In this episode, host Gwyneth Shaw talks to Professor john a. powell, co-author of the new book Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World, which was published earlier this year by Stanford University Press.
powell is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy and has taught and written for decades on these topics. He’s a professor at Berkeley Law as well as a professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion. powell is also a Berkeley Law alum who joined our faculty in 2012, and is the founding director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, a UC Berkeley research institute that brings together scholars, community advocates, communicators, and policymakers to create transformative change toward a more equitable world.
In his new book, powell and co-author Stephen Menendian tackle one of the most pressing issues in our society, especially in this contentious election year: How can we find common ground as human beings when the roots of inequality — the practice of creating division among ourselves along racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, and caste lines — so easily divide us? They make the case for adopting a paradigm of belonging that does not require the creation of an “other” that hinges on transitioning from narrow to expansive identities, even if that means challenging seemingly benevolent forms of community-building based on othering.
To learn more about powell and his work:
Othering & Belonging Institute
Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World
Plessy v. Ferguson and the Legacy of “Separate but Equal” After 125 Years
Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society
About:
“Berkeley Law Voices Carry” is a podcast hosted by Gwyneth Shaw about how the school’s faculty, students, and staff are making an impact — in California, across the country, and around the world — through pathbreaking scholarship, hands-on legal training, and advocacy.
Production by Yellow Armadillo Studios.
Episode Transcript
GWYNETH SHAW: Hi, listeners. I’m Gwyneth Shaw. And this is Berkeley Law Voices Carry, a podcast about how our faculty, students, and staff are making an impact through pathbreaking scholarship, hands on legal training, and advocacy.
In this episode, I’m joined by Berkeley Law Professor John A powell, the co-author of the new book, Belonging Without Othering– How We Save Ourselves and the World.
In addition to the law school, he’s a professor of African-American studies and ethnic studies at UC Berkeley and the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute.
Powell is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights, and civil liberties, and a wide range of issues, including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy, and has taught and written for decades on these topics.
He’s also a Berkeley Law alum who joined our faculty in 2012. In his new book, powell and co-author Stephen Menendian tackle one of the most pressing issues in our society, especially in this contentious election year.
How can we find common ground as human beings when the roots of inequality, the practice of creating division among ourselves along racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, and caste lines so easily divide us?
They make the case for adopting a paradigm of belonging that does not require the creation of another, that hinges on transitioning from narrow to expansive identities, even if that means challenging, seemingly benevolent forms of community building based on othering. Professor Powell, thanks so much for joining me. And I’m eager to discuss your excellent and timely book.
JOHN A POWELL: Thanks for having me.
GWYNETH SHAW: First off, tell me what you mean when you describe othering? And how pervasive is it in our society?
JOHN A POWELL: Well, othering is– like a lot of terms, it’s ubiquitous as a practice. And it takes on different forms. The simplest way of thinking about it is that when you don’t accord someone the full mutual humanity that you have, you might think they’re not as smart. They’re not as deserving. They’re a threat.
And there are different ways of othering, but all of them amount to saying another person or another group is not accorded full dignity and humanity that you are. Othering can be done in a personal level, but also can be done at a group or institutional level. And while they’re similar, they’re not the same.
So when you have othering at an institutional level, it takes on a more pernicious form. And it invites othering at an interpersonal level. And we’re seeing it not just in the United States, but all over the world.
And we could say we’re seeing accelerations of it. And part of the reason is because as the world becomes smaller, there are more, you could say, opportunities.
But othering is always sociological, that is there is no other. There’s no natural other. There’s nothing about someone that makes them inherently different. And we have to create a story, a practice, a structure to support that.
Once it’s in place, it feels natural. So Black people may seem different than white people or women may seem different than men. And not just different, but that a different valuation, not as important, not as deserving.
And so our book really digs into that, not just in the United States, but around the world, and across time. And what we find is that there are just hundreds of ways of othering. People are very clever.
This could be, how tall are you? How many cows do you have? What school you went to? And when it comes ossified, it becomes very destructive.
GWYNETH SHAW: What are some of the ways you propose to change this? Like you said, this is pervasive, not just in the United States, but around the world, and it goes back to probably the beginning of human history, as soon as we were able to conceive of ourselves versus another person. How do you change this? How do you break this paradigm? How do you solve this problem?
JOHN A POWELL: Well, one is to recognize it as a problem. And two, part of what we do in the book and part of what I think is important to note is that, while it’s pervasive, it’s not inevitable. And it’s not– we’re not hardwired.
So a lot of people, for good reasons, think that, well, that’s just what we do. And in fact, they would say, in order to belong, you have to have another. And that’s pretty depressing news if that’s accurate. And some people actually try to take it back to when we organized around small bands and tribes, but it’s actually a misnomer.
So small bands and tribes, if you will, existed because you had, not only certain technologies, certain environmental conditions, but also they were a small group of people that one would spend their whole life with, you would see every day. You wouldn’t get a chance to necessarily change your band or expand it or contract it. These were people that you trusted and depended on for survival.
So the intimacy that happened out of that is not the same intimacy that happens when we say, African-American, you’re talking about 40 million people or Christians, you’re talking about 2.5 billion people. That’s something else. So something else is happening now that can’t be simply traced to our evolutionary past.
And one thing that’s particularly interesting is that almost all of othering is in service of belonging. So that is that the foundational thing is not othering. The foundational thing is belonging. So we other in order to belong.
So this is not inevitable. And if it’s sociological, why is it so pervasive? Well, part of the reason is that we’ve been doing it in some forms for a long time, but also it’s the stories we tell. We tell stories in such a way that, not only promotes belonging but also promotes othering.
And those stories are not biological stories. They’re not evolutionary stories. They’re stories that are made up. So countries, those are made up stories. Religions, those are made up stories. Race, those are made of stories. Those aren’t based on the daily contact with people.
By saying, you and I are similar because– here’s my story. Once we step into stories– and I don’t mean to belittle it. Joseph Campbell reminds us that myths can be truer than truth. Do some work.
And these stories, once we step into them, as symbolic animals, which apparently we did about 70,000 years ago, not 2 million years ago, 70,000 years ago, that’s not that long.
So this ability to tell stories, and live into stories, and to create meaning, and to have imagination, these are relatively new things for humans, but they’re also relatively unlimited. We are not bound by the existing story. We can tell a new story. The problem is, once a story is in place, it seems inevitable.
Right now, it’s hard for us to imagine a world without money. And right now, it’s hard for us to imagine a world without nation states. 500 years ago, it was hard to imagine a world without the devil.
It was hard to imagine a world without kings, and queens, and princes. And there’s still some, but it doesn’t have the same– right now, it’s hard for us to imagine a world with fairies, and witches, and goblins. Before the enlightenment, those things were just natural. And people organized their lives around it. And it gave their lives meaning.
So the question to your question is, can we create stories where everyone belongs and no one is other. And I would say, in fairness, we don’t know. But there’s some indication that not only can we, but we must.
GWYNETH SHAW: Where do you start with that concept of belonging without othering?
Because I’m really struck by what you just said, that it is about belonging. I think anyone who’s ever been bullied can tell you that the bully gained strength from the people who want to be in the in-group rather than the object of the bullying. That’s an easy concept for people to understand, but how do you start that? How do you get that process started.
JOHN A POWELL: Well, in some ways it’s already started. I mean, it’s interesting. The world used to be that we lived in little enclaves and spent our whole lives there. There were no such thing as passports. Most people didn’t travel.
The reality is, when I was growing up, the news was always local. And there might be a small section somewhere about internationals. It was uninteresting. It didn’t take up much space. You didn’t call people across the country. If you did, it was a big deal. And your conversation was quick. It’s like, this is expensive. I’ll call you later.
And I actually remember one of the things we used to do when I was a kid, if you want to– if you traveled, you want to let someone know you arrived safely, you would call collect. And they wouldn’t even take the call. They would just say, will you accept the call from John Powell? You said, no. Thank you. It’s like, that’s it. OK, that’s my message that I’ve arrived safely. That’s all change.
So technology has created a space where the world has become very small, where we’re essentially in each other’s face, on each other’s Facebook. And the stories that we told. 500, 1,000 years ago were local stories that we tried to expand universally.
So all the major religions, major faiths was about my group, but my group was extrapolated across time and across space. And I could believe that. I could believe that, my God, my religion, my food was just what humans did. My people represented humanity.
That’s not the case anymore. And that’s the reason– and so now we’re squished together. And I’m forced to actually– whether I’m a Christian, or a Buddhist, or Hindu, I’m forced to actually know about other people.
We have companies for [INAUDIBLE] multinational corporations that have platforms across the whole world. Something happens when you push a button. And billions of people can see it within a few seconds.
So in a sense, the technology, the environment in which we live in is pushing us together. The stories that we tell have not kept up with that. The stories have not kept up with the technological, economic change that the world is actually going through.
And that’s part of the anxiety. Part of the anxiety that people feel is that things are changing so fast. But I don’t know if me and my group will belong to this new world.
And so part of the effort, part of the challenge that authoritarian, reactionary leaders– they literally are reactionary, offer people is the past. The future looks scary. You don’t know what will come along in that future.
OK, we’re going to cancel the future. We’re going to go back to when Russia was great, when India was great, when China was great. And you say, when was that? I’m not sure I know that. And it’s always a fiction.
It was a past. There was purity. Things were simple. We were dominant. There was no challenges. Everybody knew their place. There was never such a time. And not only that, we’re clearly not going back there. And so the need for a better story that animates who we can be, a need for a story that gives life’s meaning, it’s really powerful.
When we talked about enlightenment, Max Weber talks about the disenchanted world. It’s not that long ago. So a few hundred years ago, he said the world was enchanted, but I knew where I belonged. I knew that something happened. The gods were mad at me. And I knew what to do about it.
And then what science apparently gave us was a world where gods were largely kicked out. And it’s like, well, what’s my life meaning now? Why is something happening? The world lost its enchantment. The world lost its magic.
And while science has given us a lot of things, it hasn’t given us meaning. And we are meaning animals. So people are longing to belong. They’re longing for meaning. And we just have not been that creative in terms of creating new stories. We’ve done some
And the new stories are in demand. So for example, when I was growing up, literally, in cases in the Supreme Court, the Court talked about there was a naturalness, a biological scripture for race. Race was immutable. And of course gender was. And genders were binary. There was men and women. That was it. That’s not the reality we live with today.
And the court has changed this language. And now it’s like races. We don’t even know what race is anymore. So what I’m saying is that we’re hungering for a different story. Our lives, in some ways, is changing faster than the stories. And we see pockets here and there. And the question is, how do we expand that so that it’s global?
And we see expressions of that as well. I’ll give one quick example. Every five minutes, the French, and Germans, and the English were at each other’s throats. So much so that 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. What we mean by that is that we have a nuclear war, we’re going back to the Stone Age. And it’s likely, at that time, in the 1930s, and ’40s, and ’50s, it’s likely to come out of Europe because the Germans and the French, they just can’t get along.
And now there’s– even though England has decided to take an exit, there’s a thing called the EU, where people’s identity is not only just German or French, it’s also European. And it’s not– and it means something. And then they’ve organized their money. So there’s the Euro, which is amazing.
Money is how we value things. So they’re saying, we have a– we have a shared currency. We have a shared identity. We’re creating it. We’re creating identity where you can travel and live in different countries. We’re changing what it means to live in a country.
This is an amazing experiment. It may ultimately fail or not. But is someone consciously taking on. If we keep our small national identities, we will destroy each other. Can we have a larger we?
And now we’re talking about, 300 million, 500 million people. That’s not a tribe. It’s a different story, the whole people together. So we already see experimentation with that. But to lean into it consciously, deliberately.
And part of the nuance and complexity is what gives us the possibility to move. It breathes life into it. So again, some people are afraid of it. And we haven’t quite figured it out, but we can. And we can do it collectively.
GWYNETH SHAW: Yeah, it’s interesting that you bring up the example of the EU, which I’m old enough to remember before that happened. And being there now really does feel like an incredible change, just that whole experience is so different than it was before the EU happened.
But it has also come with friction. And it’s some of the same friction that we have in the United States in terms of immigration, who gets to call themselves European, what is that identity mean. And a sense that even within that larger community, there’s still some efforts to exclude some people from that.
What are some of the things driving that sentiment? And I’m going to ask you in a minute about US politics, but that idea of– you mentioned it a little while ago, that I want to belong, but in order to belong, that must mean somebody else can’t. And what’s the genesis of that?
JOHN A POWELL: Well, in many ways– first of all, for these large questions, people don’t figure it out on their own. They get help. There’s something we call conflict entrepreneurs, people who are– the McCarthy’s of the world. Those damn communists, we have to have– they’re going to– and we don’t just identify them. We also prop them up as a threat to who we are.
So a lot of this is being driven by fear. And by some accounts, the oldest part of the brain is what’s called the lizard brain, because we share this part of the brain with lizards. It’s the amygdala. And it’s more complicated than that.
But when we were thinking about it, it’s that it’s all just quick. It’s available to us. And what leaders and stories do is help us give shape to that. So when we experience a lot of change– this is not just true of us. It’s true of all mammals.
When we’re experiencing a lot of change over a short period of time, it stresses us out. We get anxious. We’re habituated animals as well. It’s like I do. I walk home the same way every day for five years. And then someone feels some blockade there. And I’m confused. It’s like, not that I’m lost, it’s like I know how to get home. It’s just that that’s not the way my brain actually functions.
And so all this change we’re seeing happening is, in some ways, taxing people’s nervous system. And then leaders come back with stories about, it’s threatening. And the most significant part of the story is not the technology is changing. It’s not the environment is changing. It’s that people, the demographic change.
So in the United States, for centuries, we implicitly assumed– some of the people on the Supreme Court basically said, this is a white Christian country, even though it never was just a white Christian country. Stories are not necessarily aligned with facts.
But to some extent, it gave people, particularly a certain group of white people, some comfort to know they were in the majority. This is a democracy and you’re the majority. You’re the favorite group. This is your country. And it wasn’t just Christian. It was Protestant.
So when John F. Kennedy ran for president, there was a big deal. It’s like, wait, isn’t he a different kind of Christian? What’s going to happen to us if the Pope, or a stool, or a surrogate of the Pope becomes president of the United States?
And Kennedy had– that was a big deal in the 1960s. It’s not anymore. So people’s ability to move and redefine is basically unlimited. But leadership matters. The imagination matters.
And we underuse that, our ability to imagine something different, something better. So we need better stories. We need better practices. We need some experimentations. And not all of them will succeed.
If you go to some countries like Canada, which I think is, in some ways, much more belonging country. They actually say that. But the way they do race and the way we do race are quite different.
So if you’re Jamaican in Canada, as opposed to from Nigeria or from another island in the Caribbean, it’s a source of friction, if you will. That’s less so in the United States.
The United States got painted with a broad brush. That may be changing now, but it was like, you’re from– you’re Black. You’re African-American. Which country, which tribe was a non-issue.
So the point is that our ability to tell new stories and to tell stories about the change is not threatening. Yes, the world is changing. And the United States will no longer be a majority white country, whatever that means. Is that terrible? In the imagination, it might be because what some people say is, where do I belong in that new world?
Now, a lot of people haven’t noticed. The California crossed that Rubicon decades ago. Hawaii crossed it before California. Texas is about to cross– they have crossed it recently. And the sky didn’t fall. Whether you like California or not, there’s no racial majority in California. It still functions as a state.
So, again, part of it is just, our ability to deal with change, we need help, not just in terms of leadership and stories, but also in terms of structures. And the change that we are facing will continue to speed up. So the challenge will continue to speed up, including demographic change.
GWYNETH SHAW: I always think about the song from South Pacific, “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.” And when we talk about changing views about Catholics or an ethnic group that used to be really discriminated against in the United States and is now considered a mainstream immigrant group, I always think about that song.
It’s where you’re taking your stories. And I really love that frame that you’re talking about. Former President Trump seems to me to be the poster child for the concept of othering. And that dynamic, I think, is– we’re seeing it right now in the presidential election now that Vice President Harris has entered the race.
I’m thinking about two things that have happened in the past couple of weeks, which feel like an eternity, particularly Republicans calling her a DEI hire. And then Democrats coalescing around the idea that Republicans and their policies are weird.
How would you– what’s your take on those two things and how they compare in the, I guess, the spectrum of othering? And how can candidates use what you’re talking about, use that idea of leading through stories to run a campaign that differentiates them from another candidate without resorting to the idea of othering?
JOHN A POWELL: That’s extremely important. So othering, we use it because it’s effective. And it’s like bullying. And again, what’s driving it is belonging. So I haven’t been, but I have friends who have gone to Trump rallies. And they say it’s a warm sense of belonging.
The yellow vest movement in France, it had a lot of political context, but the energetic content was it felt like you belong. And so again, the importance for that for people can’t be overstated. People need to feel like they belong.
And we sold people a bill of goods that, as an individual, go off and figure it out by yourself. It’s not going to happen. And so what Trump is offering to a certain segment of America through fear, through resentment is that you belong and they don’t. And that they is extremely important.
And we talked about immigrants, just to go back to that for a second. It’s not just immigrants, that’s too broad. So Trump I think, you’re right. He weaponized othering. And so he tells a story about the immigrant. It’s not just the immigrant.
They’re criminals. They’re drug dealers. They’re murderers. And if we’re honest, they’re not white. All right, so he says, I don’t care about immigrants coming from Norway. Those are the kind of immigrants I like. Of course, Norway is not immigrating in large numbers to the United States, but those people south of the border, the racial other.
So in the United States, there’s a master narrative about the other that’s organized around not just race, but also anti-Black racism. And not just race, but also white dominance. So it has particular expressions in the United States.
And it’s really important when we dig into that that we don’t confuse that with Black people or white people. That this ideology, the story of race is a story that can affect all of us. And affects us not simply based on our phenotype.
So a person who’s dark skinned, who’s Black, can totally embrace white supremacy. A person is white can totally embrace multiracialism and equality. And so it’s really important to make that distinction because some people is like, are you saying this country is always racist?
We said all white people are racist. No, in fact, the very idea of all white people is already complicated. That’s already a story that we should actually, as we would say, interrogate our challenge. But we already have that grounding, right. And so what we’re doing is referring back to something. We have these codes.
When I was growing up, one of the terms was, you people. Everybody knew what you people meant. And it was playing to certain group, but playing particularly to their fear. And the change in America’s dislocating all of us, but particularly conservative whites.
And some of the way we approach things around racial justice, around DEI, there’s a narrative which makes sense. But the narrative was white people were part of a colonial process. They were part of the genocidal contests.
We had a thing of replacing monuments, statues, which makes sense. You don’t want a statue, necessarily, of Robert E. Lee in your bathroom if you’re Black, maybe not even if you’re white.
But in doing so, we ignore, to some extent, what Robert Sapolsky talks about. He talks about people have sacred symbols. And sacred symbols are sacred in part because that’s where the identity gets organized around.
And when they lose that, they’re not just losing their symbol, they’re also losing their identity. And so in come Trumps and says, embracing Robert E. Lee, embracing all the symbols, the Confederate flag, the Nazi salute.
And it does two things. It basically says, those people are other. And you are the we. And so literally, you can have people now arguing about, well, slavery wasn’t so bad. It’s like, for whom?
So you have the governor of Florida saying, we got to teach slavery gave people skills. I mean, this is bizarre when you look at it. But this fight about who belongs, who does not belong, it’s really important. It’s really subtle. It’s really powerful. And it’s also really interesting.
So just take two quick examples, declaration of independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men– and Jefferson, although his committee, really meant men. Women weren’t allowed to participate in these discussions at the time. But all men are created equal. Excuse me.
How many people do you have enslaved? They’re not people. They are not men. And so it’s like bending contortions. But it wasn’t just duplicitous. It wasn’t just Lincoln– not Lincoln but Jefferson was a hypocrite. It’s more complicated. It’s more nuanced. And despite the complexity, it’s really a powerful statement that we should not let go of.
And Lincoln came back years later, about seven years later and tried to actually expand and redefine what equality meant. And in doing so, he reached to the future. Turns to our better angels and reset the paths in terms of the Greeks.
So this debate about what we mean by equality has been ongoing. And so the DEI debate, like any important term, belonging, othering, love, equality, what does it mean? There’s not a set meaning. Each group has to define it, and come to terms with it, and live it itself.
And so when I was growing up, there was a fight about, do we mean– does equality mean equality of opportunity or equality of results? It’s actually not so simple. Who said all people are equal?
Well, when we’re talking about group-based inequality as opposed to individual based inequality, it’s actually a different conversation. And we conflate the two. So it might be true that I’m better at math than you for whatever reason, but to say that men are better at math than women is a very different statement.
And these things are– if you dig into them, they look a little bit dry. And most people don’t dig into them. And so the debate happens in terms of symbols, in terms of simplicity, in terms of binaries, in terms of emotions. They’re not thought through.
So the DEI debate, there are people who are really confused, just like some people are confused with All Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter. That’s confusing? Maybe.
But there are conflict entrepreneurs who will take that confusion and clarify it and say, to say Black Lives Matter is racist. To say equity is to say you hate white people. It’s to say you hate America. That’s not what it means. It may be confusing, but that’s not what it means.
And some of them know that, but they know the people who are confused and a little scared, can we organize these people? Overwhelmingly white conservatives. That is to say that Black Lives Matter mean you hate. white people. It means you hate the police. For some people, that might be true. And they’ll find some extreme statement of someone saying something. But that’s not what the majority of people mean.
And so in some ways, we have to have a more complicated, a cooler conversation. At the same time that we know that people need some emotional resonance, that people are afraid. And you don’t talk to the lizard just rational discourse.
What’s the lizard afraid of? The thing that is afraid of most, it’s not belonging. So we have to start by saying you belong. That you’re part of the conversation, whether you’re Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native Americans, whether you’re straight, or gay, trans. You belong.
We start there. You belong. We may not agree on everything, but we agree that there are certain truths– that all people have equal dignity. And some people will take exception to that. OK, let’s have a discussion about that.
But we believe in the Othering and Belonging Institute and what the book is about, it started with a foundation that everybody, but everybody belongs. Everybody deserves human dignity. Everybody has a transcendent being.
And expressions of that are throughout history, so the idea that we’re all God’s children again. Sounds very simple and doesn’t necessarily be reflected on how we do the world, but it’s a radical statement if we could give meaning to it.
GWYNETH SHAW: And I’m really struck thinking about this. You’re talking about conflict entrepreneurs, which is such a wonderful term. And I’m thinking about using the past as something we always hearken back to when we want to weaponize that othering.
I’m thinking, Trump– Make America Great Again. And Harris is starting to use we are not going back as, if not her main campaign slogan, her significant campaign slogan. And that really does call to these two paths a little bit.
And can you talk some about how you can use that idea of the future as an organizing– maybe not an organizing principle, but organizing a story for people to say, OK, the future can be different than the past, but it doesn’t have to be scary.
How do you help people through that? Because you’ve given several examples. I’ve thought of others while we’ve been talking of things that have really changed within my lifetime, within yours in the United States.
And yet, we still come back to this fear that you scratch the surface a little bit and you’ve got a different spheres of the population afraid of other parts of it. How do we go forward from here? I know the way people feel right now at this particular moment in 2024 is it’s impossible, but I’m hearing you say you think it is.
JOHN A POWELL: Well, I think you’re exactly right. And I think Vice President Harris, I think, is drawing a line between Trump wants to take us back. And I mean, if you think of the Project 2025, a lot of is rooted in women shouldn’t be in the workplace.
And let’s go back before the civil rights movement. Let’s go back before the environmental movement. Let’s go back– as if there’s some precise time that everything was well. It just so happens then that also the country was considered 90% white. And again, that time we can’t go back to it.
I think part of what– someone who actually wants to welcome a flourishing fruit future where we all belong, we have to talk about that future. We have to help people imagine it.
And so as powerful as– and I have tremendous respect for Vice President Harris. Actually, I know her personally. But I would also encourage her to talk more specifically about the future, not simply that it’s not the past, that it is something different.
And part mistake that we make sometime is that people, when they talk about the past and they talk about their fears, we get stuck there. And it’s not saying the past is unimportant. It’s not saying we can ignore it. It’s not saying we can jump over it.
And there’s a South African word called [NON-ENGLISH] which means I see you. So we have to see people. And so when people are afraid, even in our personal life, if someone’s afraid, a kid, it doesn’t help to say, there’s no monster under the bed.
The kids think, where did I get these parents from? And they say, turn on the light and look under the bed. And every kid knows and every parents forget that the monster disappears when the light is on. It comes back when the light is out.
So telling the kid that there’s no monster under the bed is actually not only not convincing the kid, it’s actually, in a sense, disrespecting the kid. Just saying your reality is wrong. You’re stupid to actually think there’s a monster in the bed.
So when people express fear– when they express fear based on stories that seems bizarre, one response is those people are stupid. That’s not the right response. All of us have fears. All of us have our limitations.
And so the first thing is, to your point, is to acknowledge the person’s fear. I know you’re afraid. There’s a lot of anxiety. We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know this, we’re much better off in the future and the present, when we’re turning toward each other instead of turning on each other. We’re going to get through this together.
That was Roosevelt. Remember Roosevelt? Was it four or five freedoms? And one of them was free from fear, free from hunger, fear from repression, but also fear. He recognized that fear is important. It’s not only important, it’s unmanageable when you’re on your own.
When you’re with your people, your group, when you feel like these people have my back, the government has my back, the community has my back, the police have my back. I may still have fears, but it’s different now.
So we have to make it clear that, yeah, we don’t really quite know what the world is going to be. I mean, I spent hours thinking about AI. And I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, but I know there’s some dislocation that’s concerning.
And we’re not– as a society, we’re not really worried about that yet. I think that’s a mistake. And that’s part of the thing is that you worry about climate, I worry about. I say your worries are stupid. You say my worries are ridiculous. That’s a useful conversation.
So I would encourage, not just Vice President Harris but all of us to help people think about the future and actually give them some signposts that were already there, some examples of already having made that transition and being OK.
GWYNETH SHAW: One of the book’s final chapters is titled Hope for an Uncertain Future. How hopeful are you having written this book? And I know you have another new book coming out fairly soon. When you look at what’s happening now, how hopeful are you that this change is possible?
JOHN A POWELL: Well, I’m completely convinced that change is possible. It doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. And you may have heard me say, many of my friends have, I don’t really organize around hope. President Obama said hope is not really a strategy.
What I do organize around– I’m not an optimist or a pessimist. I call myself, if anything, a possibilist– that things are possible. Exactly what things are possible? We don’t know.
But what we do know is that when we engage, the possibility opens up. That when we come together, together and we imagine together, then what’s possible rapidly, exponentially expands.
And not only that– I sometimes say– people ask, is it the destination that’s most important or is the journey? And my response is, it’s the company you keep, we got to be on this journey.
I’m sure we won’t hit the destination if there is a destination, but who we have around us, who loves us, who we love, who can see us, who we can see. And we’re not simple beings.
We’re not just have communities. We have communities inside of us and outside of us. How do we give life to that? How do we give expression to that? How do we face the future together?
But not just face it in terms of terror and fear, but also face it in terms of joy, face it in terms of dancing, face it in terms of– we’re on this journey not just with each other, but with the butterflies, with the earth, with the bees.
If there’s no Earth, there’s no people. We’re part of something much larger. When we lean into that, then I think the possibilities are endless. [INAUDIBLE] to it? I don’t know.
But it is interesting– this is particularly a disciple if you think about it. I’ll give you two quick examples. Francis went through an election. And leading up to the election, all the data showed in the polls, and the scientific examination, and the political scientists that France was going to make a sharp right turn.
And the French elections are different than us. And I don’t want to overstate the analogy. And the current government is centrist, [INAUDIBLE] the idea that a more right wing government was going to come forward out of Le Pen.
And the French vote over two weekends. After the first weekend of voting, all those predictions of France moving to the sharp right look true. After the second weekend, not only had France not moved to the short right, it had moved to the left.
Now, for some people, probably myself included, that was a sigh of relief. I’m not saying they’re out of the woods. They still have a lot to deal with. But it’s interesting that the movement– the fear of the movement to the right had a parallel movement to the left.
When we think about Hitler as the penultimate example of authoritarian fascism, when Hitler came to power in 1930s in Germany, the socialists and communists were actually collectively more powerful than the Nazis.
And the reason I’m sharing that is that you had the expression of far left and far right at the same time. Which one is going to actually take the lead? Maybe neither. Maybe there’s a centrist role. But I think that’s what’s happening in the United States.
You have expressions of people who are seriously flirting with authoritarianism, seriously flirting with white nationalism. I mean, some people are calling out JD Vance saying, how can he actually protect white people? His wife is not white.
And at the same time, you have people who are seriously thinking about, how do we have a multiracial, multi-ethnic society where democracy means something different than it means today? You have both of those expressions happening at the same time.
And then you have a lot of people in what’s called the exhausted majority who are not on the far left or the far right. They know they need something different, but they don’t know how to get there.
So the possibilities are just phenomenal. And so it’s not surprising to me that the country is evenly divided, if you will. And the question is, how do we bring it together?
GWYNETH SHAW: Well, I like the frame of possibilist. I think that’s a good mantra for 2024. Thank you so much for joining me. This was such a wonderful conversation. And I really enjoyed everything you said. I really appreciate it.
JOHN A POWELL: Thank you. Gwyneth.
GWYNETH SHAW: And thank you, listeners, for joining me. To learn more about Professor Powell and his book, please check out the show notes and also about the Othering and Belonging Institute. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it. And be sure to subscribe to Voices Carry wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Gwyneth Shaw.
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