Years ago, as a young university faculty member with a newish Ph.D. in Management, the Federal Government borrowed me from my university for one year that stretched to two. My DC assignment as a temporary expert, was to help them design and implement a program to train research scientists to be managers of research and of science. We got it done and earned kudos for it.
While there I and my whole division were exposed to "anti-racism" training, something in which the Feds took a lead largely before anyone else was doing it. Maybe people have changed dramatically in the intervening years, but probably human nature is relatively static.
We all sat there politely attentive to the training, as was expected. What was interesting was what was said during breaks and after we were back in the office. It was clear almost no one took it seriously except the trainers, and even they seemed to be "going through the motions."
Coworker wisecracks about the general uselessness of "affirmative action hires" were commonplace. In the idiom of the time, comments about which DC suburbs had "good schools" or "not good schools" were euphemistic Fed-speak for the percentage of minority residents of each area.
If anything, anti-racism training appeared to make racism worse. Maybe that is no longer true, I suspect it still is.
