI discourse. Of course, it is easy to understand why one day, mandatory trainings don’t work well. Sure, it’s possible that they might alienate some white people, pushing them in the wrong direction toward further entrenchment or resistance. Are these findings really surprising, given what we know about basic human nature? Don’t we have plenty of formal and anecdotal evidence that one-off lectures don’t work? When was the last time you heard someone say, “You know, that one conversation with my racist uncle George did the trick!” Or, “All it took was me sharing a few talking points, and those white folks came around to understanding how institutional racism benefits them in their workplace.” Writers and thinkers like Frederick Douglas, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, plus a host of contemporary authors and thinkers, have asked white people to dig deep into our histories and truths for centuries. We can be fairly certain that they didn’t imagine one-day workshops.

This author, and many others like him, seem both dutiful and gleeful in their reporting that mandatory one-day DEI trainings aren’t effective. Most damagingly, they use this fact to excise organizations and people from further responsibility to pursue equity work. What if we didn’t participate in this tiresome and predictable flogging of DEI trainings and workshops? What if we didn’t just throw our hands up and say, “See? I told you this was hopeless.” What if, instead, we got curious about the problems with these trainings and asked why they are so limiting? What might we learn if we examined how the history and racialization of white people in this country influence how white people receive this kind of experience? What would happen if white folks stayed in the conversation instead of using the data as a trap door, a way out?

The author attempts, very briefly at the end of the article, to address what might work better, citing evidence that we should focus on behaviors and actions rather than changing hearts and minds. I agree with this to a degree; ultimately, changing behaviors is the goal. But I also believe that to change behaviors in any real and transformative way, white people need critical, ongoing opportunities to think and connect deeply about how we were and continue to be racialized. I also believe that many DEI programs and facilitators work thoughtfully to bring this awareness to their participants as opposed to what the author implies, that DEI facilitators’ goals are to trash white people’s very existence at every turn.

The author takes a predictable stab at Tema Okun's work, which delineates some of the major components of white supremacy culture. Okun’s work is deep, well-researched, and evolving. Her website, dedicated to understanding whiteness and white supremacy culture, is thoughtfully laid out, exposing many complexities and nuances. Indeed, throwing Okun’s work up on a slide in a short talk to a large group is probably not productive and possibly even counterproductive. But instead of asking how this work might be used differently or more complexly, the author tells us that such tools are simply fads that will soon fade in favor of different, probably just as limited fads. There is nothing about Okun’s work that is a fad or a gimmick. She has dedicated decades to understanding white supremacy culture, first with her colleague Kenneth Jones in the 1990s and then with other colleagues after his passing in 2004. I have found Okun’s descriptions and antidotes to the tenets of white supremacy to be incredibly helpful as a DEI tool and one of the most effective ways to talk about the culture of whiteness. The concept of whiteness as a culture is uncomfortable for white people. They often say a version of, “I’m white, so I don’t have a culture.” Okun’s work breaks down this myth and explores how white people and the systems we operate within expect, often unconsciously, that our cultural norms are adhered to by everyone.

When I first considered the list of white supremacy tenets, I was struck by how pervasive they are in schools, my primary professional community. For example, schools operate with an excessive amount of urgency. Ask any teacher how they’re doing, and there’s a very good chance they’ll tell you they are busy or overwhelmed. They’ll tell you they don’t have enough time to complete all their work and are behind in their curriculum. I don’t think that Okun is saying that all urgency is bad. We all know that sometimes urgency is the thing that pushes us to get something done. But the fact that urgency is such a dominant force in schools means that we are all, white or not, held victim to it much of the time. This is at the cost of the connection between teachers and students, students and students, and students and curriculum. Schools move through days at warp speed, preventing and disrupting many possible moments of joyful learning.

Work like Okun’s can provide rich and transformative learning opportunities for white folks. The learning comes from the processing. It comes from dialogue within our communities. The learning comes from slowing down and moving away from a transactional approach. The author does get at the idea that for many companies, checking a box that lets them off the hook for deeper DEI work is problematic, and he’s right. We have to move away from this model of quick fixes and one-offs. These kinds of trainings suggest that ending racism is easy and passive. The path forward requires more connection. More time, not less. And a compassionate approach. As Brene Brown says, shame is not a tool for social justice.

Unfortunately, like the DEI trainings it critiques, this article is a one-off. Instead of stand-alone opinion pieces, we need ongoing discourse. Instead of assuming that we’ll be in this same predicament in ten years because DEI trainings don’t work and probably won’t change, we should ask questions about why they don’t work and what structures and methods we might try. As James Baldwin noted, white people need to investigate the trouble that lives in us. Building this critical consciousness takes time, nuance, practice, and tenacity. It takes rejecting one-offs of any kind in favor of connection, community, and accountability.