This post is my attempt to pay homage to Crystal Marie Fleming’s fantastic book, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide. Fleming argues that we are swimming in a sea of absurd and harmful ideas that maintains a racially unjust status quo. Unfortunately, we can say the same about most forms of social injustice.

For Fleming, pursuits of social justice require the courage to challenge personal and collective cluelessness while dedicating resources to collective action. The last chapter of her book offers several suggestions for becoming more racially literate. The eighth recommendation encourages people to read, study, and “amplify the voices of black women, indigenous women, and women of color.”

I hope readers interpret this post as my attempt to amplify Fleming’s voice, as the Social Justice Innovation Institute wrestles with developing strategies for cultivating socially just communities. Fleming compellingly forwards that the disruption of racism requires an acute awareness of interlocking systems of oppression and the centering of intersectionality in our knowledge acquisition practices. She bluntly concludes that “if you’re not thinking intersectionally, then you’re not thinking about race intelligently.”

I would add that if you are not thinking intersectionally, you have no hope of developing the diverse and inclusive social networks that we need to solve our most intransigent issues.

I agree with Fleming that the construction of socially just communities featuring interconnected webs of coexistence requires a shift from a narrow unidimensional understanding of social identities to a deeper appreciation of nuance and, at times, counterintuitive perspectives. I am deeply concerned about the ideologically impenetrable barriers erected between communities experiencing the same phenomena yet unwilling to listen to countervailing opinions.

I fear we are politically and physically sorting people in ways that make it increasingly difficult to find opportunities for compromise and collaboration. As we watch more people flee from challenge and disagreement, I am occasionally overwhelmed by the difficulty of cultivating empathy and perspective-taking in environments bereft of face-to-face conversations and the desire to listen to ideas that challenge reigning orthodoxies.

We cannot tackle the vexing social and political issues engulfing our communities without harnessing the power derived from clashing ideas. None of our current efforts are perfect. While improvement is always possible, innovative progress rarely occurs without a commitment to entertain questions and the appreciative engagement of challenges.

Photo by Nick Fewings on UnSplash

One way that we can be less stupid about social justice is by embracing a culture of curiosity about conflicting ideas. Earnest curiosity about alien and/or alienating ideas has the potential to heighten social and historical awareness of power relations, diffuse our fear of intellectually engaging ideas that we reflexively find abhorrent, and prepare us to cogently defend more-just positions. Additionally, nurturing a culture of nonjudgmental curiosity about a diverse array of opinions can transform conflict into a wellspring for creativity and innovation. These seem like great reasons for us to get comfortable with conflict.

I also agree with Fleming that if we want to go beyond paying lip service and begin to dismantle systems of bias and discrimination, we are “going to have to become more comfortable with difficult conversations and conflict.” Social discontent and ideological discomfort must be seen for what they are – pathways to personal growth and collective action.

A survey of progress throughout history reveals that dominant perspectives tend to ossify in the absence of conflict, critique, and challenge. Margaret Heffernan’s Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril exposes the dangers of a conflict-free milieu. She fears that an organization bereft of opportunities to articulate and explore conflicting ideas inevitably leaves the institution out of touch and captured by a form of groupthink that is “likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups.”

For Heffernan, anyone who believes that a better and more-just world is possible should “ring the alarm bells” when a group is offended by a critique of their ideas, attempts to shut down argumentative challenges, or finds comfort in an accepted certainty of their perspective. We should whole-heartedly embrace the exploration of conflicting viewpoints as a vital component of our collective well-being.

We must embrace conflict, protest, and dissent as social ends, not just a secondary value that we husband after we have secured emotional safety and intellectual comfort. Creating a refuge for difficult conversations where students argue, dissent, and express their differences provides the intellectually provocative moments they need to become more democratically astute and productive citizens. Encouraging them to engage ideas that they may disagree with will become increasingly important as the United States continues to undergo radical shifts in its demography and cultural values.

In Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected Society, Timothy Garton Ash insightfully argues that institutions of higher education can best prepare students for living in more diverse communities by encouraging them to engage multiple sides of vexing social issues. Garton Ash concludes that when students engage in difficult conversations about controversial topics, they are “equipped to think critically about prejudices,” “understand where other people are ‘coming from,’” and develop “imaginative sympathy.” All are desperately needed to take advantage of the rich intellectual diversity on our campuses and build communities replete with interconnected webs of coexistence.

We are at a crossroads. We will either support educational methods that equip students with the ability to use conflicts to democratically engage across their differences – or those differences will derail the grand American experiment that built one of history’s more socially stable countries by using its cultural and ideological differences as sources of creativity, inspiration, and innovation.

We need to provide students with the means to look beyond myopic views and free themselves from rigged ethnocentric values. In other words, we need to create “safe spaces” for creative and generative conflicts.

Ed Lee III, EdD
Curriculum Director & Lead Facilitator
Social+Justice Innovation Institute

References

Fleming, C. (2018). How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Garton Ash, T. (2016). Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Heffernan, M. (2011). Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc.