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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In these turbulent times, defined by ideological chasms, clashes over social justice, and a pandemic intersecting with misinformation, Americans seem hopelessly divided along fault lines of politics, race, religion, class, and culture. Yet not everyone is accepting the status quo.
In Bridge Builders: Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age, journalist Nathan Bomey paints a forensic portrait of Americans who are spanning gaping divides between people of difference. From clergy fighting racism in Charlottesville to a former Republican congressman engaging conservatives on climate change and Appalachian journalists restoring social trust with the public, these countercultural leaders all believe in the power of forging lasting connections to bring about profound change. Though the blueprints for political, social, and cultural bridges vary widely, bridge builders have much in common—and we have much to learn from them. In this book, Bomey dissects the transformational ways in which bridge builders are combatting polarization by pursuing reconciliation, rejecting misinformation, and rethinking the principle of compromise.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Introduction
Notes
Part I: Forging a Path toward Reconciliation
Notes
1 From Blindness to Sight
Notes
2 From Human to Human
Notes
3 From Hating to Healing
Notes
Part II: Reconnecting with Truth
Notes
4 From Fiction to Fact
Notes
5 From Caricature to Nuance
Notes
6 From Misunderstanding to Understanding
Notes
Part III: Redrafting the Blueprint of Compromise
Notes
7 From Denying to Believing
Notes
8 From Rigidity to Flexibility
Notes
9 From Discord to Collaboration
Notes
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Interviews
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Interviews
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
To Grandpa R.D., who embodied the essence of bridge building
Bridge Builders
Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age
Nathan Bomey
polity
Copyright © Nathan Bomey 2021
The right of Nathan Bomey to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4594-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Bomey, Nathan, author.Title: Bridge builders : bringing people together in a polarized age / Nathan Bomey.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “An absorbing and inspiring portrait of individuals who are uniting divided communities across America”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020055372 (print) | LCCN 2020055373 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509545933 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509545940 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Polarization (Social sciences)--United States--History--21st century. | United State--Social conditions--21st century.Classification: LCC HN90.P57 B66 2021 (print) | LCC HN90.P57 (ebook) | DDC 306.0973--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055372LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055373
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Prologue: The Better Angels of Our Nature
In many ways, America is like one big dysfunctional family that, despite its differences, is better off when it’s communicating and cooperating effectively, even though we will never agree on everything. But lately we’ve been emotionally abusing each other, failing to listen to one another, and exploiting each other’s failings.
The fact that we increasingly can’t hold fruitful conversations with people who aren’t like us – which is the key to finding common ground and thus achieving political, social, and cultural progress – illustrates the depths of our civic crisis. Productive discourse in spite of our disagreements is “the arch stone of democracy” – it’s what holds us together – according to David Blankenhorn, cofounder of Braver Angels, a nonprofit that teaches Americans from different backgrounds how to communicate. “Conversation is the very heart and soul of self-government,” Blankenhorn said. “It always has been. You can’t run a democracy without that.”
In view of the parallels between familial discord and our crisis of polarization, it would seem appropriate to look to family therapy for clues on how to improve our national dialogue. And that’s precisely how Braver Angels got started. Originally known as Better Angels, the nonprofit was founded in the wake of the 2016 US election by a group of politically diverse Americans who were determined to catalyze healthy conversation about the issues that divide us. “Family therapy has been dealing with” polarization for as long as there has been family therapy – just in a different context – said Brookings Institution political scholar Jonathan Rauch, a former member of the Better Angels board. “Typically, when you have a marriage or family that’s having problems, you’re dealing with . . . strong emotional feelings, which are blocking communication, exacerbating stereotypes, [and] causing discursive loops that go in the wrong direction where people escalate.”
Sounds familiar, right? That’s what we see all around us.
Bill Doherty, one of the nation’s leading family therapists and a cofounder of Braver Angels, designed the group’s community workshops to bring together an equal number of Republicans and Democrats – or what he calls “reds” and “blues” – in small-group settings. The participants typically spend several hours immersed in a series of conversations moderated by trained volunteers to learn how to more effectively communicate with people on the other side. “So when they speak, you have to create a structure that makes it unlikely that they will go on the attack and a space that gives them an opportunity to listen to the other,” Doherty said.
That approach comes directly from couples counseling, where the therapist is firmly in control of the conversation from the beginning. “You don’t let them turn to each other and then start processing an argument that they had – because if they could do that on their own well, they wouldn’t be paying you,” Doherty said. “Careful attention is paid to minimizing the likelihood of flare-ups and meltdowns because you have trouble recovering from that.”
While people are allowed to express their views in the Braver Angels workshops, they’re also encouraged to examine the limitations and flaws of their own side. This concept also comes directly from counseling strategy. “In working with couples, the real takeoff point occurs for people getting better when they see that their problems are not just due to their spouse’s bad behavior or rotten personality, but they see themselves as contributors, if you will, to the polarization that has occurred,” Doherty said.
From a practical perspective, Braver Angels places one group of politically like-minded people in a circle to have a conversation with each other. The participants from the opposite side of the aisle are positioned in a circle around the original group and are instructed to listen but not speak, creating the feeling of a fishbowl. The people in the inner circle are then asked to discuss their values and consider why their preferred political policies are good for the country. That gives them a chance to crow about why their side is superior.
“The second question is, ‘What are your reservations or concerns about your own side?’” Doherty said. “There you get people to be self-reflective, to be selfcritical, to recognize that their side doesn’t have it all nailed. And there is this almost visceral softening you can feel in the room. People on the outside have exactly those criticisms. And you’re not coming across as a fanatic.”
Then the groups trade places. This exercise helps members of each group see that people on the other side recognize some of their own flaws and that people on both sides might have something in common. The lesson here? When you display a degree of vulnerability and humility, you can begin to make genuine connections with others.
In another exercise, the groups break off and examine negative perceptions about their respective sides, listing the most common stereotypes about them. “Typically, the reds would make lists of things like, ‘We don’t care about the poor,’ or, ‘We’re a bunch of racists,’ and blues will make lists like, ‘We’re unpatriotic,’ and, ‘We’re all for open borders,’” Rauch said.
Each group is then asked to examine whether there’s a kernel of truth in the other side’s perceptions. “And people say, ‘Well, racists are attracted to our side and some of our leaders are, and it’s disturbing to us,’” Doherty said. It’s only after these sessions, which force the participants to consider each other as human beings, that the groups begin to discuss hot-button issues directly with each other.
Braver Angels has achieved extraordinary results by teaching people how to communicate. By April 2020, the group had nearly 10,000 dues-paying members and 1,240 volunteers, including 630 moderators trained to lead sessions on their own, according to Blankenhorn. Before the coronavirus pandemic shut down in-person gatherings in early 2020, the nonprofit was conducting a total of 15 to 18 sessions per week throughout the United States. When the pandemic hit, Braver Angels temporarily switched to online sessions, holding dynamic conversations on topics ranging from the 2020 election to race relations in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. Membership more than tripled during the year.
The group’s goal is to help people “see the little bit of humanity that you recognize is shared with you in the other person to the degree that you have an inner desire to do good to them, even though you disagree strongly,” Blankenhorn said. “That’s really all we’re trying to do.”
From the beginning, Braver Angels had no interest in the pursuit of political consensus among the participants. “We were not that much interested in having people agree on policy. We were not that much interested in having people adopt a centrist political philosophy. We were not that interested in getting people to modify or change their views of public policy issues. Nor were we particularly interested in having them agree on facts,” Blankenhorn said. “Our point of view was that what one views as a fact depends on questions of social trust, not the facticity of the fact.”
Without reestablishing social trust, we’ve got no hope of getting on the same page. “The diminishment of social trust was the reason that we believe that people couldn’t agree on facts,” Blankenhorn said. “So what we were trying to do was establish social trust, which we believe is a precondition for all these other things.”
Doherty said Americans won’t get on the same page until they recognize that everyone must be part of the solution – just like for couples to be successful in therapy, both people must embrace the role they can play in pursuit of relational reconciliation. “It has to be a we problem, not just a you problem,” said Doherty, who is also a former president of the National Council on Family Relations. “And if we have a problem, then more of us may have some motivation to try to be curious and understand the other side.”
Doherty recalled that after one Braver Angels session, one group member walked away with the transformational realization that he was part of the problem – much like drivers complain about congestion: “This person realized, ‘I am traffic.’”
Yet even if the entire nation entered into the political version of family therapy, we’d still struggle with the purely human magnetism of polarization. It will never go away in full. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find common ground more often. “I tell people at the end of successful couples therapy that you are now much more aware of the handful of problems that you will have until death do you part,” Doherty said, only half joking. “Hopefully what you’ve gotten from this is better understanding of [those problems] and better ways to deal with them, having them be annoyances rather than life threatening – and to live gracefully and graciously with them.”
Clearly, we can’t send everyone in the United States to Braver Angels workshops. We need a more realistic approach to helping people find common ground within the context of their daily lives. But what Braver Angels has proven, within the confines of a civic laboratory, is that reestablishing social trust is possible when approached strategically.
So how do we go about it in real life?
Since you’ve picked up this book, you are at least curious about the possibility that there are proven methods for bringing people together despite their differences. But perhaps you are skeptical. You’re thinking, Americans are stubborn and won’t change their minds no matter what we try.
Maybe you’re right. Maybe our divides are too wide to be bridged. I can’t rule it out. Yet if history is our guide, there is hope.
Take it from Rauch and Blankenhorn. During the early 2000s, they engaged in a years-long debate about the merits of gay marriage. Blankenhorn, who is straight, actively opposed it, while Rauch, who is gay, was a vocal proponent and had written a book about it. “We went at it hammer and tong as intellectual adversaries,” Rauch said.
There was no reason to believe they’d ever find common ground on one of the most contentious political topics in America at the time. But as they got to know each other – as their friendship deepened and they engaged in an ongoing conversation about the issue – Blankenhorn eventually came over to Rauch’s side. His change of heart on marriage equality ultimately led him down a path to the creation, in 2016, of Better Angels. “I changed my mind on gay marriage mostly stemming from my relationship with Jonathan,” Blankenhorn said. “We began in this public debate, but then we eventually became friends.”
Blankenhorn’s experience brought him to a realization that the establishment of social trust is the first step toward getting on the same page. It’s not enough to simply present new facts or opinions. “But because of relationships,” he said, “you can change your mind and still feel that you’re being true to yourself.”
Introduction
When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in early 2020, I thought perhaps this would be the catalyst that finally brought Americans together. Surely this crisis – a life-or-death situation for millions of people – would prompt us to rally alongside one another, bond with each other despite our differences, and set aside our political disagreements to get through it together.
Looking back on it, my hope was terribly naive. It didn’t happen. It was never going to happen.
Yes, Americans showed plenty of support for frontline workers who put their lives at risk to contain the virus. And we did a lot of Zoom calls with our friends, which was nice for a while until it got tiresome. But it wasn’t long before we began bickering over the roots of the COVID-19 crisis and arguing over what to do about it.
The tendency of some Republicans, in particular, to resist the exhortations of public health officials to wear masks placed them and others at risk of death and profound economic hardship.1 One reason may be because then-President Donald Trump initially refused to set a good example by wearing a mask in public. To be sure, at various stages during the pandemic, many other prominent Republicans, including Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, publicly promoted masks, which were scientifically proven to save people from contracting the disease.2 Nonetheless, mask wearing became so contentious that National Public Radio referred to it as “another signifier of political identity,” as Republicans insistent on maintaining their personal freedom declared that masks are “for the weak” and reflect “government overreach.” On the other hand, there were also reports of people – presumably Democrats in many cases – berating others for not wearing masks in socially distanced outdoor situations where they were scientifically unnecessary.3 Debate about the seriousness of the crisis even turned rigidly partisan, as Republicans became less concerned about it as the months went along, while Democrats became more concerned.4
We should not be surprised that the pandemic turned out to be a force of division. One-time events – no matter how significant – are no match for our chronic divisiveness. Even sudden disruption of our way of living cannot overcome the disgust we have for others who aren’t like us. Such disruption can provide only a superficial sense of togetherness – and usually for a short period of time – unless people on the ground are ready, willing, and able to organically transform their circumstances into an opportunity to build bridges toward each other. Absent such a concerted effort, we’d rather fight about our circumstances than fight together against our circumstances.
It was, in fact, virtually inevitable that the pandemic – which, by the end of 2020, had killed more than 340,000 Americans, infected more than 19.6 million,5 and ravaged the economy – would cast a spotlight on our national divides. Much like there was no quick fix for the pandemic after it began raging, so there is no quick fix for our crisis of polarization – no treatment that can eradicate divisiveness overnight. “The divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political values – on government, race, immigration, national security, environmental protection, and other areas – reached record levels during Barack Obama’s presidency,” according to the Pew Research Center, and those gaps grew “even larger” under Trump.6 During his four years in the White House, Trump personally and relentlessly attacked his political opponents, emboldened White nationalists, assailed reporters as enemies, and unleashed furious tweets day after day, among innumerable other polarizing actions and statements.
After Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in the November 2020 election, we can certainly hope that political polarization will ease a bit, in part because of the former vice president’s pledge to pursue bipartisanship and the perception that he could serve as the “healer-in-chief” following Trump’s intensely polarizing reign.7 But Biden’s win was far from the sweeping victory that might’ve signaled a national repudiation of Trump’s style of political vengeance and intransigence. Rather, although Biden received the most votes of any presidential candidate in US history while campaigning on a platform to unify the country – more than 75 million people backed him – Trump got more votes than any previous sitting president.8 Despite all the polarizing things he was responsible for, Trump still won the support of more than 72 million Americans on election day.9
And even though he outperformed expectations, Trump baselessly labeled the election results as fraudulent.10 His own Department of Homeland Security reported that the election was “the most secure in American history,”11 yet Trump repeatedly refused to concede. In doing so, he injected further animus into the American political environment, threatening to erode voters’ confidence in future elections and further solidifying the fissures that plague our democracy.
As the election showed us, the things that divide us are deeply embedded in the American psyche. They cannot be swept away with a particular electoral outcome or erased by an inspiring politician. Among Democrats, 61 percent view Republicans as racist, bigoted, and sexist, while 54 percent of Republicans view Democrats as spiteful and 49 percent view them as ignorant, according to a poll conducted in late 2019 for digital news outlet Axios. About one-fifth of Democrats and onefifth of Republicans view the other side as “evil.”12
Yes, that’s the same adjective we would typically use to characterize Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty or Scar from The Lion King – as in, the same way we would describe a maniacal sorcerer or a murderous tyrant from an animated movie. But there’s nothing cinematic or fictitious about our situation. No one is here to sing “Hakuna Matata” and explain how we’re all part of the circle of life.
Among both Democrats and Republicans, only 2–3 percent view the other side as kind, while no more than 4 percent view the other side as thoughtful, according to the Axios survey. The poll had a margin of error of three points, meaning the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who view each other as kind could be as low as zero.13 Think about that for a second.
The tendency of people of difference to loathe one another on a deeply personal level is what political scientists call “affective polarization” – and it’s coursing through America’s veins. “When polarization started emerging, it looked like disagreement about issues,” said Jonathan Rauch, a US political scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Affective polarization is different because it means you have an actual emotional dislike of the other side. It’s often not even issue based. It’s based on the sense that the other side is dangerous, evil, wants to endanger people like me – a threat.”
In lawmaking, affective polarization throttles legislative progress because politicians don’t have an incentive to work together if their constituents actively or passively support their obstinacy. That’s obvious to anyone acquainted with the unending stasis on Capitol Hill.
Our democratic principles are at risk of crumbling if we can’t have difficult conversations with people of difference, tackle challenging issues together, confront our personal biases, and see the world through each other’s eyes. As conservative scholar and author Arthur C. Brooks wrote in his 2019 book, Love Your Enemies, affective polarization is breeding a culture of contempt. It is undermining entire communities, interpersonal relationships, and institutional stability.
In the workplace, we have an actual financial incentive to get along, yet affective polarization is still prominent. Personal contempt is leading employees to spurn others who don’t share their political views. According to a study by research and advisory group Gartner, 36 percent of employees avoided talking to or collaborating with a coworker during the 2020 presidential primary season because of that colleague’s political views. Nearly one-third reported that they had “witnessed at least one instance of unacceptable treatment of a coworker because of their political beliefs, including being called offensive names, being avoided by colleagues, or being treated unfairly.”14
Before the pandemic had even begun, pervasive divisiveness had afflicted the personal lives of about one-third of Americans, of whom about four in ten had experienced depression, anxiety, or sadness because of it, according to a poll conducted in late 2019 by the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda for USA Today’s Hidden Common Ground project.15
If nothing else, COVID-19 has shown us that affective polarization can even be deadly. When we make lifestyle decisions based on tribalistic politics rather than science, we are putting the lives of the people around us at risk of contracting the virus. Yet, ironically, even if there were a vaccine to treat polarization, many Americans would refuse it. Just as a misguided slice of Americans – including a cross-section of those on both the left and the right – won’t listen to the science that vaccines are safe and necessary to preserve public health,16 many of us won’t listen to the facts on other issues if those facts contradict our preconceived notions about each other and the world around us.17
As a newspaper journalist, I’ve devoted my life to seeking out the truth. So it pains me to admit that publishing the facts through old-fashioned media isn’t enough to get people on the same page. The decline of traditional news media has frayed the relationship between Americans and professional journalists, whose collective bond of civic trust has been further ravaged by false accusations of “fake news” leveled at journalists from the likes of Trump and his hyperpartisan media supporters. Amid my industry’s financial implosion – which has led to massive layoffs, publication shutdowns, and so-called “news deserts”18 – social media platforms have become the new gatekeepers for the information that many people see about the world. These technology giants are enabling misinformation to flourish and profiting from it.19
Consequently, Americans have been largely left to fend for themselves on an information superhighway riddled with potholes of falsehoods that further divide our society. Owing to the classic psychological condition of confirmation bias, many of us believe and actively spread the lies. As falsehoods flourish, our emotions become supercharged, and our crisis of polarization worsens. And there’s no reason to believe our increasingly cacophonous public discourse will suddenly become symphonic, absent a new orchestration specifically composed to achieve harmony.
William Galston – who cofounded No Labels and The New Center, groups that work to bolster the political center in America – began studying American polarization at the Brookings Institution during the second Iraq War. Polarization “seemed very serious back then,” he said. “It’s clear in retrospect we hadn’t seen anything yet. Every year I say to myself, ‘It can’t get worse than this.’ And every year it gets worse.”
Ensconced in our political echo chambers, we are constantly fed the premise that the other side is crazy. Talking heads say it. Social media says it. Politicians say it. Even journalists say it. And Americans have bought into it: 87 percent of Democrats and 84 percent of Republicans say the other side is hateful, while 88 percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Republicans say the other side is brainwashed, according to a June 2019 survey by the nonpartisan group More in Common for its Hidden Tribes of America project.20
But are we truly as far apart as we feel? More in Common, which studies political tribalism in an attempt to bridge ideological divides, examined “second-order beliefs” – that is, what people believe others believe. It turns out that we may not be as polarized as we think we are.
The study concluded that “Democrats and Republicans imagine that almost twice as many people on the other side hold extreme views than really do.” For example, Democrats underestimate the share of Republicans who believe that “many Muslims are good Americans” by 29 points, and underestimate the percentage who believe that “properly controlled immigration can be good for America” by 33 points. Likewise, Republicans overestimate the percentage of Democrats who agree that “the US should have completely open borders” by 33 points, and overestimate the share of Democrats who believe that “America should be a socialist country” by 25 points.21
Perception, of course, is reality – so that wide gap in second-order beliefs has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that doesn’t mean Americans like it this way. “After more than a decade of intensifying polarization, even people who disagree with each other pretty vehemently are hungering for a politics that feels different, politics that sounds different, politics that doesn’t make us hate our neighbors,” Galston said.
He’s right. The Hidden Tribes project found that 67 percent of Americans constitute an “exhausted majority” containing “distinct groups of people with varying degrees of political understanding and activism” who “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”22
“What is it that’s exhausting people? The constant fighting. The sense that we are devoting 99 percent of our energy to struggling with each other,” Galston said. “It’s like this giant social war where roughly half the country is pulling hard in one direction, and roughly half the country is pulling just as hard in the other direction, and the rope isn’t moving. We’re getting really tired. It takes a real effort to keep on going in a tug of war, but it can get pretty frustrating if the rope never moves.”
The rope is stuck in myriad ways. On immigration, for example, lawmakers have been deadlocked for at least a generation over how to handle people living in the country without legal documentation and how to handle border security. But most Americans are not divided on the issue, according to The New Center’s research. “You have one party that’s offering a wall and another party that seems to be offering open borders,” Galston said. “Majorities don’t want the wall, they don’t want family separation, they don’t want non-responsiveness to refugees fleeing a genuine fear of persecution. On the other hand, they don’t want open borders, they don’t want sanctuary cities, they don’t want to abolish ICE” – the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
What most Americans want is something in the middle. But political paralysis has prevented a solution, in part because people on the far left and the far right wield so much influence over public policy debates. Progressive activists and devoted conservatives make up only 8 percent and 6 percent of Americans, respectively, despite having an outsized influence on our political discourse.23
“It’s been a political science truism for decades now . . . that intense minorities can have disproportionate effects on politics – and issues like immigration tend to attract passionate minorities on both sides,” Galston said. “They set the terms of the debate within their respective parties but not in the country.”
That paradigm is ensuring a political stalemate because the nation’s two-party system was designed to guarantee that neither side gets what it wants in full. “The political system for too long has been guided by the hope of both political parties that they were on the verge of winning a sweeping victory that would enable them to form a new permanent governing majority and just get their way,” Galston said. “Faced with compromise or stagnation, the system has elected to go down the path of stagnation.”
Indeed, compromise has become an anachronism in part because there’s little consequence for the engineers of stagnation. Politicians are consistently rewarded in lopsided, gerrymandered primary elections for standing their ground and refusing to budge based purely on their ideological principles. That stubbornness makes the pursuit of common ground extraordinarily difficult.
Yet our leaders won’t change unless we change. Otherwise there’s no incentive for them to do anything differently. And that means we need to embrace relationships and conversation with people who aren’t like us. It means we need to immerse ourselves in friendships and interaction with people of difference that expose us to their perspectives and to the challenges they face, even when the process makes us uncomfortable. If we don’t work with each other – if we don’t build bridges – we’ll never achieve progress together.
Sometimes the path to conversation, understanding, and cooperation proceeds slowly, as we gradually learn more about each other and become more attuned to the structural issues that underpin our polarized culture. And sometimes it happens swiftly, when we become viscerally aware of the need to span the gaps that have divided us for ages.
When I began working on this book in late 2018, I never imagined we would see the type of national outcry over the compounding scourge of racism that we saw in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, on May 25, 2020, at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. The searing sound of Floyd pleading, “I can’t breathe,” and crying out for his mother as White officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck while he suffocated24 shocked many White Americans into realizing for the first time that racism manifested in the form of police brutality is still real and vicious. But, perhaps even more significantly, it also shocked them into recognizing that police brutality is just one element in a much broader societal scheme that keeps Black Americans under the knees of White privilege.
The death of George Floyd was the latest in a seemingly endless series of violent acts by police against Black people – including incidents like the killing in 2014 of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which spurred outrage among some White Americans for a while, yet eventually faded from the national spotlight. But this time, the shock factor sparked a burgeoning awareness of the need for White Americans to step out onto metaphorical ledges and to begin building bridges across structural ravines that have long prevented Black Americans from escaping the trenches of economic inequality, underfunded schools, and lack of access to adequate medical care, to mention just a few obstacles to social justice.
The national outpouring of anger following Floyd’s death was largely directed at the White establishment, as Americans of all races hit the streets throughout the country to protest and demand change despite an ongoing pandemic that put their lives at risk. The groundswell of outrage can serve as the raw material for the type of bridge building that needs to be done to begin overcoming the whitecapped rapids of racism. The key will be to ensure that the protests translate into lasting bridges, which are the key to policy change. For that, White Americans, myself included, cannot ask Black people to meet us halfway. White people need to use their voices and places of privilege to speak up and take action by constructing the bridges that they have so long neglected to build.
Building bridges between people of difference against a backdrop of racism, political polarization, misinformation, and social division may sound like a milquetoast way of pursuing change. But it’s not. Rather, it’s a bold form of countercultural revolution. It stands in stark contrast to the typical way of doing things, in which we stand firm on our cultural biases, cling to social and political isolation, and refuse to consider the possibility that we could be wrong.
Bridge building does not, however, require unity. And it does not involve cultural assimilation. That is a false assumption. What’s required is the pursuit of understanding – that is, the pursuit of social trust, as David Blankenhorn of Braver Angels described it. Social trust paves the way for structural change that can bring about tangible benefits for our society at large.
But how do we pursue social trust when the things that divide us feel so overwhelming? How do we achieve policy progress when our polarized politics have taught us that we should never have to compromise? How do we foster improved communication to combat the crisis of misinformation that fans the flames of division? And how do we ensure that the movement that arose in the wake of George Floyd’s death turns into substantive change among White Americans who previously did not grasp or care about the need to fight racism?
As I began considering ways to address polarization in this book, I figured there must be people out there who aren’t accepting the status quo. There must be people who are bringing others of difference together. There must be people who are dedicating themselves to fostering dialogue, mending broken relationships, and finding common ground.
I’m here to tell you that they’re out there. I visited them. I talked with them. And I believe that we can – we must – learn from them.
They are not Pollyannaish. They are not impervious to discouragement. They are not flawless.
But they are hopeful, they are driven, and they are countercultural.
They are bridge builders.
Bridge builders are people like Eboo Patel.
About a quarter century ago, racial tension was high following the police beating of Rodney King, the O. J. Simpson trial, and what Patel called “the emergence of identity politics on college campuses.” “It wasn’t as politically divided” as things are today, “but it was socially divided in a variety of ways,” he said.
For a while, Patel was immersed in the divisiveness. “I spent a couple of years angry,” he said. “And then frankly I developed some perspective and maturity and judgment. Along the way, I discovered religion.”
He devoted himself to his faith as a Muslim of Gujarati Indian heritage. At the same time, he began learning more about the discordant role that religion was playing in the world, including in the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and in the Yugoslav wars. But he also began learning more about what he called “the positive role that religious identity had played in social movements,” such as the struggle to defeat apartheid in South Africa, the American Civil Rights Movement, and “the language used by everybody from Dorothy Day to Jane Addams to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Joshua Abraham Heschel.”
Patel’s personal journey gave him the conviction that “religion can be a bunker of isolation, it can be a barrier of division, it can be a bludgeon of domination, or it can be a bridge of cooperation.”
That led him in the late 1990s to form the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) to promote conversation, relationships, and cooperation among college students from different religious backgrounds. Today, the nonprofit provides training, organizes volunteer outings, and offers curricula on interfaith issues. By April 2020, IFYC had established a presence on more than 600 campuses throughout the country with about 100,000 student participants.25
Patel has advocated for higher-education leaders to allay marginalization and sniping among evangelical Christians, atheists, and Muslims by integrating “conversations about religious diversity” into “first-year orientation, required courses, and policies that affect campus climate.”26
Since Patel often finds himself attempting to bridge gaps between students from completely different worlds, I asked him whether he felt like his work was countercultural. I certainly think it is. But he disagreed – and his response was reflective of the way bridge builders tend to see the world differently. “If America is defined by cable news, then what we’re doing is countercultural,” he said. “But if America is defined by what we do on a regular basis in hospitals, in little leagues, in pickup basketball, in hip-hop ciphers, then it’s actually very much part of the American way.”
