Adam Grant used research curated by leftist professors to argue against colorblindness and meritocracy in TED Talk scandal.

If something sounds leftist, it almost always is.

Sep 29, 2023

My work is completely grassroots-funded. That means my only obligation is to tell you the truth and bring the receipts. To support my efforts, please consider a subscription for $8/month or $80/year.

Subscribe to Support My Work

If you can’t financially support my work, please consider sharing it with your friends and family to spread the message. I can’t do it without you.

I’m an industrial/organizational psychologist by training.

I think my background is why I’m so effective at analyzing the social systems at play in the culture wars, recognizing the patterns, and predicting what individuals and groups will do next.

I was never an academic but rather spent my time working in organizations doing practical work with real people to make work better. I’ve been a featured speaker several times over for conferences hosted at the largest human resources conference in the world, published my first book about mindfulness at work, and have worked with organizations all over the country.

I witnessed the rise of diversity and equity training in organizations directly because, around 2018, the sponsors at the largest conferences were overwhelmingly driven by the topic, as were many of the conference presentations. I watched as it slowly took over the industry, with corporate trainers abandoning time-tested strategies grounded in psychology for tactics that encouraged people to judge one another by the color of their skin.

I never achieved the success of Adam Grant in the I/O psychology world, but I did watch his rise. I never found him to be particularly compelling, nor did I find him to be particularly offensive. I viewed him as an academic who had done a lot of media and speaker training to learn how to present topics beautifully, but with minimal real-world experience to know that research studies don’t always translate to real life.

I hadn’t thought about Adam Grant in years…until this week when he landed himself in the middle of the culture war.

Here’s what happened:

Coleman Hughes published an article for The Free Press about TED suppressing his talk about color blindness in which he specifically called out the organization for bending the knee to the woke employees in their ranks.

My first thought when I heard this was, “duh, TED was captured a long time ago.” It was a major black pill of mine when I realized it because it also meant that I would never give a TED Talk, which had been an aspiration of mine at one time.

In the article, Coleman specifically calls out Adam Grant for providing an analysis that claims that colorblind approaches “fail to help and sometimes backfire.” Coleman also noted that he read the paper cited by Grant and disagreed with his interpretation, believing the paper supports his research.

The Free Press followed up with an article in which Adam and Chris Anderson responded to Coleman’s allegations.

In that response, Adam Grant doubled down:

Here are the three points that I made:

(1) The meta-analysis distinguishes between three forms of color blindness (what the authors call “identity-blind” approaches). All three are either ineffective or counterproductive on key outcomes:
a. Ignoring differences (“color blindness”) is associated with reduced stereotypes and prejudice. . . but fails to protect against discrimination. From the authors: “discrimination may be most problematic in organizations where color blindness prevails.”
b. Minimizing differences (“assimilation”) is problematic across the board—it exacerbates discrimination, prejudice, and stereotypes.
c. Meritocracy predicts lower discrimination but fails to shield against prejudice and stereotypes.
(2) To make the case for an identity-blind approach, you would need evidence that one or more of these approaches has greater efficacy than a multicultural approach that acknowledges differences. Unfortunately for Hughes’s thesis, the meta-analysis shows the opposite. As the authors conclude, “multiculturalism is more consistently associated with improved intergroup relations than any identity-blind ideology.”

Adam Grant may not know it, but he had jumped head first into the black sea of the culture war.

What’s wrong with Colorblindness and Meritocracy?

Colorblindness is the idea that we do not treat people differently based on the color of their skin. The left often incorrectly defines it as meaning people claim they don’t “see color.” I prefer to use the term “color indifference” to get around this claim, which means that you see skin color (of course, we all do) but are indifferent towards it.

The left hates the idea of color indifference because if you’re not judging people by their identity group, but rather by their individual contributions, then you can’t utilize those identity groups to gain power and cause destabilization.

After all, individualism is the opposite of collectivism. Collectivism is what the left wants.

Colorblindness also supports meritocracy, which means that individual hard work and effort matter more than what identity group you belong to.

All of these ideas are directly related to capitalism, which the woke left loathes. You cannot have capitalism without individualism and meritocracy.

So, whenever I see an analysis saying that colorblindness (color indifference, individualism) and meritocracy are bad, I know there’s a leftist involved somewhere. It’s an artificially engineered reality to try to convince us that we’re all part of some collective borg.

This is an example of the leftist capture of institutions.

When I saw this, I instantly thought that this is an example of the impact of the woke (authoritarian) left capturing institutions of higher education. The left controls higher education, starting their long march through the institutions when the Frankfurt School landed at Columbia University in the 1930s.

Because they control the institutions, they control what’s taught in the institutions.

Because they control what’s taught in the institutions, they control the training of all future tenured faculty in the institutions, the high priests that can never be fired.

And because they control the faculty, they control the peer-reviewed research that

People believe that the impact of the left is loud and in your face - the riots in 2020, crazy pink-haired people yelling in your face, etc.

But the most dangerous impact of the left isn’t loud. It’s quiet. It’s the everyday things that you might completely miss if you don’t understand the language of the left, or how they are trying to corrupt our way of life.

The meta-analysis that Adam Grant offered as evidence of Coleman’s talk being wrong is called On Melting Pots and Salad Bowls: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Identity-Blind and Identity-Conscious Diversity Ideologies.

The lead researcher on the paper is Lisa M. Leslie of New York University.

What does Lisa specialize in?

Strategies for facilitating social justice.

Lisa regularly partners with Elinor Flynn at Wharton…where Adam Grant also teaches.

Their latest piece together focuses on how organizations can have better rhetoric around their diversity programs.

Do you notice a leftist theme in the research?

Another researcher on the paper is Gregory Beaver, who focuses his work almost entirely on diversity initiatives, including teaching courses about them at Suffolk University in Boston.

There’s relatively little information about the paper's third author, Yeonka (Sophia) Kim, in the public sphere…but what we do get seems to focus on gender and identity as an interest area, which doesn’t indicate a penchant for individualism and meritocracy.

In fact, the only person associated with the paper who seems completely unwoke is Joyce E. Bono, who teaches at the University of Florida and doesn’t really appear to have overt political leanings. We have to celebrate our successes where we can.

There’s an obvious left-leaning bias in the research.

In the 10+ years I’ve been practicing industrial/organizational psychology in the real world, there’s one thing I know for sure: I/O Psychology is not a science. It is an art. People are not robots. You can make best guesses about what they’re going to do based on a variety of inputs, but you never really know for sure.

But more importantly for the question at play here, I also know that industrial/organizational psychology papers are never objective. They are always subjective, reflecting the attitudes and dispositions of the researchers.

So, we have three out of four researchers involved in this meta-analysis that Adam Grant cited with an obvious left-leaning bias in their work, with the lead researcher being focused on “social justice.”

The meta-analysis, and the conclusions they draw, will reflect their bias.

What studies were included in the meta-analysis? What studies weren’t included? How were the results of those studies interpreted? What possibilities were dismissed?

Do you think it’s a coincidence that when this study was originally reported on, it was positioned as a direct rebuke to the Trump administration’s policies banning diversity training at the time?

And it should come as no surprise to anyone that the language in the above article seems very similar to the language that Adam Grant used in his defense of the meta-analysis in the Free Press:

It is clear diversity and racial sensitivity training programs endorse a multicultural ideology – they explicitly acknowledge differences between racial/ethnic groups and assert these differences deserve our careful attention. Critics of multiculturalism often argue that its emphasis on differences exacerbates racial conflict and animosity, and this seems to be an underlying message in the recent memo. However, out of the ideologies examined in the meta-analysis, multiculturalism exhibited the greatest promise for addressing racial and ethnic bias. Of course, this is a moot point if one does not believe there is a significant racial bias problem in society. But that is a subject for another day.

It’s entirely possible Adam Grant didn’t even read the study in question and merely read this article to get a general overview, but that’s speculation.

Do I think Adam Grant is woke?

The answer may surprise you.

No, I do not believe Adam Grant is woke.

I think that Adam Grant is an idealist who is disconnected from the real world because his level of success allows him to be.

However, I do believe that Adam Grant is surrounded by woke leftists and interacts with them far more than he interacts with people of other types of political persuasions. And, for that reason, his ideas and interpretations of information will be strongly influenced by the left in ways that he isn’t even aware of.

What you see happening here is a reflection of the quiet success of the woke left’s long march through the institutions. And that’s far more terrifying than the alledged suppression of a TED talk.

TED has been captured for a long time. It always will be captured. Because it is driven by academics who were trained in, and work at, captured institutions.

Questions?

Let me know in the comments!

Fight back against the woke and support my work.

I believe the woke - on the left and the right - are an existential threat to our values as Americans. Some of them know it, most of them are just useful innocents. Regardless, fighting back against this woke cultural revolution is my full-time job. I’m dedicated to exposing the woke ideology in our country, helping people to understand what’s going on, and providing spaces for non-woke people to connect, support each other, and plan ways to fight back.

Here’s how you can help.