Can Chloé Valdary Sell Skeptics on DEI?
Chloé Valdary is the founder of Theory of Enchantment, a diversity and resilience training company that the 27-year-old African American entrepreneur runs from Downtown Brooklyn. Its website lists clients including TikTok, WeWork, the Federal Aviation Administration, and Greenwich High School, and asks potential customers a loaded question: “Looking for an antiracism program that actually fights bigotry instead of spreading it?”
The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry is booming as corporations, government agencies, high schools, colleges, and nonprofit organizations clamor for its services. Advocates insist that formal instruction in anti-racism yields more inclusive, equitable institutions. Skeptics object to what they characterize as coerced indoctrination in esoteric theories, or charge that prominent consultants like Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling White Fragility, traffic in false and divisive racial stereotypes. Still others cite studies finding that diversity training sessions are actually counterproductive.
[John McWhorter: The dehumanizing condescension of ‘White Fragility’]
Valdary is unusual because she shares many critiques of the multibillion-dollar “DEI industrial complex,” as sardonic observers call it, even as she argues that her framework avoids the flaws of her competitors’. “We teach love and compassion,” her website insists. “Let us train your team.” What’s more, Valdary pledges, “We do not dehumanize, stereotype, or caricature anyone who seeks our services.” Can her Theory of Enchantment help bridge this chasm in the culture wars? Maybe so.
“My first response to any anti-racism course is disgust,” Mikhaila Peterson, the daughter of Jordan Peterson, told listeners in the preamble to a September podcast episode featuring Valdary. “They teach white people to be ashamed of being white. Sometimes they separate people by race and pit them against each other … The minimum these courses do is make people angry.” Valdary’s explanation of Theory of Enchantment didn’t exactly convert Peterson to the cause: “I still don’t think anti-racism courses are a good idea,” she said. But “if there are business owners out there that are mandated to provide anti-racism or anti-bias training, Chloé’s course is what I would recommend,” Peterson said. “She doesn’t come at you from a place of hatred … I believe she really wants to make the world a kinder place without tearing anyone down.”
Although it’s too soon to evaluate the proliferation of training sessions introduced after George Floyd’s death, I am persuaded by older––even granting that there is no universal definition of success––and I think I know one reason why. The political psychologist Karen Stenner has found that roughly a third of humans have an authoritarian predisposition—a kind of political personality—characterized by a fundamental discomfort with difference. Authoritarians tend to treat members of other racial groups best in contexts where they are presented as (or feel like, or appear to be) “one of us,” and with more hostility when race is seen (or identified) as a core attribute that differentiates “us” from “them.” The racial essentialism embedded in leading DEI frameworks fuels “us” and “them” thinking.
