Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world.
This is part two of a two-part interview, and has been edited for length and clarity. Read the first part here.
SD: You differentiate belonging from inclusion and offer a four-part definition rooted in inclusion, recognition, connection, and agency. Could you break down these elements and explain how to operationalize a paradigm of belonging?
“[Belonging] happens in the process of cocreation. You can’t decide for them. You have to decide with them.”
jp: Belonging has many different elements and those four are key. There is another observation I would make. When we talk about equity, we say targeted universalism is equity 2.0. We also sometimes say belonging is inclusion 2.0.
To be included, there remains a power dynamic. You can be included in some place or school—you’re being welcomed. For example, saying “Welcome to America.” It’s my country, but I am welcoming you as a guest. That’s inclusion. That’s one way of thinking about inclusion. We say, “That’s great, but it’s not enough.”
When people come to your school or your nation, it becomes their nation, too, and that’s belonging. And that happens in the process of cocreation. You can’t decide for them. You have to decide with them.
In a sense, we are all constitutionalists. We are not stuck with what some White men said 200-plus years ago. In order to cocreate, you have to have agency. Some writers say the most dangerous thing happening today is not fragmentation or polarization. It’s not even the nuclear threat or climate change. It’s the sense that most people have lost a sense of agency. They don’t believe they can make a difference. They feel powerless.
So, when you have an exhausted majority opting out, it is a very dangerous situation. Hitler never had the majority in Germany; he didn’t need it. He had to quiet dissenters and have a very active core.
Democracy requires agency. If democracy exists, it is because of the power of our actions. The radicals often say we don’t really have democracy; of course, we have a republic. But the skepticism is that, even if you go back to the Greeks, democracy probably won’t work because most people can be duped.
The response of Jefferson, John Dewey, and others to this is that the purpose of education is to prepare people to be citizens—not to prepare people to get jobs in Silicon Valley.
We have sort of lost that. We got detoured. Now we think the most important thing about education is what job you are going to get when you graduate. Whereas Jefferson was saying [that] citizens are made. If you want a democracy, you have to invest in citizen training, where people learn to take in each other’s perspective. In a sense, many of the elements of belonging really harken back to those principles.
SD: You’ve written about how bridging is “one of the pillars to create a culture of belonging.” Can you expand upon that statement and explain how this culture building process functions?
“Something happens when people really listen to each other. Not for the purpose of finding out where they are factually wrong, but to have a sense of them as human beings.”
jp: So, we have social differences. Whether they are artificial or real, we live them. We also have conflict at the individual and group level—political, cultural, religious, political. Not just individuals but groups. We have different interests. What do you do with that?
Well, one is to organize, and [the] winner takes all. But that’s not working very well. The country is evenly split. It used to be you could disagree without the person you oppose being seen as an enemy to the state or a threat to [your] existence. Because once I rationalize that, then I am very close to engaging in violence.
What bridging says is without agreeing with the other person, without inviting them to dinner, can I [at] least engage with them and listen to them? Am I willing to acknowledge their humanity?
Something happens when people really listen to each other. Not for the purpose of finding out where they are factually wrong, but to have a sense of them as human beings.
So that’s what bridging entails. But the problem is this: most bridging that actually takes place in the United States today is interpersonal, not intergroup. Much of it is based on a psychological model, which is incomplete. Part of the conflict we experience now is not just people not liking each other. It is organized groups, organized by elites to fight each other.
You cannot understand traffic jams by studying a single car. Society is not reducible to 300 or 350 million individuals. You have to pay attention to the social mechanisms. You have to pay attention to the organization of corporations. You have to pay attention to the organization of groups and leadership in groups. Oftentimes, when people are invited to bridge, especially if it is a long bridge, they risk being kicked out of their group. That’s a heavy threat that a lot of people suffer. So, it is not clear we will get out of this mess, but if we do, bridging will play a role.
I should also say that sometimes people ask what you should do if someone is dropping bombs. Well, get to an air raid shelter. Certain conditions are required. People have to decide whether they engage in bridging or not. But I will also say even when there is a war, in virtually every context, at some point, there is the need to meet with the other side. Do we have the skills to do that?
SD: At one point, you write about the “danger of the single story,” which you define as a “dominant, essentialist narrative about the self or a social group that overwhelms all other aspects of identity.” Could you elaborate on the danger this “single story” entails—and what are healthier alternatives?
jp: Karen Stenner writes about this. Sometimes we have a singular story about ourselves and the other. The stories we tell about ourselves—they tend to be a little more complicated, but not always.
Sign up for our free newsletters
Subscribe to NPQ's newsletters to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.
By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.
“You cannot understand traffic jams by studying a single car. Society is not reducible to 300 or 350 million individuals.”
So, what do we know about this person? Well, they are Black.
And? What else do we need to know? There is an assumption that by knowing the Blackness of this person, we know everything that needs to be known.
Part of what is happening in the world today—not because of any politics per se but multiple things, including the change of technology, the change in our language, the internet—it is putting stress on a single self.
What would “the self” look like in the 15th century, when most people’s lives were organized around church and God? There is a danger both to society and to one’s mental health to have a rigid notion of who they are. It is simply empirically wrong.
Life forces upon us change. And yet we find change difficult. Sometimes those changes are hard and are not the ones we want to make. You’re used to living in a neighborhood where everyone speaks English. All of a sudden everyone doesn’t speak English. Everyone is Catholic. Now some people are not Catholic.
Part of the fluidity is for us to recognize that we all have multiple selves and multiple expressions of our selves. We get older. We have a job or don’t have a job. Even if we don’t move, the society, the environment, the neighborhood we are in does move.
A single story denies much of our own humanity. This is a carryover from the Enlightenment project—the idea that the individual has a unitary, unchanging soul. Even the claim of “get to know your authentic self” is dubious. The world is impinging upon the single self. The single self is really stressed out right now—and will be.
SD: In your book, you ask: “How can we build a more inclusive future collectively, a world where everybody belongs?” Could you talk about the role of narrative and storytelling in building a world of belonging without othering?
jp: We all have world views. There was a time when people were organized in small bands. In those times, you were more likely to be a hunter-gatherer and to have a relationship with the forest. There weren’t gods to relate to. We didn’t have writing. We didn’t have computers. Human life, in a sense, was very small. There were 50 to 200 people that we spent our existence with. Those were the people we knew. Those were the people we trusted.
The ability to have much larger groups came out of the ability to have new stories. The fact that there are now 2.4 billion people who call themselves Christians and nearly two billion people who call themselves Muslims is not because they hang out together. It’s not because they have the same language. It’s not because they live in the same country. They have some story that unites them. And there was a time [when] money came into existence. Money allows us to have a relationship with people. Money is, if you will, a collective story.
One of the reasons we can have those stories is that we have the capacity now, which we didn’t always have, to imagine and to tell stories. We have become deeply symbolic animals in a way that our predecessors were not.
How we can manipulate symbols is not set by biology. So, that is one of the things that evolutionary biologists miss when they think we must behave a certain way. Now we can imagine having a relationship with people we haven’t seen. That’s because we share a story.
So, we have the technology to be in relationship with everyone. That is pretty amazing. How do we use it?
Most of us were related to some kind of divine entity at one point. At some point, we stopped—or many of us stopped. Not all of us. My father’s life was completely organized around God. That’s a story. It is a certain god. And it allowed him when he traveled across the country to stay at people’s houses and have dinner who were organized around the same god.
People get organized around communism. That’s a story. Or capitalism. The technology has created the conditions in both a positive and nefarious way for us to relate to everyone.
I use it in the book. The European Union is an amazing experiment: 27 nations give up something to be part of the EU and invent a new money called the euro. That’s an amazing thing—more than 400 million people constructing a new identity and a new story about who they are. That’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t always work. The Soviet Union tried to do that and failed. But it can be done. We don’t know how far we can push it.
SD: Is there anything else you would like to add?
jp: Two things: First, I think there is a tremendous longing to belong. The thing that is holding us back largely is our imagination. We need to take advantage of new conditions. Globalization, for example, is not just about moving cars and technology; it’s about people potentially coming together in new ways.
But secondly: What’s the alternative? If everyone doesn’t belong, who does not? What group designates which group does not belong?
We know that our systems are fracturing. And these old systems are built on a 19th-century understanding of people. If you look at the law, which I teach, we still have an almost pre-Freudian sense of what it means to be human, in which we are fully transparent individuals who know what we have and what we need. All of the stuff that has happened in the last 200 years tells us this is wrong.
We haven’t integrated what we’ve learned into anything. Well, we’ve integrated it into computer games, where they have hacked your brain. But not in law.
People need something. And it cannot just be done at the individual level. It has to be structures, systems, things that help people move in a certain direction. The struggle is not just over stuff, it is over being. Who are we? What kind of people do we want to be? And what is our relationship to each other? I think if we have a healthy relationship with belonging, we become healthier animals as well.
