How Psychological Manipulation Spread DEI Across America
How Psychological Manipulation Spread DEI Across America
The ideology behind DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ has roots in the controversial re-education methods of 1970s Racism Awareness Training.
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The following essay is an exclusive excerpt from Joseph (Jake) Klein’s newly released book, Redefining Racism: How Racism Became “Power + Prejudice.” This excerpt is breaking news, shedding light on the National Training Laboratories (NTL) and its deep ties to modern anti-racism education—a revelation that has not yet been noticed by anyone outside a few individuals with pre-release copies. In this section, Klein uncovers how the infamous ideas of Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, trace back to NTL’s controversial training methods, exposing a key third vector that has shaped modern DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs across America.
A few weeks ago, America’s most famous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion educator and author of the infamous book White Fragility (which spent over 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and argued that “only whites can be racist” and white people like herself must strive to be “less white,”)—Robin DiAngelo—was revealed to be a plagiarist.
However, DiAngelo’s history of plagiarism is far worse than the recent reporting reveals. I’d know. Today/Earlier this week, I published my book Redefining Racism, an investigation into the origins of DiAngelo’s ideas. While most Reality’s Last Stand readers will know by now the origins of “wokeness” in critical theory and post-modernism, I discovered a key third vector from which DiAngelo’s strain of so-called “anti-racism” stems.
DiAngelo’s ideas are identical to those taught by a group of white-on-white “Racism Awareness Training” educators during the 1970s, most prominently Robert W. Terry, Patricia Bidol, and Judith H. Katz. DiAngelo, without citing them in White Fragility, recycled their ideas that “Racism = Power + Prejudice”—meaning that it’s impossible to be racist against white people within Western society—and that the best a white person can be is an “anti-racist racist,” as all white people are inherently racist by definition.
But to understand who originated these egregiously bad ideas is to know only half the story. The other half requires understanding how such transparent absurdities could successfully skyrocket DiAngelo’s public profile and come to dominate educational institutions and corporations across America. The death of George Floyd in 2020 may have provided the opportunity, but the means were developed decades prior at an organization Terry, Bidol, and Katz were all closely tied to: the National Training Laboratories (today called the NTL Institute).
The origins of the techniques used in modern DEI training can be traced back to the 1940s, with the work of psychologist Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who headed the “psychological warfare center for the Far East” at the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency) during WWII, is perhaps best known for his research on “group dynamics.”
Lewin studied how people change and come to accept new values via “re-education.” He believed that new belief systems and values are generally accepted when people feel a sense of belonging after joining a new social group, upon which “previously rejected facts will become accepted as they become ‘facts’ of ‘his group.’” His re-educative change process involved “unfreezing” people’s previously held psychological patterns, moving them to “a new level” of thoughts, feelings, and/or behavior, and then “refreezing” that change. Lewin believed that this sort of re-education could lead to “cultural reconstruction.”
While Lewin did not live to see the first operations of NTL in the summer of 1947, his ideas formed its underlying philosophy and he gave “enthusiastic support” to its creation. NTL was conceived of as “an educational or re-educational or resocialization program directed first toward adult leaders with the goal of helping them become better group leaders and members, sensitive to the dynamic forces in groups and in themselves, and more competent agents of change in their roles and organizations.”
NTL gained prominence due to its development of the “T-Group,” short for “training group” and also known as “encounter groups,” “sensitivity training,” and “human relations training.” T-Groups are a type of “experience-based learning” in which “participants work together in a small group over an extended period, learning through analysis of their own experiences, including feelings, reactions, perceptions, and behavior.”
NTL used T-Groups to run experiments in what they called “action research,” meaning “the scientific study of controlled social change.” NTL understood that in order to create change, “detecting and correcting fallacies in group thinking” was necessary and that “member ideologies” must be integrated into “common group traditions, ideology, and goals.” They knew that creating change in individuals would require getting them to overcome their natural rejection of those labeled as “outside agitators” or “Communists.” The techniques they developed to do so included “making changees aware of the need for change” through “shock” and “guilt,” helping group participants “experience acceptance, support, trust, and confidence in their relations with one another,” and encouraging them to “anticipate their Utopia in the days to come.” These techniques worked, and NTL staff understood their power; one staff member told NTL co-founder Leland Bradford, “you're now in a position where you can form ideology for other people.”
Despite their often radical views, NTL was not a fringe organization. Staff came to NTL’s programs each year from major universities including Harvard, Yale, and UC Berkeley. NTL received a grant from IBM and conducted trainings for Bell Telephone, General Electric, the American Red Cross, the State Department, and the National Security Agency, among other corporations, non-profits, and government agencies. A scholar of NTL’s history wrote that by the late 1960s, “NTL assumed an almost mythical status as an agent of the new order.” By 1974, Bradford estimated “it would be a conservative figure to say that at least twenty to thirty million persons have been touched by group experiences that had some relationship, usually unknown to them, to NTL.”
From the beginning, NTL was aware that its programs “created various degrees of stress for some individuals and we needed either a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist present.” Psychiatric staff brought into NTL, while very friendly to the organization, reported that “some casualties are probably inevitable.” Those “casualties” ranged between participants leaving T-Groups with “emotional disturbances,” participants with previous psychiatric histories undergoing “psychotic episodes and become[ing] seriously ill,” and at least one suicide. A study by the American Psychiatric Association found that 9.4%—a “conservative estimate”—of 170 subjects who completed NTL’s programs could be counted as casualties, meaning they “became more psychologically distressed” for an enduring period of at least eight months after their group experience.
While the casualties from NTL’s T-Groups were bad enough, the casualties from other groups who adopted and further developed their methods tended to be much worse. For example, Synanon, an organization that was originally founded as a rehabilitation program for drug addicts but developed into a particularly brutal cult. Synanon members were forced to shave their heads, and some members were forced to have vasectomies, abortions, and divorces. Despite Synanon owning hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weapons and participating in multiple attempted murders, Synanon successfully maintained ties with major corporations such as IBM and Heinz until the 1980s when the cult was finally shut down by the IRS for tax evasion.
The problems with T-Groups and “sensitivity training” didn’t go unnoticed; they became a focus of political controversy. In congressional testimony, the T-Groups were compared to Communist struggle sessions and accused of “trying to homogenize… members” by making “approval… more important to [members] than truth.” Due to this public notoriety, the terms “T-Groups” and “sensitivity training” have become less common over time, but their methods have continued nonetheless.
The links between DiAngelo and NTL’s techniques are not marginal. Judith Katz, whose work DiAngelo’s White Fragility most heavily copies from, was a member of NTL’s board of directors. Patricia Bidol, who Katz took her ideas from, was the “dean and facilitator for NTL’s Human Interaction Labs.” Robert Terry, who Bidol based her work on, underwent a series of NTL group sessions and ran his own trainings in partnership with an NTL staffer.
While “Racism Awareness Training” as developed by Terry, Bidol, and Katz—and currently taught by DiAngelo and her ilk under the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—may not have gone quite as far off the rails as Synanon, they’re both sibling children of NTL’s methods. Like Synanon, which claimed to be one thing but indoctrinated its participants into something much worse, DiAngelo’s style of DEI claims to be “anti-racist” but has indoctrinated its participants into something entirely different.
For more on the National Training Laboratories and the history of Racism Awareness Training, read Joseph (Jake) Klein’s book Redefining Racism: How Racism Became “Power + Prejudice,” available now.
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This is an excellent article! I was in college during 1965-1969, and entered grad school in clinical psychology immediately after. Many of my friends participated in NTL groups. I wrote my master's thesis on NTL groups, focusing on the correlations between self-reported change in participants and behaviors they ascribed to group leaders. My thesis was neutral on the safety of T-groups, as the participants in the groups I studied reported mostly positive experiences. I never participated in them myself, however, because of the frightening stories I heard from friends who did.
One of the core features of T-groups was that participants were encouraged to engage in highly aggressive behavior towards other participants. The stressful group environments tended to elicit aggressive behavior anyway, and the leaders were intensely critical of anyone who tried to protect victims from attacks. The result was that participants were "broken down" emotionally, and this was viewed as a positive, necessary stage in the process. This philosophy has declined in popularity but continues to influence the conduct of unstructured group psychotherapy in clinical settings.
I don't know to what extent the NTL approach also influenced the diversity training that was so popular in corporations several decades ago. These were generally very structured trainings, involving a lot of low level personality tests (like the Myers Briggs) and experiential exercises. They were relatively benign in comparison with the T-groups, but the evidence base reportedly shows that diversity training of that type ranged from ineffective to destructive relative to the goal of decreasing racial tension in workplaces. (I can't offer my own opinion about the evidence base because I haven't reviewed it).
Descriptions of the current type of mandated "anti-racism" trainings do indeed sound a lot like the NTL model. Thanks to Joseph Klein and RLS for bringing out this history, which has not been mentioned in any other literature I have read regarding DiAngelo.