Gregg County Elections, “Joint/General Election,” November 8, 2016, https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/TX/Gregg/64736/184366/Web01/en/summary.html.29 29. “Bridge Construction Methods,” WSP, https://www.wsp.com/en-US/services/bridge-construction-methods.
30 30. “Brooklyn Bridge,” History Channel, https://www.history.com/topics/landmarks/brooklyn-bridge.
31 31. “Ponte Vecchio,” Visit Florence, https://www.visitflorence.com/florence-monuments/ponte-vecchio.html.
32 32. Serenitie Wang and Andrea Lo, “How the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge Changed China Forever,” CNN, August 2, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/nanjing-yangtze-river-bridge-revival/index.html.
33 33. “White House Honors Atorod Azizinamini,” FIU Research, http://research.fiu.edu/2015/12/white-house-honors-atorod-azizinamini/.
Part I Forging a Path toward Reconciliation
We still live in a racially segregated society. We are separate and unequal.
Our schools, our friendships, our religious services, our neighborhoods, our cities, our civic gatherings – all these environments remain largely divided by race. The demise of Jim Crow laws may have technically outlawed the segregation of physical facilities, such as bathrooms, buses, schools, restaurants, and hospitals, but we are far from being an integrated society. So it should come as no surprise that so many White people like myself remain blind to racial injustices. We remain blind to the oppression of Black people in many areas of life, such as education, jobs, healthcare, and criminal justice. We remain blind to the plight of immigrants living in America without documentation, to the plight of people seeking to keep their families together when they cross the Mexican border, and to the plight of refugees who are seeking a future in what we once called the Land of Opportunity. And in many cases, of course, we are not blind at all – we are directly perpetuating racial injustice and continued segregation, whether we realize it or not.
Why are we so unwilling to grapple with the challenges our fellow humans face? Because they aren’t our neighbors. Because they aren’t our fellow congregants. Because they aren’t our classmates. Just about the only place where Americans regularly interact with people of another race or ethnicity is in the workplace, where they usually have no choice. When given an option, most White Americans choose to stay ensconced in their comfortable social bubbles.
Fewer than half of Americans frequently interact with friends of other races or ethnicities, while only a quarter frequently interact with people of other races or ethnicities at religious services, according to a 2019 study by the Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute. Fewer than one in five Americans say they frequently do so at local civic gatherings, such as club events or school meetings. And about one in five seldom or never interact with someone of another race or ethnicity in any setting.1 Let that sink in.
In other words, as White people, we don’t need Jim Crow to keep segregation intact. We’re taking care of that on our own – and it’s shameful.
To be clear, people of color do not bear responsibility for this massive gulf. They have been subject to centuries of injustice at the hands of White oppressors. They should not be expected to build bridges to the other side, even though they frequently do so. Rather, White people need to step up and begin a journey of introspection, memorialization, lamentation, and reconciliation that must occur to demolish the barriers that continue to separate us from people who are Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, including immigrants.
A lack of meaningful relationships between people of difference is one of, if not the most, significant drivers of our continued division in America. It prevents us from engaging in conversation, which would breed more understanding and a greater willingness to call for policy change to address lingering problems. It blocks our kids from forming friendships with people who don’t look like them. It encourages White people to perpetuate our White privilege, driving the systemic racism that continuously gets us ahead. A lack of meaningful relationships partly explains why, for example, White people continue to deny that Black people are often actively prevented from achieving the same economic, social, and political progress as White people. It also leads many White people to embrace the misinformation and misdirection of political leaders who actively deny, misconstrue, or outright lie about the role of racism in America today. Only about one-quarter of White Americans agreed in 2019 that “slavery has a great deal of an effect” on the status of Black people today, while about six in ten Black people said it does, according to the Pew Research Center.2 We should not be shocked that many Americans deny the legacy of slavery. If seeing is believing, then White people will remain culturally and politically ignorant until we establish the types of relationships that will prompt us to open our eyes.
Coupled with our human tendency to prize group loyalty over the pursuit of truth – a tendency well documented by Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project – we fail to absorb what other people are saying, in part because they’re so far away. Intolerance, racism, and inequality continue to fester.
Yes, policy change is necessary to achieve tangible progress on key issues caused by systemic racism, like a lack of access to good schools, economic inequality, and unaffordable medical care. That is the ultimate goal. But until White people begin to authentically see Black Americans as family, friends, and neighbors, we won’t accept the premise that anything needs to change. Our hearts will remain hardened, and segregation will endure – because people in power will see no need to shake things up when their constituents aren’t pressing for change.
The encouraging news is that, in 2020, many Americans began to open their eyes to the endemic racism that continues to plague our country. In the wake of the highly public killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in rapid succession, certain White people began contemplating, for the first time, the premise that their indifference – or, in many cases, their actions – has played and continues to play a central role in harming and undermining people of color. In 2016, just over a quarter of Americans approved of the Black Lives Matter movement. Four years later, in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing at the hands of the Minneapolis police and the uprising that occurred on the streets of American cities following his death, support for Black Lives Matter soared to 57 percent.3
That surge in support reflected a marked shift in public opinion that paves the way for sweeping cultural change – but only if we embrace the techniques of bridge builders in cultivating relationships and conversation between people of difference.
In this part, I’ll tell the stories of people who are refusing to settle for the dysfunctional status quo defined by racial, ethnic, and cultural barriers. They believe that we can forge a path toward reconciliation by immersing ourselves in community. And that’s what they’re doing.
They believe that simply being present is the first step in bringing people together. They believe in the power of lasting, authentic personal connections to foster transformation.
