Thought Reform 101

The Orwellian implications of today's college orientation.

Alan Charles Kors from the March 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Nichols' schedule of fees is almost as impressive as his schedule of thought reform. He charges $3,500 for a three-hour "Basic Cultural Awareness Seminar," plus travel and per diem. For a plain old "Workshop," he gets $4,000-$5,000 plus expenses. This makes his staple offering--a "Full Day Session (Awareness Seminar and Workshop)"--a bargain at $5,000 plus expenses. For a "Cultural Audit," he gets $20,000-$35,000 (he recently did one of these for the University of Michigan School of Medicine). The Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor paid him $15,000 for diversity training; the Environmental Protection Agency got him cheaply at $12,000.

Business is booming. Nichols has brought awareness to the employees of six cabinet departments, three branches of the armed services, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the FBI; the Goddard Space Center, the Naval Air Warfare Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NASA; the Office of Personnel Management, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Social Security Administration. He has enlightened city and county governments, whole school systems, various state government departments, labor unions, several prestigious law firms, and the Archdiocese of Baltimore. His clients include "Fortune 500 Corporations, foreign governments, parastatals, associations, health and mental health systems," and he has been a consultant to offices of "The British Commonwealth of Nations" and "organizations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Latin America...Singapore, Malaysia, and China." He has a very long list of academic clients, and he was a centerpiece of Johns Hopkins' 1999 freshman orientation.

What does Nichols believe? He believes that culture is genetically determined, and that blacks, Hispanics, and descendants of non-Jewish Middle-Eastern tribes place their "highest value" on "interpersonal relationships." In Africa, women are the equal of men. Whites were altered permanently by the Ice Age. They value objects highly, not people. That is why white men commit suicide so frequently when they are downsized.

Nichols calls his science of value systems "axiology," and he believes that if managers and administrators understand these cultural differences, they can manage more effectively, understanding why, according to him, blacks attach no importance to being on time, while whites are compulsive about it. Whites are logical; blacks are intuitive and empathetic. Whites are frigid; blacks are warm and spontaneous. Whites are relentlessly acquisitive; nonwhites are in harmony with nature. White engineers, for example, care about their part of something; Asian engineers, managers should know, care about the whole. Whites are linear; nonwhites have a spiral conception of time. Nichols has a handout that he frequently uses. Whites, it explains, "know through counting and measuring"; Native Americans learn through "oneness"; Hispanics and Arabs "know through symbolic and imagery [sic]"; Asians "know through striving toward the transcendence [sic]." Asking nonwhites to act white in the workplace is fatal to organizational harmony. Understanding cultural axiology is essential to management for the 21st century. Now, reread his list of clients.

Two diversity training films widely used at major universities reveal the techniques and the characters of two other leading thought reformers. Skin Deep, the 1996 film funded by the Ford Foundation, records an encounter at a retreat between college students from around the country. The facilitators are not active in the film, but the published guide tells you what they do and identifies their leader as Hugh Vasquez.

Skin Deep begins with ominous news clips from the major networks about "racial violence," "racism," "slurs," and "racist jokes" on campus. It announces that "at these training grounds for our future leaders, intolerance has once again become a way of life." We meet white, Hispanic, black, and Asian-American students from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of California at Berkeley, and Texas A&M. The whites have terrible stories to tell: They have grown up in white neighborhoods; their families have prejudices; and they feel rejected by people of color. The people of color have terrible stories to tell: They suffer frequent abuse in white America, and they are sick of it.

Neither group is typical of a college population. The whites, we gradually learn, have been members of organizations working for racial understanding. The students of color all use terms like "allies," suggesting that they've been through sessions like this before. There is a Jewish woman who objects to being thrown into the nightly "white caucus," where she doesn't really belong. She also anguishes over whether all of the things she has been told at the encounter about the Jewish role in the suffering of people of color are true. (Vasquez responds candidly to an inquiry on this, revealing that some of those allegations were outright anti-Semitic, and that the Jewish girl was looking for "allies" who would not "scapegoat" Jews.) In short, the white students talk about the stereotypes they have learned, and the students of color reflect deeply on the cruelty of race in America.

When white students initially suggest that they personally did not do terrible things, the students of color fire back with both barrels. A first reply goes immediately to the heart of the matter: "One thing that you must definitely understand is that we're discussing how this country was founded, and because you are a white male, people are going to hate you." A black student explains, more patiently: "Things are going on presently: the IMF, presently; the World Bank, presently; NAFTA, presently; Time Warner, presently; the diamond factories, presently; reservations, presently; ghettos, presently; barrios, presently. Slavery still exists." (Diamond factories?) The Chicana, Judy, lets them know that "I will not stop being angry, and I will not be less angry or frustrated to accommodate anybody. You whites have to understand because we have been oppressed for 2,000 years. And if you take offense, so?" (Two thousand years?) And from Khanh, a bitter Vietnamese student: "White people need to hear that white people are very affected by internalized racism....As a person of color growing up in this society, I was taught to hate myself and I did hate myself. If you're a white person, you were taught to love yourself....If you don't know that you have shit in your head, you'll never deal with racism."

By the end, the students of color have had the grace to state that if the white students become real "allies," their victims can let go of their anger a bit. White students have come to realize that the pieties their parents taught them, such as an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, apply only to whites in America.

In short, what moves the film (and American thought reform) is a denial of individual identity and responsibility, an insistence on group victimization and rights, and the belief that America is an almost uniquely iniquitous place in the world, without opportunity, legal equality, or justice. "I want you to know," an Hispanic male explains, "that because of the system, my cousin was shot...and then another cousin was shot." The tribalism of the exploited Third World expresses a core truth: You are your blood and history. Let the children of the guilty denounce their parents. Let the victims stake their claims. Let the cultural revolution begin.

Vasquez is a frank and warm man by e-mail. He explains that the filmmaker never showed the facilitators because she wanted to focus solely on the students, but that "it took a great deal of planning and structure and facilitation to make what happened happen." In his own mind, he was devoted to eliminating "blame, ridicule, judgements, guilt, and shame" among all of the students in the group, and he sounds sincere when he writes that his goal is to eliminate "individual and institutional mistreatment of any group or culture." But his effect, whatever his intention, is frightening, atavistic, and irrational, and his means are deeply intrusive.

Americans surely need to study, discuss, and debate, frankly, matters of race and ethnicity. Reasonable people disagree on profound questions. Some of the issues are empirical: Is aversion to difference acquired above all from culture or evolution? Should we be more startled by America's success in creating a nation of diverse backgrounds or by the difficulties it has in doing so?

Some of the issues are moral and political: Should we favor legal equality with differential outcomes or equality of outcomes even at the price of legal inequality? Are today's whites responsible for the crimes of 19th-century Southern slave owners? What are the benefits and costs of a society based on individual responsibility? These are not issues for indoctrination. Indeed, they do not even reflect everyone's chosen intellectual or moral agenda, and free individuals choose such agendas for themselves.

Vasquez's "Study Guide" for Skin Deep explains that the final goal of using the film in "colleges, high schools, corporations, and the workplace" is to produce "action strategies and... networks for working against racism," for which there is a page of strategy. The guide further explains the necessity of affirmative action, the "myths" of reverse discrimination and balkanization, and the reality of white privilege. It teaches the need for the privileged to become "allies" of the oppressed, and it focuses on the nightmare of "internalized oppression." The internalization of oppression manifests itself in "self-doubt...fear of one's own power; an urgent pull to assimilate; isolation from one's own group; self-blame for lack of success; [and] fighting over the smallest slice of the economic pie."

The guide also has a rare explicit endorsement of "political correctness," reminding facilitators that "language was a prime factor" in the murder of 6 million Jews, that language perpetuates racism, and that it is wrong to believe that "anything people say should be left alone simply because we all have the right to free speech....The challenges to political correctness tend to come from those who want to be able to say anything without repercussions." (He did not have Khanh in mind.)

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|5.5.10 @ 4:31PM|#

I believe that we create change more on an individual and relational level than we do on a mandated level. Teachers should teach. Not regulate multiculturalism or diversity. Speaking as a "white" female with a Hispanic last name living in the southwest (and after actually reading SB 1070 - I support it) I have experienced more racism from my Latino cousins (and friends) than I have from traditional "whites". I have been told who I should associate with, which groups I should 'join' for equal (or better) opportunity in employment. I've been told that I should use my Hispanic name more often because it would help me get loans, an education, and jobs. But I don't have "whites" telling me not to use my "Hispanic" name because they think less of me. Racism has many colors other than white. I want a job, an education, friendships and opportunity not because of the color of my skin or the name of my father. But by my own personal efforts and accomplishments. Shame in racism moves in many directions( or skin colors) . Professors should teach and leave culture to the individual. I can understand others with personal compassion, but struggle when I am told that "I must". Just a thought.

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