Race and Social Change

A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action

Max Klau

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119359432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Student Life

A powerful study illuminates our nation's collective civic fault lines

Recent events have turned the spotlight on the issue of race in modern America, and the current cultural climate calls out for more research, education, dialogue, and understanding. Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action focuses on a provocative social science experiment with the potential to address these needs. Through an analysis grounded in the perspectives of developmental psychology, adaptive leadership and complex systems theory, the inquiry at the heart of this book illuminates dynamics of race and social change in surprising and important ways. Author Max Klau explains how his own quest for insight into these matters led to the empirical study at the heart of this book, and he presents the results of years of research that integrate findings at the individual, group, and whole system levels of analysis. It's an effort to explore one of the most controversial and deeply divisive subject's in American civic life using the tools of social science and empiricism. Readers will:

• Review a long tradition of classic, provocative social science experiments and learn how the study presented here extends that tradition into new and unexplored territory
• Engage with findings from years of research that reveal insights into dynamics of race and social change unfolding simultaneously at the individual, group, and whole systems levels
• Encounter a call to action with implications for our own personal journeys and for national policy at this critical moment in American civic life

At a moment when our nation is once again bitterly divided around matters at the heart of American civic life, Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action seeks to push our collective journey forward with insights that promise to promote insight, understanding, and healing.

1
A Personal Quest

Ican't tell you precisely when the quest began, but I can share a moment when the first of a great many veils of blindness and ignorance fell from my vision, illuminating the first small slivers of insight.

It was in the basement of a college dorm in Virginia. I was working as a group leader for an organization called Operating Understanding DC—more often known by its acronym, OUDC—and we were 3 days into a month-long bus journey across the United States. Our travels would take us through some of the most important sites in the history of America's civil rights struggle: Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Philadelphia, Mississippi. OUDC brought together a group of 30 teens from the greater Washington, DC, area; half of them were Jewish, half of them were Black, and one or two were both. Together, we would encounter these historic sites and meet some of the courageous individuals who made these towns so significant. As a group, we would engage in an intense, honest, searching dialogue about race and social change that would unfold in an essentially unbroken stream for the entire 30 days.

We were just a couple days into the trip and still early in the process of evolving our group dynamic. The program this evening was a “fishbowl” activity that would be led by OUDC's remarkable founder, an endlessly colorful and energetic woman named Karen Kalish. She was Jewish, with a soul that burned for racial equality and social justice. It was thanks to her that we were all gathered that evening in the basement lounge of a college dorm in Virginia.

For this fishbowl activity, a group of six Black participants (three young men and three young women) were seated in an inner circle, with the rest of the group arranged in a larger circle surrounding them. Those of us in the outer circle were told to just listen; all the talking would be done by the six Black teens in the inner circle, who were invited to discuss their experiences growing up Black in Washington, DC.

The conversation began with a tone that was light and casual, but it didn't stay that way for long. In just a few minutes, the conversation entered terrain that I have since come to recognize as a space of sacred truth: a place where one can feel—in one's innermost heart—that truth is being spoken and that defenses are being lowered as people risk levels of honesty and vulnerability that are almost never revealed in day-to-day life. In that space, real tears began to flow, along with the sort of utterly genuine laughter and joy that emerges spontaneously in moments of authentic human connection. I had explored race in an intellectual way many, many times in the past via books, documentaries, and discussions with others who shared my own background. But it was in this space that I first had a significant, genuine, fully human experience with the “other” and had a flesh-and-blood encounter with all the bitter, painful, difficult truths and all the awe-inspiring resilience and spiritual strength that animated the inner lives of this group of young Black Americans.

The young people told stories of walking into stores and being stopped by store employees who suspected them of shoplifting. There was no ignoring the fact that if they walked into the store with White friends, the White friends were never stopped and questioned. They had stories of being pulled over while driving, even though they were certain they were going no faster than the speed limit to avoid exactly this outcome. They talked about struggling to get the sort of entry-level jobs in retail or restaurants that White friends seemed to land with minimal effort. They shared stories of parents struggling to pay the rent and of how the adults in their lives so often found their opportunities limited and constrained in a thousand small but significant ways.

In time, the deeper complexities of their experiences began to surface. A light-skinned Black girl noted that she was rarely stopped by store employees, even when she was with darker-skinned Black friends who were stopped. Part of her felt lucky to be able to “pass”—to move through the world enjoying the privileges that come with people simply assuming that she was trustworthy. But that privilege and relative ease of movement came with some heavy baggage. She struggled with guilt every time her darker-skinned friends had to endure some injustice that she had been spared, and she had to deal with Black friends regularly making comments suggesting that she wasn't “really” Black. To be light-skinned, I learned, was a blessing and a curse in the life of a young woman of color.

The fishbowl lasted for at least 2 hours, and as I listened, a whole world of complexity, pain, resilience, and emotional truth about the lived experience of young people of color in America was revealed to me for the first time. And what I remember most about night was the thought that kept running through my head again and again as the discussion unfolded: I had no idea.

I had no idea how frequently people of color encountered discrimination and barriers to opportunity in their lives. I had no idea how much pain these incidents caused. I had no idea that differences in skin color created such social complexities in the lives of kids of color. I had no idea how much strength and wisdom and humor was required to stay healthy and resilient in the face of these relentless challenges. I had no idea how any of this felt, or how any of this worked, or what any of this demanded of these kids, because I had never really had to worry about any of it. I had no idea.

And I was the group leader.

I felt—and I still feel—that I was hired with good reason. Similar to Karen Kalish, I was a Jew with a burning passion for social justice and a deep desire to promote racial equality. I was appalled by America's history of slavery and viewed leading figures of the civil rights movement such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. as personal heroes. I had worked extensively with communities of color while participating in a year-long service program in Israel, and later I managed young adults engaged in similar service as a group leader. I even had a remarkable job that allowed me to spend 4 months traveling around America with an Ethiopian Israeli colleague and friend; together, we gave speeches and raised money to support the Ethiopian community in Israel. On my résumé, at least, I was no stranger to matters of race. At the age of 27, I could honestly claim years of involvement in service, youth development, and social justice education. Karen Kalish had every reason to hire me for that job. And yet still: I had no idea.

That night, my hunger to learn more was piqued, and the weeks that followed provided a treasure trove of opportunities for learning, dialogue, and understanding. We had amazing experiences, such as meeting the mother of civil rights worker Andrew Goodman, one of the three young organizers who was killed in 1968 while advocating for voting rights for people of color in Philadelphia, Mississippi. That night, we stayed overnight in the homes of Black residents of Philadelphia who had agreed to host our group. Our host offered to take us on a tour of how it all happened, so we got into his car in the pitch-black Mississippi night and he drove us around: Here was the jail where the three young men were being held, and where they were pulled out of their cell by a White mob; here was spot where they were pulled from the car, beaten, and killed; here was the spot where their bodies were buried. Driving through the thick woods on the darkened back roads of rural Mississippi, it was impossible to not feel a small dose of the terror those three young men must have felt that night, and I was left struggling mightily with the question of how a group of ordinary White people with jobs and families could transform into that kind of rageful, hateful, murderous mob.

While on the bus, we watched Spike Lee's powerful documentary Four Little Girls about the four Black girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The movie ended just as the bus pulled to a stop…in the parking lot of the 16th Street Baptist Church. We walked inside and immediately participated in a panel discussion with community members, including a parent of one of the little girls. Days later we walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Blacks and Jews holding hands, singing “We Shall Overcome.”

It was a remarkable, month-long, encounter with something I can only call the civic sacred. Every day, we met seemingly ordinary men and women who had summoned levels of courage, creativity, and commitment that literally transformed a nation and inspired the world. In confronting some of America's darkest shadows of hate and intolerance, they had elevated everyday civic spaces—bridges, buses, roads, coffee counters—into sites that properly can be called sacred. Despite—actually because of—all the emotional complexity evoked by confronting this history, it was a wonder to encounter it all and a blessing to experience it as a member of this diverse group of young people.

The conversations begun that night with the fishbowl continued all month long as together we processed each day's experiences and learned more and more about how we all saw and experienced the world. Despite all my interest in these matters over the years, I realized that I had reached the age of 27 without ever having had the chance to have these kinds of deep, authentic discussions about race with people of color. I remember feeling waves of gratitude at finally having the chance to explore all this with people who didn't look just like me. It was a peak life experience, and to this day I remain amazed at how rare it is to encounter these spaces of authentic connection and deep dialogue about race with “the other” and how essential they are to achieving a genuine understanding of what is true about race and social change in American civic life today.

I have said that my OUDC experience was not the moment the quest began; I had been passionate about matters of race and social change for years before that remarkable experience. But it was beyond a doubt a pivotal moment in my journey. It was the time when I saw clearly just how blind I was to how race and social change actually worked. And it was the experience that crystallized the questions that would burn in my soul and animate much of the next decade of my life:

How does this whole thing work? What's really true about race and social change in America?

Just a few months after completing OUDC, I started graduate school at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Harvard was a remarkable experience. I took classes with titles such as “Education for Social Change,” “Promoting Morality in Children and Adolescents,” “Exercising Leadership, Mobilizing Group Resources,” and “Moral Development.” I was immersed in topics I yearned to learn more about and was privileged to explore it all as part of an extremely diverse student body. Harvard is surely an elite institution, and I have no doubt that a great many students and professors could make compelling arguments about all the ways the school does not adequately confront the realities of issues such as race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and more. All I can say is that in my experience, I was pushed, challenged, and transformed by encounters with diverse peers on a nearly daily basis. My studies were so engaging that I knew almost instantly that a one-year master's program would not be enough; I applied to the doctoral program in human development and psychology and was thrilled when I heard the news that I had been accepted. I now had at least five more years to seek answers to the questions at the heart of my quest.

In those first years of my doctoral studies, the learning was intense and exciting. The professors were experts in their fields, and I was surrounded by hard-working, passionate, inspiring peers eager to dive into debate and dialogue. Despite all I was learning, though, something felt incomplete. In hindsight I realize that I felt a lot like the blind men in the well-known parable of the elephant, although I wasn't really conscious of the metaphor at the moment.

In that story, one individual touches the animal's leg and declares that the elephant is like a pillar, another touches the ear and declares the animal to be like a hand fan, another touches the tail and declares the animal to be like a rope. The blind men descend into a bitter argument about who is right, until a wise man appears and illuminates the truth: They are all correct, but they have all encountered different, limited aspects of what it is in fact a cohesive, larger truth.

So it was with my studies of race and social change. I listened to professors and peers share different insights and perspectives every day, and I realized quickly that it made no sense to assert that their experience was “wrong”; it was their experience, as true to them as my own experience was to myself. But how did all these perspectives on truth fit together?

I knew from personal experience that when it came to matters of race and social change, as a White male I arrived at adulthood blind to how things worked in profound and surprising ways, despite my good intensions and passion for these issues. I knew from many meaningful encounters with people of color that for them, blindness to race was impossible. Race was something they could never escape; they confronted discrimination and felt their “otherness” on a near daily basis. Every day brought a new lesson in the complexity of how race and social change was experienced; Asians, Latinos, Blacks, LGBTQ students, students of mixed ethnicity, as well as atheists and students deeply committed to their faiths all had distinctive stories to share.

I quickly learned that trying to absorb more about any of these issues inevitably opened up entirely new frontiers of complexity. Consider, for example, the effort to gain a deeper understanding of the Asian experience of race and social change in America. It didn't take long to encounter that there is no single monolithic “Asian” experience; individuals from Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other Asian nations have their own identities, their own histories, and their own truths to share. The same goes for Latinos and Blacks; to inquire more deeply into any of these groups is to encounter a vast landscape of subgroups, each with their own experiences, histories, and traditions. It soon became obvious that it was quite simply impossible to truly understand all of this complexity; the full diversity of humanity is too vast for any one person to grasp. But I could certainly learn to expect that complexity and resist the tendency to think and talk about individuals as representing monolithic groups that have never really existed.

In addition, when I turned my attention from listening to personal narratives to examining the broad sweep of history, a whole new set of questions appeared. Day after day, I heard stories of discrimination and oppression met with resistance, resilience, and a deep commitment to working to create positive change. And it was clear that positive change could and did happen, in dramatic and sudden ways. After decades of Jim Crow segregation in the United States, a powerful civic rights movement emerged and in a few short years created transformational change in America. Similar stories could be found in other nations, such as the movements for Indian independence from Britain and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, both of which unfolded in a similar fashion: Decades of grinding oppression and stagnation followed by the rapid coalescing of movements that created transformational change in a relative blink of an eye. How did that happen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Personal Quest
• Chapter 2: Introduction to Classic Social Psychology Experiments
• Chapter 3: Understanding Systems, Part I: Dynamics of Complex Systems
• Chapter 4: Understanding Systems, Part II: Development Toward Complexity and the Hidden Process Driving Social Change
• Chapter 5: The Separation Exercises
• Chapter 6: Findings at the Interpersonal and Intergroup Levels
• Chapter 7: The Whole System Level of Analysis
• Chapter 8: Lessons for the Real World, Part I: Seeing the System and the Process of Awakening
• Chapter 9: Lessons for the Real World, Part II: On Power, Control, and the Interconnectedness of Our Inner and Outer Worlds
• Chapter 10: The (Dual) Call to Action
• References
• Appendix A: Research Methodology Overview
• Appendix B: Sample Questionnaire
• Appendix C: Codes Related to Research Question 1: “How do Individuals Understand Their Involvement in Macro-Level Systemic Dynamics?”
• Appendix D: Responses to Question 2: “What did it feel like being a member of your group? Why?”
• Appendix E: Responses to Question 4: “Why did you not break this exercise earlier than when you did?”
• Appendix F: Quantitative Attention Distribution Charts by Exercise
• Appendix G: Qualitative Data Related to Question 3: “In your opinion, what was the most important group? Why?”
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement