It’s fifty-four days until the election, and we’re still here: reckoning on a national level with the belief that White people face worse racism than people of color. Affirmative action in college admissions has been struck down as unfair to White and Asian applicants (the fruit of which I’m seeing in the new school year, as fewer students of color are admitted to schools like MIT and Amherst) (https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/09/admissions-after-affirmative-action). Judges have ruled against pandemic-era relief packages due to complaints of anti-White discrimination. If Donald Trump takes the presidency in November, he has explicitly committed to eliminating equity from the White House (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/news/5ec7b970-78bb-4a32-8db9-0553602da477). “Reverse racism” continues to be brought up at dinner tables and in corporate DEI conversations as a legitimate variable in the equation of racism. From the three branches of government to the four legs of the dinner table, the idea of anti-White racism finds resonance with Americans across the country.
And yet, the statistics tell a different story. For precision, I’ll focus on the condition of Black people in America, although other historically marginalized groups face similar conditions. Black people continue to face significantly worse health outcomes, lower wealth levels, and more extreme punishment from the criminal legal system than White people. Life expectancy among Black Americans is four years lower than White Americans (https://www.cdc.gov/minorityhealth/racism-disparities/impact-of-racism.html). A mere 1.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs–a total of eight–are Black (https://fortune.com/2024/02/09/black-ceos-fortune-500-high-workplace-diversity/). Black adults continue to be imprisoned at 4-5 times the rate of White adults (https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2023/05/racial_disparities_persist_in_many_us_jails_brief_digital.pdf). So why does this myth of anti-White racism persist?
I’m not a political scientist—I learned about the Overton Window from Succession. However, I do have experience cultivating conversations around divisive topics, particularly racism and religion. In the midst of the current national conversation around race, two factors—availability heuristic and zero-sum thinking —can make or break the future of race equality in America.
Availability Heuristic, Zero-Sum Thinking, and Racial Equality in America
People solve problems based on the information available to them. This is known as the availability heuristic. And this is what makes empathy across races so difficult. Most White people mostly know White people but consume a disproportionate amount of media featuring Black people. They see Black people succeeding in entertainment, sports, and politics. At the same time, they know White people with failing businesses, unaffordable rent, and massive debt. The primary Black experiences they see are the experiences of Black people who have succeeded enough to enter the national spotlight. And the White experiences with which they are most intimately acquainted include a great deal of pain and failure–as is inherent to almost any full life. They are exposed to Black success and White failure, hence they see affirmative action as “affirmative discrimination” against White people.
The White heuristic can only include Black people if it maintains awareness of the full spectrum of Black experience. This requires building bridges of genuine connection between Black and White communities. It requires withholding judgment and listening to the stories of people with different color skin. But that’s not always easy to do.
Often in our American conversation on race, participants conflate experience with analysis–they confuse stories with conclusions. And it’s this conflation that drives a person into zero-sum thinking when it comes to racial equity. You think, for their experience to be true, I must be wrong. Their story competes with my story.
Separating Story from Conclusion
But the story and conclusion are two separate things. While conclusions come after analysis and can contradict each other, stories are the raw material and are not in competition. Racial understanding starts at the level of story and experience, not analysis and conclusion. Two stories can be true without invalidating each other. In fact, since we are continually writing our stories, the process of listening to someone else’s story is actually additive. Learning another’s experience writes a new chapter of my own. My story expands to include someone else’s story as I hear it. The Zulu language captures this well with the word ubuntu, meaning “I am because we are.” Marshall Ganz of Harvard further articulates this through the framework of public narrative, where he teaches students to connect their story of self to a collective story of us (https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/30760283/Public-Narrative-Worksheet-Fall-2013-.pdf).
As I listen to you, your story becomes part of my story. My own conception of the world grows. My world becomes bigger. I become bigger. And this expanded story influences my analysis and conclusions. But it only makes them more true, more universal, more accurate. Whatever the outcome, I find myself on the side of the truth because my world, my experience, my story has expanded to reflect that truth.
Defeating Reductionism in Race Relations
Both of these concepts–availability heuristic and zero-sum thinking–depend on a return to experience. If we are to move into racial equality as a nation, we have to know each other at this level. We need media that reflects every register of success and failure. We need integrated community institutions like public housing, colleges, and places of worship. But most of all, we need to let go of our tendencies toward defensiveness. We need to embrace the truth that validating others’ experiences does not invalidate our own but rather reinforces it. Not only can both of our stories be true–we must hope they are.
And when this is the case–when our stories finally become shared–it won’t make sense to think in zero-sums because we will be tied in with the people around us, even those who look different. Their benefit becomes our benefit. Their success, ours. Only then will we be equipped to solve problems within the comprehensive story that connects us all.
Author: Stephen Erich
Bio: Stephen Erich is a religious life advisor at Columbia University and NYU and co-founder of Anti-Racist Hot Dog – a DEI consultancy that throws parties to talk about race. He is a graduate of Yale Divinity School, where he edited the Yale Journal of International Affairs and organized an interfaith conference on mass incarceration.
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