The post Courageous Citizenship: Choosing Connection Over Violence appeared first on Braver Angels.

Each is rooted in a commitment to seeing the human dignity in our opponents and healing the divides of society in so doing. But the Nonviolent Movement was the leading edge of the Civil Rights Movement, which was a movement for social justice in American society, while our movement (the Civic Renewal Movement, or alternatively, the Bridging Movement) is a movement to revive (or ignite anew) trust between the American people, and between the people and their institutions. In principle at least these goals should be complimentary. But given the decades old tradition of exploiting the moral standing of Martin Luther King Jr. to legitimize political projects that have had little to do with King, it is worth asking if the connection between the work of Braver Angels and that of Martin Luther King Jr. is in fact a meaningful one. My answer to this question is that it is – and over time is likely to become more so. But it raises in me the question as to Braver Angels predominant influences, to which must be added at least one other name that has also long been questionably appropriated by opportunistic partisans and politicians…and that is the name of Abraham Lincoln. It is from the language of Lincoln that Braver Angels ultimately derives its name, and whose mission to preserve the union of the states serves as a certain backdrop for our own efforts to bridge the partisan divide in the modern day. In the mainstream telling of American history the names of Lincoln and King, separated by a century in their works, are linked in a thread by the issues of race, equality and the goal of reconciling American principles to the living realities of our society. But the ethics and spirit of their practical politics and philosophy also leave a legacy, one that has nurtured the character of Braver Angels at the roots.

A Politics of Empathy

Braver Angels is a community of practice with a mission to mend the wounds that fester between the American people so that democracy itself can endure. We are an ideologically diverse community to our core. As such Braver Angels is influenced by many traditions and many strands of history. Most conspicuously, the influence of Abraham Lincoln looms largest over the founding of Braver Angels. Originally named Better Angels by David Blankenhorn (president and co-founder of Braver Angels), this phrase harkens back to the closing words of Lincoln’s inaugural address, delivered on the cusp of the Civil War, in which he beseeched a divided nation to turn back from the precipice of armed conflict:

            “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln’s pleas failed to steer the United States away from the bloody Armageddon to which it was headed. Yet the United States stands today, functionally united (however tenuously) and though this union was ultimately held together by cannon fire the time that has intervened between now and that historic collision has reinforced the fraternal bonds of American society. For all our great diversity there are overarching themes of American culture that can be identified across geography and generations. The independence of spirit and the resistance to the rigid hierarchies of old Europe that Alexis de Tocqueville identified in America nearly two-hundred years ago still largely characterize the nation we live in today.  The idea of the union, that we are “one nation, under God [though we must grant that the role of God in events grows more controversial as America has become more secular], indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” is a deeply ingrained sentiment that immerged a generation after the Civil War and has generally traveled down with us to the present day.

Perhaps more importantly than any of that however, the interconnectedness of the American people through commerce, culture, and the continuity of time has ensured that we as a people exist in a fabric of relationships that ties us to friends, relatives and associates that defies the expanse of geography and politics. We leave our home states for far flung coasts and regions to go to school. Corporate America calls enterprising Americans from all corners of the nation into its ranks. And the children of immigrants and descendants of slaves wear the uniform of the United States military alongside rural “rednecks” and “good ol’ boys” from the once slave-holding south.

One might still argue the idea that “we are not enemies, but friends,” in Lincoln’s words, is a mere matter of perspective. One could argue that we are both, or neither. As an aspiration and an affirmation, however, this is the perspective we stand upon at Braver Angels.

The relevance of Abraham Lincoln to the spirit of Braver Angels goes beyond grand appreciation of the sanctity of the union and efforts to effectively preserve it. Lincoln also speaks to us in the interpersonal ethos with which he practiced his political craft. As a politician Abraham Lincoln was a uniquely empathetic statesman, and though the word ‘empathy’ was not a part of the lexicon in his time he articulated the value of it in practice nevertheless. In a speech given to the Washingtonian Temperance Society as far back as February 1842 (and back when the Temperance movement was a rising force in the land) Lincoln applauded the swelling influence of that cause. He then attributed much of that success to the shifting of the movement’s leadership away from an old class of “champions” who suffered from “a want of approachability.” For “these champions for the most part, have been Preachers, Lawyers, and hired agents.”

            “The preacher, it is said, advocates, temperance because he is a fanatic, and desires a union of Church and State; the lawyer, from his pride and vanity of hearing himself speak; and the hired agent, for his salary. But when one, who has long been known as a victim of intemperance, bursts the fetters that have bound him, and appears before his neighbors…however simple his language, there is a logic, and an eloquence in it, that few, with human feelings, can resist…Nor can his sincerity in any way be doubted; or his sympathy for those he would persuade to imitate his example, be denied.”

Lincoln continued further to suggest that the old class of champions might have been more effective if they had been less judgmental.

“Too much denunciation against the dram sellers and dram-drinkers was indulged in…When the dram-seller and drinker, were incessantly told, not in the accents of entreaty and persuasion, diffidently addressed by erring man to an erring brother; but in the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation…that they were the authors of all the vice and misery and crime in the land…I say, when they were told all this, and in this way, it is not wonderful that they were slow,..to join the ranks of their denouncers, in a hue and cry against themselves.”

These early insights of Lincoln’s speak to his understanding of the power of fellow feeling in human persuasion. It is through the development of shared feelings that so much of the fabric of human relationships is woven. As David Blankenhorn has written of Lincoln, “This way of thinking meant that Lincoln never treated opponents as enemies. Even during the Civil War, he did not demonize Southerners or the South. He did not view those fighting on the other side as evil.”

Those familiar with the work of Braver Angels know that this is what the foundational layer of our work is dedicated to, through one method or another. Braver Angels Red/Blue Workshop teaches Americans how to question one another’s beliefs in ways that eschew condemnation in favor of curiosity. Our Disagreeing Better workshops train Americans in the art of empathetic communication, stressing the value of accurately paraphrasing the positions of others, listening to hear rather than respond, and more. Though he was an effective debater these softer skills were traits Lincoln possessed in abundance and that made his brand of political communication distinct.

From Trusting People to Trustworthy Institutions

Ultimately, while Braver Angels’ model for social impact begins with the exercise of fellow feeling in civic relationships, it matures in the spreading of this culture of “patriotic empathy” across the landscape of American communities and institutions. Fundamentally, the problem of affective polarization (a polarization based on inter-group alienation as opposed to mere policy disagreements) in America is one of declining trust not only between groups of the American people, but between the American people and their institutions. Rehabilitating trust in our institutions (and making our institutions worthy of that trust) is central to our movements mission because, absent trusted and trustworthy institutions, democracy can only careen into chaos.

This was a topic upon which Abraham Lincoln had much to say even before it became a visceral concern of his eventual presidency. Bemoaning the proliferation of vigilante justice and lawless mobs “from New England to Louisiana” to the Young Men’s Lyceum as a member of the Illinois House of Representatives in 1838, Lincoln sought to educate his audience on the critical need for confidence in our political institutions—a confidence threatened by the inconsistent application of the rule of law:

“I know the American People are much attached to their Government;—I know they would suffer much for its sake;— I know they would endure evils long and patiently, before they would ever think of exchanging it for another. Yet, notwithstanding all this, if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the Government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.”

There are reasonable parallels that could be drawn between Lincoln’s description of a moment of falling trust in institutions and our own, particularly with respect to the rise of mob culture. Federal and state government and law enforcement failures to curb the riots of the summer of 2020 and to protect law abiding citizens in various cities across America deeply diminished confidence in these institutions. (One might also be tempted to cite January 6^th as an example, though the drop in institutional confidence that resulted from that day accrued most specifically to the president.) Rising crime in parts of the country and real or perceived reluctance on the part of public officials to respond fits into this pattern.

But the word ‘mob’ has expanded applications in our own time which serve the basic point even further. From campus mobs to social media mobs ours is a moment where popular anger seems to trump institutional protections of the right to free speech in the eyes of many. When college faculty, corporate leadership and politicians seem to defer to or even abet the demands of offended groups in ways that threaten liberties and livelihoods, institutional confidence also diminishes. Such groups may in fact be righteous in their views. But as Americans have come to feel that certain fundamental liberties “are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob” their affections for American institutions have become alienated in much the way Lincoln suggests.

In a generation where Americans have quickly gone from taking the workings of our institutions for granted to taking it for granted that our institutions don’t work, Braver Angels refuses either posture. Instead, implicit in our culture is an ethic of citizenship—far from a mere legal status, it is roughly the notion that to be a part of democratic society is active participation in the work of self-government and a felt responsibility for the welfare of the nation and its people. It is an applied patriotism that is willing to apply itself from within our institutions and our communities alike.

A Vision of Citizenship

As is often the case with military service, part of what rouses us to greater civic participation is an aspiration to serve a project worth believing in. To be a part of the American story as not merely a passive observer but as one who rose to the challenge of advancing the most audacious experiment in human history, this is one principal motivation that has moved many to the service of their country over the ages, in whatever way that service manifests.

This romantic commitment to the cause of America has had its high and lows tides over the generations. In the revolutionary era, according to Abraham Lincoln, a common drive for social recognition led to the advance of the American experiment. “Then, all that sought celebrity and fame, and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that experiment…Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition…namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves.”

Yet when the experiment was proven successful, when the fledging republic passed the tests facing the new nation and showed that a free people could peaceably pass the torch of power with continuity and legitimacy, the glory to be gained by being a part of proving that experiment in its earliest phases was gone. “The question then, is can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others?” So Lincoln asked. His answer was grim. “Most certainly it cannot.” Lincoln feared the fading glory of the Revolution. Rather, he feared the consequences of its receding beyond the dim reaches of memory.

In our time, however, there are many who claim the Reverend/Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. as our modern American founding father. The Civil Rights Movement, and the period of time extending from 1956 to 1968 (from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the assassination of Dr. King) was a time in which the foundations of American civil rights and the heart of American social conscience were refreshed and revolutionized in ways that new media broadcast unto a newly dawning modern world.

It may not have been lost upon King that the Civil Rights Movement was ushering forth a transformation of the nation’s consciousness that was arguably tantamount to a renewed founding. Looking out upon the assembled hundreds of thousands on the National Mall King referenced Abraham Lincoln in declaring “Fivescore years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”

If Dr. King could be looked at as a modern founder, it is hard to argue that a similar distinction was not attained by President Lincoln a century before. In freeing the slaves and preserving the union, Lincoln shifted the identity of the nation in a manner punctuated by the moral leap forward described by King in these glittering terms. “But one hundred years later,” so King continued, “the Negro still is not free…”

The cause of their time, so King argued before the nation standing before the Lincoln Monument, was to continue onward in stride towards the realization of the American promise—a promise King described in the following way:

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The heroics of that age still reside in living memory. There are still among us Americans who remember Martin Luther King Jr., including some who were there to hear him speak on the National Mall, who marched alongside of him, and who in one way or another were a part of this movement to awaken the conscience of America.

“At the close of that struggle,” Abraham Lincoln said of the Revolutionary War era, “nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family—a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related—a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all…But those histories are gone.”

The living histories of the Civil Rights Era are not quite gone in our time. But they are leaving us, with every passing year, for those eternal shores beyond the oceans of this life. The passing of former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and hero of the Edmund Pettus Bridge John Lewis, in 2020, brought our nation together in mourning in a way that we might now expect to be the case for few living Americans. 2024 saw the home-going of the reverend James Lawson, a leading peer and ally of Dr. King’s. Reverend Jesse Jackson, a younger contemporary of Dr. King’s, still lives and there are others. Of the most preeminent leaders of that movement, however, most of them have by now passed on.

Within Braver Angels however, the living memory of the Nonviolent Movement and the spirit and ethos of Martin Luther King Jr. is kept alive in the person of Harry Boyte Jr., a leading organizer and a professor of Public Work at Augsburg University, and once field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizing poor white southerners in advance of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968 for Dr. King. Boyte’s father, Harry Sr., was one of the sole white members of staff at SCLC, leading dialogue programs across racial lines in ways that would seem to resemble the work of Braver Angels today. Harry Boyte Jr. (whose room adjoined that of Dr. King’s, whom he could hear rehearsing his I Have a Dream Speech through the hotel walls the day before that monumental event) bears witness to the civic organizing work of the movement that instilled a patriotic commitment to traditional civic values of free speech, discussion, and active citizenship through grassroots community organizing.

In an America’s Public Forum program from 2020 Professor Boyte spoke to Braver Angels members about the invitational nature of King’s iconic address and that of the larger strategic framing of the March on Washington of which it was the culmination.

[Bayard Rustin, a principal organizer of the March on Washington and a chief proponent of the philosophy of Nonviolence] “framed the march as a way to have a conversation with the American people. So that’s the way to see King’s great speech…he was actually having a conversation with the American people about what we share…”

This being said, the success of the March on Washington, in Boyte’s recollection, was dependent not merely on the power of King’s visionary eloquence but a larger culture of civic organizing at its foundation.

Thus, “nonviolence was not simply a philosophy that was articulated by great leaders like King…what gave the march its power was the everyday citizens who came from across the country on buses on railroads on cars, sometimes by foot, to be involved. And the program notes of the march read that ‘in a neighborhood dispute there may be stunts, rough words and hot insults but when a whole people speaks to its government the quality of the action and the dialogue needs to reflect the worth of the people and the responsibility of the government.”

This spirit was cultivated across an organizing infrastructure that developed the civic knowledge and character of the marchers and foot soldiers of the movement in what were called “citizenship schools.”

As Boyte explains, “we had over 900 across the south. And they educated people in Nonviolence, they also developed people’s literacy skills to pass the stringent tests, [tests used to disqualify voters of color and sometimes poor white voters in the Jim Crow south] there was historical dimension. Unlike a lot of activists today there was a professed love of America.”

These citizenship schools were “held in church basements and community centers.” Active members of Braver Angels listening to Professor Boyte at this event would no doubt relate to the community based organizing spirit that in our own work often unfolds at libraries, campuses, and churches as well. Braver Angels, holistically, is itself a community that deeply prizes and leans upon civic education in a variety of forms, and in ways that strengthen our understanding of American values, our shared history, and that equips citizens to engage in the difficult work of conversing, debating and organizing across the deep seated tribal/political differences that rend our social fabric here in the 2020’s. Harry Boyte’s living witness to the spirit and culture of the Nonviolent Movement helps solidify our own felt connection to the organizing legacy of this extraordinary social enterprise. In no small way, this helps to preserve in Braver Angels a sense of our own potential to reform the conscience of America in a way that may contribute to a transformation that honors the ideals of the Founding such as the Civil Rights Movement sought to do some 60 years ago.

Redemption and the Braver Angels Way

It is a dramatic understatement to say that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. were challenged by their opponents. But each was also challenged by allies who at times could be adversarial.

For Lincoln, it was the abolitionist faction of his party known as the “Radical Republicans” who scourged him, for whom Lincoln’s efforts were never bold nor decisive enough. As David Blankenhorn explains of Lincoln:

“Within his own party, the ‘Radical Republicans,’ those most fervently opposed to slavery, never trusted him. Lincoln, in turn, considered them unreasonable zealots. He complained to his secretary that they were ‘utterly lawless’ and ‘the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with.’ But he also could admire their idealism and recognize their goodness, explaining to his secretary that ‘after all, their faces are set Zionwards.’”

The second principle of the “Braver Angels Way” states that “we treat people who disagree with us with honesty, dignity and respect.” Though, to allude again to Lincoln, passion may strain the bonds of affection, what we have deeply ingrained at Braver Angels is an understanding that the manner in which we pursue our disagreements determines whether or not disagreements shall break them.

Like Lincoln and the Radical Republicans, King was challenged as moderate and naïve by what would become the Black Power wing of the Civil Rights Movement, as represented in the person of Stokley Carmichael (who succeeded John Lewis as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). The more militant wing that came into its own in 1966 wished for King to abandon Nonviolence as a fundamental commitment and wished to push in the direction of an all-Black movement.

Dr. King reflected upon the rise of these criticisms and sentiments in his book Where Do We Go From Here? During the Mississippi Freedom March of ’66, King recalled hearing SNCC activists exclaiming, “I’m not for that nonviolence stuff any more,” “If one of these damn white Mississippi crackers touches me, I’m gonna knock the hell out of him,” and “We don’t need any more white phonies and liberals invading our movement. This is our march.” As the march matured, unprecedented rhetorical battles broke out between activists, with dueling chants of “Black Power!” being met by retorts of “We shall overcome!” in collisions that threatened to tear the movement apart.

King was heartbroken by the rise of Black Power as a phrase and a rallying cry, and what it signified in the rejection of his commitments to integration and Nonviolence. But while King felt wounded by these developments and was pointed in his criticisms, this did not prevent him from being generous in his expressed understanding of the legitimate feelings that motivated Carmichael and his followers:

“First, it is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment. The Black Power slogan did not spring full grown from the head of some philosophical Zeus. It was born from the wounds of despair and disappointment. It is a cry of daily hurt and persistent pain…If Stokley Carmicahel now says that nonviolence is irrelevant, it is because he, as a dedicated veteran of many battles, has seen with his own eyes the most brutal white violence against Negroes and white civil rights workers, and he has seen it go unpunished.”

Lincoln and King alike were charitable to their enemies. Lincoln and King alike sought to engage those with whom they disagreed. The third principle of the Braver Angels Way states that “we welcome opportunities to engage those with whom we disagree,” and indeed this civic spirit is evidenced in the four hours Dr. King spent seeking persuade Stokley Carmichael from his path in a spirit of friendship, the long hours Abraham Lincoln spent debating Stephen Douglas with civility and sophistication in their legendary debates on the question of slavery in the western territories, Lincoln’s earnest appeals to the humanity of the slave-holding south, and King’s insistence that the way of Nonviolence demanded his followers recognized that those who stood against them were not truly their enemies in the most fundamental sense. They were their opponents, but their mission included not the annihilation, but rather the redemption, of those who stood against them.

In a speech given to the YMCA at UC Berkeley in 1957, King remarked:

“…the nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. This was always a cry that we had to set before people that our aim is not to defeat the white community, not to humiliate the white community, but to win the friendship of all of the persons who had perpetrated this system in the past. The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community…the end is redemption.”

King went on to say that “the nonviolent resister seeks to attack the evil system rather than individuals who happen to be caught up in the system.” In this again, King and Lincoln were of the very same spirit. Speaking of southern defenders of slavery Lincoln once said “We mean to remember that you are as good as we; that there is no difference between us other than the difference of circumstances.” Like King, Lincoln believed that those who were caught in the throes of racism where people who were afflicted with something rather like a disease by which they were made susceptible by the circumstances of the society into which they were enmeshed. Lincoln hoped to free both slaves, and those who believed in slavery, from its evil grip, as King hoped to free both those who were victims of racial segregation as well as those who would uphold it. Each man saw his political foes as redeemable, and calibrated their political language to emphasize this fact.

The Better Angels of our Heritage

The fourth principle of the Braver Angels Way states that “We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to.” What is implicit in this is a recognition of the human worth of those who may disagree with us, even on the most profound issues, and an acceptance of the reality that, as Lincoln made clear, we are all of us human-beings with human failings. Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of Nonviolence rested first and foremost on the virtue of “agape love”—that is to say an overarching goodwill for one’s fellow man regardless of their race, color, creed, or even their political opinion. It was the sort of love demonstrated by Jesus in the gospels, by Gandhi in the struggle for Indian independence, and by anyone who is willing to refrain from hating their opponent in politics and society. even if their opponent should hate them.

Braver Angels, and the Civic Renewal Movement that finds itself nurtured in the wake of our work, is one that is born forth in an effort to heal the wounds of the body politic opened by an ever more polarized political society. These are wounds that tear apart families over questions of justice, questions of morality, in ways that add up to conflicts of identity that produce the collisions of warring political tribes. To reverse this momentum Braver Angels has given life to a suite of workshops and programs aimed to rebuild the bonds of affection between relatives, between friends, between classmates and coworkers, and ordinary Americans at every level of society who have forgotten how to see the good in each other due to the rampant demonization of our times.

But the effort to heal these wounds has always been understood by Braver Angels as the first level of a mission that reaches further upwards into the healing of our institutions and the stabilizing of the pillars by which our republic may hold together. Thus Braver Angels programs and influence reaches into government, academia, media, art and culture, as well as local communities where American life is rooted in place. For, as Lincoln knew well, the institutions of society cannot endure absent the trust and affection of the people they serve. And they fail to be worthy of that trust and affection, society itself may be condemned to the flames of violence and anarchy…at which point our experiment in constitutional democracy may find itself at an end.

But the stability of institutions does suggest the absence of injustice. Indeed powerful institutions may themselves become tools of injustice, as Dr. King well knew. Braver Angels commitment to debate, to fostering consensus on questions of reform, and to elevating the experiences of Americans across the spectrum of social experience in our country stands as testimony to the fact that activism and speaking truth to power (and each other) is the method by which we refresh the American conscience in every age. The question is, can we do so in a way that brings out the best in our opponents and ourselves, as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Nonviolent movement ultimately sought to do?

Ours is a community and a movement unique in American history. I do not mean anything grandiose by that statement. It is a novel movement, small but dynamic, and still finding itself after eight years time. It is a movement predicated on uniting Americans on the basis of our differences politically, but in the conviction that there are deeper values that yet unite us as an American people.

As was written, and voted into approval, in our 2019 Platform by Braver Angels delegates at our 2019 convention in St. Louis, MO:

Proud of our origins, today we dedicate ourselves to the great task before us—to safeguard the spirit of our republic and to preserve its deepest unity. In our politics, let us work together when agreement is found and oppose one another in civility and good faith when it is not. In the work of Braver Angels, let us build trust between individuals and restore trust in our institutions. Let us labor together to discover and cherish our common heritage and identity as Americans. Let us strive as one for the “beloved community” of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s vision and the “more perfect Union” of the Founders’ summoning.

We find ourselves as Americans, in part, by rediscovering the better angels of our common heritage. What the destiny of our work shall be in this modern day is up to we of this generation to make known. But as we do so, let us do so remembering that we are buoyed forward by the moral and civic examples of many might forebearers.

And that among them stand Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

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This past Thursday a jury of 12 rendered its verdict in the New York District Attorney’s case against the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump. The court found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a payment his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. That payment was made in an effort, the prosecution alleged, to mislead voters in the interests of winning the 2016 presidential election.

This is a troubling but historic moment: our leading candidate for president stands as a convicted felon. On this we can all agree.

What we disagree on is why this moment is so troubling.

For some of us, it is the “fact” of Trump’s obvious guilt and that a criminal may retake the White House; one whose multiple and flagrant abuses of the law may be rewarded by the votes of their fellow Americans to the detriment of the nation.

For others, it is the “truth” that Donald Trump was subjected to a political prosecution on flimsy grounds in order to derail his candidacy. The greater indictment, so many of us believe, is not of Donald Trump, but of a corrupt and politicized judicial system in the state of New York.

We can be angry with one another for failing to acknowledge facts and truth as we see them. But our warring convictions arise from compelling stories about this man who, for better or worse, has transformed politics in America.

On the one hand, the rage and frustration that spills out towards the former president from the vast majority of Democrats, many independents, and some disaffected Republicans, arises from a view of Trump as a consummate and corrupt liar going back years before his time in politics, but metastasizing in his performance as a politician and president.

From this point of view, this is a man who lied about Barack Obama’s place of birth to undermine his presidency, who obstructed an FBI investigation into his ties with Russia, who tried intimidating Ukrainian president Vladimir Zolensky to investigate the now current president Joe Biden just as he tried intimidating Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger to find more votes in the state, who lied about and attempted to steal the 2020 election, who provoked an insurrection, who was impeached twice, and who even today is unwilling to accept the outcome of a 2024 election if he should lose. This is a deep and bitter way to feel, full of pain and indignation, about the man who led and may again lead all of us at the helm of the US government and the free world.

Yet it is no less deep and bitter than the grievance felt by the vast majority of Republicans, many independents, and some disaffected Democrats towards the Biden administration, the justice department, and the media they see as accomplices to their corruption.

This is one in which a Washington outsider who dared expose the wrongs of the political establishment found his campaign spied upon at the behest of the Obama administration, found the legitimacy of his election denied over allegations of collusion with Russia that a special counsel investigation admitted it had little evidence to prove, subjected to the indignity of unjust impeachment, and who Joe Biden continues to link to white supremacy even as he declares his support for historically Black colleges and universities and has moved the American embassy back to Jerusalem. And now his political enemies have weaponized the justice system to make him look like a criminal for challenging their own corruption.

As Americans, we tend to live in one of these stories or the other. When you live in a story, that story is compelling. The stories that surround us become the eyes through which we see the world.

Yet the way we see Biden and Trump must not be the way we see each other.

Truth is often different than the stories we tell. But the most false story of all is the one that says the politics of our neighbors render them morally useless as human beings. We can search for truth together in defiance of the powers that profit from our divisions. We can dig for common ground and reform our politics and institutions along those lines. But we can only do this if we perceive enough humanity in one another to extend the hand of goodwill.

This moment marks one more step on the dangerous road that lies before the United States of America. We will cast our ballots as we will. But there is hope for a nation whose people are willing to challenge one another without abandoning the bonds of friendship.

In such a nation truth may gain the final say, the story we ultimately emerge with may be a shared one, and the union of the people may endure.

The post The Conviction appeared first on Braver Angels.

I caught a funny instance of this reading a comment from a conservative Christian account on X (formerly Twitter) recently, who was being accused of anti-semitism for stating “Christ is King.”

“I didn’t mean it that way!” she protested. It was a shame, she argued, because the phrase Christ is King is a simple profession of faith for Christians. Sure, some may use the language as a club against Jews, but it’s important to discern the intention behind the phrase when it is used to understand its true context.

I nodded along in approval.

“It’s not like ‘Black Lives Matter’ after all,” she continued, “which is an obvious statement of Black supremacy.”

I’m afraid I had to stop nodding.

There is no limit to tragic irony in the era of the culture wars. Left and right, when we find ourselves stereotyped and singled out by the other side for misunderstanding what we mean by the words we say, bemoan the fact that our meanings are twisted or that we are lumped in with others who may have much more cynical reasons for using the same or similar words as we do to make a certain point.

“Black Lives Matter never meant only Black lives matter,” many have effectively said. “It means Black lives matter too.”

“Yes, but why say Black lives matter then, when you could have said ‘All Lives Matter?’” others have effectively retorted. Suspicion of the original phrase remained as ‘Black Lives Matter’ fixed itself in the political lexicon, after which the counter phrase of “All Lives Matter” itself took on a reputation as being effectively a statement of white supremacy among many.

How, you ask? Because it was a phrase employed deliberately to distract from the unique dangers facing Black lives in America by people who could not possibly have truly believed that Black Lives Matter was a statement of Black supremacy – at least, according to many people who felt this way about the phrase ‘All Lives Matter.’

As slogans collide in a polarized era, the mass of our distrust grows larger and larger. Our ability to communicate craters beneath the weight of it.

In a moment in which antisemitism seems to be on the rise there is certainly a conversation to be had about the phrase ‘Christ is King’ and the context in which some people are using it. But it is a phrase with a larger history as a mere profession of Christian faith.

George W. Bush once said, “too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” There is something relevant in that here.

We wish for people to see what we truly meant in the words that we say, the good effect we wished to have even in our mistakes. But when we are polarized across tribal lines, we fail to see anything good in the intentions of others…even at times when we are asking for understanding of our views in the same breath.

The answer to this problem must lie in the golden rule; that you must “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” For this must also imply that you must listen to your neighbor with as much understanding as you would have them listen to you.

The post Listening past the slogan appeared first on Braver Angels.

Strange kid, I know.

Early in life it was impressed upon me that America began differently than other countries. Instead of a king we had a president. The president was like the king of America, I thought, but he was different because he won his position by earning the respect of his fellow Americans. I was an American. From that I concluded ‘this man is my leader. He must be a great man. It must be important to listen to whatever he has to say.’ And so I did.

This many years later I actually am of the opinion that President Bush was at least a good man. But that is aside from the point.

Though we are a modern nation, the United States of America still has its pageantry and mythology. Drive through Washington D.C. and you will see statues and monuments to American statesmen and civic leaders array our nation’s capital as a pantheon of heroes. Live on a military base and the golden ring of trumpets will call men and women of arms to salute the flag. When the President of the United States enters the Capitol to address a joint session of congress, he is announced by the House sergeant-at-arms in a booming call: “Mr. (or Madame) Speaker – the President of the United States!”

I quickly learned to be a bit cynical towards all that ceremony, however. By the time I was twelve it was clear to me that the hypocrisy of politics had made mockery of the pageantry. Bill Clinton had lied to the American people, which was bad enough. Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans however had tried to impeach him for this offense, which (in my world) paled before the importance of the good job Clinton was otherwise doing, bringing the business of the American people to a halt.

My father explained to me that the presidency was not revered in the way it once was back when Jack Kennedy (Dad and Grandpa’s hero) held court in the Oval Office. It started with Watergate, and the mischief of Richard Nixon. The public learned not to trust the government, and the media abandoned its deference to the privacy of the President. Americans were dividing. It was sad to see.

Today however there is nostalgia for the 90’s because of how unmoored American politics have become in the present day. It seems strange that some should feel grateful for a time that seemed like a low point when it was actually happening.

Strange – but maybe not strange at all.

When Jack Kennedy was elected Americans lived in fear of nuclear annihilation. His assassination accelerated a decade of social upheaval beyond what we see today. But those years would mark the end of Jim Crow segregation and the beginning of man’s journey into the heavens. The 90’s, for all its challenges (far beyond Clinton/Lewinsky), would hail prosperity, the fall of the Soviet Union and the wonders of the information age.

One day, we will likely look back on the America of the 2020’s with nostalgia as well. The weighty question is simply why?

Will it be because American democracy declines so terribly that these chaotic years will look peaceful by comparison?

Or – will it be because the resiliency of the American people, our culture and our system of government, proved itself capable of triumph in the face of adversity yet again?

This is a question for all ages, and for our own. Through our deeds, we will answer it.

The post How will we look back on the 2020’s? appeared first on Braver Angels.

“My fellow Americans; the issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are,” the president stated. “It’s about how old our ideas are.”

Does President Biden have a point?

Meanwhile, this past week marked Super Tuesday in the presidential primary. In it former-president Donald Trump swept the electoral map, vanquishing his sole remaining Republican opponent, former South Carolina Governor and his own former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, effectively cementing for himself the Republican nomination.

“We are going to make America great again,” the former president declared, “greater than ever before.”

What former president Trump, at 77 years old, has also secured is a rematch with the 81 year old Joe Biden, making this election a contest between the oldest presidents and the oldest presidential candidates in American history. (By contrast, Ronald Reagan was 77 years old at the end of his second term as president.)

This has led many Americans to feel that, simply put, there needs to be an age limit for our presidents. Do you agree? Or is President Biden correct that advanced age ought not be a disqualifier for public service?

This is the question we are wrestling with in our upcoming Braver Angels Debate on the question should there be an age limit for politicians? This question has never been more relevant. Join us this coming March 21st, 8pm EST and lend your voice to the conversation.

In the meantime, you may believe that there are more concerning issues looming ahead of us in the 2024 election. We would like to know what you think they are.

Over the weeks and months to come Braver Angels will be organizing debates, and vehicles for policy discussion and advocacy, that we want to reflect your concerns about the issues facing America. Respond to this email and let us know where your thoughts and priorities for America lie in 2024.

I have never been more excited to be a part of the work of Braver Angels. The focus and energy of our community in response to the cancer of polarization continues to inspire and continues to grow. Goodwill in America will have its say, and the toxicity of our politics will give way to the better angels of our nature so that the American Dream may flourish again.

That may sound like a fantasy. Yet we have accomplished greater things in United States of America. Together we will do so again.

This is the goal that guides us here at Braver Angels.

The post Upcoming debate: should there be an age limit for politicians? appeared first on Braver Angels.

This is February, and so it is Black History Month. Instantiated by scholar and publisher Carter G. Woodson in 1926, Black History Month achieved presidential recognition in 1976 during the presidency of Gerald Ford, who stated: “In the Bicentennial year of our Independence, we can review with admiration the impressive contributions of Black Americans to our national life and culture.” Congress would recognize Black History Month ten years later.

But history, like politics, is not an easy thing to talk about in today’s America. Add the element of race and it can feel nearly impossible. We have seen this dysfunction break into the realms of education and presidential politics. While Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has argued in opposition to AP African-American Studies courses that he and state officials believe traffic in ideological indoctrination through focus on Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory and prison abolition, critics of the erstwhile presidential candidate — including civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump and the Biden administration — have accused him of trying to silence black history itself.

While history should indeed inform our politics, there is something tragic in history itself being politicized. There is also the danger, when it comes to race and history, that we allow ourselves to see some histories as not also being our history as one people in the United States of America. There is a desire to honor Black history in its own right, but a need for us all to be united in honoring the family of lineages that make up America.

As I write this newsletter I find myself listening to the music of “Porgy and Bess,” introduced to me by my father, a white man. Perhaps like myself you grew up listening to the classic American song “Summertime,” which comes from this breakthrough musical set amongst the Black community of “Catfish Row” on the Waterfront of Charleston, South Carolina in the 1920’s. Through my mother I am an African-American, but with my father we all inherited the music of one of America’s first major musical productions of an all Black cast (but composed by the Jewish composer George Gershwin). This music was part of a Black history that in a larger way belonged to all of us.

Can Black history be both Black and American history at the same time? Can it unite us in understanding rather than divide us through politics?

Philosopher, DEI practitioner, founder of the Theory of Enchantment and the platform DOJO! Chloe Valdary claims that the path towards true diversity, equity, and inclusion is to “treat people like human-beings, not political abstractions.” Russell Kirk, founder of the conservative movement in America, wrote in The Conservative Mind that “reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors…is the first principle of all consistent conservative thought.” The author Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name.”

Our histories are the legacies of our ancestors. We cannot make political abstractions out of them without doing so to each other. And while there are many valid debates to be had about the policies of education, let us be humane in honoring the rivers of history from which the ocean of American identity swells…an aspect of which we dedicate special attention to in Black History Month, and all of which we honor here at Braver Angels.

The post Black History Month and the politics of race and education appeared first on Braver Angels.

Braver Angels seeks to rebuild trust between Americans in the context of politics, and between the American people and their vital civic institutions. Yet even as this is true there can be no such trust in the realm of political life without intellectual engagement. The question for Braver Angels therefore becomes how do we advance the work of rebuilding trust in the context of intellectual and ideological debate and discussion? The virtue of intellectual humility is foundational to our capacity to accomplish this.

Braver Angels is not just an organization, it is a mission driven community. It is generally bound by both a love of country and an essential goodwill towards the people of this country (whether they are people we agree with or not). As such, Braver Angels has a creed. That creed is illustrated in what we call the Braver Angels Way:

We state our views freely and fully, without fear.

We treat people who disagree with us with honesty, dignity and respect.

We welcome opportunities to engage those with whom we disagree.

We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to.

We seek to disagree accurately, avoiding exaggeration and stereotypes.

We look for common ground where it exists and, if possible, find ways to work together.

We believe that, in disagreements, both sides share and learn.

In Braver Angels, neither side is teaching the other or giving feedback on how to think or say things differently.

Within the text of the Braver Angels Way one finds statements that are meaningless if they are not founded upon a commitment to intellectual humility.

“We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to.” This statement is a reflection upon our inability to know, or be right about, everything that matters in both politics and life.

“We seek to disagree accurately, avoiding exaggeration and stereotypes.” In this we acknowledge that our own prejudices, the biases of our own emotions, are no fit substitutes for truth (whether these embellished opinions are about issues or people).

“We believe that, in disagreements, both sides share and learn.” This statement asserts that, not only do we know ourselves to be wrong however often merely by virtue of being human, but that those with whom we find ourselves at odds do in fact have things to teach us that we can learn from. It contains a faith in the value of other perspectives that de-centers one’s own opinion in a way that is only possible through an internalization of intellectual humility…

(Read the rest of this special essay on intellectual humility by John Wood Jr. at braverangels.org.)

The post Intellectual humility and Braver Angels appeared first on Braver Angels.

With illegal crossings at our southern border having reached new highs, the federal government has taken an approach to this problem that has left Republicans in particular feeling as if the administration has no interest in solving this problem at all. Asylum seekers are allowed to cross over the border and participate in a process of legal review, during which they are able to stay in the United States.

Dissatisfied that such crossings are allowed to take place in the first place, and having little confidence that these processes will actually lead to meaningful deportations of undocumented/illegal immigrants, Governor Abbott, cheered on by fellow Republican governors, has taken matters into his own hands, summoning the Texas National Guard to erect razor wire along key parts of the border. Though the Supreme Court has overturned a lower court ruling prohibiting federal agents from removing the wire the state of Texas stands undeterred, with Abbot arguing that Texas has the constitutional right to defend its own border from “invasion.” A battle in the Supreme Court over the actual merits of the case is pending, even while efforts at bipartisan legislation appear to be waning in congress.

The federal government and the Texas state government are at odds, but more importantly, so are the American people. To infer from the tone and caliber of our popular conversation on cable news, Twitter and talk radio, this is a battle forced by open-borders leftists who despise the rule of law and care nothing about native-born Americans, or alternatively, by xenophobic rightwingers who want nothing more than to drag brown people and their children kicking and screaming back into Latin America rather than share an ounce of this country’s wealth and opportunity with the people whose ancestors we stole it from.

There is a more accurate story to tell however, and it is a moral imperative that we begin to tell it this way. It is a story of Americans who, on the one hand, have legitimate concerns about our national sovereignty, about the economic opportunities of poor people already living in this country, and who are heartbroken over the deadly influx of substances like fentanyl into the the United States, locked in hard disagreement with Americans who have humanitarian concerns for the welfare of struggling families fleeing violence and poverty beyond our borders, who believe that America is enriched culturally and economically by the contributions of immigrants not so different than our ancestors before us, and who feel we must err on the side of compassion even as we strive to establish a responsible plan for border security and immigration reform.

At Braver Angels we seek to provide a haven for discourse on this issue as with so many others. As a part of this I invite you to join our upcoming national debate on immigration featuring Braver Angels members and leaders from across the country. For even as the hard work of advocacy persists on either side what will empower the pillars of American democracy to remain standing in the aftermath of our debates will be the integrity with which we have them. Let us therefore set an example in how we treat each other on this topic that America can follow.

The post The crisis at the border appeared first on Braver Angels.

Redemption and reconciliation stand as almost alien concepts in our politics today. Recently, footage of comments by President Biden’s science advisor and former director of the National Institute of Health Dr. Francis Collins — who was a lead figure in our COVID-19 response — surfaced and went viral on social media. The footage was from our Braver Angels national convention in Gettysburg this past July, where Collins engaged critics like Wilk Wilkinson and others in conversation about the public health establishment’s response to the pandemic.

Collins’ remarks provoked outrage from throngs of commentators on social media and chastisement from writers in the Wall Street Journal and the National Review. What is interesting about this, however, is that the statements of Collins that sparked this response were remarks of contrition:

“As a guy living inside the Beltway, feeling this sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House…we weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk and his family in Minnesota a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city…if you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. Doesn’t matter what else happens…you attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”

It is rare that a powerful public official admits meaningful mistakes. Francis Collins did so and did so voluntarily. Collins’ engagement with Braver Angels, including many of us who are critical of the institutions he represents, has been gracious. For this, I express my sincere thanks.

A part of me therefore bemoans that this rare moment of public vulnerability has been met with so much unforgiveness by much of the commentariat and public.

Yet it is vital to remember that, while many Americans certainly feel that extended lockdowns were justified given the stakes, many critics of the establishment felt that they themselves stood unforgiven for daring to share what in retrospect may look to others like reasonable concerns about the policy of lockdowns and a culture of censorship that punished dissenters for stepping out of line. One humble statement from Dr. Collins does not undo that feeling.

But the conversation continues. On her most recent two-part installment of A Braver Way,Mónica Guzmán brings together Collins and Travis Tripodi, a Braver Angels grassroots volunteer and adamant critic of the public health establishment, for further debate on our COVID response. Collins and Tripodi challenge each other on the issues, but they also challenge one another to push the bounds of empathy and respect. The result is a discourse that sets a new tone for a deeply difficult conversation. (You can listen to or read the transcripts for Part 1 and Part 2 of these episodes on our website.)

Braver Angels is committed to fostering a fair-minded culture of conversation around what went right and wrong in our COVID response, as well as any deep questions that live at the fault lines of our politics. We are committed to good faith, understanding the need for truth, context and accountability, while striving always for reconciliation in the spirit of Dr. King.

“The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community,” a society in which we have confronted our shortcomings, reckoned with truth, and have made peace with one another. That process is a painful one. But let its goal be the reconciled America that Martin Luther King Jr. hoped for, and a culture of redemption available to all.

The post Redemption and reconciliation: lessons from MLK appeared first on Braver Angels.

It was a unique experience. For all the rooms I’d ever been in across a short career in politics this was the first where the agenda was, purely and simply, to bring the American people together.

That was it. Nothing more, nothing less. In finding a community dedicated to transcending the dividing lines of tribe I realized I had found my own.

Six years later I still feel this way.

Yet, I would be the first to admit that things have come to feel more complicated inside of Braver Angels and outside. As we turn the corner into 2024 it seems evident to me that our journey together is delivering us to a new time of testing. Knowing this, I am filled with some emotion.

We have always known, at Braver Angels, that people of differing parties and differing worldviews can share the strongest bonds if made to see the redeeming humanity beneath their differences. The differences in our politics can be obstacles. But the right attitudes, aided by the right methods, delivers us to an understanding that transcends. When we truly see each other as human beings politics is no barrier to friendship…especially when all we are focused on is the dignity of the man or woman before us.

The trouble is that the fundamental question of the dignity of our fellow Americans is not the only feature of our politics that makes our divisions so bitter.

In principle a liberal may come to love a conservative as a neighbor and friend and vice-versa. Every instance of this is a powerful victory for the ideal of democracy. But despite our love for each other, the differences between us still ripple out into the perils of living questions…questions of justice and injustice, of life and of death.

Can I abide a neighbor who I believe, by her political actions, invites Marxism, or Fascism, to America? Who, even unwittingly, provides aid and comfort to those who cost American lives in a pandemic? Who undermined democracy in 2020? Who cheer the forces of genocide in 2023?

We wound each other in life. Sometimes we wound each other with the noblest intentions.

Understanding this makes it easier to release our contempt for one another. That may not be enough to close the wound. Especially if the actions arising from those intentions continue to cause us pain. As between individuals, so too in politics.

Where then does this leave us?

It has been said that there can be no humility without grace, but that grace has left us in the modern age. As the songs of Christmas linger in the air however, a holiday for religious and non-religious, left and right alike, I am left thinking this may not be true. There is still room for forgiveness in America, and the humility to recall that to be human is to sometimes be in the right and to sometimes be in the wrong.

It is only time and our friends that can show us the difference.

Let Braver Angels be a source of grace, humility and friendship for America in a moment when our country will need it most. And let us be this for each other. Only in this can we arrive at truth together with a love that stops the bleeding.

A very happy new year to you all.

The post How do we close the wounds? appeared first on Braver Angels.

To refer briefly to a foundational piece of wisdom literature, the first Epistle to the Corinthians states that “knowledge puffs up, but love edifies.” Though anti-intellectualism may seem to be on the rise it is perhaps fair to say that we live in a time where facts and information are seen by many to be the answer to problems of severe social and political division. The truth however is more nuanced. Affective polarization is not a phenomenon of misinformation (though this may be both a consequence and a contributing factor) but rather a collapse of trust between opposing groups, as well as between the public and its institutions. Braver Angels seeks to rebuild trust between Americans in the context of politics, and between the American people and their vital civic institutions. Yet even as this is true there can be no such trust in the realm of political life without intellectual engagement. The question for Braver Angels therefore becomes how do we advance the work of rebuilding trust in the context of intellectual and ideological debate and discussion? The virtue of intellectual humility is foundational to our capacity to accomplish this. How intellectual humility expresses itself across the tapestry of Braver Angels activities and grassroots infrastructure building is the focus of this essay.

Braver Angels is not just an organization, it is a mission driven community. It is generally bound by both a love of country and an essential goodwill towards the people of this country (whether they are people we agree with or not). As such, Braver Angels has a creed. That creed is illustrated in what we call the Braver Angels Way:

We state our views freely and fully, without fear.

We treat people who disagree with us with honesty, dignity and respect.

We welcome opportunities to engage those with whom we disagree.

We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to.

We seek to disagree accurately, avoiding exaggeration and stereotypes.

We look for common ground where it exists and, if possible, find ways to work together.

We believe that, in disagreements, both sides share and learn.

In Braver Angels, neither side is teaching the other or giving feedback on how to think or say things differently.

Within the text of the Braver Angels Way one finds statements that are meaningless if they are not founded upon a commitment to intellectual humility.

“We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to.” This statement is a reflection upon our inability to know, or be right about, everything that matters in both politics and life.

“We seek to disagree accurately, avoiding exaggeration and stereotypes.” In this we acknowledge that our own prejudices, the biases of our own emotions, are no fit substitutes for truth (whether these embellished opinions are about issues or people).

“We believe that, in disagreements, both sides share and learn.” This statement asserts that, not only do we know ourselves to be wrong however often merely by virtue of being human, but that those with whom we find ourselves at odds do in fact have things to teach us that we can learn from. It contains a faith in the value of other perspectives that de-centers one’s own opinion in a way that is only possible through an internalization of intellectual humility.

Upon these philosophical foundations Braver Angels community supports and implements a wide range of events, programs, and content creation that cultivates goodwill, trust and understanding across our political divides between individuals and within communities and institutions. While these offerings are dynamic and wide spreading, Braver Angels program work began with a single workshop design. Rooted in principles of family therapy, our “Red/Blue” workshop does not center argument or debate, but rather the elevation of each side’s life experiences in terms of why they see politics the way that they do.

Deference to the validity of “lived” experience is built into the character of Braver Angels workshops. Our workshop offerings have now expanded into a roster of seven group workshops and several other one-to-one scripted conversational offerings focused on differences as varying as race, geography, generation as well as political ideology.

Bill Doherty (noted family therapist, professor of psychology, Braver Angels co-founder and architect of Braver Angels workshops) describes the role of intellectual humility in workshop culture and design in this way:

“Humility about the weaknesses and limitations of one’s own political side is at the heart of Braver Angels workshops. For example, in our red/blue workshop, we pair the question ‘Why are your side’s values and policies good for the country’ with a follow up question, ‘What are your reservations or concerns about your own side?’”

Reflection upon our individual and group capacity for error and imperfection is a consistent feature of Braver Angels’ programmatic culture. This is impossible without a commitment to intellectual humility.

Braver Angels work links personal experiences to narrative, debate and direct civic engagement. In the messaging of Braver Angels there is a focus on challenging Americans to empathize with both sides of an argument (and the experiences that give rise to such arguments) that loudly implies a foundational commitment to intellectual humility.

Braver Angels Instagram page, for example, is replete with quotations from figures in history exhorting us to this effect:

“Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, not absorbed.” – Mary Parker Follett (philosopher).

“The test of a first-rate intellect is that ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

In an essay published as part of a special issue of Deseret Magazine this author, in his role as Braver Angels National Ambassador, talks about his own background as a mixed-race American with an African-American mother from urban Los Angeles who is a democrat and a white father from the south who is a Republican, the challenge of polarization, and the lessons drawn from a life spent learning from the divisions of a polarized family:

“The antidote was in understanding. I carried this attitude with me throughout life right into politics. So in an age where Democrats and Republicans view each other as the enemy, I cannot help but see them as merely Mom and Dad.”

Intellectual humility may come more easily in contexts where there is affection between parties to a disagreement. It is for this reason that goodwill at least also stands as a foundational value of the work of Braver Angels. Yet one of the fruits of such goodwill is intellectual humility. When we have affection for one another it is easier to imagine that we each may have some valid perspective to contribute to a conversation.

That said, in the real world of politics stakes are high, competition is fierce, and material interests are often zero-sum. Politics is not necessarily a natural place to make friends. We must be able to advocate for and defend our points of view on living questions whose consequences matter. Yet even in this truth matters, and so too does our ultimate capacity to trust one another’s intentions across lines of political ideology and “tribal” affiliation. The constructive tension we at Braver Angels seek to restore to the American understanding of civic life is the tension between fierce advocacy on the one hand and winning the interpersonal trust and goodwill of the opposition on the other. Even in the throes of debate, democracy at its best rests on the presupposition that even in conflict we are engaged in a dialectic that moves us collectively towards a greater appreciation of truth. Even in debate then, bonds of civic trust and our collective pursuit of truth are strengthened through intellectual humility.

Braver Angels work extends deeply into the realms of both popular political debate on the one hand and professional political polemics as exist between candidates and elected officials on the other.

The Braver Angels Debates model is predicated upon a commitment to community building and the collective pursuit of truth that is only possible through a commitment to intellectual humility. Based upon the debate format of the Yale Student Union, Braver Angels Debates is a parliamentary process designed to minimize contests of personality while maximizing engagement with ideas and experience. All people in a given room have the opportunity to volunteer to give a speech in support or defense of a given resolution (be it ‘resolved: we should defund the police’ or ‘resolved: America should build a wall along its southern border’). This is itself a marker of intellectual humility in design because this ironclad commitment to inclusion rests in part upon the presupposition that there is something to be learned from everyone in a given discussion, whether we are hearing from a university professor or the janitor. Questioners, when responding to speeches given on the other side, are not allowed to address the speakers directly or by name but rather are required to address their question to the chairperson. (This again keeps the focus on ideas, not on personalities.) Most strikingly, perhaps, participants in these debates are encouraged not only to marshal logic and data in support of their arguments, but to also be candid with respect to doubts they may have about their own arguments, and to be honest about the ways in which they think they might be wrong. In fact participants who begin a debate on one side of a debate are allowed to switch sides during the course of it if they hear something from the opposition that sways their view.

April Lawson, the architect of the Braver Angels Debate format, describes the spirit of the program this way:

“What we think about when we think about Braver Angels Debates is the spirit of it, which is a collective search for truth. So what that means is that we invite everybody into the room to share what they particularly have to say about a topic. They don’t have to be the best spoken person in the world, they don’t have to have lots of statistics. But we do ask that they say what they actually believe.”

Braver Politics, on the other hand, is an effort encompassing a suite of programs aimed at directly impacting the culture of political campaigning in American elections. It includes, among other items, its own debate model specified to candidates and electeds in a manners that focuses in on issues of genuine concern to constituents while discouraging the sort of ad hominem and personal attacks that too often corrupt the competition of ideas in electoral contests. There is a degree to which our overarching Braver Politics initiative can be understood as a direct effort at injecting intellectual humility into electoral politics.

Braver Politics director Elizabeth Doll analyzes the relationship between Braver Politics and intellectual humility in this way:

“One of the most important qualities a public official can have is intellectual humility. Whether supporting and pursuing the best policies or building relationships with constituents, effective work requires a consistent willingness to change your mind (even when you think you’re right), being sure that there are things you can still learn (even – maybe especially – when you already know a lot.)”

Intellectual humility is both a value and a disposition. It reflects an understanding those who have it possess about how we may best channel uncertainty into wisdom. In this it stands as an epistemological conviction. Yet even more so intellectual humility connotes a way of being in the world. Embodied as a virtue it animates the way in which we relate to one another in ways that open up possibilities previously closed to us.

Monica Guzman, Braver Angels senior fellow for public discourse and author of I Never Thought of it That Way: How to have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, has established curiosity as a virtue within the culture of Braver Angels and indeed across the bridging space and beyond. Curiosity allows us to open up space for knowing others and in turn being known be them, diffusing the anxiety that may surround our differences in favor of a clarifying humanization. Yet curiosity as a virtue does not travel far outside the company of intellectual humility. About the relationship between the two Monica says the following:

“Curiosity is a craving for information, for what we don’t understand that we want to understand. Intellectual humility is the capacity to receive information, to hold a posture that lets us stay open to new ideas, even and especially if they challenge us. Curiosity is a very narrow thing without intellectual humility. IH is what turns the tunnels it travels through in search of information into vast landscapes. They strengthen each other, need each other, and work together.”

In the work of Braver Angels, and indeed a larger community of organizations, scholars and practitioners brought together by the work of the Greater Good Science Center and the John Templeton Foundation, we see evidence of a shift towards a renewed appreciation of intellectual humility as both virtue and subject matter in a dynamic landscape of innovators dedicated to constructive social change. This is a trend that must continue if the spirit of American pluralism is ever to overcome the polarization that undermines the foundation of America democracy.

The post Intellectual Humility and Braver Angels appeared first on Braver Angels.

TED is a popular platform for the spreading of ideas through short presentations. They feature amazing speakers from across professions who give thoughtful takes on topics worth discussing.

But the risk of being an organization that discusses ideas, particularly when it comes to race and politics, is that you will find yourself playing host to ideas that people are threatened by. Sometimes they are not merely people in the audience, but people who work with you closely, whose views and contributions you respect.

TED, and its head Chris Anderson, have come under fire in the aftermath of a TED talk given by Coleman Hughes, a young writer and intellectual famous for his critiques of modern racial activism. Coleman’s talk was titled “A Case for Color Blindness.”

In it Coleman argued that people, institutions and society should not center race in the way we engage and afford opportunities for other people, even when the goal is to promote racial equity. Colorblind standards and class-based policies, in Coleman’s view, are a better way of providing opportunity and equal treatment for people of color and humanity in general.

To some this is benign. To others such colorblindness risks ignoring the reality of racism by refusing to acknowledge race. Many of TED’s employees felt this way and asked Chris Anderson not to publish Coleman’s talk.

Ultimately Anderson did publish it, but followed it with a debate on the subject between Coleman and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

No doubt the choice to publish was a disappointment to some at TED. But the hesitation around publishing the talk, ultimately done only on the condition that there would be a follow up debate, has also prompted visceral outrage among those who felt that this presentation should simply have been treated like any other.

Coleman Hughes is a friend of mine. He has appeared in multiple Braver Angels events and podcasts. I consider him to be insightful, respectful and honorable. So I, like many, was very frustrated by the inability of TED to simply air his presentation without pre-conditions.

“At Braver Angels we know well the difficulty that comes with hosting conversations on controversial and (arguably) dangerous subjects.”

However, at Braver Angels we know well the difficulty that comes with hosting conversations on controversial and (arguably) dangerous subjects. We also know the need for us to respect the views and concerns of not only our audiences, but also our colleagues.

In the spring of 2021 Braver Angels was rocked by its own controversy over our decision to hold a debate on voter fraud (and voter suppression) in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Members, funders, volunteers and staff had concerns. Many insisted we not go through with this decision.

Ultimately we did. I believe it proved to be the right decision. Braver Angels’ April Lawson revisits this experience (and more) in this week’s episode of Uniting America.

Part of what you will hear April reflect upon was the need for us to honor both those who felt it was vital that we debate the issue of voter fraud as well as those who felt that we were platforming a discussion that was out of bounds.

Most of us felt it in keeping with our values and mission to go forward with the event. Yet we preceded that with the release of a podcast that was an internal staff debate on the decision to hold the debate on voter fraud.

The view that we shouldn’t debate the issue at all was also highlighted as a part of our featured debate on voter fraud itself.

It is not morally illegitimate to believe certain topics should not be platformed by socially responsible organizations. People have strong reasons for feeling this way.

I almost always disagree with this view. But how can we disregard the views of those who feel this way while in the same breath suggesting all views should be heard?

At Braver Angels we decided to compromise in a way that, in some respects, was similar to what Chris Anderson chose to do at TED.

(It is important to note here with respect to TED, an organization that we at Braver Angels greatly respect, that there are more concerning allegations from Hughes that they have suppressed the circulation of his talk in violation of previous commitments. This I cannot speak to.)

But the compromise we came to in a somewhat similar situation was, in my view, wise, ethical, and advanced our mission. Without satisfying everyone it preserved the unity of our team and allowed us to continue serving America.

American institutions will continue to face these sorts of challenges. Let us strive to meet them with grace.

The post On TED, Braver Angels and the near “cancellation” of Coleman Hughes appeared first on Braver Angels.

We are seeing things in American political life today that are not normal. On Thursday, former President Donald Trump was arrested and booked in Fulton County, GA on charges that he sought to overturn the election results in that state. Trump has already been federally indicted on charges that he attempted to do so across the country (alongside a separate federal indictment and one in New York state).

At a gathering highlighted by the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project a crowd of hundreds erupted in furious celebration as CNN released the mugshot of the former president, glaring grimly into the camera. President Biden, when asked about the photo, remarked with dark humor that Trump was a “handsome” guy. Many will have read satisfaction in the president’s voice.

Yet even as enemies of Trump celebrated, the image inspired renewed devotion in the former president’s supporters. Memes highlighting the image of the president as a persecuted yet undaunted champion of the people are proliferating across the internet. Never before has a photograph proved so instantly iconic. In an era in which the popular credibility of our justice department and our mainstream press has never been lower Trump’s arrest stands to many as a badge of honor.

It is Trump, for many, who stands between us and an authoritarian state. “In the end, they’re not coming after me,” Donald Trump reminded his followers in a defiant speech after the arrest. “They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”

These events are not normal. And yet that is a relative statement. For young Americans, this turn in our politics is normal.

If you were born in 1997 (the beginning of generation “Z”) you may well remember a moment full of hope, for most Americans, in the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. You were 11 years old.

America’s first African-American president running on an inspiring platform of unity and reconciliation, Obama tapped into the desire of Americans to transcend the bitterness of our partisan and cultural divides with a message of “hope and change.”

By the time of his re-election campaign, when you were 15, you may well have felt that all such talk of hope and change had been a farce.

You may have blamed different parties, of course, or heard your parents and others doing so. Some said the Tea Party and congressional Republicans proved there was no making peace with the other side. Others claimed that Barack Obama showed himself to be a divisive radical who preyed on the idealism of the American people to gain power.

Either way the idea of hope and change, for most Americans, was already dead by 2012.

Your first opportunity to vote in a presidential election came when you were 19. In 2016 you were given a historically bitter contest between perhaps the two most unpopular presidential nominees in history: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Allegations of collusion with Russia to interfere with our election on his behalf surrounded Trump. Outrage over alleged falsifying of salacious stories about Trump and Russia joined with derision over Secretary of State Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified emails.

Hillary Clinton lost that election while winning the popular vote. Protestors jammed highways in grievous indignation. The legitimacy of Trump’s election was immediately challenged, ultimately culminating in an impeachment that failed to remove him from office.

President Trump officially lost the 2020 election, but launched a massive effort to investigate, denounce and challenge its results. This effort ended with the storming of Capitol Hill (whether one blamed the president for this or not) by hundreds of Trump’s supporters and a final impeachment that also failed to see his removal.

You are now 26 years old. You have never had the opportunity to vote in a presidential election where the results and the candidates were overwhelmingly accepted as legitimate. You are not likely to get that chance in 2024.

Yet and still, I write you on the eve of the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, delivered at the March on Washington near the apex of the Civil Rights Movement.

In challenging injustices that had stood for hundreds of years, Dr. King and his followers beckoned Americans across the spectrum of race and politics to remember the better angels of their nature in the interests of saving justice and equality in American society.

In mighty ways they succeeded. And their challenge was not necessarily less daunting than our own.

“Our experience as a country reminds us that we are capable of overcoming the mightiest of obstacles.”

Our experience as a country reminds us that we are capable of overcoming the mightiest of obstacles. We can overcome these as well. But whatever your politics, we cannot do it by sinking ever further into the culture of dishonesty and demonization that got us here.

In the words of King: “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”

The Civic Renewal Movement is galvanizing the American people to restore trust in one another, and from this to challenge our leaders and institutions to serve their function and cease inflaming the tribal breakdown of our country.

This battle is a daunting one. But history reminds us that hope will not be denied. No challenge is too great for an American people that remembers her capacity for redemption and unity.

This is the work of Braver Angels. Let us commit to it together.

The post Trump’s arrest and the 60th anniversary of the I Have a Dream speech appeared first on Braver Angels.

The energy of this movement was felt at our national convention, with a passion and creative electricity that inspires us to believe that our small band of patriots and conscientious objectors to the status-quo of polarization really can change the country.

But the energy of this movement is durable by virtue of the structure we build for it. In this sense, the work of Braver Angels is not merely movement building; it is also institution building.

Braver Angels is a community. We are a community within a nation. This great country of more than 330 million people, drawn in their heritage from all corners of the earth, boasts a history rooted in grand idealism and the tragic failings of flawed human-beings.

America’s grand ideals count for nothing if they are not activated through a spirit of community. It is a spirit that can only come through this flawed, cross-racial intersection of humanity we call Americans.

“At the heart of all that civilization has meant and developed is ‘community’ —the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother.”

With the words above (which I quote from a speech entitled The Ethical Demands of Integration) Martin Luther King Jr. offered a vision of democracy resting upon full recognition of human dignity requiring us to be in community with one another. The Nonviolent Movement was a movement for community even as it was a movement for justice. For these two things cannot be long separated if free society is to endure.

Our movement, what we have come to refer to as the Civic Renewal Movement, is itself at heart a movement for community.

Yet ours is a movement that finds its core support not among Americans who agree on the political issues but who disagree on them.

In this it is utterly unique. For what binds us is the goodwill that animated the Nonviolent Movement – not necessarily a consensus on rights and liberties or any other issue set that is usually a requirement for any political movement to get off the ground.

“It is disagreement itself we seek to translate into the stronger bonds of community.“

It is disagreement itself we seek to translate into the stronger bonds of community.

Through “Depolarizing Within” experiences that refresh how we think about each other, “Skills for Bridging the Divide” courses that reset how we speak to each other, “Red/Blue” workshops and “1 to 1 Conversation” models that deepen the way we understand each other, and “Braver Angels Debates” that show us how to argue with each other, we are developing the attitudes, skills and relationships through disagreement itself that we are then able to leverage back out into the landscape of American society in a way that re-humanizes our politics.

As a movement this is novel. Yet there is a type of precedent to be found for the idea of community building through structured disagreement in the very founding of the United States itself.

In American Creation historian Joseph Ellis describes the clash between factions that produced the U.S. Constitution (“nationalists” like George Washington who favored a stronger central government versus “confederationists” likes of Patrick Henry and the most Americans who believed strong government invited the very despotism against which the Revolution was fought).

As Ellis writes, “the argument that triumphed defied logic and the accumulated wisdom of the entire European political tradition, for it made argument itself the answer by creating a framework in which federal and state authority engaged in an ongoing negotiation for supremacy, thereby making the Constitution, like history itself, an argument without end.”

There is no final victory in American life between liberals and conservatives.

Why? Because people are not fundamentally liberals or conservatives. We are neighbors, family, co-workers, and hopefully friends.

The triumph of our movement is not the victory of Republicans over Democrats or vice-versa but the sustained capacity of Republicans, Democrats, and all Americans to live and work alongside each other today, tomorrow, and in the generations to come.

The community we are at Braver Angels, the limbs we have built extending into college campuses; federal, state and local governments; digital media; the world of music; and local communities establishes our ability to sow the seeds of goodwill into the blossoms of better debates, conversations and collaborations across the landscape of American communities and institutions.

It is by energizing our community towards raising up the very institution of Braver Angels itself that we are able to see this work slowly become so many vital threads in the great tapestry of American civic life.

This is what it means to Rise for America: to bring people into a movement that may re-found, in some sense, the civic conscience of America and to build the structures by which we may see this civic renewal unfold.

We are beyond the beginning. But the greater story of Braver Angels is barely starting to be told.

Let us write it as one.

The post What we are building appeared first on Braver Angels.

Ours is not a narrative of a villainous left or an irredeemable right bent on destroying all that is good in this republic. Ours is not a view that gives all power on earth to politicians and denies any agency to the American people to shape our common destiny.

At Braver Angels I think it is fair to say that we believe in the American capacity for good. Moreover, we believe in the power of that goodness. We believe this even as our shared capacity for prejudice and corruption stands ugly and evident in the bitter trenches of our divides.

But within the better angels of our nature lies the formidable powers of wisdom, understanding, courage and compassion. These are the tools by which we bring forth the best in each other to bring forth the best in America.

This past Tuesday former president of the United States Donald J. Trump was arraigned and brought before the magistrate in a federal courtroom in Miami. There he learned, as America would learn, that the former leader of the free world and the leading candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2024 has been indicted on 37 felony counts related to his alleged willful mishandling of classified government documents following his time as president.

Onlookers from across the spectrum describe the former president’s legal jeopardy as very real. What is also very real is the fact that, though done through the independent offices of the Special Counsel, the prosecution of Donald J. Trump has been sanctioned by the Justice Department serving within the administration of President Joseph R. Biden. The federal government under Biden is wielding the powers of the law against the sitting president’s primary political rival in a high stakes legal struggle that parallels the contest over who will lead America.

“This is beyond ordinary politics. This is a moment unlike any we have ever been in as a nation before.“

This is beyond ordinary politics. This is a moment unlike any we have ever been in as a nation before. One thing of course is certain: our divisions continue to deepen.

To tens of millions of Americans President Trump is a champion. He stands as the bulwark against the rising tyranny of the left. This unequal application of justice, never considered for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden for similar transgressions, is being used as a pretext to destroy the one man who can save America.

Tens of millions of other Americans, meanwhile, see this offense as but one more landmark in a long trail of corruption and abuses by former president Trump for which only the powers of justice can hold him accountable. President Biden stands between America and a perverse and fascistic movement that will unravel the fabric of democracy should they ever again gain hold of power.

Yet each side is united in seeing the other as holding itself and its leaders above the law.

At Braver Angels we hold all of these views and a universe of nuance in between. All that makes us different is that we understand that the reasons we hold for seeing politics as we do are deeply held, and interwoven with experiences living life in America that are inscrutable absent the keen eye of empathy.

Understanding the humanity in our differences, we do not see them as negating the deep good of which we are capable should we only choose to see the good in each other.

And so, we choose to see the good.

Will you be at the Braver Angels Convention? Come next month following the Independence Day holiday we will convene as Americans left, right and center, young and old, religious and secular from BLM to MAGA, to challenge each other to understand each other at the site of one of the great battlegrounds of the Civil War.

We will use the tools we have honed through the work of our brave community of volunteers to till the soil for a bright and resilient American future.

We will speak the truth to one another in fierceness and friendship. And we will celebrate the fact that in the heart of our turmoil the friendship of the American people thrives in Gettysburg.

We don’t know what the future holds. But at Braver Angels we do know that it depends upon our willingness to hold true to each other in the face of the forces that divide us.

It will take patriotism. It will take empathy. It will take bravery.

But these are the things in which we believe at Braver Angels.

The post The indictment of Donald Trump appeared first on Braver Angels.

This means we use the labels “red” and “blue” a lot, and if you’ve been with us any length of time you’ve probably found yourself thinking about those colors more than you have since rummaging through crayon boxes in kindergarten.

This focus on red and blue leaves some people to ask thoughtful questions about the implications of our language. As much as Braver Angels seeks to tend to the left/right divide in America, we also have a natural appeal to independents and anyone who seeks to challenge or organize outside of the strict partisan binary of our two party system.

So is Braver Angels a home for independents, members of the Green Party, Libertarian Party, etc.? Absolutely. Our focus on red and blue is not meant to exclude others, and it’s important for us to make that as clear as we can as often as we can.

But sometimes I am confronted with another, perhaps more philosophically fundamental critique. And that is, isn’t Braver Angels reinforcing the very psychological polarization we exist to counter by leaning so heavily on these differentiating labels?

My answer to this critique has tended to be practical: labels are dangerous, but they are also necessary. The differences between us are real, as is the tendency on the part of many to actually want to actively identify with the side that speaks to their political values. We have to be able to identify our differences clearly if we wish to communicate about them and potentially transcend them.

But even while I think that is true, even at Braver Angels we have to guard ourself against the temptation to shorthand the actual thought and character of real human beings through labels and stereotypes. It is too easy to slip into not to be taken care against.

(By the way, this was an important theme of my recent conversations with Senators Tammy Baldwin and Susan Collins about polarization and their successful sponsorship of the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act – you can read more about that in my latest column for USA Today.)

I was reminded of this while listening to a song submitted for our Braver Angels Songwriting Contest in my capacity as a music judge. As it played, my first though was that the song was “blue,” not that this meant anything good or bad…I was just prone to notice. But as the melody began to move me and the lyrics spoke to my soul, the thought that replaced it was “no…this song is beautiful.” Art transcends red and blue. And so does the goodness of the human soul.

We may need labels like “red” and “blue” to do what we do. But let us never confuse our labels with the truth of who we actually are.

So this note is just a reminder to myself as well as to you. We may need labels like “red” and “blue” to do what we do. But let us never confuse our labels with the truth of who we actually are.

That too is part of what makes us Braver Angels.

The post Learning and unlearning red and blue appeared first on Braver Angels.

They would seem to have nothing to do with each other. Yet in each of them I observe a legacy of conscience and independence that bears witness to a deeper understanding of what it is to be an American.

Tim Keller was a voice of conscience in evangelical America, and a man who paid a price for his independence of mind. I knew Tim, though not well. In my exposure to him, I noted the lament with which he looked upon an evangelical movement that he felt had forsaken true Christian charity for political ideology.

The author of The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, and literally dozens of other books, Keller in recent years came under fire by others in the evangelical movement for his criticisms of its embrace of President Trump and a politics he believed were out of step with Christian conscience.

I did not know Jim Brown personally, but I do know that he was an icon in American life. Not unlike his younger peer in national sports, Muhammad Ali, the three-time MVP award winner and Super Bowl champion put his name and voice forward in support of civil rights.

For decades, Brown’s leadership in the Black community has been recognized. But his stature as a civil rights activist and icon did not prevent him from being sharply criticized for public encouraging President Donald Trump.

“I should be criticizing Trump at every level because he does certain things that call for criticism,” Brown said. “But when I look at television I see all these announcers become experts and they’re pointing the fingers and they’re not doing a doggone thing but pointing their fingers, I find myself really pulling for the president.”

They were not afraid to sacrifice their reputations on their side of the political and cultural divide because they were also men of conviction and conscience.

Tim Keller and Jim Brown were men with starkly different politics and experiences. They were not afraid to sacrifice their reputations on their side of the political and cultural divide because they were also men of conviction and conscience. They showed an independence of thought that demonstrates something central to the American character – a willingness to defy the expectations of others in order to do what you feel is right.

I doubt Brown and Keller ever met, and it’s likely that no one has ever associated one with the other in print before the day that marked their passing. But it seems proper to me to note that between the two of them, they show us that courage and conscience are virtues that cross the divide.

The post The America of Tim Keller and Jim Brown appeared first on Braver Angels.

What will it take for us to embrace a culture of goodwill in American life and American politics? What will it take for us to heal the wounds of our society? 

There are many ideas and solutions on offer. Some say it will take electoral reform. Some say it will take a change in institutional incentives. Some argue that we need to abandon the left/right paradigm. And some will say we need the work of groups like Braver Angels.

But… maybe we need Jesus?

This is the message of the He Gets Us campaign, which has launched a massive, one-hundred-million-dollar ad campaign to “rebrand” Jesus in America. 

With beautifully-produced commercials that aired to an audience of nearly one-hundred-million viewers during the Super Bowl, the people behind He Gets Us presented a Jesus whose teachings and example, they stressed, are the answer to America’s deep-seated polarization. 

“Jesus loved the people we hate,” declared the ending text of one of the two Super Bowl advertisements, after a montage of images depicting bitter social conflict in the United States rolled. 

“He gets us. All of us.” The ad calls upon us, in the words of the Bible, to “Love your enemies.”

For many people, religious and non-religious, it was an uplifting message.

Yet there was serious backlash to the commercial, and the backlash itself came from remarkably far across the spectrum. 

Superstar progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took issue with the ad on Twitter, stating “Something tells me Jesus would not spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign.” 

AOC was preceded, however, by leading conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, who declared “The marketing group behind ‘He Gets Us’ has done one of the worst services to Christianity in the modern era. The Green family are decent and wonderful people who have been taken for a ride by these woke tricksters!”

The Green family refers to the family of David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby, the arts and crafts corporation known by many for their tremendous financial support of socially conservative causes, including pro-life activism and efforts opposing the redefinition of marriage.

For the many Americans who simply thought the commercials to be positive or well-meaning, both Kirk’s and AOC’s reactions were confusing. The financial connection to the Green Family and other conservative interests does, however, give context to Ocasio-Cortez’s reaction. 

Yet many conservative Christians such as Kirk were just as offended by a portrayal of Jesus that made no mention of Jesus as messiah, no mention of Jesus as the enemy of sin, no mention of Jesus as the only path to salvation, no mention of Jesus as “the way, and the truth, and the life.”

I can understand these views. But I wonder if our insistence on purity of political association and purity of theology alike both do not stand in the way of our building a trust between each other as Americans that can allow us to overcome the political bitterness that really is undoing the fabric of American life?

A cultural moment like the Super Bowl brings together the very broadest collection of Americans imaginable. As we watch the game (not to mention the halftime show and the commercials) we sit alongside each other, with all our political and religious differences, bound up together in this unofficial but very real American ritual. It is remarkable how popular culture affords a moment for us to tap, however perfectly or imperfectly, into the timeless teachings of a figure in Jesus of Nazareth, who speaks to us as if from beyond time.

To many, it is dangerous to mix popular culture with the realm of the holy, but maybe there is promise for healing in precisely this mix. 

(That is certainly the view of Chloe Valdary, innovator of the Theory of Enchantment and my most recent guest on Uniting America, whose invitational approach to diversity, equity and inclusion shines light on the human condition by recognizing the transcendent truths that connect pop-culture and ancient wisdom. For those interested in fixing DEI, the Kingdom of God, and the spiritual dimensions of our political and racial divides, it is not a conversation to miss.)

For myself, I am a Christian. I am a Christian who believes in the separation of church and state, one who believes that we ought to be able to hear a message from a person or organization even if we do not agree with all of their politics, and I am certainly a Christian who believes that Jesus cannot quite be captured by a 60-second commercial, no matter how much money is spent on it.

But if I want to see Jesus in the political conversation a bit more, it is only because I, like many Christians and many non-Christians, believe that loving one’s neighbor and loving one’s enemies is the way to a better world.

This belief that love can transcend our differences is a belief that yet binds many Christians and non-Christians alike. We need love if we are to heal America. And we need the teachings and exemplars of love to come forth from our heritage to show us the way to mend.

We do need love and forgiveness in America.

Is it wrong therefore to say that we need Jesus too?

-John Wood Jr., National Ambassador, Braver Angels

The post Can Jesus Cross Our Divides? appeared first on Braver Angels.

Editor’s Note: A version of this piece was originally published by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, available here. -LNP

I wasn’t aware of it at the time. But looking back on my suburban upbringing in 1990’s Los Angeles it is clear that I grew up upon the foundation of a sort of end of history thesis with respect to race. Race, biological fiction though it may be, had existed as social reality in the past and continued to exist as an aesthetic and something of a cultural differentiator in the present. Yet we had reached Dr. King’s Promised Land on the question of whether or not race determined anybody’s value or treatment in society.

            ‘End of history’ theses posit that at a certain point the social and political order of society reaches an ideal state (i.e. some form of liberal democracy, as argued by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man), at which sustained progress is only a matter of continuing to build upon this order. Growing up half Black and half White (or half African-American and half Anglo-American to be more specific) with extended family from across Latin-America in the multicultural, liberal suburb of Culver City, California it was not so much easy for me to embrace the colorblind paradigm of racial tolerance as it was impossible to see outside of it. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 his election seemed to crown this happy understanding of our social reality.

            Beyond the borders of my understanding, however, from Black and brown inner-cities to White and Asian suburbs lay a nation that was steering away from complacent acceptance of our claims to a racially well-adjusted status-quo and towards a visceral reckoning with the reality of whiteness.

            An unstable element in the periodic table of our political awareness, as common as carbon in composing the molecules that make up our social reality in the eyes of some, White supremacy, White privilege and White identity itself is oft regarded as the acute toxin perpetuating injustice and inequality in society. We can say that the problem is racism. But in the antiracist awakening of America it is whiteness, we feel ourselves learning, that is the spirit that animates the racist structures of America and the western world. Hence a focus on racism is futile if one is not more specifically concerned with the abolition of White supremacy.

            But the question of whiteness is a profound one, arching over history, society, psychology and identity. Is whiteness a cancer? A legitimate identity? Or is it just another divisive racial category that obscures the value of the individual?

            The answer is complicated for a Black man like me.

            I WASN’T ALWAYS BLACK. I wasn’t always White either. For the first five years of my life in fact I do not recall having a racial identity. And when I did finally get one it happened to fall outside of the usual categories.

            Skin color was always interesting to me because our home had so many of them. My mother was some shade of milk chocolate, my father a more beige sort of hue. My brother and I fell somewhere in between. This fact became significant to me when I realized that most families I observed seemed to generally be colored the same. So one day I found my dad in the kitchen as he made himself a sandwich and I asked him a question.

            “Dad,” I started. “Mom is Black, right?”

            Dad paused and looked at me. “Yes.”

            “And you’re White, right?”

            “Yes,” he responded, studying me.

            “Well, if you’re White and Mom’s Black…then what does that make me?”

            I remember my father smiling as he turned towards me. “Well can’t you tell?” he asked.

            No, I answered. He knelt down and took the palm of my right hand between his fingertips. Holding my palm to face forward he lifted my hand so that the back of it rose to my line of sight, that I might see clearly the color of me.

            “You’re tan!” he answered.

            “I’m tan?” I responded. I looked at my hand. Made sense. “Tan” seemed to describe where I fell on the color spectrum.

            “You’re tan,” Dad repeated. And so for the next two years of my life my self-professed racial identification to anybody who would ask was “tan.”

            At some point I was disabused of the notion that this was a legitimate racial category. I was mixed perhaps. But Black kids I knew knew themselves to be Black. And if you were light-skinned or “high-yellow” or mixed-Black like I was, well, you were Black too. That’s not to say no one ever called me White. Black kids would (usually by saying “you’re so White”) as a way of commenting on my speech, dress or taste in music. Some White kids would as a way of highlighting the fact that I was really more like them then other people my color. (“John’s as White as I am” or, alternatively “John’s not really Black.”) But the circumstance that made any of these jabs relevant was that I was really Black…at least technically.

            At a certain point however I wanted to be more than technically Black; I wanted to be authentically so.

            So began a journey for me which involved changing my body language, my dialect, even the way I dressed, so that at least when around other Black people I would not find myself on the outskirts of “blackness.”

            Given the time and place, the idea of authentic blackness that I sought to step into was inextricably bound to the trappings of Hip-Hop culture. In this my identity journey was not unlike that of author Thomas Chatterton Williams, who in reflecting on his own coming of age experience as a mixed-race Black teenager wrote, “If it is true that it feels good to look good, then it is equally true that it can feel gangsta to look gangsta…” I had uncles who were rappers. They were from the hood. Blackness in the eyes of my peers was the embodiment or at least the approximation of the sort of swagger life in the streets had taught others of my relatives to master.

            By the age of 13 I thought I was getting a handle on this. Pride in my blackness became important to announce, important to signal, especially among Black peers whose acceptance I craved.

            There was one kid in particular whose respect as a Black man I hoped to earn. Tony was a star on campus; a Hollywood smile, moves on the basketball court and threads like one of the guys from the R&B boy band B2K, Tony was everything I thought I wanted to be. That is to say, nobody questioned his Blackness. And yet, like myself, Tony was half-White. But that was only a technical matter. Tony was vibrationally Black, essentially Black and qualitatively Black. And that’s what I wanted to be.

            Then one day I found myself sitting next to Tony at the beginning of class. Others were milling about and taking their seats coming back from lunch. We spoke a little bit and somehow found ourselves on the subject of being Black. I took the opportunity to play up my own blackness for him, to boldly declare how proud I was of being Black…and to do so in a lingo that would drive my authenticity home for him.

            Tony listened to me, nodding his head patiently. “Yeah. I’m proud of being Black too,” he started. “But don’t ever forget, you’re just as White as you are Black. Just like I am. And you should be proud of that as well.”

            He turned to face the teacher as class started. But Tony had left me stunned, my conscience convicted. In seeking to play up my blackness and obscure my whiteness had I diminished an entire side of my being? Beyond simply not being true to myself was I dishonoring the White father who raised me with as much love and as much pride as my Black mother? Was I dishonoring my father’s entire family, our lineage, the grandparents and ancestors I’d heard stories about who were as much the reason for my existence as my mother’s ancestors? It seemed to me that I was and that this was a terrible shame. It was in that moment that I made up my mind to be as proud of being White as I was of being Black—and to never lose sight of the equal honor both cultural identities were entitled to hold in my mind.

            FROM THAT DAY until now I have thought of myself as being White as well as being Black, not just technically but meaningfully. This consciousness does not follow automatically from the mere fact of being biracial, clearly. Williams writes in Losing My Cool, “Despite my mother’s being White, we were a Black and not an interracial family…My parents adhered to a strict and unified philosophy of race, the contents of which boil down to the following: There is no such thing as being half-White, for Black, they explained, is less a biological category than a social one.”

            True as this may be for some this particular way of viewing Black racial reality held in place the one drop rule of racial identification that my interracial family ultimately, if tacitly, rejected. I was Black and White and would remain so.

            This principled conviction that I was my father’s son, however, did not in and of itself reveal to me the substance of whiteness as even a cultural differentiator. A picture formed within me and a White experience took shape. But the question of what Whiteness actually is remains here to be answered.

            It is important to recognize the fact that, while the identity aspect of this question may seem naturally relevant to White people and perhaps even to some mixed White people such as myself, there is a deep and often uncomfortable question of identity within the heart of the Black experience that is left unanswerable absent a reflection on the American experience of being White.

            Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed to this reality in Where Do We Go From Here, published in 1967:

            “The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity and even the food of America are an amalgam of Black and White…This is the dilemma of being a Negro in America. In physical as well as cultural terms every Negro is a little bit colored and a little bit White. In our search for identity we must recognize this dilemma.”

            This desire to shake our Whiteness, at the very least the desire to not be perceived as insufficiently Black as a consequence of presumed White cultural influence, is not a feature of the Black experience reserved solely for conspicuously biracial Black people such as myself. Nor is it limited to the ultimately parochial contrast between White culture and the urban-centered culture of 90’s Hip-Hop.

            Bertrand Cooper, writing for Current Affairs, recalls the example of John McWhorter. McWhorter has admitted that, earlier in his career, he feared publicly debating Michael Eric Dyson because of his sense that he would be perceived as insufficiently Black given his academic demeanor and middle-class origins in contrast to Professor’s Dyson’s Black Baptist preacher-style of speaking. Cooper cites the example of the Nigerian-American writer Ijeoma Oluo, who has written about the “difference between the expectations of the type of Black we were supposed to be, and the type of Black we were—which was Black nerds raised by a White woman in a poor White neighborhood.”

            Yet even as some Black people seek to dissociate themselves from the perception of having been culturally adulterated (or psychologically “colonized”) by whiteness, so too do many white people either seek this distance from whiteness as well, or feel shrunken by the void that the lack of a positive racial identity seems to leave.

            As someone who was trying to demonstrate his pride in Blackness it was easy for me to observe that, to a certain degree at least, racial pride was social currency within African-American culture both at school and beyond. Yet it took my conscious decision to embrace my White identity for me to fully realize that there was not even the shadow of an equivalence to the bold racial pride experienced by Blacks in my school among Whites in the same classrooms. I may have been the only student in my high school who actively took pride in being White—a fact that was only possible because I was also Black.

            There were indeed White kids who wanted to be Black however. This expressed itself in some of my suburban White classmate’s culture shocking their parents’ homes, dressing in baggy jeans and backwards caps, blasting rap music and passing the n-word back and forth amongst themselves and maybe a protective circle of Black friends who might let them get away with it.

            Shy of this flattering cultural appropriation however there was merely a longing to experience the cultural solidarity that Black people so easily took refuge in. It is a longing that led a White boy sitting behind me at a graduation ceremony to grumble “I wish I was Black” as every White kid crossing the stage received her diploma to polite applause, whereas almost every Black kid to get hers received a field-filling, rapturous roar from the booming minority of Black students and family members scattered across the bleachers. The larger part of the student body and the audience was White, but Black pride literally reverberated through the stands.

            “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab onto,” wrote Christian Lander, author of the popular satirical blog and later best-selling book Stuff White People Like. “Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language.”

            Of course, Lander and I both grew up in liberal Los Angeles. White people in other parts of America respond to the cultural mainstream’s moral and social repudiation of Whiteness with a reactionary embrace of White identity that, in its worst form, continues a centuries old tradition of White racial terrorism right into episodes like Charlottesville. It echoes forth in the chants of “You will not replace us!” In this we hear the paranoia of a people who believe themselves to be shoved to the margins of American life, madly flinging themselves off these social cliffs for fear of being pushed.

            Yet for all the ethnic cultural envy one can point to, particularly among more progressive leaning White people of recent generations, critical race theorists and White studies scholars stand in agreement in observing a steel thread connecting the psychology of overt White supremacists to that of the broader psychology of White America. This thread is the romanticization of Whiteness, the expectation that White identity should be rewarded, and the real (whether loud or silent) consensus that it is the culture of Whiteness that must determine the ultimate distribution of power within American institutional society.

            It is here that we come to the substance of whiteness, to reckon with it as both reality and illusion.

            WHITENESS IS A REALITY. Or at least, the term “whiteness” points to some things that are very real, both in the currents of history and contemporary American society. It is vital that these dynamics be both understood and responded to. But the concept of whiteness is also, if not an illusion, than an obscurant as well. (I mean this with respect to whiteness as both a thing with which people identify as well as a force to which people are opposed.) Our emphasis on whiteness hides as much as it reveals, both about the American people as well as the social reality in which we live.

            There is a history to whiteness. A slow and unevenly emergent pan-European identity began to be brought into stark relief in the idea of the shared racial identity of “White” during the crescendo of the African slave trade. The latter had everything to do with the former.

            It would be hard to add to the scholarship on this, so well established it seems to be. In the American colonies in particular the tying of slavery to racial identity and the institution of the racial caste system that would continue into the founding of the United States (despite its flagrant contradiction of the idea that “all men are created equal,” entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”) served to protect the economic interests of particularly the landed, southern elite. It did so by providing a social status to poorer White Americans that would give them something to lose in establishing common cause with enslaved Africans. This caste system, having entered the law principally to justify slavery, expanded to separate and then absorb other identity groups whose whiteness would seem to have been further removed from that of the Anglo-Saxon bulk of the British settler population and their descendants. Over time this included the Irish, Italians, Greeks, and even Slavs and other Eastern Europeans. This gradual expansion of the concept of whiteness within the realm of American law corresponded to a larger cultural integration of various European descended peoples whose children and grandchildren intermingled and intermarried with “White” Americans. Through both breeding and simple cultural immersion they became “White” themselves.

            Critical Race Theory and related scholarship tracks the legal and larger institutional development of American society as the structural manifestation of this consciousness. It assumes this reality, and charts it, not until 1865 or 1965, but to the present day.

            As Michelle Alexander writes in a recent foreword for Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well:

            “Yes, the old Jim Crow system of legal segregation was officially ended by a carefully crafted legal campaign combined with an extraordinary, multiracial grassroots movement. But it is also true that less than two decades later public schools resegregated, and a new system of racial and social control was born in the United States-a system of mass incarceration that swept millions of poor people and people of color behind bars…stripping them of the very civil and human rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement…”

            She quotes Bryan Stevenson, saying “slavery didn’t end in 1865. It evolved.”

            To say that slavery merely evolved after 1865 is true perhaps in the most technical sense. It is certainly true in the metaphorical sense, in the way that Dr. King meant it when he declared during the I Have a Dream Speech of 1963 that 100 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation “the Negro still is not free.”

            What becomes more questionable in the minds of some (and conspicuously at odds with the oft heard claim that arguments against racism are not arguments against racist people but merely against racist systems) is the connection of this history and present circumstances to the larger psychology of White America generally. To them historic racial oppression, possibly merely misguided contemporary public policies and the occasional, innocent faux pas of millions of ordinary White people become crudely forced together in an overarching narrative of White supremacy in a manner that leaves most White people feeling unjustly maligned.

            One hears this narrative spelled out in all its punch and poignancy in the first episode of the Netflix original series Dear White People, through the words of the shows protagonist, Black campus activist Samantha White:

            “Dear White people…I get that being reduced to a race-based generalization is a new and devastating experience for some of you. But here’s the difference: my jokes don’t incarcerate your youth at alarming rates, or make it unsafe for you to walk around your neighborhoods. But yours do. When you mock or belittle us, you enforce an existing system.”

            Samantha goes on to connect White college students showing up to a Halloween party in blackface with the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland and Philando Castile.

            For many White people this juxtaposition seems arbitrary. Stereotyping is a rude fact of life but everybody deals with it. Microaggressions are not real, and if they are they have nothing to do with the larger inequities of society.

            One can indeed take issue with this narrative. But these juxtapositions, so random to many mostly White people, are eminently obvious to most African-Americans and other people of color.

            Part of the difficulty many White Americans have had in understanding the present state of particularly Black American struggles and grievances is that we (I do say “we”) fail to see the larger reality of American life for Black people beyond the contrary proof points of Black Americans such as myself.

            Growing up in Culver City I experienced a richly tolerant, multicultural universe in which I was treated well by kind White people who loved, respected and saw themselves as one with people of all colors. This is a fair description of the reality I remember. But I was set apart in my circumstances, and in the treatment I received, from other Black kids my age because my cultural bearings were largely a product of this very culture of integration. I spoke (at my father’s insistence) “the king’s English.” Until my performative Hip-Hop phase I dressed out of something more or less like an Old Navy catalogue. I had a standard, “White” name and was well adjusted.

            I was easier to understand and easier to deal with then the Jamals, Hakeems, Tamikas and Latoyas that were bused into my suburban school from the inner-city parts of L.A. that most of my relatives lived in. To this day I operate culturally in a manner that yields me an appreciative ease in the attitudes of certain White individuals and institutional environments on account of that bearing. Black cultural idioms and mannerisms are etched in my personality. But a la John McWhorter, Wayne Brady, Condoleezza Rice and any number of Black people one can name, my “Whiteness” whether natural or performative is seen as the currency by which I gain entre into the privileged treatment of American society.

            To some degree at least they are surely right. Yet while this is just a way to be, or to aspire to be, for some Black people many others see this Americanization (in its White-cultured sense) of Blackness and the opportunity it yields for some Blacks as a threat to the larger ascendency of the entire race.

            This is the dual consciousness that both King and (Ibram X.) Kendi have talked about from one angle or another. Derek Bell gives voice to the critical appraisal of the cultural integrationist side of this consciousness in Faces when, in illustrating a conversation between two Black men from either side of this divide, he writes: “I mean no offense, but the fact is you movin-on-up black folks hurt us everyday blacks simply by being successful.” In this analysis Black people like me become the unfair standard by which other Black people are judged, rendering the more authentic Black experience, culture and struggle comfortably invisible to complacent White folks by virtue of the proximity of our own success to theirs.

            In other words, a few of us Blacks have achieved success in America by managing to submerge ourselves in the homogenizing stew of cultural (though never racial) whiteness, just like the Irish and Italians before us. But unlike them, we can only ever be exceptions to the rule because whiteness is itself only real in opposition to blackness. Our success as individual Black people can only ever truly come in the context of the larger marginalization of Black America—whether we are Larry Elder or Barack Obama.

            WHAT I AM describing is the Black experience, or much of it, as it exists in interaction with, and on the other side of, whiteness. The consequences of whiteness for so many Black people and other people of color therefore become the only meaningful thing defining whiteness. How could it be any other way?

            Early in American colonial history the identity system by which slavery was justified was not based on race but rather on religion. Africans were eligible for slavery not because they were Black but because they were not Christians. As pressure to convert Africans to Christianity threatened to undermine this justification however the racial rationale for bondage became the more sustainable premise for enslavement. Thus was innovated what historian Edmund Morgan described as “a screen of racial contempt” that would justify the vicious subjugation of Africans in America for centuries to come.

            This screen of racial contempt exists within the larger mesh of what is in truth the screen of whiteness. Whiteness is, at the end of the day, not but a screen. It is a thin frame through which one sees. Through one side one sees people of color and the non-white world. Through the other one sees the white race and the world that whiteness is said to shape. Through this frame we are also liable to see ourselves. There is nothing inside of the screen itself. But we struggle with what the screen shows us from either side of its divided illusions.

            Whiteness is purity. Whiteness is virtue. The mythology of the superior race (its vestiges sputtering traceably into the present in episodes like the Good Morning D.C. anchors hailing pseudo-scientific studies asserting beauty standards that only White women can meet) one might think to be a psychological gift to those in a position to receive it. But the screen of whiteness has proven itself a cruel burden.

            The White supremacist order demanded the sacrifice of more than a million White Americans killed, wounded, sickened or starved during the Civil War. The razing of the south still lives in the cultural memory of southern whites. Slavery itself robbed White workers of economic opportunity; subsequently racism in the labor movement, it has long been argued at least, undermined the economic interests of working class Whites by diminishing the bargaining power of labor for generations. But perhaps more than anything it is the legacy of guilt, shame, and for many the willing disassociation with their own ancestors and heritage that defines much of the burden for White people that whiteness has left us with.

            There is much that is right and much that is wrong in this impulse. But one can see the wrestling of conscience that leads to this place drawn out over the long arc of American history.

            One can obviously see this unfolding in the rising Abolitionist and Civil Rights Movements that, taken together, have nearly as deep a history in our nation as racism itself. But it is in the internal conflicts with whiteness within White people who are not activists wherein this struggle is perhaps most poignant. This is because it is in such cases where we see whiteness as an ideology of racial superiority slowly undermined by people who naturally take for granted that they must have allegiance to the concept.

            Such was the case with a young woman named Harriet Ruggles Gold whose short life spanned the early decades of the 19^th century. The daughter of a prominent religious family in Cornwall, Connecticut, she fell in love with the nephew of the chief of the Cherokee nation, a young man named Elias Boudinot. They met through the missionary school her family supported to help cultivate Christian learning in the leading young of the Cherokee. However a love affair and marriage between Boudinot’s cousin and another prominent daughter of the community had already scandalized the town, threatening violence in response and the ruination of the Foreign Mission School. Yet despite the threats of the mob, the protestations of her parents and minister, and her own racial status as a White woman, Harriet held fast to her love and the convictions upon which it rested. She married Elias in 1826, telling her parents: “We have vowed, and our vows are heard in Heaven; color is nothing to me; his soul is as white as mine.”

            Harriet would live the rest of her short years amongst the Cherokee, and would die with the Cherokee Nation. As the Cherokee were driven out of Georgia, terrorized, despoiled of their land and riches, and divided by political intrigues nudged by the outside, Harriet fell ill. She passed away under the gaze of her loving husband. He wrote to her parents in Christian prose, “her immortal spirit forsook its early home to join the righteous and just men made perfect, and ‘to sing the conqueror’s song.’”

            Why should his soul have been “white” modern readers might ask? But in her love Harriet was driven to see Elias’ character and to recognize that whiteness was transcended by the substance of humanity—an affront to the very concept of White superiority itself.

            I remember being a boy, reading about the retired, undefeated heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries, reclining in his Alfalfa farm in tranquil obesity. Jeffries was not a White nationalist, not a member of the Klan. But he had participated in the embargo on Black fighters in heavyweight championship fights—a policy meant to ensure that a Black man would never win the ultimate symbol of athletic glory.

            The charismatic Jack Johnson however, rallying public pressure, had seized that prize in a dominant performance against Jeffries successor, Tommy Burns. Jeffries had no interest in coming out of retirement and was conflicted about the pressure he felt to do so. But called upon to defend the honor of the White race he slimmed down and emerged from retirement, only to be dispatched by the matchless Johnson on July 4^th, 1910.

            Black people celebrated. Many Whites raged. The outcome should not have surprised sober observers, but what may have were Jeffries’ words in the aftermath: “I could never have whipped Johnson at my best…I could never have reached him in a thousand years.”

            Taken in context these words were startling. In his time Jim Jeffries was considered the greatest boxer in history, the iconic embodiment of White manhood. He fought, pushed though he was, to defend the honor of whiteness. He could easily have blamed his loss on age. Instead he freely chose to acknowledge that Johnson was the better man—and in so doing undermined the very premise of the White supremacy he fought for; an ideology that was willing to sacrifice a quiet man content on his farm to a brutal battle of fists that he could never win.

            About a hundred years later, in 2013, country singer Braid Paisley joined forces with rapper LL Cool J to release a Country-Rap song called Accidental Racist. It portrayed a conversation between a White southerner and a “Black Yankee” reaching out across the chasms of history and experience to set aside racism in favor of friendship and understanding.

            The song’s reception was highly critical, with many racial commentators lambasting the false equivalencies between Black and White racism they saw the lyrics as trafficking in.

            But I at least am grateful for the effort. For if one listens one hears in Paisley’s lyrics the honest struggling with whiteness, history and White identity that has led most of White America to morally grow in the shadow of its burden. And ironically, this growth becomes partially definitive of the White experience itself. So it is apparently for “a proud rebel son with an ol’ can of worms, lookin’ like I got a lot to learn.”

            The song continues:

            “I’m just a white man, comin’ to you from the southland, trying to understand what it’s like not to be. I’m proud of where I’m from, but not everything we’ve done, and it ain’t like you and me can rewrite history. Our generation didn’t start this nation. We’re still pickin’ up the pieces, walkin’ on eggshells, fightin’ over yesterday, and caught somewhere between southern pride and southern blame.”

            THE FIGHT IS not merely over yesterday, of course. The fight is over today. Whiteness as a social construct in American history has yielded a centuries old story of oppression, struggle and inequality for African-Americans and other people of color that in one way or another travels right down to the present day. In this “whiteness” is the enemy.

            And yet, the story of White people is far more complicated, defined not just by moral failing but by moral progress. This progress has always been pushed by minorities willing to take up the cause of their own equality. But the story of White America is not just the story of slaveholders and the Klan, Lilly White Republicanism and minstrel shows, police brutality and gentrification.

            The story of White America is also found in the abolitionist movement and the antiracism of progressive liberalism. It is found in the integration of the Church and the de-whitening of Christ in the revivalist movements of the early 20th century and the crusades of Billy Graham. It is found in the revolutionizing of Hollywood in the embrace of multiculturalism. It is found in the White allies for Civil Rights who took to the streets before the death of King and after the death of George Floyd. It is indeed found in the words of the Declaration Independence that “all men are created equal.” And—yes damn it, yes—it is found in the election of Barack Obama, where millions of White Americans from every region and both parties decided to make a man who would have been a slave at this nation’s founding the symbol of America to all the world.

            Am I proud to be White?

            I see the damage whiteness has done. I see, perhaps, the damage it is still doing. One thing I know above all is that America is right to center its social energies on the uncompleted work of realizing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream; not a colorblind America so much as an America in which justice and freedom confront the ancient inequities of our racial caste system to produce a world in which we can be reconciled to each other in a beloved community of equals.

            But I remain proud to be my father’s son; a White man who sees himself as such who raised me to be proud of my Blackness, and the intersection of culture and identities that makes each of us Americans.

            There may come a day when whiteness is destroyed in the conceptual lexicon. We may one day return to being Anglo, Italian, Irish or simply European Americans. More likely than not the label of White will continue to be an identifier for many or most of those who have used it for 400 hundred years, while others will try to move through the world discarding racial labels altogether, as much as the world will allow them to.

            Let history take its course. What matters more is that we see beyond the screen of whiteness to the more complicated and yet more hopeful realities of the full lived experience of Americans on either side of this tragic divide. And as far as the people we call White are concerned, there have always been those among us, consciously and subconsciously, who have sought to transcend the false veneer of White supremacy in the name of greater humanist and religious ideals.

            Our numbers have, and only ever have, grown across the generations right on up to now. I am proud of that.

The post The Screen of Whiteness appeared first on Braver Angels.

Nevertheless I, too, have a history with abortion. It has left a mark on my life in ways I have never widely shared.

A sleepless night

When I was still a teenager I found myself in a relationship that resulted in a pregnancy. My partner was adamant — she wanted to have her baby. How could I argue? It was her choice, I believed. And on some level I wanted to have the baby as well.

But I was also scared, more scared than I had ever been of anything. I remember lying awake in my bed that night thinking. My heart raced and my sweat was cold. I was a mediocre student whose performance never lived up to his potential. I had never had a job. How could I, with a partner little more prepared than I was, raise a child?

I imagined the disappointment of my parents, my grandparents. Would they think I had thrown my future away? I considered everything I didn’t know about raising children, and the scariness of what I did know: long, sleepless nights, the full and unending dedication to the wellbeing of someone other than myself.

Tears rolled down my cheeks. I didn’t sleep at all.

And yet, as the sun rose, I knew one thing for certain: we would love this child. So would our families. In this love was an opportunity for me to grow. And as the morning light streamed in through my window, I told myself that I was ready even if I wasn’t ready. I would embrace the craft of being a father.

The phone rang.

I answered it quickly. My girlfriend spoke, her voice small and sullen.

“I talked to my mom,” she said. “I’m not going to have the baby. We’re going to get it taken care of.”

“Oh,” I responded. “Do you – do you want me to go with you?”

“No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

She hung up. I breathed a sigh of relief… and uncertainty.

What might have been

In the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I have discovered feelings in myself that I scarcely remembered were there. They have been the cause of profound reflection.

My experience with abortion has not led to the moral certainty others possess on this issue.

In the years since, I believe I have come closer to being the man that that teenage boy dreamed he might be. I have traveled America, found fulfillment in deeply meaningful work, and have raised three children with the woman of my dreams. And though I haven’t seen my then-girlfriend in years, I know that she came to raise a beautiful family as well.

These things may never have been if she had gone with her first mind. The counsel of her mother may have saved us from a life in which we never realized the dreams that would one day come true. In this, our story is a hopeful argument for choice.

Yet it may also have been that the vow I made to myself to stand by my child would have made me a better person… and sooner. My girlfriend and I could have had a family of our own, and maybe we would have brought out the best in each other. That child would have been the center of a universe of love.

Instead, the dashed dreams of what could be were replaced by mournful thoughts of what might have been. In this, our story is a tearful tale in favor of life.

Of one thing I am certain: I cannot hate my fellow Americans who have dedicated their lives to either side of this issue. I am asking you not to as well.

A deep humanity, divided

Healing is still possible.

We can reach beyond our divisions to create a society in which children brought into the world by parents who are not ready will nevertheless be cared for. We can grow into a nation where we love with compassion those among us who make choices that we disagree with, but who may still bear wounds from which they must heal.

Let us become a country where we do not stigmatize each other for our deeply held convictions. Let us be a nation in which we reason together, seeking to persuade from a place of kindness and goodwill.

There is deep humanity on each side of this divide.

Raise your voice for what you believe is true. But remember that this is true as well.

It is this remembrance that we stand for at Braver Angels. It is this conviction that we carry with us into this Independence Day and every patriotic holiday thereafter.

The post Living the humanity of life and choice appeared first on Braver Angels.

But is that the type of attitude that can get you elected to Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate seat in today’s divided America?

In this first-ever candidate interview on The Braver Angels Podcast, Steven Olikara gives us the backstory of his relationship to democracy through his love of jazz, his work in the field of depolarization, and his experiences on the campaign trail.

Learn more about Steven’s campaign: www.stevenolikara.com 

Twitter: @braverangels, @StevenOlikara, @JohnRWoodJr

The post From the Depolarization Movement to the U.S. Senate? | Steven Olikara with John Wood Jr. appeared first on Braver Angels.

In such a world facts have to matter. But before we can get there we have to be able to restore trust in one another. Only through the rekindling of social trust will we be able to reason together once again.

We cannot trust each other if we cannot tolerate the differences in our points of view. Still, aren’t some views wrong and perhaps dangerous as well?

Braver Angels members and followers deserve a clear understanding of the principles that guide us. That is why we have published these Braver Angels Guidelines on Tolerance so that everyone who participates in and observes Braver Angels may understand exactly what informs our editorial and programming decisions.

At Braver Angels we do not shy away from discussing controversial and difficult issues. In the past this has included subjects ranging from whether or not the United States is a white supremacist society to exploring the issues of alleged voter fraud and voter suppression in the 2020 election. But as you will observe in our guidelines, we do not engage controversies for controversy’s sake. We talk about the issues that actively divide the American people; the very subjects we need to be in communication over if we are to understand each other enough to heal the wounds between us.

Please take a look at the guidelines linked to above and let us know your thoughts, agreements and concerns. Braver Angels continues to evolve, as we all do, in the work of bridging the divide. This work is neither easy, nor simple. But the moving that rises from it promises to revive the heart of goodwill in America. It is through this transformation that the promise of democracy survives.

Happy Easter (or Resurrection Sunday) to all those who may be celebrating. May the hope that fills you this day be a gift to us all.

The post Introducing the Braver Angels Guidelines on Tolerance appeared first on Braver Angels.

Jackson stands to be the first African-American woman appointed to the Supreme Court. She stands on the precipice of being a historic first, and for many African-American women in particular they see themselves and their own struggles in her.

For many who have forged careers in predominantly white spaces and paths through predominantly white institutions, this includes a sense that they have been demeaned and disrespected because of their race. Persistent Republican questioning on subjects that many liberal commentators felt to be irrelevant to the question of her judicial competence evoke familiar feelings of having to patiently endure condescension whereas a white man might be allowed to respond with righteous anger.

“Brett Kavanaugh was allowed to do that, to show his righteous indignation,” the New York Times quotes Professor Andra Gillespie, a black woman, as saying. “But if Ketanji Brown Jackson had done that, we’d be talking about the angry black woman being temperamentally unfit.”

No doubt many black women and others felt this way observing parts of these hearings, a significant part of which included references to the prior confirmation hearings for Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh…references that many democrats considered to be irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Yet for Republicans, the experience of Brett Kavanaugh was highly relevant in a way that is of a piece with the way that many on the right are experiencing the coverage of these confirmation hearings now.

In an age where many conservative leaning and white Americans feel themselves presumed to be misogynist and racist merely on account of their politics, race or gender, the accusations leveled against Kavanaugh and the outrage they engendered seemed a product not of the credibility of the evidence put forward against him but rather a smear on his character allowed only because he was a conservative white man.
Thus writes Isaac Schorr and Britney Bernstein at National Review “…Brett Kavanaugh, endured hell when Democrats abandoned any sense of objectivity, taking an uncorroborated allegation of sexual assault from thirty years ago and treated it as the gospel truth.” Commenting on hearings in which Republican senators opened by praising Jackson for her personal charm and the historic nature of her nomination Schorr and Bernstein conclude by saying “Ketanji Brown Jackson will no doubt face some tough lines of questioning over the course of her confirmation process, but she should wake up every day this week thanking God she wasn’t nominated by a Republican.”

We can argue with the validity of each others claims. But the validity of our experiences, whether or not they arise in part at least out of misinterpretations, must be addressed with a humility that recognizes that the bias that affects the human condition is not merely an affliction of my opponent but is something I am vulnerable to as well.

Yet if we can take heart from these hearings it is because of the humanity that shines through even our flawed elected officials.

Corey Booker and Ted Cruz alike have been ridiculed by their opposing sides for their conduct whether in these hearings or in those of Brett Kavanaugh. Yet, though differing with Cruz, Booker stated for Justice Jackson and all to hear with respect to the Texas Senator that Ted Cruz “…is my friend. He is my friend, I like him…in this culture of tribal politics, the reality is we know each other, we get to know each other over years, and I’ve had the privilege of working with Ted on a lot of really good policy.”

It may not seem like much…but in a sense it is everything. When the bonds of affection break entirely, contempt and even violence bleed between us. It is through hearing one another that we begin to move back towards friendship. And that is a cause we can never abandon.

The post Ketanji Brown Jackson and the prism of experience appeared first on Braver Angels.

Week before last we released a podcast with Professor John Sybley Butler of 1776 Unites (to which I contribute) and the University of Texas. Professor Butler is a leading historian of black business in America, and argues that our understanding of black history and the road to progress is incomplete without a celebration of the long history of black entrepreneurship, self-sufficient communities, and triumphs over racism.

Next week we will be releasing an interview I conducted with Joy Donnell (a previous guest of the podcast) co-founder of the Center for Intersectional Media and Entertainment, who led us through an exploration of the historic racism of Hollywood, the dynamics of colorism, and the ways in which, in her view, the legacy of racism in the entertainment industry continue to shape the culture of the motion picture industry to this very day.

This week we released an interview with Lorenzo Murphy, once righthand man to one of the most powerful drug dealers in America during the crack cocaine era: Freeway Rick Ross. The crack era gave rise to the phenomenon of mass incarceration, the decline of inner-city life and a new age of distrust between African-American communities and police. Our current controversies over race cannot be understood without an understanding of what happened to America—and black America—during this particular period of time.

Butler, Donnell and Murphy, not to mention myself, all occupy different places on the spectrum of black experience in America. Our lives and studies tell different tales.

Professor Butler is a man from the south who, upon attending college in the 60’s was not the first or second but in fact the fourth generation of his family to do so. Poverty and marginalization scarcely touched his black experience…even in the days of Jim Crow. This leads him to reject narratives of victimhood and patronization.

Joy Donnell is the daughter of accomplished, socially ascendant parents from the south. She found success in Los Angeles and the 21st century world of media and public relations, but has endured the frustrations of lack of representation and subtle prejudice in the often largely white spaces she has integrated. This has spurred her passion for equity.

Lorenzo is from poverty in Los Angeles, grew up witnessing bitter violence from neighbors and police alike, and like disproportionately many in black America has a life in part defined by experience in the criminal justice system. This has set the stage for a story of both regret and redemption; a desire to criticize a country he feels took from him while giving back to communities he knows he took from.

There are those on the right and left who will seek to simplify the black experience to terms suitable to making all black life a didactic lesson in the callousness of conservatism or the reprobation of liberalism. But the black experience is complicated enough to merit understanding in all its dimensions. Black lives matter enough to view black life through prisms more concerned with truth than with the political interests of professional Democrats and Republicans.

This holds true for all groups of Americans. But having done only a little to explore black history during black history month, we nevertheless embrace the greater need to explore the dynamics of black life and history in America throughout the year and as a part of our greater body of discourse here at Braver Angels.

Why is this? The question of the black experience in America is vital to the larger conversation over America and race. The future of our understanding of the question of race is key to the future of America, just as it has always been.

At Braver Angels, let us have this conversation in a way that sets an example for America. Let us challenge each other towards truth with trust…and towards understanding with goodwill.

More on this in the weeks to come.

-John Wood Jr., National Ambassador

The post The crack cocaine era and the spectrum of black experience appeared first on Braver Angels.

Week before last we released a podcast with Professor John Sybley Butler of 1776 Unites (to which I contribute) and the University of Texas. Professor Butler is a leading historian of black business in America, and argues that our understanding of black history and the road to progress is incomplete without a celebration of the long history of black entrepreneurship, self-sufficient communities, and triumphs over racism.

Next week we will be releasing an interview I conducted with Joy Donnell (a previous guest of the podcast) co-founder of the Center for Intersectional Media and Entertainment, who led us through an exploration of the historic racism of Hollywood, the dynamics of colorism, and the ways in which, in her view, the legacy of racism in the entertainment industry continue to shape the culture of the motion picture industry to this very day.

This week we released an interview with Lorenzo Murphy, once righthand man to one of the most powerful drug dealers in America during the crack cocaine era: Freeway Rick Ross. The crack era gave rise to the phenomenon of mass incarceration, the decline of inner-city life and a new age of distrust between African-American communities and police. Our current controversies over race cannot be understood without an understanding of what happened to America—and black America—during this particular period of time.

Butler, Donnell and Murphy, not to mention myself, all occupy different places on the spectrum of black experience in America. Our lives and studies tell different tales.

Professor Butler is a man from the south who, upon attending college in the 60’s was not the first or second but in fact the fourth generation of his family to do so. Poverty and marginalization scarcely touched his black experience…even in the days of Jim Crow. This leads him to reject narratives of victimhood and patronization.

Joy Donnell is the daughter of accomplished, socially ascendant parents from the south. She found success in Los Angeles and the 21st century world of media and public relations, but has endured the frustrations of lack of representation and subtle prejudice in the often largely white spaces she has integrated. This has spurred her passion for equity.

Lorenzo is from poverty in Los Angeles, grew up witnessing bitter violence from neighbors and police alike, and like disproportionately many in black America has a life in part defined by experience in the criminal justice system. This has set the stage for a story of both regret and redemption; a desire to criticize a country he feels took from him while giving back to communities he knows he took from.

There are those on the right and left who will seek to simplify the black experience to terms suitable to making all black life a didactic lesson in the callousness of conservatism or the reprobation of liberalism. But the black experience is complicated enough to merit understanding in all its dimensions. Black lives matter enough to view black life through prisms more concerned with truth than with the political interests of professional Democrats and Republicans.

This holds true for all groups of Americans. But having done only a little to explore black history during black history month, we nevertheless embrace the greater need to explore the dynamics of black life and history in America throughout the year and as a part of our greater body of discourse here at Braver Angels.

Why is this? The question of the black experience in America is vital to the larger conversation over America and race. The future of our understanding of the question of race is key to the future of America, just as it has always been.

At Braver Angels, let us have this conversation in a way that sets an example for America. Let us challenge each other towards truth with trust…and towards understanding with goodwill.

More on this in the weeks to come.

-John Wood Jr., National Ambassador

The post The crack cocaine era and the spectrum of black experience appeared first on Braver Angels.

I received a message recently from a friend of mine at a prominent university. The campus was in uproar over incidents of anti-Asian hate speech by a member of the student body. It was interesting to note, however, a subtle divide—between Asian student activists assertively demanding change from the administration alongside traditional activist groups, and traditional Asian student organizations who eschewed demonstration in favor of quiet talks with college officials as a means of addressing the problem.

That did not surprise me. It points to the delicate relationship that exists between Asian-American identity, black culture, the culture of black activism, and black cultural activism’s power to adjust mainstream American social norms as effectively as popular black culture has otherwise inspired them.

Joe Rogan is no stranger to controversy. But after already having diplomatically avoided explicit contrition in response to charges of spreading misinformation with respect to the COVID-19 vaccine, the world’s most popular podcaster then offered a fulsome apology for his history of using the N-word. A highlight reel of Rogan liberally employing the term was compiled and published in light of the other controversies surrounding him. Of the video, Rogan said “it looks f***ing horrible, even to me. I know that to most people there is no context where a white person is ever allowed to say that word…I agree with that now.”

I imagine Mr. Rogan is perfectly sincere in his apology. Given that it seems he never used the term maliciously, some are arguing such repentance should not be necessary. Whether necessary or not however, Rogan’s apology demonstrates the immense social pressure that comes down upon Americans for racist behavior generally and perhaps for anti-black racism in particular. This has to do with the fact that the modern antiracist movement, while intersectional, is largely a product of a fierce tradition of activism in Black America that has come to inform the larger culture of social justice for all marginalized groups in the present day. This leads to sensitive cultural conflicts that most Americans never consider, including between African-Americans and Asian-Americans.

Another celebrity who has recently had to navigate very different charges of anti-blackness is the popular actress Nora Lum, popularly known as “Awkwafina” (Crazy Rich Asians, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.) After she called out the longtime Hollywood practice of casting Asian actors to fit clumsy stereotypes using stereotypical accents, Awkwafina came under fire by activists, including many African-Americans, for hypocrisy. She herself is widely understood to employ a “blaccent”— simply put, many people thinks she talks Black. It is a part of the personality that has gained her success in the entertainment business. And many now feel this success is exploitative.

It’s true that Nora Lum speaks in a dialect that could easily be called black, but it might be more appropriate to call it a dialect inspired by Hip-Hop culture. Hip-Hop is so closely related to urban black culture, in the modern American mind, that there is a degree to which all this may sound redundant.

Yet as Awkwafina pleaded the purity of her intentions, as Rogan did in his response, she made reference to her “immigrant background,” “the movies and TV shows I watched,” and “the children I went to public school with” as allowing her “to carve out an American identity.”

She went on to say: “…as a group, Asian-Americans are still trying to figure out what that journey means for them—what is correct and where they don’t belong.”

In her Twitter response Awkwafina went out of her way to express deep empathy for the black experience and what she feels to be the reality of systemic racism, without ever actually apologizing for her way of speaking. That left many dissatisfied. But Awkwafina grew up in Queens in the 90’s and early 2000’s. She was surrounded by black and brown kids listening to Hip-Hop, melting into the culture that enveloped her and finding a home in it. On some level, is she now being asked to apologize for her very identity? Is her very identity on some level exploitative appropriation of the culture of others?

On the group level the relationship between Black Americans and Asian-Americans is more complicated than many people realize. As a young black boy in a multicultural suburb, it just so happened to be the case that most of my closest friends were Asian. I was surrounded by Korean kids who excelled on the basketball court and by Filipino kids who rapped and dressed in baggy pants. For that matter, I also knew white kids who had “n-word passes”—white kids who wielded an “urban” dialect and used the n-word freely within their circle of black friends (and for Joe Rogan, a person who established himself as a young comic in the close company of black comedians like Dave Chappelle, I can imagine how his comfort with the term might have evolved).

All of this was incredibly normal to me, given where I grew up. As I grew older, and moved into a predominantly black neighborhood, the tensions between Korean (and Indian and Pakistani) shop owners and black people in the community became visible to me.

“Can’t stand these Asians!” I recall a middle-aged black man in front of a liquor store shouting following an argument with the attendant or store owner. “They wanna hide behind us in prison, but treat us like sh*t on the outside!”

He was referring to a phenomenon where, in prison life, because tribal associations are so often necessary for survival, outnumbered Asians will sometimes ally themselves with black prisoners against other groups. (Similarly, whites who have no history of white supremacist prejudice or affiliation have been known to join ranks with white supremacist groups in prison as a matter of survival.) The fact that Asians own far more businesses per capita in inner-city black communities sets the stage for the friction “on the outside” that the man referred to.

But outside of poorer communities, these tense dynamics between blacks and Asians often persist, and along similar lines. Like other groups who advocate for equity and justice within the broader rubric of antiracism, and like other groups who have been historically marginalized in American history, Asian activists have pledged themselves in a common cause with African-Americans in intersectional coalitions aiming at social justice. Yet immigrant Asian communities have embraced assimilation into mainstream academic and institutional culture traditionally, an approach that, in spite of racism, has represented a path forward for Asians in the United States. Meantime many black Americans feel (for many historical reasons) that this approach has been unavailable to most people of our hue. As such, the idea of Asians as the “model minority” points to a deeper comfort or investment in the norms and structures of white society that make Asians unreliable or even opportunistic allies in the larger fight for racial justice. Some Asian-American student activists have even said this about their own communities.

Yet who is to judge? There are no villains in this story. It is true that African-American culture—through food, song, dance and so much more—has authentically inspired non-black Americans and enriched American and even global society, even as many African-Americans have felt that their very culture has been commodified, diminished and exploited by powers that neither truly understand nor respect it. It is true that Asian-Americans have an American experience that has been marked by the bitter sting of racial oppression in ways that are reminiscent of the struggles of African-Americans, while also having a unique (and, within the catchall category of “Asian,” incredibly diverse) American experience unto themselves that differentiates the Asian community’s relationship to black and white America from black and white Americans’ relationship to each other. And it is true that Asian-Americans, white Americans, and all Americans are grappling with shifting norms over race and language that present no easy answers as to how we reconcile cultural sensitivity with our right to free expression when we feel our hearts are in the right place.        

This is why, as important as it may be for us to reflect on or challenge the behavior of others, we must also we abide by the moral wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote “…the important thing about a man is not his specificity but his fundamentum, not the texture of his skin but the quality of his soul.” That may sound like just another King quote. But think about its implications; that the quality of one’s soul bespeaks the purity of one’s intentions. It does not mean that one does not make mistakes. But we all make mistakes; a changing world ensures that we will continue to make them, and that they will not be easy to see in the moments when they are made. This is true for black, white, Asian, Latino and all of us alike. We all must hold the balance. When we believe we are right we must advocate, or defend ourselves, with the courage of our convictions. When we see that we are wrong, we must have the humility to apologize. But most of all, when others acknowledge their mistakes, we must have the decency to forgive. In an ever more diverse and complicated society such as ours, it is only through the balm of understanding and forgiveness that we may nurture our way towards liberty and justice for all.

The post Awkwafina and the Conflicts of Assimilation appeared first on Braver Angels.

YouTube drew a line on Braver Angels. Our recent Braver Angels Podcast featured conservative scholar Peter Wood, a member of the Braver Angels Scholars Council, who believes many of the conspiratorial claims made by allies of former president Trump about the events of January 6, 2021, and the 2020 election. Ciaran O’Connor, our CMO, couldn’t have seen things more differently. But to Ciaran and Peter, it is necessary for us to listen to what each other has to say in the course of learning how to relate to each other as human beings again.

Our differences do not disappear when we deplatform people, or cut them out of our lives. So how can we contend with the differences that challenge us so deeply? How can we do so while being responsible to the public good?

This isn’t a simple issue. There may be good reasons why certain views cannot gain expression in certain places. The desire to ensure that perspectives deemed false or damaging for public health and democracy stay in check does not, by and large, arise from a mean-spirited authoritarianism in the hearts of our fellow Americans. It comes from an earnest concern for justice, truth and the lives of our neighbors. We know that many who work at platforms like YouTube share this concern—and are grateful they do. We share it, too.

But for the work of Braver Angels and the future of democracy, limiting conversation in order to protect people from the consequences of false ideas also prevents people from being exposed to true ones (from whatever side they may come).

More importantly, this pattern of censure prevents us from establishing the relationships of trust that might allow us to rebuild confidence in each other again…and thereby also in our fellow Americans who populate the institutions that anchor our democracy.

This is what we stand for at Braver Angels. If we do not, who will?

— John Wood Jr., National Ambassador, Braver Angels

The post We Do Not Draw the Line: Braver Angels & Censorship appeared first on Braver Angels.

This is what I heard conservative radio host (and former guest of my show) Dennis Prager say as I drove home from the school I volunteer for in South Los Angeles a few days ago.

Against the backdrop of the rise of Omicron, he was complaining about what he felt to be the clear suppression of evidence showing that there are alternative treatments to COVID-19 aside from the vaccine.

“How is it I know ivermectin works” and others don’t, he asked? Dennis lamented the suppression of what he believes to be “clear evidence” of the efficacy of this drug and the tragic willingness of Americans to sacrifice the health of their children to newly developed vaccine technology, the long-term effects of which we do not know.

“We don’t have long-term data on these mRNA vaccines,” liberal-leaning podcaster and public intellectual Sam Harris stated in his most recent podcast. “We don’t have long-term data on what it’s like to get COVID not having been vaccinated – apart from the short-term data of watching people die by the hundreds of thousands.”

Sam was explaining why he would not debate COVID-19 vaccine skeptics such as his and my mutual friend, the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein. “Not everything can be debated responsibly in the middle of a pandemic, where you have thousands of people dying everyday…in many cases…dying quite unnecessarily.”

The breakdown in communication even within the high halls of our democracy is on full display in the fireworks that routinely unfold in congressional hearings between the nation’s leading infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and United States Senator (and one of only four medical doctors in the Senate) Dr. Rand Paul.

I got caught up on their most recent duel in a video I listened to as I drove around town. I didn’t learn much about the issue, but I did learn that Sen. Paul finds Dr. Fauci to be a man who equates criticisms of him with attacks on science itself, a highly paid and arrogant official who “rules by mandate” and “attacks [his] colleagues in a political and reprehensible way.”

I also learned that Dr. Fauci finds Sen. Paul to be a political opportunist guilty of “attacks on me that have no relevance to reality” whose words feed threats of violence against Dr. Fauci and the spread of misinformation. I learned that, in Dr. Fauci’s view, Rand Paul is “making a catastrophic epidemic for [his] political gain.”

Political grudge matches can be sadly entertaining. They can emerge out of earnest disputes as well as the clashes between those who would lie for gain and those who would tell the truth.

It is up to the American people to discern the truth and to decide which authorities and experts we trust. But we need compassion for one another in the process. How many of us can follow every thread of the most important debates that unfold in America? How easy is it to be swept up in the contempt and distrust expressed by political and opinion leaders because none of us have the time to pursue every issue to its roots?

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Let us remember that Dr. King had a very different vision of American democracy – one in which “we must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy but to win his friendship and understanding.”

The relationship between trust and our ability to make sense of the world is expressed brilliantly by Daniel Schmactenberger of The Conscilience Project: “If people don’t have some spaces and some relationships where they feel like they can actually share fully, openly, honestly, their sense-making is going to be radically curtailed.”  

Braver Angels must hold the space for us to understand our neighbors as human beings so that we can help each other learn what is true – and where there is earnest disagreement – on the issues that matter most. If we fail to do so, the well of common ground and respect in American life will dry up. There will be less and less room for the American people to work together. Distrust in our institutions will naturally rise unless the American people set a better example for our entire society to follow.

As we set our sights on the balance of this new year, let us commit to expanding the ground upon which we may faithfully hear one another, and open the landscape upon which we may build this house united.

—John Wood Jr., National Ambassador

The post Is there room for compassion in the US vaccine debates? appeared first on Braver Angels.

Bertrand Cooper is a deeply insightful yet underappreciated voice on the intersections of race and poverty in American life. In our conversation we talk about popular culture’s representation of black life, the differences in the black experience as a function of class, and Bertrand’s own compelling journey through race, poverty and the ladder of education.

The post Class and Black America | A Conversation with Bertrand Cooper appeared first on Braver Angels.