On April 15, john powell and Stephen Menendian sat down with interim Dean of Social Work Susan Stone to discuss their book, Belonging Without Othering at the UC Berkeley School of Social Work.

Transcript

Susan Stone:
As you might know, social work is a very, very broad profession. It brings together a lot of different expertises, and sensibilities, all bound around the idea that we are trying to advance well-being among those who, in various ways and in various forms, can become or be rendered otherized.

And we do that because we want to advance well-being, just fairness and dignity. We do so using ourselves as instruments of building relationships. Our profession, historically, has sometimes been critiqued. Like what makes you distinct? And many people say, when social work is at its best, that we are boundary-spanners, we're bridgers. And so that is why your book just resonated with me so much. And then I learned over time that your book is resonating with many practitioners.

I threatened earlier this fall to have a book club where we all read this book together, and hopefully invited, and had... Was like, "Will John Powell and Stephen Menendian come and visit us?" And here we've manifested them. So I'm really excited to be in conversation with you. I don't think these two need an introduction, but I'm going to go ahead and give an introduction anyway.

We have John Powell who is just a whirlwind of productivity. And as it relates to civil rights and civil liberties across a variety of very vexing and entrenched social issues, ranging from poverty, to structural racism, et cetera, et cetera. John Powell is a professor of law, African-American studies, and ethnic studies here at the University of California, and is also the director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, and the Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair and Equity and Inclusion here.

So I don't know... And you manage to teach classes on advanced civil rights, and manage to just come and share your wisdom with all of us. And so I'm deeply grateful.
Equally prolific is Stephen Menendian, also a lawyer by training, and also just amazingly prolific. You have a forthcoming book, Structural Racism: The Dynamics of Opportunity and Race in America, forthcoming, that I hear you're just putting the finishing touches on?

Stephen Menendian:
Page proofing.

Susan Stone:
Page proofing.

Audience:
Nice.

Susan Stone:
And you currently serve as the assistant director, and the director of research at the Othering & Belonging Institute. So again, I think I told you why I'm so grateful that you're here, and you're joining us today to present on your recent book.
And to set this up a little bit, I loved, John, what you said, and I hope you don't mind that I call you John-

john a. powell:
Oh, no.

Susan Stone:
... and Stephen, and Susan, is to create a practice story structure and system, where everyone, we can achieve this great aspiration where everyone participates. And again, because I believe this vision resonates so much with the project of social work and social welfare, I am delighted that you are joining us in conversation with me today.So thank you, and please welcome our distinguished guests.

So you are here to talk today about Belonging and Othering, how we save ourselves and the world. I'm a professor, so I assume everybody has read the book before they came. And I know that might be a little bit overly ambitious, but I might want to just ask you to give a light thesis of your book for our audience, in case some have not read, or what you really hope they will take out of it when they read it. The only thing I ask is we're supposed to talk loud, because our speakers are not working as well.

john a. powell:
Do you want to go?

Stephen Menendian:
Sure. I'll take the first... We both looked at each other, hoping the other would take it. First of all, I just want to thank you, Susan, for inviting us. It's equally a pleasure to be in conversation with you. Just the short brief time we've had, I feel like I'm already learning a lot from you, and this is going to be a really interesting conversation. It was also one of the best introductions I've heard for John in a while. So nice on that.

So the book has two parts. The first part is about othering, the second part is on belonging. And we had these conversations, "Should we just open the book around belonging?" If we want to just maximize sales, that's where a lot of people are going to be entering. What is belonging? How do we operationalize it? What are the examples of institutionalizing it? Practice of belonging, design principles?

The problem we had was we just felt hollow doing that. It wasn't grounded. You can create belonging, but do so on an exclusionary basis, with a small we. We call that belonging based on othering. And we see a lot of examples of that right now. In fact, you can create a real sense of thick belonging, of deep community, but it's built on exclusion.

And so if we just did a belonging book, or opened the book with belonging, we wouldn't be honest or authentic about what we really meant as a moral vision. So we spent a lot of time, probably a disservice in terms of readers, because we know that the first part is pretty dense. I think one of the critics said it's pretty dry. But that's okay, because once you get through it, and you get to part two, then it's clear skies. I think it opens up and it becomes really understandable what we're trying to do.

So part one is really defining, what is othering? Who is the other? How does othering happen? And how does identity formation, how is it bound up with the othering process? When John and I were working on the book, I kept coming up with all these fascinating historical examples of othering, obscure examples that you would never have heard of before, from maybe the 14th century, or the other side of the globe.

And John said it's sort of like, "Well, there's a bird, and there's a bird, and there's a bird. Eventually, you've got Audubon's book of birds." Right? How many birds can you call before you get to the undercarriage of it, the structural dynamics? And John kept saying, "The other is a byproduct of the othering process." What do you mean by that? What is the othering process? So he began to think about that, and look at that, what that looks like.
And the first part of the book tries to give you examples of how the othering process occurs, and how it's not just simply about prejudice, or hatred, but really deep structural dynamics that produce the other. So that's the first half of the book.

Then we get to the fun part, belonging. So the second part of the book is really defining what we mean by belonging. And we have four elements to the definition. And we went through all of the social-psychological research, the attitudinal research, and we just felt the definitions were really inadequate. They were either valid in being predictive, but they didn't give you practical application. They didn't tell you what to do.

And so we wanted to come up with a definition we thought was really reflective of this vision, this moral vision of belonging without othering. And so chapter five sets that out, and then it tells you a little bit about how to operationalize it. And then the rest of the book is about, what does it mean for our identities and our sense of self? And what does it mean for the stories and the larger narratives that we wrap ourselves within?

So the thesis of the book, the theory of the book, is really, how do we build a world where belonging is an aspirational value and a deep norm? And then how do we put that into practice? And we try and give guidance to the readers on how to do that.

Susan Stone:
Thank you.

john a. powell:
So just to add a couple of things. First of all, I'd light to be here with you. And I'll just add a couple of things to what Stephen already shared. Plus, I'll give you a little history as to our naming ourselves. Some of you may know, that we at one point, we were the Haas Institute for Fair and Inclusive Society.

And we have seven clusters, which vary in terms of subject matter and populations. So there's the health disparity cluster, there's an LGBTQ cluster, there's an education cluster, there's an economic cluster, and they're all looking at issues around marginalization through structures and different populations. And there's a religious cluster, and so on.

And we felt at some point, we'd have this annual conference where we talked about belonging, a belonging conference. But we felt at some point, that all of them were doing good work. They're organized with professors on campus. And they all were sort of politely criticizing the others. "You think it's gender, but it's really race." "You think it's race, but it's really class." "You think it's class, but it's really religion.

And so in a sense, they weren't, from our perspective, as curious, and weren't learning from each other. They were gentle turf wars. They were gentle, but they were wars. And we felt that something was missing. What was missing was the deep structure of, that all of them were dealing with othering, but they had different expressions of it, and they didn't see the common thread.

And that's not just true of these brilliant professors here, and colleagues, but it's true of most people. So our work is global. So in the United States, it's easy to think, if you think, because some people don't, it's easy to think that the penultimate othering process, if you want to call it that, is race, or maybe gender, or maybe race and gender, intersectionality.

And maybe that's right. But here's the rub. When people think about that, they think about it in universal terms. They think, "Oh yeah, they say they're not doing race in India, but they really are." They may call it something else, let's say, okay, they can call it caste, but they're really doing race. And yes, there's some correlation between colorism in India and caste, that one-to-one.

And Isabel Wilkins, who I know, and interviewed several times, and love her work, her book Caste, from my perspective, she conflates caste and race. And they inform each other, but they're also different.

But one way they're not so different is that they are deep formative structures of othering. So let me just say a couple other things about othering. Talking to a friend the other day, and she was saying, it's a person of color, she was saying, "This happened to me just because of my race."

And I said, "No, this happened to you because of the othering process, because of what people are ingesting. It's not you." So if you think about that it's you, then how do we fix you? How do we fix people with disabilities? How do we fix people who are minorities? The whole minortizing process.

Of course you're feeling bad, you're a minority, you should feel bad. Right? Not realizing that there's a process that's going on, that really defines, not just the other, but the groups that thinks they're not other. In fact, one of the major functions of othering, is to constitute a kind of belonging. And so in a sense, you can't fix the other, because the other's not broke. It's serving some deep social glue.

And people, I know this is not political, but here comes, people say you go to Trump rallies and people having a good time. They say, "These are not mean people. They're not sad people. These are happy people. They have a community." And I can believe that. They have a community based on belonging predicated on othering.

So I sometimes joke and I say, "You know, I'm a professor here at Berkeley, so every two years I have to make up some new words. Othering & belonging, that fits. So part of the thing was, the work is really trying to situate something that happens in human societies all over the world.

Okay. Some people will grant us that, so the social psychologists. And I should say, the work is primarily, which a lot of people miss, the work is primarily social and structural, not individual. So a lot of ways that people digest it, is that, "Oh yeah, I know exactly..." Because they make it down to the individual, which Tillie called, "We're methodological individualists."

Everything is about the individual. I'm not saying the individual has constituted through these processes in relationship. So if we think about the process of belonging and othering, some people will grant us, "Okay, what you've done is interesting, Stephen and John, but it's actually old hat, because in some expression, belonging is everywhere."

Like the game you see we're talking about, when you say, "Let's look at the yellow Volkswagen." All of a sudden they're everywhere. It's like, "Wow, so many yellow Volkswagens." You see the person outside the window painting your car yellow. Yellow Volkswagen's are everywhere, so belonging is everywhere. And it is.

If you've been following the DEI fights, the New York Time ran that all these companies are dropping DEI, and embracing something called belonging. Okay, whatever, they haven't read our book, obviously.

So if belonging is so prevalent, it's so ubiquitous, why did we take the time to write this book? What does it have to offer? So this is the thing, belonging is everywhere. And I would paraphrase the Reverend Dr. King, when he says, "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

And obviously, that's right, sort of. What's not right is that it doesn't bend by itself. It's a process that we have to be engaged in the bending. And just as we are bending it toward something, and I'll come back, I say we're bending it toward belonging, there are other people who are bending it toward exclusion, other people who are bending it toward othering.

And I would say right now, they're feeling their oats. I mean, othering is just going crazy. I wake up in the morning, and Stephen's helping with a memo to help universities and institutions create spaces of belonging in this environment.

And you have the administration saying, "If you do, they're going to take billions of dollars away from me," right? So it's not just at the personal level, it's at the institutional level. So what is it that we are bringing to this discussion that's new? There are two or three things, many things, really, but two or three things.

The first is, it's belonging without othering. So creating a global norm of belonging without othering. Now all the people who are saying, "This is old hat," now they're saying, "You're crazy. You can't have belonging without othering. That's just evolutionary baked in. It's an entailment. It's a logical necessity. The only way we notice something is when we distinguish..." Then they get all... So we've lost them then.

So that's what the book is also challenging. It's sort of engaged. And a lot of this come out of the more recent stuff, as people are thinking about the mind science, and they're thinking about evolution. You have Harari's book, Sapiens. Like, yeah, we were in these small tribes, and the mind got habituated to othering.

Wrong. Wrong. So that's first, that's one of the most important things to knock down, that this is what other would call a false necessity, that we think we are wired to othering, it's evolutionary necessary. And I'll just give you the highlights of why that's not true, and then maybe turn it back to Susan so we can have a real dialogue.

I'm going to give you another historical moment before I do that though. So a good friend of mine, colleague I learned a lot from, is Derrick Bell. And Bell wrote a lot of things. One of the things he talked about was convergence. He talked about, basically, that poor whites and rich whites would converge in their interests. So he called it interest conversion. And therefore, necessarily, racism is a permanent fixture of America, because of interest conversion.
Derrick was smart. And he says, "If you look at history, when it looks like we're making progress, when it looks like maybe the white elites are siding with the downtrodden Blacks, he says, it's just a blip. If you wait long enough, you will see something happen, a conflict between poor whites and rich whites. And they will resolve that conflict, as in the reconstruction by making common cause against the racial other." Interest conversion.
And it's sort of amazing to me. I actually wrote this, so it's not a secret. A few people now have said maybe Derrick was wrong. I would say, in writing, I probably was the first one to say, "Wrong." Why is that wrong? Just think about what he's saying. Basically, he's not just essentializing race, just academic is a bad thing, even though we do it. He's also essentializing interests.

There's white interest and Black interests, and it's relatively stable, so we can always go back to it. Wait a minute, how do we deal with that when we say race is socially constructed? Race is socially constructed by necessity. Interest is socially constructed, which means it's constantly shifting.

But then, again, Derrick is smart. He's saying, "Well, sometimes it looks like Blacks and whites, usually poor Blacks and rich whites are really coming together, and something positive or different is about to happen. But just wait and it's going go away."
And I said, "Derrick, what you've done is made a hypothesis that can't be disproved. Because any time there's a disproof of your hypothesis, you say, 'Just wait.' Why can't I flip it and say, 'Every time it looks like there's interest conversion, that's temporary. Just wait.'"
Why is the interest conversion phenomenon real and the interest diversion process not real? There's no empirical way of disproving it, right?

So, anyway. So I'm saying all that to say that they are very smart, powerful people who fall on the side of, we have to make others in order to have belong. Social welfare, you are our cousins. No, no, you're not cousins, you're our brothers and sisters.
Okay, and why do I say that? Because part of the thing, when people make that argument, how do I have a sense of me unless I differentiate myself from Stephen? So that seems to be a pretty powerful argument, that there's a natural need to differentiate, and therefore othering.

Two mistakes, differentiation is not othering. They're not the same process. They get conflated. Secondly, we're talking about the phenomena of belonging and othering on a social level, not simply on the individual level. And there's a problem with aggregation, as you know. If you know something at the individual level, it means something at the individual level. It doesn't mean you know anything about the social level.

And because we're methodological individuals, we don't realize that. And then last thing I'll say on this, and then throw it back to Susan, what about all the time that we lived in tribes, and we just naturally were hardwired to be suspicious of the other?
Well, of course, there's the recent book by Korber about individual, about equality, that caused all that in question. But here-

john a. powell:
About equality that calls all that into question. But here's the thing, the people who sort of trade on the tribal thing, first of all, make a number of serious mistakes. There's something implicit in them that's problematic because tribe then is associated with being nasty, being selfish, being mean, being warlike. Most historians believe many of those things associated with being nasty, being mean, being warlike, being horny, it's actually a modern phenomenon, not pre-modern. The stuff happened in pre-modern. It's not war. By some accounts there were certainly fights, but war as we understand it is a relatively new phenomenon. Some people say it had to wait out to after the agriculture revolution. These standing armies. We can't have standing armies and hunter-gatherers at the same time. It's a contradiction.

The other thing though, is that the theory of tribes is that you have 150 people, 200, 250 at most, although that's been challenged, that you spend your whole life with, that the idea of belonging is predicated on daily interaction for your entire life. You're born into a group. I call it a band, not a tribe. You're born into a group and you spend your whole life with that group. You depend on them for everything, and therefore, they become "your tribe." They become where you belong.

Okay, so how does that explain your sense of belonging with 280 million people called white in the United States because you are white? People that you'll never see, people that you never know, people that you never sit out and have food with. Okay, but you're all Americans. What does that have to do with intimacy? What does that have to do with knowing them? You don't know them. What's holding them together is not intimate knowledge.

Take it one step higher. There are 2.2 billion people in the world who call themselves Christian. Well, there are Christians fighting against each other because some of the Protestants who say Catholics are not real Christians. They both would agree that Mormons are not real Christians. But be that as it may, there are a lot of people across the world that call themselves Christian and they're not ... I mean, the Pope could say, "All right, your brethren in Mediterranean need you to go out and fight the Muslims and die." But you're doing it as the Christian brotherhood like, "Yay, we'll send our son off to die," for strangers that we've never seen, that we'll never know in favor of God that we've never seen and we think we know.

So what's creating that glue? It's not intimate contact. It's saying what Harari would say, or McMahon, it's a good story. It's a story based on imagination. What creates the nation state is not intimacy. It's a story. And right now, we're in the midst of someone trying to tell a different story and they're saying, "Oh, these people don't belong. What are they doing here?" "But they were born here." "It doesn't matter. Send them to El Salvador. They're bad hombres."
My point is that there's a different process, and McMahon in the history of equality says that the cognitive revolution created a break in biology. Meaning, that when Sapiens learn to imagine and tell stories, they created new possibilities that are unheard of. Money? Money didn't exist very long. The fact that we all believe in it now is an incredible story.

And so, what other stories can we create? And I'll end this just by saying this. 2,000 plus years ago, the world was very divided, very small and so it was very divided. But 98-99% of people in the planet were Serbian. They were either enslaved or Serbs. The elite was extremely small, and the rest of those people were not people at all. They were just there to serve the royalty, the God, kings, or whatever. And then some guy came along and said, "Everybody, all these minions running around here are children of God." Of course, that guy was Jesus. Jesus made up an announcement over 2,000 years ago that every human being, these minions, these enslaved people, these women, women, the children of God. It's probably hard to wrap your mind around how radical a concept, how radical a story that was. It was reaching toward, it didn't quite get there, reaching toward belonging without other.

And if you looked at the world, you'd said, "There must really be something powerful in that line for someone to believe that." And yet, when I say to people, "Who is the Caesar when Jesus was persecuted?" 99% of the people don't know. Everybody knows Jesus. They don't know who was the head of the most powerful empire in the world when Jesus was alive. Come forward and you keep doing this. 250 plus years ago, 200 years ago, there was a committee and they said, "Let's do something different. We don't want to be part of this great English empire. We are going to declare independence." So they wrote the Declaration of Independence. And then Jefferson said, "What about, I was in France, let me put this in here. We hold certain truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal." And Jefferson took that seriously at some level, notwithstanding the fact that he had 600 people enslaved. So again, someone could turn to Jefferson, "What the hell are you talking about, dude?" And the country's been struggling with that.

And in 1948, World War II, over a hundred million people killed. 6 million Jews slaughtered. Africa, cut up as colonies of Europe. Women all around the world cannot vote. And Eleanor Roosevelt in the United Declaration of Human Rights pushed in there that every human being had inherent dignity. And W.E.B. Du Bois was so upset he conferred with her. He's like, "Eleanor, what the hell are you talking about?"

So I'll just end by saying, if you look at those examples, it's not that the world reflect those examples. It's that someone had the imagination to put a flag in the ground for what's called a regulative ideal. This is what we're going to, this is what that moral arc that King was talking about, this is where it's going if we bend it that way. And we think that is what belonging without othering is. It's the next moral arc. And you have people pushing back. You have the dark and light of people saying, "People are not equal, women are equal." We should just say it. That's their story. But it's not our story. So we try to tell a different story.

Susan Stone:
Okay, this is great. I love it. I love it when we do big, deep conceptual thinking about what these concepts mean. I'm going to make a right turn and I'm going to take it very applied because I'm a social worker. How about this? So many times, social workers are kind of working at a particular point of great potential for belonging with othering.

john a. powell:
With othering.

Susan Stone:
Potential. Actually, I should talk with the strength. We have many potentials to promote belonging with othering. And we also have tendencies because we work within institutions or work with populations who perhaps have had many experiences of belonging with othering. And I'm thinking about that project at this time and practices that we're struggling through when we do seem at this point to be very, very fragmented.

And before you got here, John, we were talking about your concept of polarization not a great word, tendencies to fragment. And I guess I'm not forming a question here. How do we think bigger about these stories to bridge these sources of fragmentation? And your book is like, these stories have to be special stories. There's a great power of narrative. There's also vulnerabilities in some of the narratives of the past or the narratives' tactics we may have used in the past. But what do you see as aspirations towards these bigger ... How do we develop our hygiene to be better meta storytellers in this sense to get to this belonging without othering?

john a. powell:
So I don't know. I don't have a short answer.

Susan Stone:
No, that's okay.

john a. powell:
So think about this. Again, the examples I gave. These are stories. So when Jesus says that we're all children of God, that's a story, but he didn't do research and see how people reacted to it. If he did, maybe he wouldn't have been crucified. The point I'm making is that part of it has to be real in terms of our conviction. Part of it has to be this is who we are. I'm a bridger. That doesn't mean I bridge all the time. We work now with organizers all over the country because they've found, we found, research shows that when you bridge, the practice of bridging which is really listening to another person not just with your head but also with your heart, it's being curious about someone. It's basically seeing them as a full human being with dignity. That when you do that, something magical happens.

So now they're saying, "This works. We should do this." So we go talk to our opponent and pretend like we're interested in them and listening. We can persuade them to do anything. And I say, it's not pretend/ they can smell a fraud. It's interesting, research is very interesting because oftentimes when people start off pretending, they get pulled in. But when you really listen to another person, listen with your heart not just with your head, the ego back to that, the ego of the head tends to, especially at people who have been at Berkeley, they tend to look for flaws. "Aha, you missed the footnote. That wasn't the right footnote." I heard you say, "In my mind. That's my mind. My mind is like contradiction." "Oh no, that was a contradiction."
So the mind, the ego wants to be right. It's even better if Stephen's wrong. I can't be right. Now, Steven's wrong. "Yeah." The hardest about relationships, which is different than right and wrong. It's a whole different valence. And so, if we can connect ... now, the tricky thing is we can connect with someone one-on-one, but how do we do it for 8 billion people? How do we do it for 340 million people? How do we do it? We've done it. We've done it, right? Most Americans feel something special about being American. And certainly when they're outside the country, they're like, "Oh hey, there's another American. Yeah." Like, "Why are you hearing me?"

So the point is that their expression is something being done all the time. So part of it, and certainly Eleanor Roosevelt didn't test ... when the Declaration of Human Rights was passed, it was adopted in 1948, it was as W.E.B. Du Bois says, "Just symbolic." And I say, he was right and he was wrong. He's a giant, so how can you say a giant is wrong? Well, I'm whatever. I think sometimes if there's a God, jury's out, I don't know what the jury from God is. But anyway, the jury's out. If there's a God, I think God has been wrong more than once. I mean, let's add that to ministers like God turning people into bags of dust. That doesn't work for me. "But I'm God." It really doesn't work for me if you're God.

But the point I'm making is that Eleanor Roosevelt didn't test it. It wasn't reflected in the world. It was a deep, how would you even say, maybe spiritual conviction. It was a deep aspiration. It was something. So that's part of it. Then how do you take it to scale? And this gets back to some of the work that Stephen's doing. You do it in terms of Jeffrey Corn was reading a book on belonging, and he said, "Stop focusing on people and focus on the environment, focus on behavior." I mean, Our individualist mode is like, how do I change someone's mind? Okay, how do I change someone's subconscious mind? How do I change someone's implicit bias? It's like you're missing the point. When Claude Steele talks about stereotype threat. He's not saying fix the person. He's saying fix the environment. So we've done it. We've done it at our best when we innovated schools, when we created diverse settings.

So I'll give you one last example then I'll turn it over to Stephen. One of the most powerful institutions in our country that has done this relatively well at scale is the military. But think about the military, especially in the 1960s, 70s. You have poor black kids from Detroit, poor white kids from Alabama, poor Latino kids from LA, 18 years old. 18-year olds automatically poor at 18. You take all these young men, because they're all men give them a fancy gun and put them a hole together and see what happens. And you know what happened? Race wars. Vietnam was peppered with constant race wars where people were turning against each other.

And the military said, "This ain't working, folks. We have to do something to create a common sense of belonging." And they did it. And it was so effective that literally people would say, "I made buddies with someone when I was in that foxhole 40 years ago. We were still buddies." That person is Conservative and you're a Liberal. "It doesn't matter. That's my brother." And we did it at scale. People going ... so there are all these examples that we keep missing.
There's a book out now that talks about the importance of rituals for people to join. It looks at all bloodletting and stuff like that. Addison men, usually men go through these very intense rituals where they're searing their skin, but they're building bonds. Obviously, I'm not advocating that, but I'm saying we actually know a lot about building bonds. We know a lot about creating stories.

And to your question, Susan, I would just say before turning it to Stephen, we are going to be doing some experimentation. We're going to have some failures. So think about this, again, 2.2 billion people who call themselves Christians starting 2,000 years ago without the internet, without the printing press, without Facebook. So they're doing it really in a labor-intensive way.

Now, with one hit on the computer, you can reach literally ... So I did a thing with John Legend, and most of you may not know who John Legend is. How many of you know who John Legend is? Of course. All right, so anyway, okay, John Legend. I know he's famous, but I don't know really who he was. So I said I should go online and see what he's doing and see why is he people so excited? Let me see, I look at some of his music video and see how many hits they got. One of them had 2.3 billion hits. One dude. Stephen.

Stephen Menendian:
So I think part of what your question is about is not just design, but practice. How do we get to a practice of belonging without othering? And so, part of it is conceptuals, narrative, storytelling, all of these things. But part of it also, we need people who are bridgers. Bridgers are the glue, the interstitial pieces and the liminal spaces that allow us to meld together and sort of cement these communities around a larger vision that's not narrow and parochial. There's an essay by Danielle Allen, who is a philosophy professor at Harvard. And she's written this essay about a connected society, which unfortunately a lot of these things we discover after our book is out. That's how it goes. And what she says is, you have people who are already in their professions natural bridgers, translators, social workers, educators. There are people who are already in these spaces.

So part of the task is, I think the task is twofold. The first is, how can we learn from them? And the second, how can we empower and support them? Because the worst thing we could do for social workers is to have them in this really tense, inflamed, really challenging emotional environment and not take some of the burden off their shoulders. Or at least how can we be a load-bearing wall for them in this environment? My mother was a social worker at MSW, then later a clinical social worker, so I understand the emotional stress and difficulty of coming from that. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's a profession, particularly in this environment, there's a lot of burnout. So, how can we support people who are in these spaces, both institutionally and then also interpersonally and in their service?

One example I love to talk about is school counselors. Parallel, not quite the same as social work, but a school counselor, think about the position in an institution of a school building. What does a school counselor can do? What can they do? First of all, in a sense, they're a sensor. If the climate is off, there's an episode or an event in a school building, they are the antenna or the administration that can sense that. If there's a racial episode or a conflict or a tense moment, the trauma and the emotional wavelength and bandwidth that goes through the school, goes through the counselor. The counselor's the frontline responding agent. They're the one who can try and tell the principal and the teachers, "Here's what you should do. Here's what we can programmatically respond." Maybe we need to bring all the students together and have a conversation. Or maybe we need to have some other kind of intervention.

Social workers are like that. They are in a sense, natural bridgers. They're going to spaces that other people aren't going into. And we need them and we need to support and empower them so that they can help us build that larger, not just the bridge, but larger sense of belonging. And as Bell Hooks reminds us, and as John is fond of saying, bridges are meant to be walked on. So being a bridge and being a bridger is not easy. In fact, I get this, this is the most common question we get. One of the most common questions we get about bridging is, is the burden of bridging unfair or asymmetric? And the answer is yes. It's always going to be asymmetric.

If you have a bridge and you're trying to span the bridge, one side of that bridge is often going to represent more marginalized peoples, more marginalized communities, historically oppressed. The other side is going to be a little bit more privileged. It's always asymmetric. Life is asymmetric. The question is, are we going to just continue forward on this path or are we going to do something about it? Because the status quo is unacceptable.

john a. powell:
So let me just add one other thing. So hard work, but also easy work. How many of you know about the Yellow Vest Movement in France? Okay. So these were demonstrations in France. I don't know if they're still going on. On one of the years, and there were sort of middle to lower middle class French who would come out every week and demonstrate. And they were not initially very successful, but eventually they became a political force. When they interviewed these people, they were trying to figure out, "Why are you coming out every week with these demonstrations? You're getting shot with rubber bullets and being sped up on by people." And what they said was committed-

john a. powell:
... with people, and what they said was community. That they created a community, this is where they belong. In their private life, they were all isolated. To them it was like coming to a party every week to see friends. So the good news is people need, want and have a longing to belong. So from my perspective, that explains two-thirds of Trump. Because he's offering people a space to belong.

He may be doing it with snake oil and we're saying, "I can't believe you're buying that stuff." But some people are like, "I'm not buying that stuff." There was a study showing the rapid rise in conservative evangelicals joining churches and stuff like this, literally hundreds of thousands, and they would start interviewing them, "So what's driving this? Do you believe in ... Do you feel saved, is God calling you?" And literally they said, "This is a place where I belong."

So people are looking for that. So the hard thing is it's hard, but the good thing is people want it. But here's the trick, so in the space of fragmentation, of a space of fear, in the space of belittlement, part of the brain that becomes most active is the lizard brain, is the amygdala. And you've got to engage at that level. And the amygdala does not check for notes. And so we have a study, it's like, "Did you see the latest study coming out of Berkeley?" Hell no, I don't want to see the ... I haven't seen the studies before that one. I don't read studies coming from Berkeley.

We were talking, Susan, Stephen and I just before we came up, and said, "You notice movie theaters are dying?" Has anyone noticed that? Used to be five, four in Downtown Berkeley, now there's none. You know what else is dying? Bookstores. And literally my family was a working class family in Detroit, my brother would say, "You know I have all these books next to my bed? I haven't read one of them. They give me a headache." That's my brother. He loves me, and he was not joking. And he's proud, "My brother wrote another book." They said, "What is it about?" Who knows?

The point I'm making is that what he's saying [inaudible 00:50:42]. So part of the thing is how ... So when Trump does something that from the prefrontal cortex, from the rational perspective is completely idiotic, we think, "How can anyone believe that?" It's not how they believe it, they believe it in the back of their mind. They're not operating in the same way. So it's not just telling stories, people are meaning making, feeling animals, and a lot of the stuff unfortunately that we teach students doesn't ... Maybe meaning, maybe, but not meaning through Kierkegaard or whatever. It's like, "Do you feel me? Do you feel me?" Pardon me? Feel me?

Literally when I went to school a thousand years ago, someone would say, "I have ... I'm not interested in your feelings. Tell me what you think." Right? Because that sharp division between the mind and the body, and the body was just something that carried the mind, otherwise it was useless. And so that's part of it, right? If you can do this with 18 year olds in Vietnam, create these deep communities, why can't we do it here?

Susan Stone:
I was wondering, I feel we only have a few more minutes, and I was hoping that I could invite the audience to ask some questions as well. Because I'll keep talking, but any questions for John or Stephen? Gene.

Gene:
Hi.

john a. powell:
Hello.

Gene:
How do you think about the role of culture within this structure?

john a. powell:
Well, I think it's very important. So I suggest that we're meaning making animals, and as subject of reality, this object of reality, and there's inter-subjective which is where culture really is. Culture's about meaning making, and so we may all agree on the facts, something happened on January 6th, something happened. We agree on that. What does it mean? We don't agree on that.

So culture helps us ground meaning. So it's extremely important, and it's not linear. I don't know, I'm sure ... I say this, but I don't really know. I'm sure many of you have had the experience where you're listening to a song ... I lived in Tanzania for a while, and there was singing there that literally would just make you cry. And I didn't even understand the words, but it just touched me, right? And we see that happen episodically, so culture's extremely important, in the stories we tell, extremely important.

If you think about right now we're literally scrubbing our websites, we're trying to take Sojourner Truth out of the story of the Underground Railroad. Why? Most people don't even know, but still they're going to African American museums like, "Take all this stuff out about slavery." We'll have an empty building here pretty soon. No, we're putting in white people. They're telling stories, so culture's important. And it's important especially to people, in some ways, who are not going to read my book. And culture is not just how I feel, it's how we feel, it's how like to feel.

And so part of the frame right now is how do we feel proud about being Americans? People want to feel proud. And the left oftentimes like, "We should not be proud of being American. This is a terrible country." It's like, "Go away." So anyway, and the last thing I'll say is this, so culture's important, telling stories is important, and this is the rub, telling complicated stories I think is part of the secret sauce. Telling a complicated story.

Quick example, how many of you saw Black Panther? Show of hands, all right. So who was the hero in Black Panther? Was it Black Panther or was it Killmonger? Right? Which is unusual, usually it's the villain over here, hero over here, and the hero never gets dirty and the villain never gets clean. That's not life. We need to tell complicated stories. So can we tell a story where there's stuff to be proud of about being American and there's stuff to critique it?

Susan Stone:
I love that. Thank you, that's a beautiful analogy. How do we talk complicated stories? It seems like they don't get traction when they're ... The more complicated-

john a. powell:
Go talk to Pixar.

Susan Stone:
Okay.

Stephen Menendian:
So culture is immensely important. By the way, I think we can at least go to 7:30 if you're open to it. But so the thing about culture is, first of all, what is culture? So I think culture is having several traits. Number one, it's collective, social, repeated behavior. And once you realize just repeated behavior, it's everything we do. It's the food, the type of food we share, it's our language, it's our rituals, it's our holidays.

I was reading an article in the Smithsonian about a tribe of monkeys in Japan, and the parent monkeys had taught the younger monkeys how to open a shell. No other monkeys in Japan know how to do this thing, but it's cultural. It's trained repetitive behavior. So culture is very important in a lot of ways, and it can facilitate us towards belonging without othering, or reinforce belonging based on othering.

Think about, I'm going to take us into the toxic manosphere, right? The critique of toxic masculinity, in our book we talk a lot about this. So the APA, the American Psychological Association maybe five years ago issue this guidance saying that, "Masculinity in its traditional form is very problematic. It leads to men repressing their emotions, it leads to sexual violence, interpersonal violence." This list of things, which are well-founded. The question then is if you live in a culture where masculine identity is based in masculinity, what do you do about it?

And you have option one, we repress masculinity. Option two, we corral it, we just, "Okay, it's fine to allow people to be masculine and have whatever rah-rah on the football field, or maybe in the military, but not in the classroom, not in civic spaces, in the legislature, right?" So option one is we repress, option two is we corral. Option three is we rewrite it. We do something else. But if you just have options one or two, how are boys and young men going to respond to that? I think we have seen the results of that in the last election where young men 18 to 29 are more conservative, more right-wing than Millennials, Gen-X, even Gen-Xers, which everyone thought would be a conservative generation.

In fact, I think more young men voted for Trump in the exit polls than white men over 75 or over 70. Shocking data. So we see this on race too. It's like if the message is that white people are all privileged, all oppressors, is it surprising we get cases like Rachel Dolezal? Is it surprising that people want to ... You get derangement from these kinds of responses. And so in the classroom someone said, "Are those the only options on ... Is it either ..." Maybe there's another thing we can do, but you can't just take someone's identity without replacing it with something.

And so the stories we tell, by the way the most successful stories in human history are the most complicated. When we were writing the book ... So think, what are the two most enduring epic narratives in human history possibly? Certainly a candidate would be the Odyssey and the Iliad by Homer. Not as old as Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is another candidate, there's plenty of candidates. But ancient, right? You're talking over 3000 years old. What is the function of the Odyssey and the Iliad? Especially the Iliad. There is no categorical villain, there is no categorical hero in the Odyssey, it's Odysseus as a protagonist, but he certainly is not a traditional hero in the Disney sense that you would think today.

What does it do? What the function of the Odyssey and the Iliad is it's a mega narrative epic that tells everyone who they are and how they ... Where they sit in the universe. It identifies all the gods, all the different players, the Trojans, the Greeks, everyone has a place in this story. And so what we need are modern, collective, organizing narratives, what Harari calls collective organizing myths, that tell us who we are and what our roles are, and everyone has to have a positive role, where no one is a categorical villain.

And people respond to that. "Well, don't you need a villain in a story?" The answer is no. We have tons of effective stories like Black Panther, even Star Wars. The villains end up being complicated hero in a sense, redeemed. All of our best stories are actually complicated. There's a book called Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher, who is a professor of storytelling, that talks about the fable and so on. They have what he calls the fairytale twist where it doesn't line up with the moral ethical expectation. We talk a little bit ab out this in the book.

Complicated stories where things happen randomly, and those are actually the stories that have endured. Not the neat packed Disney-fied versions of them. The Grimm's Fairytales, the Odyssey, Homer, not just Western societies, but African stories, East Asian stories, they're complicated, they're complicated.

Susan Stone:
And we respond to that psychologically.

Stephen Menendian:
We encode them, we embody them, we live them, yes.

Susan Stone:
Thank you. Go ahead. Thank you.

Audience:
Thank you. I'm coming to you today-

Stephen Menendian:
Could you turn up the volume a little bit?

Susan Stone:
Oh, yeah. You have to talk loud.

Audience:
Thank you, John, Stephen, for sharing your work, your book. I'm a social work practitioner and I came across your book during the pandemic because the anti-Asian hate, and then also reading the research saying Asian Americans reported the lowest sense of belonging in America. So I got curious about this idea of belonging, and then your definition resonated with me the most, and I love the four elements. The inclusion, connection, and repetition and influence. Even just the day to day pathways, I can really bring these four elements. Thinking about my office, do I have a [inaudible 01:02:47] to make my clients feel like there is inclusive environment?

And we are always looking at our working relationship in the connected, and also make them feel they are recognized and their identities are visible. And also, can they also participate in a treatment? So we are hoping these work together. So it's just really tangible to me, and now extending these to my family work, because your book's more social level, so I'm thinking about the family as the small social group, right? And because I'm also having an Asian family, even just within the family, for different situations, scenarios, it's going to be one member, different member that they will feel excluded in a family.

And so I'm really clinically inquiring what relational and societal processes that are impacting the family or people's sense of belonging? Of course, as I'm thinking about your book, one way is that we want to look at if there's ... I'm going to go back and read more about the first part, because the more challenging one, to see what contributes to the othering process. And the other way would be I'm going to look at these four elements, just these four elements showing that in the process. But my question is, thanks to reading the book and studying this topic, just questioning what relational and societal processes that impacting people's belonging, do you have more specific processes you have discovered? So that's my question.

john a. powell:
Well, let me just say this, that if you go to our website there's a lot there. Yes, we're constantly learning. Stephen intimated this, and maybe just be sure in the future where books are never done, you're constantly learning, and we want this to be a co-creation with all of us. We continue to learn, and in the background containers are really important. I can tell you in my own family, I talk about this in my Bridging book, I was excluded from my family for a while.
And I went through many different iterations, but one of the things that actually created more space of belonging in my own family for me was I was credential-ized by people that were important to my mom and dad. Right? So there was something, I forget the exact details, but I was living in Miami and I was doing something and I was on television, and the mayor of Miami was there singing my praises. All of a sudden ... It happened a couple times, once I was on Oprah and again, relatives saw me on Oprah and it was like I had to be cool. I'm on Oprah? More complicated.

So part of what I'm saying is that part of the thing about bridging, especially when bridging in groups, it's not just between two people. It's oftentimes there's someone in my own family, my mom was really the glue, so I kept fighting with my dad or my brother or my sister, and my mom was like, "Nope. You guys got to work this out, because we're family, because we're family." And my mom and dad have both passed, and my siblings are old. When we have fights now, which we don't very often, but there's no one there to pull us back together. That happens not just in families, but it happens in larger group settings.

And so one of the things that's sometimes hard is that ... So people will engage in stuff, maybe they don't like something you're doing, but also they'll engage in stuff because they want to belong. So if the group defines belonging by othering you, then if someone stops othering you their status in the group may be compromised. Just think about that, it's like saying, "I'm Democrat and my girlfriend's Republican." My friends just go, "What? What you doing with that woman?" Without knowing anything else. That's just an example, but there's probably some truth in it, right?

We had a conference recently and we had a well-known evangelical speak, a conservative, white, it's all the tropes, right? And just leading up to it people were pissed. "What is he doing here? I don't feel safe if he's here." I said, "Literally, there are 3000 people here, one conservative guy is going to make you unsafe? Don't worry, if he attacks you I'll put Stephen between them." Really what they were doing, they weren't calling him out, they were calling me out. They were saying, "How could you do this?" In my staff was like, "You're going to lose credibility."

So there's these complicated [inaudible 01:08:22] to belonging, it's not just ... Social workers, I think you would appreciate that. It's not just between the two people, you're in the containers inside the containers inside the containers.

Stephen Menendian:
So I just want to say thank you, first of all. It's heartening to hear you incorporate this framework into your practice. And also, that you're doing it successfully, that's really encouraging. We put this work out here, but we don't know how it's always applied. I think the answer is in the family practice, the principles are about the same. My guess is that one of the big missing pieces in families is feeling seen and heard. So you read about these fracturing ...
There's been this debate that's been going on in the press lately about no contact between adult children and their parents. Should I go no contact? Is that fair? It's been an ongoing debate. And my sense is that what often happens is when children reach maturity and become adults, the relationship between parents often shifts, in fact it inverts. In some sense, children become the parents, especially as with aging parents.

And not so ... Part of it is in the family practice, maybe the question I would ask everyone in the family is, "Do you feel seen and heard? Do you feel seen and heard? Do you feel seen and heard? Do you feel seen and heard? Or do people feel invisible?" Or do people feel they have to shade or hide parts of their identity because of judgements within the parents? I was listening to Chimamanda Adichie's recent talk at City Arts & Lectures, John has done I think three interviews at the City Arts & Lectures with Justice Jackson and other people.

Chimamanda was there recently, and she said, "I always tell young writers, 'Don't share your drafts with your parents. Don't share your drafts with your parents because especially if you are African or Indian or East Asian, you will hide part of yourself. You won't be honest.'"

So part of the challenge is to belong. People can not feel a sense of belonging if they can not feel that they are heard, seen and recognized and their identity's fully respected. That's true in institutional, that's true in communities, but it's also true in families. And if people feel like if you are queer and you have an evangelical parent, that is the source of friction. Can the person at least recognize you and respect you? That's going to be a fundamental question in the family context.

So I think just going through those elements, but particularly that question around recognition. Do you feel seen and heard? Not just seen, but heard. And then also, family ... Many institutions are hierarchical. We are not anti-hierarchy. I think many people would consider us radical egalitarians, and we probably are. But we are not anti-hierarchy per se. Some institutions require hierarchy, you have to have people who decide. We also think there's nothing wring with valorize-ing serving professions. We have footnote in there like, "If we lived in a society that said, 'We are going to put on a pedestal teachers and nurses and social workers,' I think we'd be fine with that." Right? We're not anti that.

What we are is anti-hierarchy that's based on fixed and immutable characteristics. That's the key for us. So if people, where there's people moving into certain things, we should and can valorize certain things. And that's, by the way, part of the reason we think it's possible to have belonging without othering, because if you look around the world there's no society where any particular identity has always been strictly othered. It's always contingent and contextual, and we can get into that if you'd like. But I think that's the starting point is-

Stephen Menendian:
... Get into that if you'd like. But I think that's the starting point, is to each member of the family, do you feel seen and heard? Okay. From there, then do you feel empowered to speak? One of the metaphors that John has developed, or originated, and I've developed in this book is the concept of the party. Are you a guest? Which is contingent and provisional. Or are you on the party planning committee? That happens in families where there is a sense of argue. But aging is an interesting and strange thing that can flip those dynamics or complicate them. Thank you so much for the question.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for the presentation. There's something that was said about the process of differentiation being separate from... Or something like that, separate from the process of belonging. I wanted to push for a more complicated story here. Especially I'm thinking in light of webinars, this philosopher Levinas, Emmanuel Levinas, who use other in a different sense, as a respectful other. So in light of that, and also in light of my own life, I feel like sometimes people are almost like samed, almost like they're grouped together as the same in a way which does not see their differences. The pushback roughly I wanted to say was I almost feel like we need to pay attention to the process of how we go about differentiating or how we navigate differences in both how we see, I don't know, people closer to us, people outside, something like that, in terms of... Do you have any thoughts about it?

john a. powell:
Sure. Great question. Mark Menous used to be the dean at Harvard, the books you talked about, what difference does the difference make? It's not difference that's the issue, it's the meaning of it. You say red or yellow, and it is complicated because to differentiate... When we use othering it's just hierarchical, is power dynamic oftentimes. It's diminishing and it's to some extent categorical, and it's social. I'm not talking about individuals. To even say individuals is to distinguish. One of the things we talk about in terms of ways in which we can actually come together with this complexity is to realize that we are all multiple beings. We carry multiple selves. And the multiplicity of those are dynamic, they're not static.

And again, they're not necessarily hierarchical. So for you that's a loving son is not necessarily better than the you that's a great student. Yet they may be very different and sometimes they may clash, and they also may inform each other. And so we expressly say, because liberalism is based on oftentimes the columnist thinking either or, not both and. So we oftentimes say that the reality is liberals would think the solution to othering is same. In a sense, the liberal paradigm suggests if you notice a difference, there's automatically a categorical hierarchy. And so that's one reason, for example, within the context of race, we say the way to deal with racism is not to see race. Because as soon as you see it, hierarchy is there. Right? Wrong, and not possible to not see race.

And then it goes even further, assimilation. I can accept you if you become me. Why do I want to become you? I mean you may be cool, but man, I don't want to be you. And I can't be you. And so it's also lazy. A church is just like a mosque, just like a synagogue. Really? Have you been to a church, a mosque, a synagogue? And what it's being collapsed into is be just like me. It's not be all the same, it's be just like me. I become the normative ideal. And as long as you achieve that idea, which you never will, you're okay. Which means you can never really belong.

And it's like, who made you the boss? Why do I want to be like you? Why don't you... Okay, we're going to assimilate. Assimilate to me. So all those sort of liberal tropes, which was sincere, I mean in the 70s and 80s when people were saying... Arthur Schlesinger, someone I knew and respected, a great writer, a great mind, he wrote a book on Disuniting America and his whole thing was we had to assimilate. When people was like, oh, one day we'll all be fine because we're going to inter marry. Every kid is going to be beige and we won't know this difference.

Again, it's locating the difference out in the world. It's really a sociology of creating meaning around apparent differences. Those differences don't exist just out there. Both in terms of recognizing them and giving meaning is a sociological process. And so we don't call for sameing because sameing basically says if we're all straight, we can all get along. Well, I don't know if I'm straight. Well come back when you know. Right? Whereas belonging says, you belong full stop. It's not contingent. It's not after you perform. It's not after you become like me. It's you belong. And the world that we cohabit together could also be co-created together. Very different. And we're not assigning any group the power to normalize.

I'm sure you know that book, The End of Average, there's a book called The End of Average. The End of Average, End of Normal. True story, united States are making fighter jets and they look at the size of all of the potential pilots, look at the weight, look at the arm length, and they build a cockpit for the average pilot. And accidents go up, not down. Efficiency goes down, not up. And they're confused. It's like, before we didn't pay attention, we just built it. We didn't think about it. Now we've actually been scientific and we've taken the average and it's like finding the family with 2.1 kids. I'm still looking for that 0.1. And it turns out nobody was average. Average is a composite, average is an abstraction. And so trying to be average actually did a disservice to everybody. So as opposed to looking at people's particularities, someone whose 5'7" is not necessarily better than some of those 5'8", but they're different.

Stephen Menendian:
So I think your question is really and strikes upon one of the most complicated areas of our book. It's complicated because it's so counterintuitive, so counterintuitive. And we have a discussion of this in part one and a discussion of this in part two. In part one, we spend a lot of energy trying to make the case for why you should think in the frame of othering. And we compare othering to these other frames that are close, like caste, insiders and outsiders and so on. And we push for othering as the kind of better frame for these kinds of things. But we basically say is there are infinite bases on which human beings can differentiate ourselves. There's no end, literally infinite. Cultural, link language, eye color, hair color, height, gender, sexual orientation, sexual impetus, clothes. There's no end to the bases.

But why is it that othering only happens on a relatively small number out of that infinite? It's because certain things become relevant and certain things don't. Right? I mean most of the bases for differentiation are social constructions. Religion, national identity, race. These are not baked into human biology, they are things that we adopt. So it's not different itself because there's infinite differences. It has to be certain relevant differences. What is the principle that makes certain differences relevant? It's the organizations of societies. It's the way in which societies evolve and emerge that makes certain differences relevant. So it's not difference itself, It's as John said, it's the meanings that attach to those differences.

We could segregate society by people who are over 5'5" and people under 5'5". We don't why? Because that's not a relevant difference in terms of social identities for us. Instead, we segregate people by race and we segregate people by gender and we segregate people by class. Our neighborhoods are segregated by people, by political ideology. People live in Republican neighborhoods with other Republicans and Democrats live in democratic neighborhoods. So you have to look at what differences are relevant.

And then in terms of the solution, one of the lines that John put in the book that was beautiful is that leaning into our multiplicity and fluidity is one of the keys to belonging because it allows us to connect with more people. And leaning into that, there are these sort of super identities that Amy Chua talked about. We all have multiple identities, we have stacked identities. We need some to connect us with a greater and ever larger number of people. And Daniel Allen has a beautiful quote about this saying that what is initially bridging actually eventually becomes bonding as that circle widens and more and more people enter into it. And I think that's the way that John thinks about it as well.

So to summarize, difference itself is not the key. It's the social relevancies that attach to certain differences. And then the question is, how can we actually lean into identities that allow us to connect with people who are otherwise outside of our current networks and social structures? And part of that is pulling ourselves into larger identities, creating new identities, telling stories that put us into community with people we otherwise wouldn't be. Or just being bridgers and getting better and better at bridging practice. Being bridging ambassadors, bridging practitioners, until eventually that bridging actually becomes bonding. And then we have to look outside of the further perimeter and connect more and more.

john a. powell:
Let me just give one quick example and then, I know we have time. So I have a friend who does ethnographic studies of mixed marriages. He's been doing this for a long time. But his primary focus is not racial, it's actually ethnic. So he looks at Irish-Americans marrying French-Americans, marrying German-Americans, and he basically said that pool has begun on one hand so porous that it almost has no meaning anymore. And it used to be, this may be a surprise, 1910s, 20s, 30s. Not only did he have Irish-Americans as a social category that was relevant, there was an Irish-American community. There was a German-American part of town with your own church, with your own language, with your own school. And it was a big deal to go outside of that to a mixed marriage, a mixed marriage wasn't that German-American marrying a black American. It was a German-American marrying an Italian-American. And it's like, don't we bringing that person to my house. Right?

Stephen Menendian:
They're Catholic.

john a. powell:
That phenomenon became so porous that he saying it's hard to study now because everybody's doing it. They don't even think about it. I mean they just, "Oh yeah, my husband is this, that and the other." But it wasn't just them that did it. The structures and the culture changed. So modern white Americans came into being as a group after World War II.

When we think of suburbanization of America, suburbanization was the recreation of whiteness in America. Whiteness became a race, not ethnicity. And all the different ethnic groups were invited in.

Stephen Menendian:
Through the white.

john a. powell:
Right. And they wrote this stuff, whites of a different color. So the point is that, so it wasn't like, oh, German-Americans moving down the street, we got to leave. The government though, played a significant role in terms of creating the physical space to facilitate this. And they're going to the same school now, they live in the same neighborhood, obviously they started marrying. So much so that most people don't even remember. It's like, go talk to your parents about it. So those differences were there, at one point they're very important. Another point difference is still there, they almost are completely meaningless. And what we did, when we say these things are socially constructed, to think about how we construct them and how we can reconstruct them in a way that invites something different.

Susan Stone:
You're going to kill me. I feel like I have to ask one more question. I have one more minute.

Stephen Menendian:
Go for it. Answer's yes.

Susan Stone:
I love how you're playing, or you're not playing with it, but you're working with essentially their social capital concepts and you're making them more complex. You're actually adding a lot of texture and depth to them. And I love that you brought up ethnic enclaves and the Chicano. And so yet sometimes the bonding forms, they're beautiful like you said, but they're prone to all sorts of different fractals of othering. Yet there's a beauty, and I think you talk about this in your book, there's a beauty in that kind of bonding and that seems to be the tricky... Yeah. How do we resist some of the oh-so-joyous aspects of these bonding mechanisms to get to belonging? Or where bonding is not enough to get to belonging. You always have to bond and bridge.

Stephen Menendian:
Let me take this first and give John the final word, make sure we have a beautiful sign off here. So Daniel Allen again says that bonding is needed for healthy living. It's sort of like kids need a solid foundation to feel secure from which they can then venture off from. People need to have healthy bonding with people who share their own core identities. But you can't just stay there, you then have to bridge. So you need a combination of bonding and bridging. And what we say in the book is you cannot have a belonging society without bridging, but people also need to have that healthy space for bonding. The problem is when bonding becomes excessive. When bonding is excessive, then it actually closes people off and becomes what John calls breaking, which is where you are so into your group that you turn your back on other people.

And so the trick is the careful balance. It's the balance there. You have to put down your shield, you have to be vulnerable in order to a bridge. But there's this image that John has sent me where it's the core safe space, then the ring around it, and then the danger zone around that. You need to find your way into that middle ring. We're not going to be completely comfortable and safe and build belonging without othering. There's some vulnerability, there's some risk to that. And we have to accept that risk if we want to do that. So the key is the balance of bridging and bonding. We need bridging for belonging outside of our groups. We need bonding for a healthy sense of self, but we can't excessively bond, otherwise it leads to breaking and further fragmentation.

john a. powell:
So Susan, it's interesting. Part of the thing, again, I start making some assumptions about social workers. Part of these things are the fallacy of the individual. We're not making choices. Some people didn't decide to live in suburban America. Suburban America was built and the cities was decimated. And it's like, get out of the city. Oh, you need a freeway? Here's one, I'll build you freeway through your old neighborhood. So you can't come back to your old neighborhood, it's gone.

So part of it is how do we actually also take advantage. We're here at Berkeley, right? 40,000 students brought together, which is going to have some kind of experience where they possibly can learn to bridge, where they're going to roll up against people who look differently than them. How do you make that part of their education? That's what education was about. Education was about bringing people together. As Dewey talked about, it's perspective-taking. Perspective-taking is bridging. How do you learn to bridge?
So I mean to me, if you travel around the world, which I'm sure many of you have, you go to Canada. The way they do race in Canada in the black community, very different in the way they do race in the United States. It's not because people in the United States just decided to do it differently, it's because the mechanisms are different.

So last example, I am from Detroit, six of nine children, my parents are not Catholic. And my parents' generation, their peers had 12, 13 siblings, 18, 19 siblings. That was not unusual. Someone having two siblings would be like, what's wrong? How did people decide in the 1850s when the size of the families were on the average 12, 13, 14 people, how did people decide in unison all across the country to now have two children?

And there's a whole sociology about this because what's happening in the United States, in Britain, in China, in Japan, educated middle-class families are having two or less children. Poor families, immigrant families, in Japan it's Koreans, in the United States, it's black and Latinos, are having four and five children. And literally this is a debate going on right now in the White House. How do we get white middle class women to have more children and to get black and Latino families to have less children? Literally, people are thinking about that and trying to figure out how to incentivize it.

Stephen Menendian:
Including Elon Musk.

john a. powell:
So it's not like, let's go talk to the women and give the agency. And what a lot of economists say, these changes were part of the changes, responding to the labor market, responding to working needs. And then you told a story about it. When you needed women to get out of the house and into work, it was like, "Be a powerful woman, go to work, be autonomous." It's like, wait a minute, some of y'all need to go back to the house. We got too many powerful women.

So my point is that you see these large shifts in society happening literally all over the world. It can't be that each individual reflected on this and decided, hell, I'm not having 12 kids. Six of y'all get out of here. Something else is going on.

Stephen Menendian:
The pill, too.

john a. powell:
And so again, this is why the social part of social welfare I think is really important, that if we keep bonding it down to the individual, we'll miss it.

And that the bonding and bridging, we can bridge on a much larger level when we support it, when society says it's okay, so that we don't have the kind of bridging we used to have among Irish Americans. I mean there'd be some, but there are not huge Irish-American clubs or pubs. It's like, know Mitch here. Once a year you go have Irish-American food, but most of your friends, if you're Irish-American, are not Irish-American. Are not. So it's not that you don't bond with them, but those bonds are thin. And your bonds with other social workers, if you're a lawyer, you bond with other lawyers, is actually much thicker. How did that happen?

Susan Stone:
That was so good. Thank you.