Only Children Owe Nothing: Diversity Is Good for Us

Diversity is good for all of us. I've seen evidence for it many times before. Here's the latest that has come across my feed:

Better Decisions Through Diversity

New research finds that socially different group members do more than simply introduce new viewpoints or approaches. In the study, diverse groups outperformed more homogeneous groups not because of an influx of new ideas, but because diversity triggered more careful information processing that is absent in homogeneous groups.

The mere presence of diversity in a group creates awkwardness, and the need to diffuse this tension leads to better group problem solving . . . She and her coauthors . . . demonstrate that while homogenous groups feel more confident in their performance and group interactions, it is the diverse groups that are more successful in completing their tasks. . . . 

“Generally speaking, people would prefer to spend time with others who agree with them rather than disagree with them,” Phillips explains. But this unbridled affirmation does not always produce the best results. “When you think about diversity, it often comes with more cognitive processing and more exchange of information and more perceptions of conflict,” Phillips says. In diverse settings, people tend to view conversations as a potential source of conflict that can breed negative emotions, and it is these emotions that can blind people to diversity’s upsides: new ideas can emerge, individuals can learn from one another, and they may discover the solution to a problem in the process. “It’s kind of surprising how difficult it is for people to actually see the benefit of the conversations they are having in a diverse setting,” observes Phillips. . . . 

Regardless of the outcome, a diverse group’s members will typically feel less confident about their progress largely due to the lack of homogeneity.

Homogeneous groups, on the other hand, were more confident in their decisions, even though they were more often wrong in their conclusions.

Having more difference in a group makes the group perform better.

Yet there is so, so much resistance to that evidence. Resistance that is gaining more strength and power all the time.

'Educators Are Afraid,’ Says Teacher Attacked for ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Unit

Last year, I was quoted in an article in the School Library Journal about how I discussed toxic masculinity with my high school students when we read Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” together. Within days, far-right publications twisted my words to denounce “woke liberal indoctrination in schools.”

Strangers sent me messages on social media accusing me of indoctrinating students, of being unprofessional and unintelligent. I received a handwritten letter addressed to me at school. The letter accused me of being a “low-life, pseudo-intellectual, swallow-the-lib/woke/b---s--- koolaid a — h----.” [The hyphens were added to replace letters because of Washington Post style and not in the original].

The author(s) decried my commitment to a more modern, inclusive curriculum as “filth, idiocy, non-intelligent crap.” They included an annotated copy of Cardi B’s “WAP,” suggesting I teach it to my students in the “spirit of modern, diverse, and inclusive voices.” They went on to disparage Black artists and the Black community.

I won’t lie. I hesitated when it came time to plan my “Romeo and Juliet” unit this year. . . . 

When social media is filled with messages about “torturing woke teachers” and “declaring war on liberal educators,” teachers are understandably afraid of being targeted.

Fear leads to silence.

Silence leads to erasure.

Erasure of books. Erasure of stories. Erasure of what students need.

Teachers and school librarians have already admitted to quietly removing books that partisan groups might view as problematic. They are not ordering new books included on lists put together by organizations such as No Left Turn in Education. Fearing threats, social media campaigns designed to intimidate, and even criminal charges in some states, educators are participating in soft censorship to protect themselves. I’ve caught myself worrying about what a random community member might think of my classroom library display for Black History Month or if I will be targeted for sharing a novel with an LGBTQ+ character. I am lucky to work in a supportive district, but that doesn’t prevent partisan groups from targeting teachers like me. . . . 

My classroom library is for all of my students. Some books speak to my ninth graders, and some speak to my 12th-graders. What speaks to one student may not speak to another. Parents have the right to tell their child what to read, but that right does not extend to control over all students. . . . 

When teachers decide they can’t risk adding books that deal with race, gender/sexuality, or certain aspects of history to their classroom library, most people will be unaware. . . . 

Except for our students. They notice. They’ll see when their teachers no longer recommend books that tell stories reflecting their lives or the lives of their classmates. They know when they can’t find a book that speaks to their heart. They will know when their teachers are afraid to affirm their lived experiences. And that erasure cuts deep. . . . 

Adults determined to fan the flames of the culture war are erasing years of important work in schools. They are fighting a war against their own children, determined to hide the existence of the real world from their children. And like all wars, young people will be the casualties.

They want to erase all difference.

They want to keep the different a "them."

Science Confirms That When White People Read About Covid Racial Disparities, They Respond Selfishly

Previous research showed that people tend to care about things less when they seem more distant from themselves and their peer group. She and her colleagues decided to put together a research plan to better understand the effect in the context of this pandemic. . . . 

“We live in a world in which if people aren’t directly affected by a problem or an issue, they’re less concerned with it.” . . . 

This phenomenon goes beyond Covid. In one 2016 study, for instance, white survey respondents were asked about a proposal to build a new, potentially hazardous chemical plant near a neighborhood. Participants were asked whether or not the plant should be built. In half of the questionnaires, it was revealed to respondents that the neighborhood was predominantly Black. In the other half, the neighborhood was predominantly white. When the neighborhood was predominantly Black, explains Roberts, people were less opposed to development than when the neighborhood was white. Researchers have observed a similar trend in other areas, too—a certain callousness when white people are shown devastating impacts on people of color, like disparities in education, for example, or the racial breakdown of prison populations in New York City, and asked about policies like stop-and-frisk. “People are more accepting of negative things when it doesn’t involve their own group,” Roberts says. “If you can show that these are issues that actually do affect you, they do affect us all, then that can actually motivate people to want to be more protective and supportive. But if you just highlight the disparities—‘Hey, it’s happening with them and not you’—well, now you’re giving people a reason to disengage.” . . . 

She notes that her study’s results capture overall trends, not every participant. And among one subset of their sample, she and her colleagues saw “a completely opposite trend”: Participants who were already aware of the systemic causes of Covid racial disparities—that people of color in the US are more likely to be essential workers, and are less likely to have access to testing, personal protective equipment, or health care—saw very different results from the rest of the group. Across both studies, she says, “The people who were more aware of these structural contributors were the most fearful about Covid-19—and the most supportive of safety precautions.”

In the face of such disheartening results, there’s reason to be skeptical anything will change—though this particular finding offered at least some hope to Skinner-Dorkenoo: “If [white] people are seeing it through a lens of injustice—and they’re aware of the nuance of the systemic contributors to this and the connections between these present inequalities and these other structural factors—that that may be a way to try to approach this.”

The last bit, at least, gives me hope that things can change, that enough education and dialogue might actually help.

(Just maybe not with bibliographies like this one.)

This reaction feels perfect to me.

New School Curriculum Just 6 Straight Hours Of Staring Slack-Jawed At American Flag

Following passage of a state law that withholds funding from districts that acknowledge the existence of systemic racism or white privilege, Knox County Schools unveiled Tuesday a new curriculum that consists of nothing but staring slack-jawed at an American flag for six hours a day. “By requiring students in grades K through 12 to gaze unblinkingly at the flag all morning and afternoon, we can ensure our kids do not learn anything that has been prohibited by the legislature,” said Chris Benson, a local parent and school board member, explaining that full compliance with the ban on critical race theory would be maintained by instructing children to clear their minds of any forbidden ideas while they directed a vacant look at an American flag blowing freely in the wind. “Now, if a teacher wishes to instruct students to spend the first three hours of the day focusing on the flag’s stars, for example, and then the next three hours focusing on the stripes, that’s completely acceptable. In addition, if the flag is affixed to a pole topped by one of those gold eagles, it is okay to stare blankly at that for a while. What we don’t want is any historical context to seep in and sully that great symbol of liberty. No, sir.” At press time, the new curriculum was reportedly amended so that a few hours of the day could also be spent staring at a Confederate flag.

Most of the time, it seems the only option they'll find acceptable.

The title of this article teases things coming to an end, but I'm not sure I found it--either in the article or in what I see of the current state of affairs.

The One Way History Shows Trump’s Personality Cult Will End

One of the big talking points and strategy of right-wing authoritarianism, is to label democratic systems as tyrannical. Mussolini was the first to say that democracies are tyrannical, democracies are the problem. And there’s a whole century’s worth of the strategy of calling sitting Democrats, who you want to overthrow, dictators. Biden as a social dictator, [is] a phony talking point. It has so many articulations from “They’re forcing us to wear masks.” And you have people like DeSantis who are doing this very subversive thing of saying, “Florida’s the free state. You can have refuge from the dictatorship of Biden here.” And what this is designed to do is discredit the sitting democratic administration in order to create, a myth of freedom. January 6 was actually marketed as the violence [being] in the service of freedom, and you were overthrowing a dictator.

The genius of the “big lie” was not only that it sparked a movement that ended up with January 6 to physically allow him to stay in office. But psychologically the “big lie” was very important because it prevented his propagandized followers from having to reckon with the fact that he lost. And it maintains him as their hero, as their winner, as the invincible Trump, but also as the wronged Trump, the victim. Victimhood is extremely important for all autocrats. They always have to be the biggest victim.

So the “big lie” maintained Trump’s personality cult versus seeing him as just another president who was voted out of office. Americans traditionally always accepted that when your time is up, no matter how popular you were, you were gone. Trump disrupted that because he’s different from any other president, Republican or Democrat. He’s an authoritarian, and they can’t leave office. They don’t have good endings and they don’t leave properly. . . . 

The Twitter was for the masses, to keep the masses indoctrinated, and I see Trump as one of the most successful propagandists of the early 21st century. He tweeted over 120 times a day. But that was for the masses. I wasn’t talking about voters as much as how has he kept the elites tethered to him. And that has nothing to do with Twitter. That has to do with what he’s always done: collecting compromising information, threatening, and he’s changed the party to an authoritarian party culture. So not only do you go after external enemies, but you go after internal enemies. You’re not allowed to have any dissent. And it’s not just when the leader was going to be impeached. In February 2021, during the second impeachment, and Republicans who voted to impeach him had to buy body armor because they were being threatened. . . . 

Ron DeSantis is turning Florida into his own mini-autocracy. . . . He has absorbed the lessons of what you need to get ahead in the GOP today. And that is to be a forceful bully, even to high school students. The way he carries himself and speaks has gotten much more aggressive. . . . what’s notable about him is he has sensed, like all smart politicians, what you need to get ahead in today’s America, in today’s GOP, what kind of leader you need to seem to be, what policies, what talking points, [such as] election fraud. What you need to do is turn citizens against each other, which he does with the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. His election security office has a hotline where you can call and tip off your fellow Floridians doing bad things. These are in themselves all things that match up with autocratic policies. Yes, he’s a very capable student of what is going to have success in today’s GOP and with today’s electorate. . . . 

I do believe if [Republicans] capture Congress after the midterms, you always have to assume the worst with people who have been very open about wanting to wreck democracy. And so that’s why they float these scary things, like making Trump speaker of the House. You have to realize that these people have left democracy, and nothing is off the table. And that’s why to go back to DeSantis, it’s very ominous that he established this office of election security. It’s very bad because it has its own prosecutors, and it makes things that used to be a misdemeanor a felony. If you look at the details of it, it’s not only an intimidation machine. It has some prosecutorial powers, and it has informing mechanisms, the tip line, and the whole idea of election integrity as this buzzword, which really means how are we going to start making elections come out the way we need to, is a very anti-democratic thing. . . . 

“Is America still a full democracy?” . . . No. David Pepper, who wrote this book Laboratories of Autocracy, has always said that many states are no longer functioning democracies. I would say that nationally, we are a functioning democracy. That’s how we got rid of Trump. But the system has been eroded and many states are shifting, are evolving over time to a condition where votes are going to mean less. And then you get into a situation which is like what happened in Hungary where over time Viktor Orbán has developed a system where it’s almost impossible for the opposition to win.

So many things I considered settled enough to take for granted now seem in danger. Including American Democracy.

So much of that articles seems related to the book I just finished, Freedom by Sebastian Junger. Here's what I wrote for my review:

A meandering rumination on the broad idea of freedom, tied together with descriptions of a meandering journey through rural Pennsylvania.

Junger and his traveling companions decided to walk the railroad tracks in an attempt to escape society for a while, living free, camping out, dodging police, and suffering unfriendliness for looking so dodgy when they came across others. interspersed through his descriptions of this wander are thoughts about governments, Native Americans, the U.S. expansion, the history of railroads, war and fighting, and more. If there is a core thought, it's living caught in the tension between a desire to be individuals within a small, isolated, lean society and the inescapable reality of living within a global, interconnected, powerful society. He loves the idea of small, but can't deny the advantages of large, and seeks to find the freedoms that come from both.

Junger's thoughts often feel random, disorganized, and lacking in purpose, but he earned an extra star from me for being such an engaging, thoughtful writer. Not as good as his previous offering, Tribe, but still enjoyable.

The book came out just last year (2021). It's hard not to believe some of this was written directly in response to Trump and current dynamics surrounding him. Some sections I marked:

It was not until the sweeping human rights laws of the twentieth century that freedom stopped being a question of fighting off one's enemies. International treaties established mechanisms for imposing sanctions or even taking military action against regimes that committed gross human rights violations, and that made freedom a concern of virtually the entire world. Enshrining human rights as the apex of international law is one of the greatest achievements of Western society--perhaps greater than landing on the moon or decoding the human genome--but depends entirely on maintaining a delicate balance between national sovereignty and collective action. All it takes to destroy that balance is for one powerful nation--Hitler's Germany, for example--to decide they're better off doing whatever they want and suffering the consequences than abiding by the treaties. In the case of Germany, it almost worked.

Enshrining human rights as the apex of international law is one of the greatest achievements of Western society. That's a great sentence.

That last paragraph doesn't directly point at the former president, but this . . . 

Although democracy may not survive as a broad form of freedom, its core virtue of insisting leaders be accountable to others and willing to make sacrifices is crucial to any group that faces adversity. In that, democracy has essentially reproduced hunter-gatherer society, where rigid constraints are put on leaders because self-serving leaders can literally get people killed. But in any society, leaders who aren't willing to make sacrifices aren't leaders, they're opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They're easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards.

That last sentence, especially. I don't know if he wrote it to explicitly describe forty-five, but he could have.

And this. This describes what actually happened just over a year ago. What is still happening in the minds of many in his cult.

At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with--and may even hate. That is true for small-scale societies like the Apache and Iroquois as well as for large-scale democracies like the United States. When American legislators granted unions the right to bargain as equals with the heads of industry, they were effectively saying that the people who owned the machines would have to start sharing power with the people who ran them, and that values like fairness and human dignity were going to determine at least some of the rules of the game.

If democratic power-sharing is a potent form of freedom, accepting an election loss may be the ultimate demonstration of how free you want to be. History is littered with fascist leaders who have rigged elections and tortured or killed critics, but their regimes are remarkably short-lived--especially considering the obsession these men usually have with holding power. Many wind up dead or in prison, and almost none leave behind stable regimes. Western democracies are among the most enduring and prosperous political systems in history. They seem to be able to transfer power almost indefinitely, which further bolsters their economies and cements their alliances.

The core operating procedure of the Republican party for years has been refusal to share power with people they disagree with, and lately they're taking it to new extremes.

I find this quote especially powerful because of the source. He's not someone from the left (definitely not a "socialist"), not someone in favor of "big government." He is a veteran looking to find as much independence and freedom as possible.

Our insignificance alongside so much energy even started to feel like its own form of freedom until we realized that everything we needed--food, clothes, gear--came from the very thing we thought we were outwitting. If subsistence-level survival were the standard for absolute freedom, the word would mean nothing because virtually no one could pass that test. People love to believe they're free, though, which is hard to achieve in a society that has outsourced virtually all of the tasks needed for survival. Few people grow their own food or build their own homes, and no one--literally no one--refines their own gasoline, performs their own surgery, makes their own ball bearings, grinds their own eyeglass lenses, or manufactures their own electronics from scratch. Everyone--including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government--depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.

For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for, if not died for, and that raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all--rationing water during a drought, for example--are forms of government tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.

The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.

Being a productive, responsible member of society--one who shares with the rest, feels mutual obligations with the rest; one who values all members, even (and especially) the different--is not tyranny. That's life as a human.