I have heard this email thread created a hostile working and learning environment in the department described as "a cloud of despair."

Might need a thread about how diversity training rooted in Critical Race Theory/Social Justice "works." https://dailyiowan.com/2020/10/27/email-thread-within-the-college-of-dentistry-community-sparks-debate/

"Diversity" training using Critical Race Theory and Critical Social Justice (henceforth: "diversity" training) is designed to create exactly the kinds of divisions and problems in an organization that are described here and that are truly "clouds of despair" and conflict.

Put more simply, "diversity" training is designed to create conditions for hostility, discomfort, polarization, conflict, and collapse in the institutions that use them. Whether intentionally or as a matter of night following day, they are designed to do this.

"Diversity" training is designed in such a way that some people in the organization will become or join the activist core that drives for this kind of training and that seeks to make "diversity" activism a central project of the organization, consuming ever more resources.

Not very many people exposed to a dull, unpleasant, unwanted "diversity" training become part of the activist core, however. What people need to understand is that it only takes a few, maybe even one, including the person who brought it in to begin with.

Another purpose of "diversity" training is to create people who are more sympathetic to the ideas in the Critical Theories being employed. They're good-faith sympathizers and adopters who aren't wholly on board but think some of it is reasonable. This is crucial to the strategy.

Yet another purpose of "diversity" training is to raise awareness among everyone of the terms and thought of the "diversity" mindset. This will prevent those ideas from being so foreign if they come up later, and they will.
(See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect)

An additional purpose of "diversity" training is to signal to everyone in the mostly disinterested middle or opposition that their views are not the ones empowered within the organization, so they should stay silent. Dissidents can also be identified, challenged, and removed.

It's important to realize that dissidents to "diversity" training will be identified as generally troublemaking and divisive by the "diversity" training itself. This is also important.

"Diversity" training is setting the necessary preconditions for an institutional civil war.

Once enough "diversity" training has been done to accomplish the above goals, it's only a matter of time. Organizational civil war will follow, again, like night after day. This is because the conditions are set and the trigger is inevitable.

The trigger will be some precipitating event, like an accusation of racism in the office or of the management or of the organization as a whole on the systemic level. This is like setting off a gender-reveal firework in the California brush in a "diversity" trained institution.

The precipitating event will be interpreted by the activist core as proof of systemic problems. The sympathizers will generally agree and think the issue is important. The dissidents will oppose it and form a second pole, which will be branded evil (racist, etc.).

Everyone in the middle who doesn't take a side immediately will be pressured to do so, ramping up division and polarization. Silence is violence. Silence is complicity. Taking the dissident side is racist. The internal culture of the institution will crack as it polarizes.

Then the institutional "diversity" civil war will begin, and if there's enough attention drawn, it will have heavy activist pressure (and dissident resistance pressure) from the outside, replicating the divisive characteristics of the inside. This is bad for the organization.

The "diversity" activists have two goals in mind, and both of the most likely outcomes of this civil war are those. Either the organization folds to their pressure and becomes a "diversity" activist organ, or it collapses, which will be rationalized as another racist org dying.

It's good to remember here that the Critical Theories at the heart of "diversity" training DO NOT BUILD. They DO NOT EVEN HAVE THE CAPACITY TO BUILD. Therefore, conquering organizations or making them collapse are both winning outcomes for them.

After the collapse, if that's what happens, there are also two possibilities, both of which are desirable to the "diversity" activists. Collapse, as noted previously, or surviving as a "diversity" organ by being propped up by the copious amounts of foundation money doing that.

It's therefore not a bug of "diversity" training that it creates a divisive atmosphere and "cloud of despair"-type hostile working/learning environment. That's what it's designed to do for the Critical purpose.

Best to understand this sooner than later.

Postscript: Why is it true that "diversity" activism doesn't have the capacity to build? Because it's based in Critical Theory, and Critical Theory is deliberately divorced from Traditional Theory (knowing how the world works), which is necessary to do any productive building.