After almost three months of social lockdown, we thought we would soon be free to breathe again. And then a white knee pressed hard on a black neck and when the black chest could no longer breathe, Americans, black and white, realized they could not breathe either. That’s how it was that American society came one more time face to face with its ugly legacy of racism and all other forms of social divisions between Us and Them.
I have just finished reading Robert Sapolsky’s authoritative volume Behave with a whole chapter dedicated to how humans navigate their intuitive tendency to see the world through an Us versus Them perspective. I knew then I would have to write a post about this topic. Little I knew that I would have to do this under such gut-wrenching and tumultuous circumstances.
Nature seeds our brains with instincts and biases that steer us toward kinship, altruism, cooperativeness and fairness. Alas, though, the same nature, aided by cultural inculcation, also renders us more willing to exercise these virtuous behaviors toward in-group than out-group fellow humans. Be exposed to something positive about a member of what is Them to us and our brain, as if in shock, pauses to process this association, as if it is an anomaly. This happens because we have come to associate positive attributes, like generosity, trustworthiness and cooperativeness with our Us members. We recognize more merit and greater morality in Us than in Them. And we are more empathetic for our Us members than Them.
In contrast to the warm feelings we reserve for Us, we see those in Them as threatening, angry and untrustworthy. We perceive them as menacing and disgusting. We look at those we perceive as Them not as distinct individuals but as a monolithic mass fully vested with undifferentiated stereotypical attributes. Arbitrary differences between Us and Them are registered as essential differences in values and beliefs. Thus, a person who fancies hoodies becomes a potential threat if encountered by a white person in the dark of the night.
Feeling superior in human attributes versus Them-s is part of the problem. It gets a lot uglier when we in Us choose to put a greater distance from Them-s not by improving ourselves but rather by putting down and hurting those in Them. In that pursuit, building greater solidarity within the Us group is not done for self-improvement but in order to better fight the Them group.
This is the grim reality of the Us versus Them conflict that Sapolsky draws from numerous psychological, neurological and neuroimaging studies. But we are not necessarily doomed to live in perpetual friction. There are manageable ways to bridge the gap and bring Us and Them together. It turns out that no one belongs to one Us or Them only. We actually belong to multiple Us and Them. We have shared commonalities. When they find one such commonality, Us and Them come together, even if fleetingly. A famous case is the Christmas Truce between British and German soldiers during the First World War. They realized they were all from Christian nations accustomed to celebrating the same holiday. That overrode their being parts of different enemy camps.
Other ways to ameliorate the chasm between Us and Them is to strive to look at the world from the other side’s perspective, to gain a better understanding of one another, and to judge people as individuals and not as members of a stereotyped body of people. It also helps if we tamp down the sense of superiority and our craving for hierarchical dominance over the other group. Bringing Us and Them together has a better chance of success if done in equal terms and under shared goals. All these hopeful possibilities can be accomplished with closer contact and acquaintance with the other side.
So, how well is America doing in practicing individual and societal rehabilitation in order to erase the lines of division. Lines whose number appears to have grown. We are told that intellectual elites are out of step with the average person; urban Americans are culturally distant from rural Americans; and Democrats and Republicans are far apart on small and large issues. Even wearing a mask has become a political statement. But nowhere else America is more divided than when it comes to race and poor versus rich. In many cases, race and poverty intersect and interact to produce common inequitable outcomes in educational attainment, social mobility, health soundness, level of wealth, and environmentally clean habitats.
The usual approach to reducing these inequities is to appeal for remedial policies. But, as we see, progress is slow. There is a reason why this is so. The leading forces that could champion such policies are not experiencing the every-day problems of the underprivileged Americans. The reason for this is that America lives in a sort of social segregation and distancing that makes difficult for the Us-es to understand the Them-s. In other words, we are not giving ourselves the chances to successfully practice what Robert Sapolsky recommends if we have a chance to bring Us-es and Them-s closer together.
The Us-es of privileged America retreat in high-cost suburbs or behind gated communities. They send their children to expensive private schools or public schools full of the children of Us-es. And then they use various means to secure admission to top colleges. Less affluent Americans separate their children from public schools by sending them to charter or parochial schools. There are rich school districts and poor school districts with unequal educational resources and outcomes. In their formative years, America’s schoolchildren learn that they live in split worlds. Even worse, there are willing public officials and professionals that contribute to our segregation. Politicians legislate strict zoning laws to keep lower income Americans out of precious suburbs or exclusive urban neighborhoods. Realty firms use dirty tricks to keep minorities out of residential areas inhabited by white and rich people.
The Us-es and Them-s may work in the same places, may cheer the same teams in stadiums, and sometimes may pray in the same places of worship. But we still are like ships passing by in the darkness of the night knowing and feeling so little about each other. When we live separate lives with little personal interaction let’s not be surprised that prejudices grow and stereotypes make us blind to individual attributes and worthiness.
If America has a hope to become a less divided and more cohesive society, we must create the political and social institutions to bring the Us-es and Them-s together. And each one of us has to build bridges that will take us to the other side. The black stand-up comedian Wanda Sykes put it succinctly when in one of her shows she asked her white audience: “In this twenty-first century, tell me whether you have a black friend? Yup. That’s the reality test. If we replace black by any other Them category, have we tried to get close to any one of Them?
* Behave: The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky (professor of biology and neurology, Stanford University, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant).
** Should we capitalize the initial letter of the words black and white when referring to people? I referred to the Columbia Journalism Review, according to which both upper- and lower-case initial letters are used by different users. I went for the lower case.
Let's Reason 