Shital Sharma of the "Let's Try That Again" podcast invited Stephen Menendian for a conversation about the new book he co-authored with john powell, Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World. Read the podcast description below and scroll down for a transcript of the conversation:
In this week's episode I sit down with Stephen Menendian, the Assistant Director and Director of Research at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. We discuss his latest book, co-authored with john powell, called "Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World." Stephen starts us off with describing what "Othering" is, and how the framework can be helpful in examining - and can work towards remediating - forms of structural marginalization and inequality. Our conversation then turns to what Stephen and john powell both regard as one of the most dangerous forces in the world today, that of ethno-nationalism, and the various "identity entrepreneurs" fueling these movements. We end on a more hopeful note, discussing how all of us can work towards fostering more Belonging - through creating and telling new stories, ones in which we all have a voice and a role to play, and through creating & expanding our identities to include parts that can connect with others. It is only on common ground that we can begin to build the kind of world we want, one based on inclusion, fairness, justice, and care.
Transcript
Shital Sharma:
Hi. I'm Shital, and you're listening to Let's Try That again, a podcast in which we try on new ideas and revisit old ones in new ways.
We don't have to search too long to see how groups of people, entire communities, and even nations are subject to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence. People throughout history have been marginalized, stigmatized, and have even been exterminated because one or several aspects of their identities, such as their gender or ethnicity or race or caste or class, has been deemed unworthy in the eyes of another.
According to my guest today, Stephen Menendian, all such forms of discrimination, whether it is caste-based violence or race-based inequality or gender-based marginalization, can all be understood as a form of othering. As the Assistant Director and Director of Research at the Othering and Belonging Institute, Stephen and his colleagues, including John Powell, who is the Director of the Institute, bring together organizers, researchers, artists, and policymakers to study and examine such various forms of structural inequalities under one rubric in the hope of working towards, and one day, achieving the common goal of a world based on inclusion, fairness, justice, and care for each other and the earth. What they call belonging.
In this episode, Stephen and I discuss his new book, co-authored with John Powell, called Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World. In our Conversation, he shares how othering can be a helpful and useful framework for understanding what initially appeared to be very different forms of prejudice or discrimination. We talk about identity entrepreneurs, politicians, and leaders, current or former presidents who are furthering forms of ethnonationalism, where a nation's identity becomes rooted in a particular religious, ethnic, or racial group.
Something that Stephen and john argue is one of the most dangerous forces in the world today. But how can we move away from such fracturing and rupture between people and communities? Well, according to Stephen and john powell, we need to craft new stories about ourselves, about our larger communities, about our countries, about our world. One in which we all feel that we have a voice and a role.
We also need new identities, or at least call upon parts of ourselves that unite us, that allow us to connect to one another. For only when we find common ground can we begin to build a new world.
Hi, Stephen. Before we get into this book that you wrote with john powell, can you tell us a little bit about what the Belonging and Other Institute is and does?
Stephen Menendian:
Yeah, I'd be happy to. So our institute was originally formed as part of a diversity initiative at UC Berkeley. And its original conception, it was called the Haas Diversity Research Center, which was a chancellor-driven initiative, try and really figure out how to bring more diverse faculty to campus.
It's been a struggle, particularly at elite institutions for a long time now, to diversify the faculty. And I could go on and on about the academy, but one of the problems in the academy is that the kind of research that's rewarded in tenure promotion processes is typically starkly disconnected from the problems of the real world.
So on the one hand, universities want these superstar professors who can grab media attention like Robert Reich or whomever. But on the other hand, the actual people who do the hiring, the faculty hiring committees, mostly focus on things like your number of publications, the quality of the journal that your publication is in, the number of citations that you get. That's really where you get hired. And so what that typically means is that people who care about the real world are not typically the top cut in competitive, really competitive, tier one research institutions.
So the institute... I'm giving a long-winded answer. But basically the institute was formed to try and encourage and recruit more diverse faculty, and we have these affiliated faculty clusters that create chairs for that purpose. And then my boss, john powell, was hired as the Haas Chancellor Chair to anchor that process. And when he came in, decided to re-envision what it would look like.
And so our initial formulation was the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. And then about five or six years into that, now, five or six years ago, we decided to rebrand as the Othering Belonging Institute. And there's an evolution behind that, which we'll talk about the book.
Shital Sharma:
Right. Then coming to the book and I guess the renaming, what did you and john feel was then lacking in this current discourse that we have around say, prejudice or racism or discrimination, that doesn't quite capture what the framework of othering can provide?
So for example, in the book you write that there can be prejudice without othering and othering without prejudice.
Stephen Menendian:
Yes.
Shital Sharma:
So could you explain that to us?
Stephen Menendian:
Yes. So part of the problem the social justice movements face, and that frankly the world faces, is fragmentation. That people move and retreat into their siloed spaces. So you have disability rights activists, you have trans activists, you have LGBTQ advocates, you have racial justice advocates. And even within racial justice, there's all this siloing and fragmentation.
So you have people who are focused on public health and really a deep bench of people who are public health advocates with a racial justice lens. And then you have housing advocates and you have criminal justice reformers. And they're, generally speaking, incredibly siloed and not really coordinated.
So you have people who are deep, deep in the weeds on education policy, but really not really familiar or conversant in the public health discourse. So it's like everything is fragmented and siloed. And when we look around the world, what you have is these competing fiefdoms and the social justice movement. And there's a lack of integration. There's a lack of strategic coordination and coherence.
And so part of what we're trying to offer with this framework of othering, this analytic approach of othering is a coherency across these expressions. And so what we say and what we see is that whether you're talking about Islamophobia or transphobia or anti-Semitism or anti-black racism, is that there is a common denominator, which is these are all expressions of othering.
And so in Othering, we were working on this work at the same time that Isabelle Wilkerson produced her book Caste. And what she's trying to do and what we do is really a similar project. She takes three expressions of othering. She says, these are all caste: anti-Semitism, Hindu supremacy, Dalit prejudice, and then anti-black racism.
And what she's really trying to do is saying look, these three things that look really disparate actually have a common undercarriage. And that's exactly the same thing we're trying to do with Othering, except in a more supple manner. Caste is too rigid as a frame, which I write about in the second chapter.
But really what we're trying to do is show that if you look at all these expressions of othering, all of them, gender, whatever, there are common mechanics that underpin them all. Segregation, discrimination, prejudice, violence, out group violence. There's a common set of narratives, out group narratives. There's a common set of tropes and mechanisms that undergird all of them.
And therefore, if we see them all as expressions of othering, we can make common cause more easily rather than continue to retreat into those separate fiefdoms, social justice, movement, advocacy.
Shital Sharma:
Okay. How would you then respond to people who say, we're all different. We're different people, different cultures, languages. And doesn't that difference automatically just serve as a basis of othering?
Stephen Menendian:
Well, one of the amazing things about the framework of othering is that it is... And so cast is unidimensional, right? You're either higher or lower in the caste hierarchy. One of the things that othering allows us to do, and the reason I called it more supple, is because it's multidimensional. You can have intersectional identities, you can have stacked identities. And most marginalized groups tend to have multiply marginalized identity.
It's usually the most marginalized groups are not marginalized on one dimension, but multiple dimensions. So it's like you're, marginalized in terms of your religion and your ethnicity. Or you're marginalized in terms of your ethnicity and your sexual orientation. Your marginalized in terms of your gender identity and your religion. It's the multiple marginalization, what we call intersectional position. What Kimberlé Crenshaw identified decades ago as the intersectional position that creates a suppleness.
And so othering is actually incredibly sensitive to difference. It's not totalizing. It's a framework that says there's a common set of mechanisms that recur across these expressions, but it allows for and embraces difference. And so what it says is, from an analytic and strategic perspective, it's saying if we see these as expressions of othering, then we can also orient ourselves towards the solution in a more holistic and comprehensive way rather than one that continues to fall into the trap of divide and conquer and fragmentation.
Because if you have a society that's driven by social justice movements that are uncoordinated and separate, it's much harder to make progress on those than if there is an understanding of both what you're fighting a similar set of goals and then also...
In life, you have to maintain the particularities and the differences, while also striving for the common goals.
Shital Sharma:
Yeah, precisely. And so speaking of marginalization, I'm drawing on how you mentioned in the book Iris Young, the political scientist, her study on oppression. She delineates these five faces of oppression. So there's exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and gender violence.
And racism, race is one of the only one that's common to all of them. All five. And so this makes me wonder when you later on in the book say... And I'm going to talk a little bit for a while here, sorry. That quote, "In the West, it is very fashionable for us to ascribe many social ills to white supremacy, but this can be a misdiagnosis of the problem."
And so I wonder when we look at every major political, not just these five faces of oppression where race is common link, but any kind of major political event in the history of the US from the foundation of the country on African slave trade to the extermination of Native Americans, segregation put opposition to interracial marriage, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, Trump building a wall, Islamophobia, calling the COVID virus an Asian virus, and just recently this 2021 replacement theory circulating and accusing the Biden administration of trying to change the racial mix of the country, makes me feel that.
And that the FBI also says that white supremacist violence is probably the most prevalent form of domestic terrorism in the United States. So I feel like calling out white supremacy as a misdiagnosis of the problem seems to be very much the problem, at least in the United States.
Stephen Menendian:
So it's partly a provocation, but it's actually partly a serious contention. First of all, one of the things that we try... A couple points. One of the things that I really wanted to do in this book, and I pushed john on it, is I want Western, particularly American readers but Western readers in particular, to encounter expressions of othering with which they would be otherwise unfamiliar.
I think there's a real tendency, particularly among American social justice, although that's changed with Gaza... So there's this incredible attention to the Palestinian plight, but very little attention to the Dalits in India, to Kashmir, to the Rohingya in Myanmar to the Uyghurs in China. There's so many expressions of extreme othering around the world that do not get a lot of attention.
India is an incredibly important place. It's the largest country on the planet, over 1.2 billion people. In my opinion, although I have colleagues who will disagree with me on this, it's the most diverse country on the planet. It's got over 50 ethnic groups. It's got dozens of languages that are spoken indigenously. It's got religious... In fact, I think India might have the largest Muslim population in the world. Not even Indonesia or Pakistan, which you would think would, but there's 200 million Muslims in a country of 1.2 billion people.
I think if we understand that othering is a global problem, it is a serious error to diagnose the source of it as white supremacy from a global lens. Because what is happening in India is not white supremacy. It's ridiculous to call it that. It's Indatva, Hindu, supremacy, whatever you want to call it. There's different versions of it, but it's certainly not white supremacy.
And what's going on in China, which is again a billion people, is not white supremacy. It's Han supremacy. And so this frankly glib assertion to reduce these expressions of othering in dominance to whiteness is a serious error. And in my view, based on, I'll be really provocative here, ignorance and also I think parochialism. There's this tendency, in the west just to view everything from parochial lens, everything all harm has originated in the United States or Europe by Europe, and really a lack of understanding of what's happening in the rest of the world.
And so I think part of the challenge is what we... So that's the factual layer that we can't diagnose what's happening in India if our frame is white supremacy. It's an inaccurate frame. But I think there's another issue here, and the deeper conceptual point, is the third point, is that really what we are fighting against, the enemy in the book... And we're really clear. We have this provocation that really, we need narratives where there isn't a categorical villain. That it's really important that we don't categorically villainize a particular group.
But if there is a villain, it is ethno-supremacy. And if there is a villain in this book, it's movements that seek to install or conjoin societies, communities, and nation-states with the particular identity and install that as the top dog in that society, ethnic groups. And so really what we're saying is we need a society where no group dominates.
It doesn't mean, and just to nuance this and I'll stop after this point 3B, I guess, is in a sense we are extremely egalitarian, but we're not radical egalitarians. Because we're not saying that we are against all hierarchy. There's a footnote in the book that says, we're not anti-hierarchy per se. What we are against is hierarchy based on immutable characteristics. Hierarchy based on identity.
So all human societies, to the best of our knowledge, have status hierarchies. But we're saying is that what's problematic is status hierarchies based on religion, ethnicity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, et cetera. What is okay is hierarchies that might be based on decisions that people make, professions that people pursue. So for example, we wouldn't be opposed to a society that valorizes the caring professions, people who want to be in professions that serve other people and that are rewarded for courage and valor and things like that.
So we're not anti-hierarchy. What we are is anti-hierarchy based on identity.
Shital Sharma:
Okay.
Stephen Menendian:
And just to put a bow on it, let me put a bow on it. So we are against is supremacy. Not white supremacy, we're against supremacy. And supremacy is a synonym for dominance.
Now, not all status hierarchies are topped with a dominant group. You can have a hierarchy where there's no group that's dominant, but there are groups that are more advantaged and privileged. And so we try and nuance that in the book as well.
Shital Sharma:
Mm-hmm. And if we go back to Iris Young's Five Faces of Repression, there's some chilling conclusions that are made where, "Marginalization is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression, as at least exploited people are viewed as having value by the powerful. In that sense, exploited people are rarely exterminated even if they're treated unjustly."
And so, one of the characteristics of a community that's marginalized are the stateless and those who have no citizenship rights. So you've already listed them. What are some of the stateless groups today in today's world that we're not paying attention to?
Stephen Menendian:
So the reason that we brought Young's framework into the discussion was we wanted people to see, we want readers to see, that there are multiple others. That othering, and this goes to your first question, that othering is a framework that is supple enough to account for difference. It doesn't wash out differences. It recognizes these different expressions as expressions of othering without washing out the differences between them.
And what her work does is it shows there can be... It's just one framework that shows different expressions of othering. Now, her definition of marginalization is different. And there's a footnote in the book that says we use the term marginalization more broadly than she does. When we talk about marginalized peoples or people who are racially marginalized or marginalized communities, we're talking about groups or communities or identities that would be ranked lower on a status hierarchy. So we're not using it in the strict sense that she's using it.
But we're bringing her analysis, her framework, into the conversation as a way to see the fact that there are multiple others. It's going back to your original question, is this totalizing? And we're showing her framework as well as others, and particularly Susan Fisk's stereotype content model, which is brilliant. Because part of it we're trying to show is that we talk about marginalized populations, most people are referring just to that lower quadrant, which is the despised outcomes.
But there are other quadrants where people are othered, and you can be this envied but cold group. There are other ways to be othered. And the more nuance we give to expressions of othering, the more richer our understanding is, and then the more precise our prescriptions can be.
There are lots of stateless groups, to answer your particular question. I won't go through all of them, but there's the Roma in Europe. It's not to say there aren't citizens, but there are groups whose position is contested. So there's been these citizenship purges in India. A lot of people who are considered Bangladeshi have been purged from citizenship rolls. We talked about the Rohingya in Myanmar.
There was an effort during the Trump administration, or at least an abandoned effort, to denaturalize people who were considered inappropriately naturalized. You can imagine that project would be revived in the second Trump administration, and that'd be a very scary prospect for a lot of people. And the basis for that is the Trump administration claimed that when people were applying for citizenship, they lied about... If there was an error in any of your... You can go back and look at the applications and try and administratively roll that back saying if there was a lie or predicate or something, a claim that was incorrect.
So in citizenship and contestations over citizenship are another common mechanism of othering. And really, what is citizenship but a question of who belongs? Because the definition of citizenship is membership in the political community. What is membership in the political community, but the question of who belongs in the society?
So it's a very important idea in text.
Shital Sharma:
And so coming to ethnonationalism, which you mentioned earlier, but you say that identity entrepreneurs, usually a chauvinistic demagogue, promoting particularistic nationalism within nation-states are one of the most dangerous forces in the planet today.
And so we spoke a little bit about India already. What are some examples of these identity entrepreneurs and of these ethno-states that are, according to you, the most dangerous forces and why? Why are they the most dangerous forces?
Stephen Menendian:
I think there's three parts to your question. What are examples? Why are they so dangerous? And so forth. So let me give you some examples and then I'll explain why they are so dangerous.
Narendra Modi is a Hindu nationalist at the BJP party is an example, in India. I would say Erdoğan, in Turkey. I would certainly point to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, is an example. Donald Trump is an expression of these. Jörg Haider. Across Europe, pretty much every country has a version of this. Marine Le Pen in France, who is the head of the far right party who lost two elections to Macron. So you have examples of these demagogic right wing... They typically in the West and in Europe and the United States, they tend to be really Christian nationalists. In the Eastern Bloc of Europe, they tend to be more Catholic nationalists, not entirely, or Orthodox. They tend to be gender traditionalists, anti-LGBTQ, and extremely xenophobic and anti-immigration.
The telltale sign the west of these demagogues is xenophobia and anti-immigration policy. Strict immigration is typically the most salient feature of these demagogues, and then even more so than their sort of Christian and white supremacy angle. And it's conjoined, because in Europe, the immigration restrictionist feature of it is really tied to these replacement theories. That browner people, that people from the Middle East, are refugees and asylum seekers and immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East are coming in to replace so-called... What's the term? Legacy Europeans.
So these demagogues, I've just given you a whole bunch of examples of them. So hopefully that's suffices to answer the first part of your question. But notice I've tied them around the world, right? There's examples from Asia, examples from Europe. I could give you examples from all over the world. I think also Bolsonaro is an example of these ethnonationalists. Bolsonaro in Brazil.
So why are they so dangerous? They are dangerous for two reasons. One is that the reason they're the villain of this book is because we want to create a society where everyone belongs, a world where everyone belongs. But we don't want to just create belonging. It's easy to create belonging on a chauvinistic basis.
When you go to a MAGA rally, there's a strong sense of belonging among the Trump supporters. This is the power that these ethnonationalists have, is they create belonging among their supporters through exclusion. So it's like imagine you're part of an institution and someone creates a small club. And everyone wants to be part of the club, but only people who are white men can be part of the club. That becomes then belonging through exclusion. That's the difference we're making between belonging based on othering and belonging without othering.
That's why the title book is what it is. It's we're calling for belonging without othering. And so, based upon what we're calling for, the thing that is most dangerous in the world are identity entrepreneurs and ethnonationalist movements that support them, that want to instill and install and maintain status hierarchies based on identity.
That's what we mean by belong without othering is we want everyone to belong. And again, we're not anti-hierarchy. We're anti-hierarchy based on identity. We don't want one group to be the dominant group. We don't want Christians to be dominant. So the idea in any nation state that a group should be dominant is anathema to us, whether it's Hindus in India or white Christians in America or white Christians in the United Kingdom. We believe that no nation state should have a dominant group.
Further, we not only are anti-dominants... And by the way, we don't believe that there should be what are called confessional states, either, which is where religion is tied to a nation state identity. So we're anti, not only ethnonationalist ethnic expression, but also it's religious expression, whether that's a Jewish state or an Islamic state. We just believe that pluralistic diverse societies cannot have a nominally dominant group in any expression.
Shital Sharma:
Would you say that Israel is then moving towards becoming ethnonationalist state?
Stephen Menendian:
There's a lot of nuance that's required with talking about Israel. But one of the things that's clear is that the citizenship law that was passed on Knesset a couple of years ago, moves closer to moving away from that universalistic democratic aspiration and more towards nominally an ethnonationalist state. That's correct.
And so that is the villain of the book, is tying nation states or political units to a particular identity. That's the villain. And why is it so dangerous? The reason it is so dangerous is because, and john started saying this and I've become convinced he's correct, that if we live in a world that is organized and oriented around ethno-states, the future will be more violent and bloodier than the bloody past.
Because what you see is, and this is the legacy of World War II, is that wherever you have ethno-states arise, they tend to be belligerent and violent because that is the nature of them. Nationalist movements, and particularly ethno-nationalist movements, not only dominate other groups internally like the Third Reich in Germany, but they tend to have a lot of grievances.
And I think there's this line in the book that's like, more borders means more potential for provocation, more belligerence. The problem with ethno-nationalists, and you see this sort of like ethno-nationalists seeing each other across the global stage. So Donald Trump looks at Jair Bolsonaro or Viktor Orbán, and they see an affinity for each other. That may happen in a world that is nominally liberal.
But in a world where you have ethno-nationalists dominating the globe, they will lead to war. This is what happens. This is how you get... Because ethno-states don't keep their dominance internal. They then turn it external. And this is Russia under Putin, right? Putin is trying to make the Russian World, Russkiy Mir, to coordinate that world. And so that leads him to want to invade eastern Ukraine.
And the same thing with China, right? Xi Jinping looks across the world and says no. Tibet, which China conquered in the fifties, Hong Kong, which China absorbed a couple of years ago, and yes, Taiwan, are all part of historical Chinese hegemony, and they want to reabsorb that. And so the point is they're not necessarily imperial in the strict sense of empire, but ethno-states are more belligerent, more bellicose. They tend to rile up their population. They tend to be more warmongering and expansionist. And you saw that with the Third Reich, right?
So the reason they're so dangerous is because they tend to be more dominant and brutal internally to marginalized groups. But they also tend to produce war, and they lead to war. And we've seen that in the history of world society. Human history is littered with expansionist, chauvinist, belligerent bellicose, ethno-nationalists trying to take over their neighbors and dominate and then subjugate groups within their neighbors who are not part of the ethnic dominant group.
So what we are saying, this is the most important warning in the book. If we allow ethno-nationalism to take its course and stranglehold the world, we will destroy not only ourselves, potentially the planet as we know it.
Shital Sharma:
I am so happy that you mentioned this. It comes towards the end where you talk about the importance of symbols and stories and narratives. And so especially when it comes to state-building, you had mentioned quoting Angus Fletcher, who explains that the so-called secret or superpower that humans have that allowed us to dominate the planet is not our capacity for reason, as was thought by Enlightenment philosophers. But instead, narrative, the ability to link causes together, establish sequences to tell a story.
And history is a narrative, a kind of storytelling about who we are based on this and what we've suffered through, what we've accomplished as people. And so can you tell us a little bit how this collective nostalgia or this golden age fallacy that you talk about helps to shape and solidify group identities?
Stephen Menendian:
Yeah, but let me start with one of the... So there are endless fights about the past. Think about it in the United States, these fights over teaching about slavery, textbooks and public schools about slavery, and book banning and all of this. And then the same thing about Holocaust denialism in Europe, and then the fights over these laws that have been passed in Hungary and specifically Poland about prohibiting Polish complicit talk, discussion about Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
You have all these examples of these, these memory laws are what they're called. And the last chapter, which is more of the mechanics of othering, and there's a long section about these memory laws, which it's kind of a supplemental chapter in the book. Why do people get so heated about these laws? Why are there so much intense fight over it?
Because it's the past, right? What does Tulsa, the Tulsa race purge? Why do these things matter? Because the past is about the present, it's about the future. Fights over the past are really fights about who we are and where we're going. And that is why there's so much fight about the past and history. The past doesn't stay in the past. And so this golden age fallacy, which we refer to, is this trope.
It's like Make America Great Again, harkening back to some great moment. And it seems going back to the ancient Greeks that every society looks back on the past as if it was a golden age, the fall from Eden. And it's the trope. And these ancient Greek writers said this was happening back in the sixth century BC. That they were saying the same thing then that people are saying now, that the past is greater. And why is that? Because the past is always about a time when our societies were more homogeneous, when people knew their place, when the dominant groups had clear dominance and society seemed to acquiesce to that dominance. So that's what the golden age fallacy is about.
So okay, now turning to story. We use the term organizing narrative, and I'm going to come back to that so just put that in your mind for a second. This concept of organizing narrative. So Homo sapiens are not actually stronger than other Homo species. We were not stronger than Neanderthals or Denisovans. We were not smarter individually.
And in fact, there's a lot of evidence, I was reading Harari's book, Homo Deus. He says, Yuval Harari, who's a Israeli philosopher and historian, he claims that Homo sapiens today are not actually more intelligent than Homo sapiens in the Bronze Age or before the Ice Age, or even 10,000 years ago. That we might not actually have higher IQs depending on how you subscribe to or define intelligence.
The reason Homo sapiens, and by the way, for most of Homo sapiens existence, we're not the dominant species on the planet. And we coexisted with other sapiens, and I mentioned the other ones, right, like Denisavins, Neanderthals, and there were lots of other Homo species.
So why is it the Homo sapiens, if we were not stronger, we're not smarter, how did Homo sapiens dominate the world? The reason Homo sapiens, this is what Harari claims others claim, we actually wiped out the Neanderthals in Europe. Neanderthals were actually stronger, bigger, faster, everything. Smarter. And we killed them. We exterminated them about 30,000 years ago. We wiped out the Neanderthals.
And then in East Asia we wiped out the Denisavins. So why? Why would we wipe them out? The reason we wiped them out is because Homo sapiens unique, among every species on the planet. There are other species that can use tools. Ravens can use tools. Other primates can use tools. Other primates, many species have sophisticated communication systems. I was just reading recently some science article about actually decoding the alphabet that whales can use. Whale signals. Whales in their sonar actually apparently have sophisticated communication system that they culturally learn.
The reason Homo sapiens dominated the planet is because we tell stories that are flexibly adapted stories. And this is the unique thing, is that we tell stories. And Neanderthals probably had culture and intelligence, but they didn't tell collective organizing stories that were flexible and that can allow flexible coordination.
Ants actually are incredibly coordinated, but they don't have flexibility in their coordination. Everything is instinctual. And what allows for flexible coordination on any scale, this is the most amazing thing about our species, we can coordinate in groups of five, 10, a hundred, a thousand, a million, a hundred million. We can coordinate in groups of billions on a project. If human beings... What are there? Seven, eight billion people on the planet? We could theoretically coordinate every person on the planet into joint endeavor. In theory. Because of our ability to coordinate projects is based upon stories, organizing narratives.
You and I don't have to have actually met each other in order to be part of a joint endeavor. So think about the moon shot. Getting to the moon, how much coordination it took between scientists and engineers and astronauts and so on. We can coordinate in having never met each other. That is not possible for other species. Every other species, every other Homo species, you create trust in intimate settings through daily interactions. So primates are able to coordinate, but only after they get to know each other and trust each. And other Homo species, Neanderthals, can coordinate maybe at most in bands of like a hundred people.
But Homo sapiens can coordinate at any scale. And organized coordination will defeat disorganized non-coordination every time. And organized coordination at scale will defeat a lesser scale every time. And so what's the most powerful secret sauce that Homo sapiens have is the ability to tell organizing narratives that put us all in the story. So we tell stories like about liberal democracy or about freedom and oppression or whatever the story is, and we can make ourselves part of the story.
One of the most powerful stories we have in the world today is about the nation state. So the idea of Hindu nationalism is you're part of this great society, whatever it is. You're part of the story of America. You're part of this wonderful nation state and you have this history. These are all stories. They're organizing narratives. They're collective narratives that tell a story about who we are, where we belong, and what our purpose is. And they bring us into activity. They marshal us to that cause. And these stories allow us to do it.
And there's religions, nation states, these are all organizing coordinating narratives to tell us who we are and what our place in the world is. And think about Christianity. There's billions of people. Islam, a billion people. That is a story that's an organizing, coordinating narrative. And so story is our superpower. That is what makes Homo sapiens... That's how we're weaker, slower.
We're slower than tigers, we're weaker than gorillas, yet we've dominated the planet. It's not because of our use of tools. It's not because of our intelligence. Because there's literally hundreds of thousands of years of human history in which we didn't dominate the planet. It's only when we began coordinating through these shared stories of nations of religion, so on, that we were actually able to dominate the planet.
Shital Sharma:
And so why isn't the Anthropocene enough for us to coordinate together? The story of the end of the world because of climate crisis or even the pandemic? It's something that unified all of us on this planet.
Stephen Menendian:
Because it doesn't. These stories don't because you have different identity entrepreneurs telling different stories. And so yeah, you have the pandemic story, but you also have the anti-pandemic story. The story that this is actually a tool by elites to manipulate you to give up your freedoms, to dominate you, to implant chips. And those stories are more compelling to some people than the story.
And yeah, there is the story and the factual reality of climate crisis, but there's the counter story to it, which is this is a tool of elites to get you out of your cars, to steal your freedom. That is a story that actually is compelling to many people. And this is part of the point of the book, is you can't actually win people over by telling them they're stupid and their stories are dumb. You have to give them a more compelling story.
That's the point. It's frustrating. But that's the problem is that too many people don't do the work to build that more compelling story where everyone has a role and has a positive script of play. Instead, the stories that social justice movements tell are equally Manichean. They're equally jingoistic.
You're the villain and you're the problem and you have to be overcome. And as long as social justice movements tell stories... And whoever the villain is, right? It could be white people, it could be the Koch brothers, it could be big oil, big pharma. As long as they continue to tell those stories, you're not going to win everyone over.
Shital Sharma:
But there's a villain in your story. Ethnonationalism.
Stephen Menendian:
But it's not a person. It's not a person. We believe in belonging for everyone, including the Koch brothers or the surviving Koch brothers.
Shital Sharma:
Gotcha. All right, so let's turn the story now to belonging, something more hopeful that we can talk about. And you say the prevailing frameworks like anti-discrimination laws or diversity programming, equity inclusion policies are great. They demonstrate how we're moving forward, but they ultimately fail to reach the aspiration desired. And this aspiration meaning belonging.
And so how are you defining belonging and why do you feel it is more encompassing as a category than say, inclusion or equality or equitable inclusion?
Stephen Menendian:
Well, I think the chapter that you're excerpting there, chapter five does a much better job than I can do on the spot, but I'll try.
First of all, inclusion is really important and we are pro-DEI interventions. We're not anti-DEI. But we think that they are too limited and too narrow. So in the model of inclusion, people are... Typically, this is what inclusion is. Inclusion is you have an institution or a community that historically excludes a particular group. So the example we use that I think is a very good example at the beginning of the vignette, is Ivy League colleges and universities, that up until the 1960s, did not admit women.
And so inclusion is the decision to admit women into the undergraduate programming. So for the first time, Harvard's going to let women into the undergraduate curriculum. Okay. So you let women in, but you let women in into an institution that is culturally and nominally dominated by men.
So you've admitted that... It's like when predominantly white institutions began letting non-white people in. The culture doesn't necessarily change at first, right? It's like inclusion, you're letting people in, but it's like they're invited into someone else's home. It's a guest model. You're a guest in someone else's home.
So it's important. We are pro inclusion. We're saying it's necessary, but it's not sufficient. We don't want to just let people in as guests, we want to let people in as part of the designers of the house, the owners of the home. We want to make them part of the party planners, not just guests to the party. That's the difference. In belonging, we define belonging as having four elements. First of all, it has it to have inclusion. These are elements that you don't have it belonging doesn't exist. Number one is inclusion. You have to have inclusion.
Number two is you have to have recognition. And what we mean by recognition is really visibility and being seen and being heard. One of the things that people around the world really clamor for is they want to be seen and they want to be heard. Lots of people feel invisible, but we use the term recognition instead of visibility because it's non-ableist. We don't want to use an ableist language. So what we're really talking about is being seen and being heard. So it's not just enough that you're included, you need to feel as if you are being seen. That's number two, that's recognition.
Number three is you need to have a sense of connection. If you are included and you feel seen and heard, recognized, do you also feel a reciprocal sense of connection or affinity for that institution, that community or that employer or whatever it is. If you do, it's more likely you will feel a sense of belonging.
And then the fourth element is agency. It's the most important element. Agency is the sense that your actions matter, that you can influence an outcome. And so agency is more than having the say, but it's less than getting your way. More than having the say, but less than getting your way. If you just get your way, then you decide. That's not agency. Agency is... And it's more than having to say in the sense that you can say something, but people don't necessarily have to account for or heed what you have to say. It's like having a vote. That's what agency is. It's having a vote.
You could have a say. I could have free speech, but I might not have a vote. And if I don't have a vote, then I don't really have any power. But if my vote is the only vote that counts, that's getting my way.
So agency is the space between having a say and getting your way. And it's important because if you don't have agency, if you're not on the planning committee. If you're on the planning committee, you belong, but you don't necessarily get to dictate the outcome. There might be five people on the committee and you might get outvoted, but at least you get a say and at least you get to explain your position and you get to persuade people of your way. It's very close to what we consider as democratic deliberation.
What we are saying is belonging requires all four of those elements. If any one of those is missing, you have something that's more closer to inclusion or diversity, but it's not full belonging. Equity is really more oriented around disparities and specific outcomes, but it doesn't really get to power in the same way. So you can have an equitable outcome without agency. You see what I'm saying? You can have an equitable outcome where there's no disparity, but doesn't necessarily, that doesn't entail belong in agency.
Shital Sharma:
So do you have any models for us that exist?
Stephen Menendian:
There are partial models for each of these. So one of the examples we talk about in terms of recognition is the intervention that was done at the University of Texas, which is an intervention where a psychologist and then the entire provost did a welcoming message to students.
It was a recognition effort on the visibility. It was an attempt to make people feel as if they are seen, heard, and valued. I forget the name of the intervention, but it's described in the book and it had profound impacts. It was really targeted to students who were first generation college students and non-white students who would typically be more likely to drop out after failing a test and having doubts about their ability.
And so it was designed to affirm their place in the institution and the community, and it was an expression of that. And that was a very powerful example of that. It was pretty close to belonging. But what that intervention didn't have was it didn't necessarily get to reorganization of the institution. It left the institution as is. So it wasn't really truly a belonging intervention, but it was two fourths or three quarters of a belonging intervention.
Shital Sharma:
And so the surgeon general in the United States recently declared that loneliness and isolation are an epidemic, a health crisis. And in the context of our conversation today, loneliness is really this feeling or experience of not belonging in the world. And so you call it a crisis of connectedness, this kind of western culture emphasis on individualism.
And really how... I love this. You really turn to how we perceive ourselves existentially, ontologically, literally how we define self. And I love how you call out Descartes, the 17th century mathematician, the father of modern philosophy, who's famous for saying, "I think, therefore I am."
And you're saying, "No. Sorry, Descartes. It's actually I am because you are."
And this is the traditional African saying, ubuntu. And also what I feel like so many non-Western cultures, collectivist cultures, indigenous cultures have articulated and vibed for centuries. Confucius felt that the self is made up and defined by relationship. There is no I without a we. And so, it's part of the book is incredible because you are really asking us to untangle what we are for so long as our identity to get in touch with their intersubjectivity, recognizing the multiplicity within and between us.
As one of the keys to belonging. That belonging requires a larger sense of we. How do we get there?
Stephen Menendian:
Well, so chapter six, which is really what you're sort of drawing on there, this is the deepest part of john powell's ongoing philosophy and intellectual work. So he wrote in, I think the early two thousands or late nineties, a book... Not a book, a law review article called the Multiple Self. Part of our joint work, we've written about the enlightenment. And actually that's going to be our next big project together, is excavating this area more deeply.
But going back to the point about narrative. If human societies are, in a sense, organized by these organizing collective narratives, a big part of the collective narrative is who are we, right? If these stories about nation and politics and religion and race and tell us who we are, we need a different story right now in order to manifest belonging.
And so part of what we're trying to do is say we need to lean into two things. We need to lean into identities that are more expansive and encompassing rather than narrow. And we need to embrace that. And there's a tendency, especially, so there's a tendency among former people who are formally members of dominant groups to hold more tightly to that identity when their identity feels under threat. There are different kinds of identity threats, but that's a specific kind called the status threat.
And then members of marginalized groups, when they are attacked because they're marginality, they also tend to hold more tightly to their identity. So you have this problem where marginalized groups hold more tightly to identity. So it's like if you are black and you feel identity threat because of your blackness, you're going to hold more tightly to that blackness.
And if you are white and you feel identity threat, status threat, because you feel the sense of falling in society, then you're going to hold more tightly. A whiteness becomes even more salient. This is how you get white identity entrepreneurs. Become so powerful in this moment, especially post-Obama, where people feel like America's changing. I'm losing my position in society. This is part of the problem.
So what we need, how do you break that log there? When you do it, is you need overlapping identities that bring everyone together. Everyone can inhabit. So what we need to do is we need to lean into broader identities where we all can belong and we need to create new identities, which sounds crazy, but it's actually what James Baldwin called it. Literally says it. We need new identities where it can all belong. We need new identities and we knew new stories and that support those identities. And then we need new cultural practices that ground those identities.
All three need to be there. We need the identity, we need the story, and we need the cultural practice to ground it. If that sounds fanciful, it's not because we do it all the time. Human beings have created new identities all the time.
What does it mean to be a European today? It means something completely different than it did a hundred years ago because the European Union didn't exist a hundred years ago. And so you have a new identity that's been created called European. It's basically a new identity. It's a brand new identity, and you have new symbols and stories that go with it.
What are those symbols and stories in organizing narratives? You have the currency, the euro, you have a flag, you have a story of the European Union. It's a brand new story. Literally a brand new story, literally made up, completely conjured out of thin air, fabricated. And yet it brings all these people together who are formally French, German, Dutch, Spanish, right? That's incredible. If you think about it, right?
It's an incredible project, a new story, new identity and new practices, new currency, new music, new whatever to ground it, to make it real. So we create new identities all the time, and our existing identities are shifting all the time. And we can overlay these more encompassing identities with our existing identities to bring people together. It happens all the time. We do it all the time.
Shital Sharma:
Well, that's hopeful. I really love how Maruth, you used that as an example. His suggestion, it sounds simple but it's actually hard, where he says, just learn three languages. That is such a great concrete. If you just learn three languages, think about the possibilities that opens up in terms of entering people's lives. You can make jokes with people and laugh together, which I find is such a great way of bonding with other people.
So are there any other concrete examples like that our listeners could say, okay, I see this in my world, in my community. How can I integrate this belonging narrative into our lives today?
Stephen Menendian:
As I said, there's three elements to this. There's the identities that we have. We all have multiple identities. We have many identities. We have religious identities, gender identities, ethnic identities, racial identities, political identities. Because we have so many identities, there's almost always at least one identity that we share with another person who may be different from us in every other regard. Lean into that. Embrace that. Make it more salient in your life. And that is really important. That's that's what we're talking about, right?
If we have a multiplicity of identities, we need to embrace our multiplicity instead of just making the one identity that is based on the identity threat most salient to us. So if we're queer and we feel that in the particular moment our queerness is most salient because that's the identity threat, we're not asking people to walk away from it.
We're saying also embrace the other identity that allows you to connect with people who are non-queer, right? At the same time, without diminishing in any way your queerness, embrace the other identity that you have that might connect you with someone else. And we call this bridging. Bridging is, I think, the most important practice that we have to call for, right? Like you cited Vivek Murthy's report and these other studies on the harmful effects of loneliness and isolation, despair.
Yet culturally, institutionally, in practice, everything our societies do keep us apart. Everyone says they want to come together, they want to connect. Yet in practice, all of our cultural practices keep us separate. We live in segregated separate neighborhoods. We don't have, generally speaking, a lot of opportunities or practices for cultural exchange across difference except for the occasional neighborhood gathering. But because people live in different neighborhoods by politics, we're extremely politically segregated.
Democrats live in democratic neighborhoods. Republicans live in Republican neighborhoods. We're ethnically and racially separated. We're so separate in so many ways. And we say we want to be less separate, but everything we do keeps us even more separate. We tend to work in organizations where people think and look like us. It's a huge problem in society. We do not do bridging.
We say we want to, but we don't. And our institutions, our cultural practices, and our society, we're so fragmented going back to the beginning. So what we call for is bridging. Bridging is when members of a group reach out to members of a different identity group and seek to connect. And to be really clear, what we believe is important about bridging is not persuading someone to agree with you. It's not even necessarily agreeing on facts. It's creating psychological proximity.
That's it. That's all it is. It's psychological proximity. So bridging practice is not about getting someone to agree with your worldview. It is about creating trust through psychological proximity. And so, for example, a bridging activity between Israelis and Palestinians may not be getting them to agree on the historical facts on what happened during the Nakba, but whatever. It might not be anything about them. It's just getting people who otherwise would not associate with each other to get to know each other. To hear their stories, not to agree with their stories, but to understand what the other person thinks, right?
If I tell you my story, you can hear my story in two frames. You can listen to evaluate it and say that's factual, that's not factual, I disagree with that, I agree with this. But that's an evaluative frame. Or you can hear my story so that you can understand how I think and what I believe. An empathetic frame, just to hear what I think.
You can hear what I think, and you can understand the way I think or what my story is without agreeing with it. But if I tell you my story and you tell me your story and we give each other the space to hear our stories, we will leave that space with deeper trust for the other person. Just the fact of having someone listen creates trust. It's a remarkable feature of humanity, but it's true. Because if I feel like you understand me, I'm more likely to trust you.
So that is what bridging is about. Bridging is not about agreement. It's not about persuasion. It's not about coming to a factual understanding. It's about simply psychological proximity leading to trust.
Shital Sharma:
What resonates for me in you, and vice versa kind of idea, which for me sounds a lot like compassion. I don't know down the street, Stanford, the Compassion Institute, does wonderful things in this respect where they say one of the profound foundations of compassion practice is that recognizing the sameness of us, not in that of course we're different, but what makes all sentient beings the same is our vulnerability to suffering and our hope to move away from suffering.
No matter who you are, what kind of suffering you experience is different from mine. But what makes us human is that we both suffer and we both want to not suffer. So can that be enough to bring us together? Compassion for each other?
Stephen Menendian:
Not necessarily, because if I hear your story and I listen to your story and I understand your story, I understand what you believe, but I think it's completely factless or baseless, then it doesn't necessarily create empathy.
So if an Israeli tells the story to a Palestinian about the Holocaust and dispossession and historical dispossession and say, "That's why I should be on this land."
And the Palestinian tells the story of dispossession and Israeli oppression, and, "That's why I should be in this land."
You can understand the other person's story without agreeing with it and without necessarily having compassion because you disagree. So in my opinion, we have to move... What you just said is the Kantian categorical paradigm, right? I don't think that's the source of compassion and empathy. I think the source of compassion is actually deeper than that. It's not from agreeing with the story. It's the intimate space. It's the act of hearing someone interpersonally and seeing them as a human in that moment.
If we are in a space two and a half feet from each other, I don't create empathy because I agree with your story. I create empathy because I feel your presence and your emotion that comes from that. Not from an intellectual capacity, but from an interpersonal capacity. So I think the story is actually less important than the feelings that emanate as a byproduct of storytelling and story listening.
So the story is what generates that, and then what we have to do is then create a new story that we're both a part of. That's the thing. It's not the story that generates it. It's the act of hearing and the trust that engenders. The kind of intimacy and psychological proximity that that creates.
Shital Sharma:
Okay. This was great. We need this, so thank you so much for writing the book and for having this wonderful institute.
Stephen Menendian:
Well, thank you for taking the time to read it and actually engage with the material and ask important, insightful questions and sharing this with your audience.
Shital Sharma:
Thank you for listening. You can find Stephen and john powell's book, Belonging Without Othering, anywhere you buy and borrow books. To find out more about their work, please visit the Othering and Belonging Institute at belonging.berkeley.edu.
And don't forget to follow the podcast on Instagram at Let's Try That Again Podcast. See you next time.
