So what is the stubborn belief that needs to shift now for us to make progress against inequality? I found my first clues in a series of psychology studies. Psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson presented white Americans with news articles about people of color becoming the majority of the population by 2042. The study …
In my gut, I’ve always known that laws are merely expressions of a society’s dominant beliefs. It’s the beliefs that must shift in order for outcomes to change. When policies change in advance of the underlying beliefs, we are often surprised to find the problem still with us. America ended the policy of enforced school …
Today our schools are nearly as segregated as they were before Read More »
On the day Donald Trump was to take the oath of office in 2017, I’d been the president of Demos for three years. I was gearing up to fight against the onslaught that Trump’s incoming administration portended for civil rights and liberties, for immigrants and Muslims, and for the Black Lives Matter movement that he …
Everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest Read More »
The idea of affirmative action looms large in the white imagination and has been a passion among conservative activists. Some white people even believe that Black people get to go to college for free – when the reality is, Black students on average wind up paying more for college through interest-bearing student loans over their …
In decade after decade, threats of job competition – between men and women, immigrants and native born. Black and white – have perennially revived the fear of loss at another’s gain. The people setting up the competition and spreading these fears were never the needy job seekers, but the elite. (Consider the New York Herald’s …
The zero sum is a story by wealthy interests for their own profit Read More »
Most Euro-Americans were not, and would likely never be, the wealthy aristocrat who had every social and economic privilege in Europe. Eternal slavery provided a new caste that even the poorest white-skinned person could hover above and define himself against. Just imagine the psychic benefit of being elevated from the bottom of a rigid class …
