By: David French – nationalreview.com – April 18, 2018

Unconscious-bias training is a rather sinister business.
By now the story is all over America. Earlier this month, two black men entered a Starbucks store in Philadelphia. They were apparently waiting for a friend before ordering — the kind of thing people do every day — and one of the men asked to use the restroom. A Starbucks employee refused, saying the restroom was for “customers only,” then asked the men to leave.

The men stayed put. The Starbucks employee called the police, and customers started recording. Soon enough, there was a viral video of police arresting the two men for the crime — as some progressives called it — of “sitting while black.”

I’m not here to dissect the incident itself. There is near-universal consensus that the Starbucks employee’s actions were racially motivated. Starbucks apparently agrees, and given that the company knows more about its employees than I do, I’m not going to question its conclusion.

I am, however, going to question its response.

In more rational times, Starbucks would discipline the manager responsible, notify the rest of its employees that discriminatory behavior will not be tolerated, and be done with it. After all, no one reasonably believes that Starbucks — a company that consistently competes for gold in the corporate Woke Olympics — turns a blind eye to systemic racism. No one reasonably believes that the company’s founder is anything other than committed to racial equality.

But we live in hysterical times, and hysterical times call for hysterical measures. So Starbucks hasn’t just publicly apologized. It hasn’t just sent its CEO to meet with the men and personally apologize. It’s ordering a national stand-down at more than 8,000 company-owned stores and forcing more than 175,000 employees to undergo “racial bias” training, including training in so-called unconscious bias.

Starbucks employees, welcome to the world of Orwellian junk science.

I’ve written at length about this before, but the concept of “unconscious bias” or “implicit bias” rests on the notion that each of us possesses hidden biases, and those biases impact our actual behavior in meaningful ways. In other words, you’re bigoted, you don’t know it, and you don’t realize how much it affects the people around you.

The concept is based on something called an “implicit-association test,” an engaging little computer exercise that asks you to make image-based snap decisions — associating positive or negative images with black faces or white faces. So, for example, people who take the IAT are more likely to associate weapons with black faces or “bad” words with Arab ones.

People who take the test often emerge chastened. They had no idea that they were carrying around such terrible thoughts. And so chastened, they’re ready to receive the new thoughts or new ideas — supplied by trainers eager to educate them on the latest theories of privilege, oppression, and power. It’s essentially a religious exercise — a word I use advisedly — with all the key elements: sudden awareness of the sin nature, repentance from the sin nature, and embrace of the new worldview.

Why use the language of religion? Because the science is . . . lacking. Last year the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that researchers, analyzing hundreds of studies of the IAT, reached a rather “stunning” result:

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Source: Starbucks Unconscious Bias Training: Why It’s Sinister