Podcast: Belonging Without Othering

Transcript

john powell:
So part of the way we talk to fear is that the South African word, sawubona. I see you. I hear you. I respect you. This love in a sense and respect and dignity that cures the fear.

Speaker 2:
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Who Belongs, a podcast from the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. This episode features an interview with OBI Director john a. powell, and Assistant Director Stephen Menendian about the recently released book they co-authored called Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World. The interview was conducted by Ivan Natividad, who is OBI's assistant director of communications. Here was their conversation.

Ivan Natividad:
john and Stephen, thanks so much for joining us today. You've known each other for over 20 years. What was the journey like writing this book together?

john powell:
In some ways it was very natural and organic. I think we riff off each other really well and think together well. So in some ways, like I said, it was sort of a natural evolution of our collective thoughts. A lot of work, but pretty painless.

Stephen Menendian:
Yeah. Writing a book is not an easy thing to do, but it can be a really enlivening experience and enriching experience. And I think this one was probably in some senses easier to write than others, but partly because you have someone helping and holding you through the process and we had fantastic editors, and also because it is in some ways a culminating point of our joint and collective intellectual and advocacy work.

john powell:
Yeah. I'll add one more thing. So writing is an interesting process. It helps clarify your thinking. Sometimes things surprise you even about the process or your own thinking. So one part of it that's, I think for me at least, that was very nice is just being spurred to think about and reconsider things in a new way, and I think both of us know the literature fairly well, but still to find surprises and things to be excited about that was quite enjoyable.

Ivan Natividad:
And I was also curious, I mean, did you find new ways of conceptualizing your work together through the process of writing this book?

Stephen Menendian:
We came to a sharper understanding of a number of different aspects of our theory and what we hope to achieve through this work. So I'll give a couple of examples I think of interesting insights. One thing that's come up is what is the relationship between, say, Isabel Wilkerson's thought that caste is really a heuristic or way of thinking about group-based inequality that has because become quite popular. And I think when we contrast what we mean by othering with caste, some of the advantages of our thought and our theory become really apparent. Right? So one example of that is that in a traditional formation, caste is unidimensional, so you are either higher or lower in a caste hierarchy. Right? And it's usually along one dimension. In a caste formation, you don't look at multiple identities together. You're looking at one identity. Right? So it could be a caste system as in India, and you could be a Brahmin higher in the caste. You could be a Dalit lower in the caste. But it's along a single dimension.
Whereas with othering, it's much more flexible. It's much more nimble. You can have, and you infrequently do have people who are positioned on multiple axis simultaneously. So usually in the contemporary world, people who are socially marginalized and othered are usually either both ethnically and or racially marginalized with religion, so that's a very common thing that you see in Africa or Europe or Asia. You have an ethnic and religious and cultural unit, so you're multiply marginalized in a sense, and a caste hierarchy is not really as sensitive to that. Another one that we mention in the book is if you look at the persecution of so-called witches in North America, colonial America or Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Who is usually the target of those persecutions? Usually elderly, widowed, or single women. But if you just look at gender, you would miss this class and you would miss this age and you would miss this in a way that allows us to see social marginality in a way that caste doesn't.
And I think one of the, I'll pause after this, but one of the other examples that I think sharpened our thinking and writing the book is the relation of othering to stigma and stigmatization, and john and I had a number of interesting conversations leading up to the writing of that section on that.

Ivan Natividad:
And the title of the book is Belonging Without Othering. These terms may be new to some people. What is belonging and what is othering?

john powell:
Well, there's no single definition of either, but they're in a dynamic relationship and most people have had some intuitive relationship with both. Most people at times have felt like they belong. In fact, we did a word, looking how frequently a word is being used and it's increasing in population. But it's a word or concept, not the very word, that's been around literally for thousands of years, and people sort of approach it through their own lens. So in a society that's deeply individualistic, people will think of belonging in very individualistic terms. In society that people are more structural, people think about it more in structural terms. So there's no single definition, but it does have some parameters, and part of it's felt, but part of it's conditions, part of it's structural. For example, if you can't allow to become a citizen, which a lot of people were not allowed to become citizens in the United States till the 1960s because of their racial ethnicity, that's a form of othering at the government level.
So when you're included in terms of voting, in terms of housing, in terms of education, you're being included by the government. The government says you belong. So there's a difference between the government saying you belong and a stranger on the street saying you belong. And there are different sites of belonging. So someone may feel like they belong in their family but not in their neighborhood. Someone may feel like they belong in their neighborhood but not in their school or at their workplace. There's also a temporal relationship to it. So I remember a friend of mine, Claude Steele, went down to Silicon Valley. Claude is probably in his seventies. He's probably in his sixties then. He was saying he felt out of place. It's like everybody was 20 years old. So all these different dimensions that you can feel a sense of belonging and a sense of othering.
What we try to grapple with in the book is more durable kinds of belonging and othering, and more at the group level than individual level. And again, that's less mercurial and it's more structured. So my experience of being African-American man is not just shaped by interactions. In fact, you could almost say the opposite. The interactions are shaped by these larger structures. So you can't have racialized othering unless you have a racialized system, at least in a large sense. So it's a lot of complexity. What we try to do in the book is spell out some of that complexity, but also look at the dynamics between them and not just in the United States but across the world, and not just around a single dimension but on multiple dimensions and try to help people understand the grammar and structure of othering and belonging, not just the specific examples. And we believe if we dig into the grammar and structure, then the utility becomes greater and it translates across many different aspects of the world.

Ivan Natividad:
Could you also talk about the relationship that belonging and othering have had throughout history, and why does that matter?

john powell:
I think a lot of the received wisdom right now is that othering is inevitable and natural, and to some extent belonging has been around a long time as well as othering, but there's been some institutionalization of belonging through churches, through different religions, through different philosophical traditions, and so the idea of a group belonging has been around for literally thousands of years, but in almost all of those instances, there is at the same time a institutionalization of the categorizing others. So it's like a chosen people and then the not chosen people. And so there's this bright line of some groups belonging in some groups not belonging that runs through, like I said, major religions and major philosophical thought and even later nation building, who's in and who's out. And so we've come to believe that the two are inextricably linked, and in fact we go so far to suggest that othering is even more primordial than belonging, and we talk about the way the brain works and the categorization of the brain, and in-groups and out-groups. We have a lot of data to support that position.
It turns out it's much messier than that, and maybe even that's just certainly incomplete and maybe wrong. So what we assert in the book, and one of the things I think we bring to the table is that belonging is more primal in some ways than othering, and the possibilities are unknown, that we should not throw in a towel believing that we have to other in order to belong. In fact, what we find is that we actually other in order to belong. In other words, we are a people engaged in othering in order to constitute themselves as belonging, and this may not be necessary. In fact, there's reason to believe it's not necessary. And so the two rules we make then that I think are quite important. One is that we're explicitly calling for belonging without othering, and that's a radical term. Calling for belonging itself is significant, but calling for it without othering is a really radical and transformative term. Secondly, we're talking about the relationship of othering being derivative of belonging, and that's actually positive. So can we think of a belonging? Can we structure a belonging? Can we imagine a belonging which is not predicated on othering?
And then the final thing I'll say is that it's tied to a number of other things, including our technology, the way we do our politics, but at a more intimate level, the way we experience ourselves, that the multifaceted nature, the multiplicity of who we are individually and collectively actually is very important to the understanding belonging, and that part of the anxiety that we're feeling is that the way we've been constructed and the way we've embraced our identity so far in many ways limit our capacity to imagine different ways of belonging. So the sort of more narrow binary self, the sort of idea of a stable single self actually traps us. It makes it hard to actually navigate in a way that we may need to in the future. So it's really calling also for a multiplicity of the self rethinking of structures, a new imagination that's not normally part of the discourse around belonging and othering.

Stephen Menendian:
One of my favorite lines in the book that john added in drafting is that the key to belonging or one of the keys to belonging is embracing our fluidity and multiplicity, and to the point that john just made, the capacity to imagine ourselves and connection with other people depends in no small part on our ability to see something in common with people who are extensively different from us. And so there are all these techniques for helping people see that. There's a thing called the twenty-statement task in social psychology, which is where you just list out a number of identities that you have, and after a few, you realize that there are identities that you share with almost any individual person. So we might not have the same race or we might not have the same gender, but maybe we worship the same religious tradition or maybe we enjoy the same cultural events or food. Right?
There's something that connects us, and what happens is that when we're tied really tightly to a single identity, it's hard for us to find points of connection with people who are extensively different from us in some culturally significant or socially significant way. And so I think john is making a call to lean into our, without abandoning the identities that are important to us to embrace our multiplicity and fluidity, and I thought that's a really beautiful call to action. I think just building on points that john's made so far, there are two really important contributions in the book in terms of belonging. One is really drawing the connection between belonging and othering. Right? That you can have belonging without othering or you can have belonging based on othering. And this goes back to what we were mentioning earlier in terms of stigma.
So there's a challenge in the stigma research, which is a claim that every society has something that is stigmatized, and the function of stigma is actually to draw people together. It's create cohesiveness. And so if every society has something that is stigmatized in order to draw a boundary around a group, a community, then how can you have belonging without othering? And our answer to that is there may be something that is stigmatized, but it doesn't have to be encoded to social groups. It could be some sort of behavior or some sort of action that's stigmatized without necessarily being durable to social identities. So we might, for example, stigmatize people who are prejudiced or bigoted without necessarily stigmatizing some particular social identity or form of membership that matches to that. And this actually goes to, there's a second thing that really important in the book.
Before I make that second point, there's a lot of nuance in our book, and so I think, I hope that it's easy to read, but it might not necessarily be easy to understand because we're trying to challenge a paradigm, and so we've written in a way that was hopefully very accessible. But when it's challenging intuitive or culturally ingrained ways of thought, it can be challenging to dislodge those and think in a new way. And we are not, by the way, necessarily... We're certainly egalitarian, no question about that. But we're not necessarily anti-hierarchy per se. Right? So think about, we think that there are many things that we should valorize in society. Service professions, teachers, people who are healthcare workers and serve other people. Those are things worth valorizing. Those are things worth lifting up. And also, I was looking at, something came up on the social media feed from 2009 that shows Barack Obama bowing deeply to the Japanese emperor. It's sort of a reminder that a lot of societies...
The whole notion of equality in some sense is a relatively recent one in human history, that both human beings and social groups could be in some form of equal setting with each other. In most older societies have very culturally ingrained gradations of hierarchy. So in Japan, the degree to which you bow indicates the hierarchy relationship. If you bow at a completely basically horizontal level, it means that that person is the most socially distant from you in terms of hierarchy and everything in between. Maybe a teacher or a political leader or principal. There's a different gradation. In America, we have generally a very egalitarian ethos, but you don't always practice that in terms of social groups. Right? Going back to Tocqueville, talking about how we don't like people talking down to us. That was a big thing during the Obama era, that people felt that Obama was in his professorial mode and talking down to people. And so we have an egalitarian ethos, but we don't have egalitarian systems and structures, and there's some dissonance there.
But the point just in terms of stigma is that we're not necessarily anti-hierarchy, but we are trying to make sure that hierarchies don't exist in terms of social groups was the emphasis. And then the second thing that really this book does is I think it really clearly explains how to apply belonging. What are the key elements of it? And it does so because it synthesizes all the psychometric social, psychological, and psychological findings about what it takes to belong with the philosophical and political theory. And so just one example of that which I think is really important is we are in a time of alienation and loneliness. We have a crisis of that where people are isolated and they're not connected for a variety of ways. And although everyone says they want to connect, that we want community, our institutions and our practices constantly pull us apart. We go to work in cars instead of public transit for the most part in America. We don't necessarily walk in our neighborhoods, and if we do, how many people listening to this know who all of their neighbors are by name and what they do?
Do we interact with them like we used to do? Are we really embedded in community? And so our institutions and practices pull us apart rather than bring us together. So part of it's people just want to feel seen. They want to feel heard. A lot of people just feel both left behind by politicians or by not centered in society. When you speak to someone and you share your story with them, you feel closer with them. There's a psychological proximity that entails out of deep canvassing and entails out of bridging, and that's something that's really lifted up in this book and really important. So we have in this book really novel contributions, but above all, I think we have great suggestions for how to build more belonging, and we have a four-part definition of belonging that I think is really easy to apply for institutions, for DEIB practitioners, for teachers. I think it's going to be very helpful for a lot of people.

Ivan Natividad:
Thanks for those insights. It does feel like we're living in a time where things that didn't previously exist, like social media, the advent of different technologies have kind of really impacted potential pushes towards belonging. Without othering. Why are we so polarized and how do we combat the things that divide us?

john powell:
Well, there's been a long, now recent history of people [inaudible 00:20:26] that we have less social cohesion. Putnam's book Bowling Alone, which we cite, literally talks about people bowling alone. McMahon talks about the decline of institutions like the church, whether you're religious or not. It brought people together. There's physical design. People talk about in the 1940s and '50s in the United States, all the porches were built out front, and after 1960, all the porches are built in the back, which means you can go outside and not see your neighbor. So there are all these mechanisms. Think about factory workers. It used to be that people had physical location that brought them together. And growing up, I remember going to union picnics with my dad. It was more than just a solidarity at work. These were people who were friends and people who you knew. And of course, everybody talks about knowing people up and down the block.
So it's all of these things happening at once. But on top of that, one of the things we talk about in the book is that rapid change creates dislocation. So the whole world is speeding up and it's speeding up along important salient axis, and you can [inaudible 00:21:48], but it's like technology, the environment, pandemics, the economy. And then in some ways, the mother of all of them is demographics. And so whenever stuff comes out, and it's not just the United States, it's not surprising that authoritarian leaders always glum onto the other, the racial other, the immigrant other. The other becomes a critical component. Why does that work? Well, part of the thing is that people are struggling to integrate all that change, and there's a fear or anxiety that in this new world, my group will not belong. So literally we have the Proud Boys marching in South Carolina saying The Jews will not replace us, referring back to a slogan from the 1930s in Germany. Will not replace us. They're telling us almost explicitly, "We're worried about a future where we won't belong."
So as these containers that normally held us began to crack, there's a sense that there's no place for us in the future, and that's one reason that authoritarian leaders oftentimes harken back to the past. Remember when things were simple and everybody knew their place? While there was never such a time, and even if we have approximate times, it was full of oppression and stuff that we don't want to or can't go back to. But we haven't created an imagination, a story that allows us to think about, okay, so what does America look like if there's no racial majority? Or Brexit? When Britain is thinking about, well, if all these immigrants are coming to Britain. You go to London, you want to go to a... I said, you want to see Egyptian art, go to London.
I mean, the world is changing in some powerful ways, and the people part of it's extremely important. So what's going on is this change is going to speed up, and then you have what Amanda Ripley calls conflict entrepreneurs, people who take this anxiety, take this disquiet and tell people, "You should be afraid of the other." They both manufacture the other, then use the other as a way of constituting the we. And so this is the environment we're in, and this environment, this sort of foundation for this environment will actually continue to increase, not just in the United States, but all over the world. So one of the things that we're doing in the book is really situating this as a global phenomenon and is accelerated by the changing demographics, accelerated by the technology, social media. It used to take months to communicate with someone in another city. Now a second to communicate with anyone around the world.
There's a lot of good in that, but we also find that there's a lot of anxiety. And reading one of Harari's books, he says we talk about the elites, meaning those sort of captains of industry. He said no one's in control. We're moving into a world where all the stuff is going on. Should you be afraid of the head of a big corporation stealing your privacy, or should you be afraid of AI? And what's the fear of AI? We don't even know what the fear. We know there's something scary, but we don't know what it is, and who's in control? And we take that and the social entrepreneurs, the conflict entrepreneurs says the reason you feel that way is because of that racial, ethnic, religious, immigrant, other, which is false. So in a sense, we turn our eyes from the prize and our best chance of having a world where we all belong is for us all to belong is for us to acknowledge each other.
And we are going to have some challenges. Climate change is going to present some challenges. It's going to present a world that we haven't seen before. But if we can turn toward each other instead of on each other, it's the best possibility of not just surviving, but thriving, and that's partially what the book lays out. And again, it's not just a U.S. problem. It's a problem everywhere in the world because the world is changing everywhere.

Stephen Menendian:
Just a couple of points on that. It's not just the sort of, let's make America great again, as an example to john's point, of the hearkening back to some imagined past. There are very strange versions of this all over the world that we mention in the book. So I'll name two sort of strange versions of this. And again, when these dynamics are happening, when it's this rapid change in technology and culture, in economic developments, people feel untethered, a lack of grounding. Right? And so you have these demagogues or other forms of conflict on entrepreneurs who try and tell a simple story that can explain all of that, as john said, by blaming the social other, and it's all over the world. So in India, it's led by this Hindu nationalist movement under the titular leadership of Narendra Modi, and elsewhere you see it.
But some of the strange expressions of this are the BJP and Modi and others claim that ancient Indians, literally thousands of years ago, had interstellar space technology and travel and actually flew airplanes thousands of years ago. This is not a joke. You can look it up. We have the citations in the book. And why would someone say that? What would be the reason for that? It's because it's a message saying, "You are a great people. You are a member of a great ancient civilization." In some ways, it's a response to imperialism and colonialism. But what it is a sense of wounded pride, and that is one of the most dangerous things in the world as we see from Putin. Right? Putin is saying the biggest geopolitical mistake of the 20th century was the fall of the Soviet Union, and in a sense is saying, is feeding that grievance, that resentment, that wound, and to try and rebuild that russkiy mir, which includes the Russian-speaking people of Eastern Ukraine, to try and reclaim these territories and rebuild that larger vision. And you see this across the world.
And then one other strange example. So in the nineties, a lot of the ethnic conflict in the world was in the former Yugoslavia, and particularly in Serbia, which in the Srebrenica Massacre I think is one of the undisputed genocides of the late 20th century. There is this belief similar to India, that these ancient pyramids were built that had mystical healing powers in Serbia and that were also used for interstellar communication. And apparently, I was reading an article that someone associated with the famous tennis player, Novak. I'm going to butcher his name so I won't say it. But the world's best tennis player is associated with the sort of cult leaders who articulate these stories. So what gives them power? It creates a sense of belonging out of a sense of woundedness. And so belonging can be offered on an exclusive expansionary basis, which is our solution or a narrow basis, and if you don't offer it on a broader basis, people will take the offer on the narrow basis.

john powell:
Let me add a couple of things because I think this is really important and really challenging and hard, but also potentially quite wonderful. We are changing. The world is changing, and our sense of self, our identity has always changed, usually changed slow enough so we don't have to think about it, and usually we think we have some control over it. We never have complete control over it, and we talk about this a little bit in the book. It's like I was born in the 1940s and literally if you could find my birth certificate, it would say colored. Black people were called colored, colored people. No one used that term anymore. And then it was negro, and then it became black, and then it became... So it's like something's going on, and you actually saw oftentimes parallel changes in the white community. It wasn't just changing nomenclature, it was just a change of sense of who you are.
And like I said, now it's like multiracial. And so part of the thing is that we are changing. We're being pushed to change, and we are not quite sure we can do it or that we want to do it. We don't get to actually completely choose it. And so again, going back to Harari again, he talks about being bio-humans, humans who are part machine and part computer. But instead of this actually grappling with the subtlety and complexity of that and helping giving a birth not just to a new world, but a new self. When I was growing up, again in the 1950s, literally, and this is not just me. You can read Supreme Court cases where the court talked about race as being immutable. The race, you're born with a race, it was biological and it never changes. Similar to them thinking about gender, and so gender was thought about in terms of male and female. And now people are grappling with, what does it mean to be non-binary? What does it mean to be they?
And some people are like, "Oh, no. We're not going there. That's just too crazy. That doesn't fit anywhere in my world schema." And I was talking to a good friend of mine, he was saying, "john, when does this stop?" I mean, we're just getting crazy. And I said to him, "It doesn't. It doesn't stop." And implicit in that question and implicit in that anxiety and explicit with the conflict entrepreneurs is that it's not something that the world is changing. It's that those people, those others are wiping out your world. They're not just different than you. They're a threat and we need to actually threaten them. And so they have what I call this breaking story, this fear-based story, and we have to have a different story where yes, the world is changing, but it can be okay. And sometimes a story is that, well, it's changing, but not really. But it is, really.
So we say gay marriage, just like straight marriage. It's like, "They're just like us." And there's an impulse where you understand why that impulse is used, but it's really overstated. There are a lot of subtleties that we're very much like, but we're very much different and we're going to live in a world, our children are going to live in a world that our grandparents couldn't imagine. And not just the world would be different, but they will be different. And so how do we actually usher in these new ontological groundings where everyone can belong? That's the challenge of the book. And it really calls upon us to actually think and engage in multiple levels, structural, cultural, interpersonal, spiritual, and we don't have a language for it yet. And so Stephen's point earlier is that sometimes the book is dense because we're trying to create a vocabulary or grammar and then at the same time push a certain set of ideas that are not intuitive.

Stephen Menendian:
There's a really funny episode of, I think it's the Twilight Zone, from the TV show from the sixties where someone, basically it's a Rip van Winkle. Someone falls asleep in 1880s and wakes up in the 1950s and the world has completely changed. Right? Think about that. Think about all the changes in that just 50, 60 year period. You had not only the two world wars. You have the invention of the aeroplane. You have invention of the automobile. You invention of radio and television, the telegraph, electrification. I mean, you go from the imagined, quaint, bucolic farm to a completely different world. There was a book that came out, I think it was Robert Gordon, a famous economist, came out a couple of years ago saying that the changes that have happened the last 50, 40 years we think are like that. I didn't even mention vaccinations, right, which is being recontested. Gordon's point was the changes in the last 40, 50 years look nothing as dramatic as the changes of the 40, 50 years before that.
I'm not sure that's so true. Think about artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, CRISPR, the personal computer, the microchip, microchip being invented in the fifties and forties, semiconductor. But the point is the changes, sometimes even subtle changes create enormous changes, and we don't always appreciate how these structures shape our lives. It's like the erection of the highway system made possible. You wouldn't have fleets of Amazon delivery drivers delivering one or two-day shipping if you didn't have that structure built in the fifties. Or the Transcontinental Railroad that completely changed American life a century before that. And so there's these hidden structures that shape our lives, and the faster that happens, the more disconcerting it is to people, the more disorienting it is. And people, the way that we make meaning and sense of that is through these stories. And what's on offer is a story that is, again, one that has the villain of the social other or one that tries to bring us together.
And it's hard because in a lot of political thought, there's a desire to have an enemy. Who is the enemy? Is it the Koch brothers? Is it Donald Trump? Is it, whomever it is. In this book it's a challenge because we're trying to tell a story without an embodied and in-person villain. Really, if there is a villain, it's a thought, not a person. It's the movement. It's really ethno-nationalism. It's the idea to try and create a villain is the villain, if there is one. And so to do that, you have to tell a hopeful story, and sometimes the more hopeful inspiring story succeeds, and sometimes it doesn't depending on how people are oriented and whether you aspire to the better angels of our nature, to paraphrase Lincoln. We're in a time of immense change, and the wildest part about it is it's getting faster and it happens quickly. I mean, the iPhone was only invented a little over a decade ago, and it's completely changed our life making Uber and other things possible. So the technology outpaces our ability to make sense of the change.

john powell:
Let me just say one last thing, and I know we're a long way from your last question, but we now sometimes can't agree on the facts. Sometimes we can but sometimes we can't. Or reality, sometimes we can't. Sometimes we can't. But what is really key is meaning. We're sense making and meaning making animals. And even if we agree on the facts and reality, we don't know, always agree on what does it mean. So that's part of what we're struggling about. And we implicitly know the meaning is not just out there. It's in here. Robert Saposky argues that people fight not just over things, but fight over sacred symbols, or fighting over what something mean. Again, Robert said, there's enough land. Israeli living in Israel. He said there's enough land and food to go around. What we're fighting over is not land and food, really. We're fighting over meaning we're fighting over ideology.
And what we're trying to do in this book is break that open, is to say, since we're talking about meaning and symbols, we have some control of that. We can tell better stories. We can engage in imagination in a different way. We're not stuck to just what was, but first we have to realize change is coming. It's here, and we have to engage it. We can't just ignore it. We can't go back to some imaginary past and never was and refuse to see a future that's inevitable. But how do we do that in a way where all of us, but all of us, belong?

Ivan Natividad:
Wow. That's such a compelling thought. And this is all quite a daunting task, I mean, we're embarking on. I mean, the subtitle of this book is How Do We Save Ourselves and the World? So I guess for readers and people that will read the book, how do we contribute to that kind of push toward that hopeful story Stephen was mentioning. How can people put the themes of this book into practice in their daily lives?

john powell:
In some ways people like doing it. We live here in California. Sometimes reality sort of outpaces the discourse. So for example, one of the fastest growing groups in the country, but certainly in California, are multiracial, multi-ethnic families, which just exploded. And it didn't wait for the government or for a pundit to say that was okay. It's just happening. Now, they do need a story. I mean, when I was growing up, we talked about things in terms of black and white. Very few people do that anymore. Now we talk about multicultural, multiracial, and we have trouble. I mean, you saw that with Trump. It's like, how should we think about Kamala? She's black and she's Indian. What is that? That's a lot of Americans. That's a lot of people around the world. So they're living a reality that's already outpaced the old stories that we have.
There's some science fiction writers who were complaining, and their complaint was all the science fiction stories, just turn on television tonight, are dystopia. They're filled with vampires and zombies and the undead. And it's like to the unconscious minds, this is not just a story, so that a lot of people, when they look at the future, they can't imagine it being anything but dystopia. We need to help people actually imagine something different and we can do it day to day. I walked in my neighborhood the other day and there was a bench that said something like, "This is a conversation bench. If you sit down on it, you're inviting others into a conversation." Just that, right? Just saying, "Sit down and you're inviting a neighbor or stranger into a conversation." So part of it's we can do little things, but we also can incentivize things. We can help people. We can create zones where people can come together and talk.
I mean, to some extent, both the promise and fear of integrated schools was just that, and we talked about it through very conflicting language. So the segregationists were fearful. Black children and white children going to school together. Literally they went straight to the jugular vein. They're going to get married and have children. There's going to be miscegenation. They went from a five-year-old entering into a school to another five-year-old to them having babies. And their worst fear is that this could be a miscegenation and that would destroy the white race because white race as conceived was constructed under purity. Pollution, which Trump has brought back into the discourse. We have to worry about genetic pollution. Yeah, exactly. And so what did the civil rights community say to that? They said, "Don't worry. This is not about education. This is not about dating. This is about just kids learning."
Now, 40 years later, integration didn't really happen, but the miscegenation did. Right? We have interracial marriage. People don't even know the word miscegenation anymore, and white people still exist. We have California where there is no racial majority, and even if you don't like it, in Hawaii and five other states already have crossed that Rubicon. And so in a sense, both the right and the left got it wrong. The right thought if that happens, the world will end. The left thought it won't happen. We need something more imaginative. It's already happening in the internet and social media, and this gives us new possibilities, but we have to free up our mind and part of freeing up our mind. That's what Carl Jung said. He said, the energy we need to change, it's the same energy we're using to maintain. So if we exhaust all of our resources on what was and what is, it's hard to think of what will be.
So we need some experimentation. we need some incentivize. We need new categories. And again, from school to the workplace to playing, you know, RoboBall, supposedly. I don't even know these games, but some of them bring people together. You look at the Olympics. The Olympics was on display that just people have moved all over the world. And so the French basketball team, great team. It looked like an American basketball team. A lot of dark-skinned people that you wouldn't have seen in France 30 years ago or 40 years ago. What does it mean? The meaning is not clear. There's already a factual predicate to support something new. We haven't told a story of what that is and what that will be.

Stephen Menendian:
And one of the things that we lift up in the book is the important of what Harari has called collective common narratives. What we just call organizing narratives. So these are the stories. What is the story that we're going to tell and who tells the story and what makes it take hold? What makes it catch in society? And one of the things that we note is that these stories actually allow us to cooperate. Human beings are unique in that we appear to be the only species on the planet that can flexibly cooperate in enormous numbers. There are plenty of species that can do cooperation like ants an enormous scale, but it's inflexible. Each of the ants has its genetically endowed role. Human beings can do anything. We can build pyramids. We can build pay stations. Right? We could theoretically do almost any technological depending on our capacity to cooperate.
And we need stories that allow us to do that in a healthy way instead of an unhealthy way, and too often the othering story is the one that prevails. Right? The one where the whole migrant crime concept is designed to create fear when it's just not true. But making something empirically untrue doesn't make it not take hold. So we have to tell them a more hopeful story. And there's some really good stories that we lift up in the book. I mean, obviously there are the ones like Mandela's Rainbow Nation. There's Barack Obama's hopeful story. But there's some that are less well known, like Marion Robinson, who was the president of Ireland, the New Ireland story, and how leaders can not only tell a story, but then embody the story and make it hopeful and bring people together in ways that they hadn't been able to do so before.
So we hope to do that, and we hope that people who read the book in terms of what they can do, again... People want to live in a less polarized society, and yet political scientists will show us that we become more polarized. So how can that happen? Well, it's sort of, as john was saying, what happens when you have a bench that doesn't allow for people to sit down and communicate? What happens when people have porches in the back of their houses instead of the front? What happens? We don't actually facilitate interaction as much as we could or should, and people want it, but just because people want it doesn't make us good at it. It's like any other thing. To get good at it, you have to practice it. And so what we need people to do is become bridging ambassadors. We need people to become weavers. We need people to become the interstitial in our communities and get good at it. And once they get good at it, and once people see the value of it'll happen in more places, it'll multiply and become emulated. Don't you think, john?

john powell:
I think it's absolutely necessary. And we're seeing some of that. I mean, we see people on television now who are quote unquote have disabilities, have speech impediments, have bodies. We wouldn't have seen that in the 1950s. So literally, we need to not just have, bring people out of the closet, we need to destroy the closet. There's no more closet. And people get to try on different things and don't get punished for it if it's not fitting a certain classical norm. And then also realizing that people will have fear. Willingness to listen to people's fear. Really, the change is not always easy. Obama said, "Hope is not a strategy," and I believe that. I mean, I believe it's important for people to have hope, but it's also, as Michelle said, we got to get to work. We got to do it. We can do it. We have to do it.
When I went to school, literally the school created at the time programs overseas. The idea was that you live in a world, not just in California, so you should go out there and see the world. We've cut back on that, but the world is getting smaller. And how do we help people move in a multiplicity of ways with language, with culture, with movement, with exchange programs? How do we hold the world for all of us, not for my group versus your group, whether my group is black or my group is American. The world belongs to all eight plus billion people, to the animals, to the trees, and to the earth itself. How do we start to live into that and reflect that

Stephen Menendian:
And to each other. And so part of telling these hopeful stories also requires new scripts, and those scripts are things that we have to try on. Right? It's like the Baldwin quote that it's at the beginning of the book. Ivan, if you have a chance, I'll let you introduce it. But part of it is some of the scripts that we have are being challenged right now. So there was a big book that was published a couple of years ago by Richard Reeves on the problem of men and boys. And in a sense, the scripts that young men have in particular put them between a rock and a hard place. So you have the American Psychological Association saying that toxic masculinity is really bad and that we can't have people repressing their feelings and pushing downward and being misogynist. On the other hand, we haven't offered what a positive story for maleness or malehood is. Right? So we have to try something and that something needs to be something healthy and hopeful and provide people meaning. It can't just leave them untethered. We can't say, "You can't be this," but not tell them what it is. And there's a parallel story that john wrote a lot about in the book for white people.

john powell:
And let me just say one last thing on this. Yes, what can people do? We may not... First of all, we believe in co-creation, so people should be involved. We also have, we're both part of the Othering & Belonging Institute, SSU. And so there's a lot of practices on there. There are communities on there. There are literally a book club around our book on there. So we say to people, "Go look at that." But not just us. There's good science centers. There's the New Pluralists. There's More in Common. There are literally hundreds of experimentation going on around the world, and yet it's still not enough. We feel that belonging without othering is not an idea. It's a movement, and we ask people to be part of that movement and bring their energy and ideas to that movement in big and small ways and share with each other. And we also know that if you don't follow certain scripts, sometimes you're asked to pay a cost. If you reach out to the other side, you sometimes will be excommunicated from your own side. So we're not Pollyanna. We're not simplistic. We know this is hard, but we also know it's really rewarding and can be uplifting, and we'll have challenges and opportunities in the future, and we hope people will not only seize them, but share them with each other.

Ivan Natividad:
Right on. I hope so, too. Well, we're coming to the end of discussion here. It's been quite lively and impactful. And Stephen kind of mentioned this about the quotes that were mentioned in the beginning of the book, the James Baldwin quote. Roberto Unger. And just out of curiosity, I was really struck by that W. H. Auden quote. As a poet, it was quite succinct, and it went something like, "We must love one another or die." Can you talk about why you chose that quote and the importance of love and empathy in this movement?

john powell:
So two things. We talk about it in the book. We are interconnected. As Baldwin says, "We are hopelessly and forever a part of each other." And how do we lean into that? When we talked about the circle of human concern, where we show concern for all humans, and that may seem again polyamorous, but think about this. There are over 140 countries now that have eliminated the death penalty. Something very concrete, very real. Go back to the beginning of the 20th century. There were four. At some point, many of those countries went through a process where they had to come to terms with, what do we do for with people who murder, who kill, who maim, who violate the rules of society? Do we kill them? And 140 of those countries, the majority of the world said no. They still remain part of the human family. We had to protect ourselves from them, protect them from themselves sometime, but they still remain human.
We just go up the road to Canada. There's no death penalty in Canada. While you're in prison, you're still allowed to vote. Not when you get out of prison, while you are in prison. They're saying we're still part of the community. And some writers, and I haven't checked this out entirely, says, if you look at countries that tend to have the death penalty, those are tend to be the most violent countries. The countries where the state has said, "We're going to kill people who kill people," there's a lot of killing going on. There's a lot of dying going on. The United States, our solution is give them a gun. Don't give them a book. Ban the books, but make guns available. I think it's wrong thinking. So when we said to create a circle of human concern with everyone in the circle, we mean everyone. Then someone challenged us and they said, "What about the Earth itself?" And I said, "They're right." Human comes from the word humus, which is of the earth. We can't survive without each other. We can't survive without the Earth. It's not a metaphor.
And we here in California, looking at fires, looking at choking air, looking at floods. We see that, yes, this is home. Native Americans have been trying to teach, indigenous people have been trying to teach that for hundreds of years. This is our mother. So some people will embrace that, some won't, but we can't survive. And Stephen mentioned the thing that actually has been the human crown jewel is our ability to cooperate, and the better we are at cooperating, the better we are. So yes, when we break into little fragmentations. I mean, think about Europe before World War II. Every five minutes, France and Germany were at, and Einstein said, "I don't know what the weapons of World War III will be, but the weapons of world War IV will be sticks and stones." Meaning that if we have another world war, we will go back to the Dark Ages. We will destroy human civilization.
And Europe did something quite amazing. So instead of Germany and France arming for the next fight with each other, they said, "Let's create the EU. Let's create an identity that encompasses Germany, France, England, Italy." 350 million people and counting, 27 different countries. Let's create a common currency. Let's create a porous border where you can move back and forth and where you don't have to stop being a German, but you're also a European and it means something different. Let's experiment. And today, not perfect by any means, but it's almost unimaginable that Germany and France will go to war. When they turned toward each other, when they start cooperating, the killing stopped. But as long as they were trying to protect the narrow self-identity, it was leading toward every five minutes. There are lessons than that for all of us.

Stephen Menendian:
Just building on what john said, I think there's two parts to the quote, Ivan. The first is a warning and an admonition, which is that when you have these conflict entrepreneurs, these demagogues who are stirring up people's emotions and making them fearful, it also makes them not just fearful, but belligerent. Right? And that's where you get wars. You get conflicts. And the problem we have is we live in a world where any particular conflict can erupt into mass devastation because of the technologies that exist, and those wars don't just stay isolated in one part of the world. One of the things we talk about in the book is, and the thing that kept Obama up at night is the Indian subcontinent. Two nuclear powers, Pakistan, India, looking each other. Belligerent in Kashmir, belligerent on their border. If there is a World War III, it's a good chance it could start there. And it wouldn't just be resolve the conflict between them. It would devastate the entire planet.
And so we don't have a choice. In a sense we're saying we either build a world without belonging or eventually humanity will end itself. Because, I mean, if you look at, for example, the Turner Diaries, which I can't get a copy of because it's such a racist track you can't find a copy anywhere. But what I've read about the Turner Diaries is that it imagines a white supremacist effort to take over the nuclear weaponry of the United States and then destroy basically the world population, leaving 1% left to dominate, the white race, quote unquote, to dominate. So these fantasies are extremely dangerous, but the upside of it, the philosophical part, this is a warning, but the philosophical part of it, and there's a beautiful quote from the book. I'm going to quote from the draft instead of the book.
john wrote, "A healthy society would not only make space for others, and love, if it's not narcissistic, requires us to love others who are different and accord them full humanity because they are human, including different." In other words, what john was saying there is that if we just love people who are like us, in a sense it's narcissistic. Right? And so we have to love people who are not like us along some salient social dimension in order for it not to be narcissistic. So love is a critical part of this, both the story and also our call to action.

john powell:
And Stephen just laid out, I think, very cogently what the challenge, and one may wonder, if so clear, why are we having such a hard time getting there? Why does this conflict entrepreneur work so well? And the answer is multifaceted. But the two quick points I want to make, one is that a conflict entrepreneur is trading on fear, and by some accounts, fear is the oldest emotion. It's not rational. It's older than the prefrontal cortex. It's older than rationality. It's older than logic. It's what we call our lizard brain, and so it can be activated very easily. And so if it's like trying to make a basket by throwing stuff in the bay. San Francisco Bay is huge. You can't miss. And so part of the challenge for us then is to actually not just engage the rational brain, and you can't dissuade fear by showing them a new study, by citing some new survey. That part of the brain which we call the lizard brain or amygdala doesn't read survey reports.
And it's there. It has a usefulness. It was there, part of our evolutionary past and present and future. But how do we talk to fear? How do we engage with fear? And what are we so afraid of? And what we're afraid of is not belonging. So part of the way we talk to fear is that the South African word, sawubona. I see you. I hear you. I respect you. Not that I agree with you. I care about you. I love you. That's how we engage with fear. So it's love in a sense and respect and dignity that cures the fear.

Speaker 2:
And that concludes this episode of Who Belongs, a podcast from the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. Thank you to our guests, john a. powell and Stephen Menendian for coming on the program to discuss their new book, Belonging Without Othering: How we Save Ourselves and the World, and to Ivan Natividad for facilitating the discussion. To learn more about their book or to listen to more episodes of Who Belongs, visit us online at belonging.berkeley.edu/whobelongs. Thank you for listening.