A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change
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ISBN-13: 9781982157609
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Atria Books
Publication Date: 10-18-2022
Pages: 224
Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Dolly Chugh is a Harvard educated, award-winning social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she is an expert researcher in the psychology of good people. In 2018, she delivered the popular TED Talk “How to let go of being a ‘good’ person and become a better person.” She is the author of A More Just Future and The Person You Mean to Be. Find out more at DollyChugh.com.
Chapter 1: See the Problem – 1 – See the Problem Read an Excerpt
You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history.
—ANTHONY DOERR
Meghan Lydon’s mom was confused. Her daughter was graduating from high school and had a peculiar request. A talented performer with a terrific voice, she had starred in theater productions like Fiddler on the Roof and Hello, Dolly! She was a funny, outgoing, “pretty mainstream” white student who rarely got lower than an A-minus and played on the tennis team.
Meghan wanted a “not cheap” high school souvenir. “I wanted to keep my Advanced Placement History textbook,” Meghan says, laughing. She had finished the course and aced the test. “We weren’t able to cover everything from the huge textbook in the course that year,” she recalls. “But I really wanted to read the whole thing.” With an amused shrug of her shoulders, her mom agreed.
Unsurprisingly, dinner table conversations in Meghan’s Rhode Island family often included recaps of what she and her siblings were learning in American history class, Meghan’s favorite subject. She had passionate teachers who inspired love of country. The underdog narrative “is so inspiring,” she reflects. “It makes you feel patriotic and prideful because you think, That’s us, we did it!” This attitude delighted her father, the type of dad who was visibly overcome by awe and reverence when visiting the monuments in Washington, D.C. The anything-is-possible-if-you-work-hard-enough American narrative permeated her history class and her family’s belief system. She went to college to major in musical theater with this sense of determination and her high school history textbook, taking nearly enough college history courses to declare a second major.
Meghan is now a twenty-seven-year-old personal trainer (my personal trainer!) and professional actor living in New York City. After an hour of planks and push-ups, we sat in the lounge outside the gym as she shared her story. “I still own that textbook,” she says. “But I think about it differently now.”
A shift began in college. In one course, a professor drew upon current events, including a recent viral video in which white fraternity members on a bus were singing a song about lynching black people. “The national response was that this was a horrible, one-off incident, not us as a nation,” Meghan recalls. “I felt that way, too.”
Course assignments required students to read primary sources and study what had happened after slavery. “I realized there was no formal taking of responsibility, just generationally sweeping it under the rug,” she says. With her classmates, she began to connect the dots from the 1800s to this viral video in present times. “There is a pretty clear cultural and historical line between point A and point B.” Reluctantly, she concluded that the “viral video was not a one-off.”
She recalled what she learned in high school about slavery, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the treatment of Native Americans. Slavery was terrible, but a necessary evil for the southern economy. Internment was terrible, but justified by the attack on Pearl Harbor. The treatment of Native Americans was terrible, but more about smallpox than genocide. “The narrative was typically that people didn’t know better, or people were scared, or people had no other option,” she reflects.
Looking back, she notices a few things. “None of it was in the horrific detail as the reality. I don’t remember any first-person accounts,” she recalls. “Also, there was an air of ‘this doesn’t relate to America today.’ The emphasis was ‘and then we fixed it.’ It was very easy to detach yourself from it.”
She pauses, and then says, “In contrast, the pride I felt at the good things was not detached at all. It is as if I was deeply moved by the good things but not as fully moved by the bad things. I guess it is hard to reconcile this idea we have of ourselves as the ‘best country’ with these bad things. That’s what people—and I—am grappling with now.”
In the summer of 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained wider visibility, Meghan read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,1 a book that appeared to suddenly materialize on many white people’s nightstands and in book groups. Both influential and controversial, the book prompted thought among many, including Meghan. She recalls thinking, Oh my God, why am I so defensive? Around the same time, she noticed that many of the people she followed on social media were white. “I purposely started seeking out a more diverse group of people to follow,” she says. Then Meghan started seeing startling infographics in her social media feeds. She rattles off a few. One offered “your daily dose of unlearning” (“Martin Luther King Jr. was more radical than we remember”); another looked at the origins of the police; yet another examined the segregated history of the American beach.
She pulls out her phone and opens up Instagram. As she scrolls to the post she is describing to me, I ask about the dozens and dozens of posts that she has saved for easy access.
“I used to just use Instagram for scrolling through posts from friends along with fitness content and recipes. Then I realized I could use it to broaden my perspective,” she explains. She started following a more diverse group of content creators, in the fitness and recipe spaces relevant to her work, as well as the historical topics that have long fascinated her.
Meghan learned of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which city officials supplied weapons to white mobs who burned down entire black neighborhoods—killing many, leaving thousands homeless, and destroying a vibrant business community known as “Black Wall Street.” She learned that her home state of Rhode Island played a central role in slavery, particularly at the ports, with economic exploitation through trade and labor. She learned that her new hometown of New York City had enslaved people in almost every other household,2 defying the common northern misconception of slavery as a solely southern institution.
Upsetting revelations kept coming. With each one, the history lover in Meghan felt “embarrassed and guilty,” but she kept scrolling. Using the research skills she had learned in college, she consulted reliable sources to verify the new information and distinguish it from “alternative facts.” To her astonishment, these revelations and more were accurate. “I realized I needed to unlearn and relearn some things,” she told me. “And I realized that progress I took for granted like the civil rights movement was far from a given.”
Meghan’s original sense of inevitable progress exemplifies “hindsight bias.” This mental illusion affects everyone and occurs when past events appear predestined, despite much uncertainty at the time.3 We struggle to imagine an alternate present in which past events had not occurred. One casualty of this quirky mental habit: we underestimate the blood, sweat, and tears that engender social change. With hindsight bias, the present feels inevitable.
While Meghan was flummoxed, she also had an insight. “I realized I could scroll and curate my feed more intentionally. I could save things I really wanted to dig into and come back to them. This could be intellectually stimulating. Honestly, it made Instagram more meaningful to me,” she explained. Her new “textbook”—written from multiple perspectives—had been in her pocket all along.
This realization became more personal while speaking with a group of friends, one of whom was black. Meghan mentioned the American dream and how they were all raised to believe “you could do anything if you worked hard enough.” To her surprise, the friend said, “Oh, I wasn’t raised that way.” Meghan saw the issue immediately. The systemic barriers to the American dream were real for her friend and so many others, even today, even if they worked “hard enough.” This was not just about understanding the past, but also about understanding the present. And she wanted to do both.
I asked Meghan if she still loved her country. “Absolutely! I definitely love this country. But my love now is shown more through trying to make it better, just like I do with my training clients.” As one of those fitness clients, I am puzzled by the comparison until she reminds me of her pep talks. Taking care of ourselves is an act of love, she exhorts clients. Fixating on perfection or shame leads to the same outcome: doing nothing. When we recognize opportunities to be healthier or stronger, then we move forward. “To me, love is always trying to improve,” she says in a firm voice. “To do that, you have to see the problem.”
In the rest of this chapter, we follow Meghan’s lead to break down what it means to see the problem. We start with how basic psychological principles shape how history is captured, remembered, and documented. Based on the “home team bias,” we reflect on how love of country can both help and hurt our country, what I call the “patriot’s dilemma.” We then explore how that bias manifests in many of our textbooks and classrooms, both in the United States and abroad. Finally, we look at how educators are seeing and tackling the problems both as learners and teachers.
It was the end of fall in 1952 and as the leaves turned red and yellow, the football season came to a close. This was a tough way to end a season. All-American Dick Kazmaier, Princeton University’s halfback, had to leave the game with a mild concussion and a broken nose in the second quarter. Jim Miller, Dartmouth College’s quarterback, had to leave the game with a broken leg in the third quarter. Princeton won 13–0. The season was ending in a dramatic fashion.
Accusations of dirty play flew. One Princeton player told the school paper that “Dartmouth was out to get” their star player, while another Princeton player said, “I am completely disgusted... with the Dartmouth brand of football.”4 In contrast, the Dartmouth coach proudly stated, “It was one of the best defensive games a Dartmouth team of mine has ever played.”5 The Dartmouth alumni magazine assured its readers that, except for one instance of unsportsmanlike conduct, the charges of dirty play were “manufacture[d]” by Princeton undergraduates writing for the school paper, and then picked up by national media.
To understand those differing accounts, two psychologists recruited students from both schools to participate in a study a week after the game. They began with a survey of students taking introductory and intermediate psychology courses at both schools. Then the researchers asked the students in fraternities and undergraduate clubs to watch a video of the game. Those students also filled out a survey about whether the game “was clean and fairly played, or... unnecessarily rough and dirty?,” “how many infractions” each team made, and “which team do you feel started the rough play?”
It was as if the Dartmouth and Princeton students had watched two different games. None of the Princeton respondents felt the game was “clean and fair.” In fact, they perceived the Dartmouth team as making twice as many infractions as the Dartmouth study participants perceived. Among the Dartmouth participants, 53 percent felt both schools started the foul play; 2 percent felt Princeton started it; (only) 36 percent felt Dartmouth started it; 9 percent felt it was neither. Among the Princeton students, 11 percent felt both schools started it, while 86 percent felt Dartmouth started it and 3 percent felt it was neither. In other words, only a third of the Dartmouth participants thought it was Dartmouth’s fault, while the vast majority of Princeton participants pointed the finger at Dartmouth. The results were the same, regardless of whether a student had attended the game in-person or not.
In some ways, they did. The researchers played the same video for everyone, but the students saw different things in the video. In a paper titled “They Saw a Game,” Albert H. Hastorf and Hadley Cantril explained, “A person selects those [occurrences] that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position,” which sounds akin to the confirmation bias other researchers would later name, a phenomenon in which people unconsciously see what they want to see.6 While motivations exist to distort the truth, intentional lies do not fully explain these stark differences in perception. This tendency to pay more attention to what confirms our inklings and less attention to what challenges our inklings also occurs unconsciously. If we were to listen to only one group of students, we would fail to grasp the game in its entirety.
Those Princeton and Dartmouth fans were no different than the rest of us. Imagine you just got home from cheering your favorite team to victory. A friend asks you for a recap. You might describe the heartbreaking error, the funny moment in the stands, the clutch play, the no-good refs. You might remember more of your own team’s plays. You might be less forgiving of a lack of sportspersonship from the visiting team than the home team. You might cheer for your team as the good guys and jeer the other team as the bad guys. You might pay extra attention to a couple of the players, whom you once spotted and greeted at a restaurant.
In other words, your home team recap will reflect your natural tendency to know more, notice more, credit more, and forgive more from your own team. This home team bias tendency does not make one evil, just human. When it comes to a football game, our tendency to see the things that confirm our own identity can be simple and straightforward enough. But what about things that are far more fraught, like American history? There the home team might certainly be “American” but it is also all of our other identities we hold, especially those that have been historically meaningful, such as race. Regardless of identity, we do not have to be intentionally biased to be subject to the home team bias.
Once, while Meghan urged me into one more plank and Bruno Mars crooned in the background, I tried to distract her with a summary of the home team bias paper (apparently, Mindy Kaling has good success distracting her trainers, so why not give it a try?!). Meghan responded, “It’s like all we know is America’s greatest hits.”
Meghan’s statement that we overfocus on the greatest hits resonates with my research. With my colleagues Mahzarin Banaji, Max Bazerman, and Mary Kern, I have written about bounded ethicality,7 which I sometimes refer to as the psychology of good people.8 No matter how objective, well trained, and professional we are, we are prone to errors in what we see and perceive, with our minds being pulled toward that which is more consistent with what we already know and more flattering to who we are, whom we love, and whom we identify with. I will never be able to see my children as others see them because our minds are not programmed for objectivity. They are programmed for consistency.
Our minds are also prone to limitations in memory, storage, and processing speed. These constraints lead to bounded rationality, a term first coined by Nobel Prize winner Herb Simon and which led to an expansive field of research in behavioral economics, psychology, and other social sciences.9 Because of bounded rationality, we may be more likely to remember the apartments we viewed first or last in our search, rather than in the middle. We overattend to vivid statistics, like the probability of dying by terrorist attack, and underattend to drab data, like the probability of dying of cardiovascular disease. Our minds anchor on a particular point of view or value, such as the list price of a car. We are also prone to bounded awareness, a failure to notice, see, and seek out easily available information, because it does not align with our expectations or views.10 We do not see the conspicuous butter in the fridge when it is in a different place than usual and we somehow miss the error messages on our phones as we scroll through our social media feeds. We need not intend to be unaware, yet we may be deeply unaware.
Bounded awareness, bounded rationality, and bounded ethicality do not apply only to sporting events. The same pattern recurs in marriages, workplaces, pandemics, elections, insurrections, and the recording and learning of history. Our challenge is to see how these natural tendencies are exacerbated by our love of our country, and, as Meghan says, how that makes it harder for us to do better.
I call the phenomenon the “patriot’s dilemma”: the more we love this country, the less likely we are to do the necessary work to improve it. The more pride we take in our ancestors, the harder it is for us to tell their full stories, both successes and shortcomings. The more we identify with heroes from the past, the more threatened we feel by their subheroic behavior. Paradoxically, the more we love our country’s purported ideals, the more difficult it is to see how we fall short of them. Because of the patriot’s dilemma, our love for our nation is a barrier to making our nation better.
But this dilemma can be resolved. The key lies in how we think about the past.
We vary in how connected we feel our past is to our present. If my present-day country resembles how I remember my country from the past, I see the past and present as highly connected. Researchers have found that this “historical continuity” can create a sense of stability.11 This continuity is particularly important for individuals who strongly identify with their country. When the past and the present feel disconnected—perhaps because of societal changes—high-identifying individuals amp up that patriotic identity to provide the stability that the past was not providing. Those who identify less with their country depend less on the continuity between the past and present. In other words, the superpatriotic person (in the very narrow sense of that word) reacts particularly badly when the past and present are out of sync.
The uptick in the conspicuous display of the American flag in recent years, during a time of great social change and upheaval, might be one example of this tendency in action. Of course, whether or not one displays the flag is not the point; the point is the increase in the flag displays for highly identified individuals during a tumultuous time. The before-and-after difference reveals the effect.
In these studies, the researchers also measured the participants’ degree of “collective angst,” defined as “fear for the future existence of the ingroup.”12 For strong identifiers confronting high historical discontinuity, collective angst and opposition to immigration were high. So, in addition to the flag displaying, these individuals are in ears-straight-up and teeth-bared mode, fearful of change and aggressive to outsiders.
To recap these research findings, psychologists have robust evidence that we are all prone to the home team bias, in which we see things through our own eyes and those of the groups we identify with. This tendency means that we are likely to have a different perspective than others, but remain convinced that our perspective is correct. When times are unstable and we feel that our group is threatened, we go on the defensive. This tendency is particularly true for those highly identified with their groups, leaving us with the patriot’s dilemma in which we are so invested in our home team narrative, we are unable to see another perspective.
The patriot’s dilemma is worsened when the patriot is a member of a dominant group. Political scientist Diana Mutz challenged the prevalent “economic anxiety” theory of Donald Trump’s rise by tracking political attitudes of people from dominant groups (whites, Christians, men).13 Her research demonstrates that the growing numbers and status of nonwhite groups—as well as globalization—contributes to a defensive reaction among members of dominant groups that is not explained by economic anxiety. Rather, she finds those who perceive threats seek to reestablish status hierarchies. She calls this phenomenon dominant group status threat. This is more than home team bias; it is home team defensiveness.
In the late 1970s, Norman Lear changed television with shows like All in the Family and The Jeffersons. These hit shows brought real-life tensions in American families to the center of the fictional shows those same families were watching. Rocky race relations and bigoted backlash were discussed openly in politically divided white families like the Bunkers and economically striving black families like the Jeffersons. While more than a decade had passed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s aspirational challenge that society not judge his children by the color of their skin, these shows rejected the color-blind narrative. Viewers could relate: racial disparity was a pervasive and persistent presence in their daily lives.
But why? In the context of this clearly racialized reality, legal scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado challenged the narrative that race—and racism—no longer explained racial disparities. From their and others’ work, critical race theory (CRT) was born.14 Their goal was to develop an intellectual framework to study if and how racism is embedded in systems, policies, and laws. Like most academic fields, CRT is a narrow, deep area of work to allow for rigor and precision in the research. For the next forty years, the topic was studied by academics and largely unknown by nonacademics.
Fast-forward to 2021. The teaching of history became front-page news, as did jargon previously reserved for that small circle of legal scholars.15 Critical race theory went from being an area of legal scholarship with a precise academic focus to a household word with little agreed-upon meaning. Unfortunately, most people using the acronym CRT—which can stand for both critical race theory as well as culturally responsive teaching—have little understanding of either. CRT became a bucket term for describing anything ranging from mentioning racism to teaching about slavery to sharing historical facts to the original legal analysis framework.
In education, some are using CRT to describe anything that relates to mentioning nonwhite people in schools, whether it be a young-adult novel written by a nonwhite author or a history lesson about how nonwhite people were treated or an opportunity to examine one’s implicit biases about nonwhite people. None of these are actual examples of critical race theory.
It is as if pomegranate—a specific fruit—suddenly became synonymous with food, such that every item on a restaurant’s menu was now simply labeled pomegranate. Pasta, pancakes, pumpkins, and pizza—we just call them all “pomegranate.” As a result, the menu is confusing and the ordering process counterproductive. The original meaning of pomegranate is lost. We are using the same words but it is unclear if we are talking about the same thing.
Put simply, critical race theory “is a way to talk openly about how America’s history has had an effect on our society and institutions today.”16 The theory takes the stance that existing laws, structures, and institutions are not as race-neutral as they appear. They are a product of the society in which they were created and thus may reflect that society’s racism, past and present. Historical patterns of racism remain in our legal system, and legacies of those patterns remain in society.
For example, the CROWN Act is legislation that prohibits discrimination based on hairstyles and hair textures in workplaces and schools.17 Several states and cities have passed the law, but it has yet to receive the necessary U.S. Senate votes to become federal law. Without this law, nothing stops an employer from essentially requiring a black employee to use toxic chemicals to straighten their hair in order to meet “professionalism” or “dress code” requirements, rather than wearing an afro, braids, cornrows, or another natural style. A critical race theory perspective would cite the lack of legal protection for non-European hairstyles and textures as evidence that whiteness is built into our country’s legal structures and institutions.
Within the legal scholarship world, sizable evidence supports this theory. For example, critical race scholars have shown that the punishment for drug offenses varies widely by the type of drug being used. There is no difference in the public health or personal risk consequences between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. However, there is a notable difference in the demographics of who tends to use these drugs: the majority of crack cocaine offenders are black; the majority of powder cocaine offenders are white. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s with “war on drugs” and “tough on crime” campaigns, sentences for possession of one gram of crack cocaine were 100 times longer than those for one gram of powder cocaine.18 The Fair Sentencing Act in 2010 changed the ratio from 100:1 to 18:1, still a stark gap.19
This superficially nondiscriminatory set of laws leads to a racially discriminatory outcome. This is the premise of critical race theory: apparently color-blind laws can still have non-color-blind outcomes and historical roots.
Understanding critical race theory requires knowledge of how the concept of race has evolved in our country and the historical roots of laws. While critical race theory is not about knowing history for history’s sake, it does require some historical digging to contextualize what would otherwise appear to be an odd (at best) or hateful (at worst) outcome. As the field of critical race theory has evolved over the past few decades, the approach has proven useful in fields outside of law, including education, political science, and American studies. The idea remains the same. What appears race-neutral in the present may actually be discriminatory when its origins and current-day impacts are revealed.
Whether we use the actual definition of CRT, or the pomegranate distortions of the term, a similar concern arises. Some worry that this pedagogical approach leaves students feeling undeserved shame and guilt, and therefore should not be in our schools. In many states, laws are being proposed or passed prohibiting teaching CRT in K–12 schools, which is confusing, given the unlikely possibility that any K–12 school was teaching graduate-level legal scholarship.
I understand the worry, but I think we are approaching the issue the wrong way. Yes, reckoning with our country’s past might lead to guilt and shame. In fact, that is exactly why I decided to write this book. While I am not a legal expert on critical race theory, I know it is a misconception that the CRT’s goal is to teach American history in a way that vilifies and shames anyone. Those emotions may arise, not as the goal but as a by-product. And we can handle them.
The idea that facing our whitewashed past will evoke uncomfortable emotions is far from new and has little to do with critical race theory. That is an issue more for psychologists like me than for legal scholars.I My stance is that we teach CRT (or as it should be called, history) and prepare ourselves to grapple with all the feelings that it brings.
The very fact that different accounts of historical events can evoke different emotions for different people reveals where part of the problem lies. Not only are we prone to the home team bias in our minds, we are also prone in our history books, our schools, and our classrooms. Seeing history for what it is, and what it is not, is part of seeing the problem.
If history is prone to some of the same biases as a recap from a home team fan, where does that leave us? Our first challenge is to notice how we rarely learn about or teach history with this limitation in mind. A prominent source of our historical knowledge is formal education, from a nursery school story about George Washington not telling a lie to a high school textbook delineating key battles of the Civil War. Teachers and textbooks carry an air of authority, and students like me and even Meghan often receive classroom history as a series of immutable facts.
To see history for what it is, we must first and foremost recognize that it is a story. And stories have a perspective. Educator Duncan Koerber wanted to create this awareness with a personal history assignment.20 He asked his students to write a classroom history, a family history, a local history, a personal history, or a piece of creative historical fiction, and then to reflect on the experience of being a historian.
If I did his assignment, I might write about my parents’ experiences as refugees during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. First, I would need to figure out what was true. I would need to reconcile the multiple family members’ perspectives about what happened and when. They might have individual perspectives on whether “refugee” was the right descriptor. When there were factual contradictions about what belongings they took or where they stayed at night, I would have to decide how to deal with the discrepancy. My mother’s family and my father’s family had very different experiences in 1947; no doubt every family had a unique experience. I would need to somehow account for this variation in stating what was