Berkeley Talks: A blueprint for creating a world where everyone belongs

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday.

Also, we have another show, Berkeley Voices. This season on the podcast, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re looking at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Ashley Gallegos: All right. (Microphone echos) A good tech check. Hello, and welcome. Good evening. It’s good to be here with you all in person, as well as with each and every one of you who’s at home. Some announcements that are more applicable to those of us who are in the room is that we will be having food and drink after the session tonight so we invite you warmly to stay, get to know each other and us, get to know everybody.

The second part is that there are books available for purchase, and there will be a time for signing. john and Stephen will be signing the books after the talk so please feel empowered, encouraged to pick yourself up one and to have it signed.

john a. powell: Pick up two.

Ashley Gallegos: “Pick up two,” john says, pick up two. (Audience laughs) All right, so welcome, welcome, welcome to tonight’s book talk with john powell and Stephen Menendian on their most recent book release, Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World.

I’ve just been informed, but am not at all surprised that this book was chosen as the best book of the year by Amazon’s Editor Best Picks so it did not disappoint. Tonight, we’re going to do a little bit of celebrating and recognizing the great works that are written about in this book, but we’re not going to leave it there because the power of Belonging Without Othering is an invitation into practice, into truly building the world that we all seek to achieve into be a part of. We invite you through tonight and for always to join us in being a co-contributor, a co-creator of a world where belonging without othering is realized.

Tonight’s event is sponsored by the Othering & Belonging Institute with promotional support from Berkeley Law, and Berkeley Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging. We just want to take a moment to acknowledge this beautiful space that we’re all in to, the Alumni House, and give thanks for the fact that we’re able to be here in person and virtually together on this beautiful campus. Many of you are likely familiar with who the Othering & Belonging Institute is. I thought I’d take a moment just to shape who’s holding this event, and who is the institute that john and Stephen are representing.

I do want to take a moment to shout out, we’re many people and many of them are in this room tonight. So just if you are part of the OBI team, maybe put your hand up and let the folks see where you are, who you are. Yes, welcome, and please feel sure or be sure to find them and to talk to them. We all represent different bodies of work that the Institute is advancing, so you’ll get a different perspective of our work and experience of it through each person that you have the opportunity to engage with.

The Institute at large has been at Berkeley for about 14 years now with john powell as the lead, and Stephen Menendian as one of the first employees of the Institute. We see othering as the problem of our time and belonging as the solution. The Othering & Belonging Institute advances groundbreaking approaches to transforming structural marginalization and equality. We are scholars, organizers, communicators, researchers, artists, and policy makers all committed to building a world where all people belong.

So who am I? My name is Ashley Gallegos. I use she and they pronouns, and I have the great good fortune to work with the Othering & Belonging Institute leading a body of work called Places of Belonging. I’ve worked with the institute now for three years and have had the distinct pleasure and opportunity to learn from the works that these two and many others have created on belonging, and find a sweet spot of turning that research into application with institutions, groups, and networks from all over. I’ve introduced myself, but I’m only one part of this dynamic trio here to celebrate this book, Belonging Without Othering.

I’d like to introduce our guests of honor. Oh, I’m sorry, I also got a just-in-time update of john’s bio, so I’m going to be reading the one hot off the press. We are emergent.

OK. john a. powell has been involved in a number of important innovative projects and frames over the years. He was part of the group that helped introduce the concept of structural racism, which he then referred to as structural radicalization into the public discourse as well as implicit bias. He also helped bring equity into the public discourse, and more recently helped introduce the concept of targeted universalism, and I would add belonging.

john’s current work on othering and belonging with a focus on practical implications as a paradigm shift and in relationship to spirituality. He has started several institutions including Perception Institute and perception practices, the Institute on Race and Poverty, and most recently, the Othering & Belonging Institute. His work is global and national, and his work has had strong implications both conceptually and also in practice. He has lived and worked all over the world, including Africa, India, South America, and Berkeley.

Stephen Menendian. Stephen is the assistant director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, where he manages many of the institute’s ongoing research projects and leads major initiatives. Most notably, Stephen spearheaded the Roots of Structural Racism Project, a multi-faceted interactive study revealing the persistence of racial residential segregation and its harmful consequences. Released this year, OBI’s Annual Inclusiveness Index. Stephen is a co-author to the book we’re discussing tonight, Belonging Without Othering, and will soon be releasing a book on structural racism in early 2025. Let’s give a warm welcome to these two co-authors.

Thank you both. Oh, is my mic on? Yes. Thank you both for joining us tonight, and for I think opening up the space and your hearts and minds and expertise to share with a room full of folks and plenty online. What I was thinking about is texturizing what you’ve written on the pages and rewritten on the pages and giving, I don’t know, of yourself and your conversation and the way you’re thinking about what you wrote in a way that is almost a one-time offer. Tonight’s experience will not be able to be replicated in another time. So with that being said, I thought I might start with the question that does a little bit of framing of othering and belonging themselves. How did you come to these frameworks and the dynamics of othering and belonging as the place we want to go?

john a. powell: Well, first of all, thank all of you for being here. We have what we call the moonshot, which is in the next 15 years to create a world where belonging is a global norm. Belonging without othering is a global norm, not just a U.S. norm. We know that’s an ambitious goal, and we know it doesn’t happen unless we all do it. We think of this not just work that we’re involved in, we think of this as a movement, and it’s a movement that’s actually been in motion for thousands of years. We’ve done the research, and you’ll see some of it in the book if you have a chance to look at the book.

But when you look at major religious movements or major philosophical movements, literally over the last 2,000 or 3,000 years, virtually all of them at their core had the concept of belonging. They didn’t sometimes use the word literally, and oftentimes did not. But what they did in that was to create a sense of belonging with the structures, with the technology for a particular group. At the same time, they said if you weren’t part of that particular group, you were the other, and bad things could happen to the other. I’m going to deviate from my … I don’t have any prepared remarks, so I don’t know what I’m deviating from, but I am deviating.

I was recently in a conversation with Pastor Roberts. Some of you may know him, he was at our conference. He’s a really big deal in the evangelical movement in the United States and around the world. He came to our conference.

My friend said, “Why would you go to Berkeley? I mean, there’s centers in Berkeley.”

He not only came to the conference, but he decided to come back in, have lunch in a meeting with the center again. It was actually a very interesting meeting. We’re probably going to do some work together. But at one point in the meeting he said, beautiful compliment, but also a provocation.

He said, “So Professor powell, I’ve been talking to you for two or three hours. You just have, almost more than anyone I’ve met, you have Christ’s energy about you.” And he said, “So why did you leave the church? Won’t you consider coming back to God?”

And I said, “Pastor Roberts, I appreciate the invitation and the compliment.”

I think of myself as a pretty radical agnostic, I don’t believe or disbelieve in very much. I don’t think it’s relevant. I think what we do is actually relevant. What we believe is of little consequence to me. And I said, but when I was a young lad and spending time reading the Bible, I read about a place called Sodom and Gomorrah where God decided that this place was wicked and decided that the people there should no longer exist. He was going to wipe them out.

In the process, He found a handful of people that seemed OK, and He said, “Leave, because I’m going to destroy the city, but don’t look back.”

Some of you may know the story. And so they’re leaving, and God is destroying the city and a couple of them look back, and he turns them into bags of salt.

I said to Pastor Roberts, I said, “Bags of salt. Now I’m just not down with that. I mean, we talk about othering, but bags of salt? So I can’t come back to that kind of guy.”

He said aloud, he said, “Well, I think we can still work together.”

Really, the thing that’s unique about what we’re pushing, it’s not belonging, because belonging is in Christianity, it’s in Judaism, it’s in Hinduism, it’s in Buddhism, it’s in Jainism, it’s in Confucianism, it’s in the teaching of Immanuel Kant. It’s everywhere. It’s in the creation of the nation state. So belonging is around in its various forms everywhere, but it’s always with that add-on, and then the other, the categorical, the infidel, the non-Christian, the heathens, the barbarians which don’t deserve respect, don’t deserve recognition. Refuse to recognize their humanity, except if they meet certain conditions. What we are saying is that this is a great arc that we’ve been on, but it’s incomplete because the arc has to be belonging without othering. The without othering is doing a lot of the work. Wherever you other, that’s where the work has to be done. And when I say whenever you, I mean you individually, I mean you collectively, I mean you the nation, I mean you, whatever we do that.

And what we try to say in the book, pushed by some of our friends and colleagues and fellow travelers, is why the focus on humanity? And some of you may know my work, and I say I’m not a humanist. I don’t believe the world, the universe is human centered. It’s too big for that, and we’re too small. We are part of something. The word human comes from word humus, which means of the earth, so we are of the earth. And so when we talk about belonging, we’re not just talking about belonging to each other, we’re talking about belonging to the earth itself. I don’t think we’ll ever get there, certainly not in my lifetime, but it’s a really important aspiration. It’s a really important vision. Not just at an interpersonal level, but at the structural, institutional, cultural level. And we’ll keep coming up short, but we’ll keep moving in that direction.

And if we can get my visa straightened out, I’ll be going to India in November. They have a movement there around belonging, and they say this is what Gandhi was really talking about. And Cecily and I who met earlier, talking to people from Israel who were talking about the problem in the Middle East should be reframed in terms of belonging.

We had a wonderful time with people in Belfast. And we said, “How did you move away from The Troubles to what you’re doing now?”

And they did. Not done, never will be done, but they did. They put down the guns. I think many of you know that the head of Belfast right now, head of Northern Ireland is a Catholic. One of the ways they did that was to put a stake in the ground. Part of the people who put the stake in the ground were not just women, they were women, but they were mothers because they understood what it means to be killing people, it means killing their sons and daughter and their family.

They basically said to the men, “Enough of that, enough of the us vs. them, we have to move to something different.”

We have them at our conference, and we are looking forward to learning from them and continuing us on this journey. And many of you, the National Equity Project, I mean, I know many of you and the work you’re doing, so I’m really heartened and pleased that you’re here, but more importantly, that you’re part of this important movement.

Stephen Menendian: Well, many of you are new faces to me, so I hope to meet many of you over the course of the evening and hear from you. I also want to thank you for coming here, not just to hear us, and not just to engage these ideas, but to be participants in this vision that john just described of making belonging a global norm. We can’t do this without all of you, and not just as passive participants, but as active participants in pushing that forward. So thank you for joining us in that.

It’s been a strange and unusual journey, Ashley, towards this framework. Originally when we came to Berkeley, we saw a pattern. We would see this trope where someone would say, “X is the new Civil Rights Movement.”

LGBTQ rights is the new Civil Rights Movement. Trans rights is the next Civil Rights Movement. Disability rights is the next Civil Rights Movement. There was a grasping for the language and the legitimacy of the Civil Rights Movement, and that helped us see that there was some common thread there. There was some disabling structural arrangement that marginalized people, there’s some common mechanisms, and therefore there could also be a common solution that didn’t wash out. We grasped for what that was, and we realized that the othering processes might be different, but they share strong commonalities in prejudice and hatred and segregation and denialism and non-citizenship, and these different mechanisms. But then I think the really profound shift was moving and hitting upon belonging and really realizing there are lots of forms of belonging that are available on offer in the world today. The problem is many of them are pernicious. So you can read about what it’s like going to a MAGA rally, but there’s a clear set of villains there.

Our vision of belonging is one that has no villains, everyone can belong. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t forces that we have to grapple with or contend with like ethnonationalism, but there’s no categorical villain. And that’s profoundly different, I think morally, and also in terms of vision and philosophy of what we’re trying to reach for. So this is, I think a very radical vision in a sense, in the sense that there’s really no place in the world that we can point to that’s realized this, but we don’t have a choice. I’m so thrilled to hear about john going to India. India, the largest country in the world, 1.5 billion people, the most diverse country in the world. If we can’t figure this out in places like India or the U.S., how are we ever going to figure this out? These are places that are grappling with this right now, and we’re seeing what doesn’t work and more importantly, working with Ashley, we’re trying to pilot and figure out what does work.

Ashley Gallegos: Thank you both for your reflections and answers. My next question, I think you’ve touched on it a little bit, but I’m going to ask it for the sake of offering it to see if there’s any nuances you want to pull out that maybe were not shared on the first answer. What is the paradigm shift that Belonging Without Othering aims to create that is different from our current state?

john a. powell: Well, there are a number of strands we could pull on. So I’ll just pull on a couple. We’re at Berkeley, and at Berkeley you are supposed to say something new that no one said before. You’re supposed to make up words, all kinds of things. And then you’re supposed to critique things. One of the critiques that we get a lot is that just logically, if you have something that’s part of something, you have to have something that’s not part of something, right? Is it even conceivable that you could have belonging without othering? And a lot of smart people, and we are constantly trying to learn and co-create, so we listen, we don’t think we have all the answers, but people will say evolutionarily, that we are programmed, we’re wired to other.

I’m part of a group called More in Common, some of you may know of it. They did a beautiful study called “The Hidden Tribes,” and they’ve talked about tribalism that’s actually manifesting itself in all of what people call polarization. Now, I think there’s something wrong with both the way we talk about tribalism, and the way we talk about polarization. I’ll just give you 30 seconds, it’s in the book.

What people are reaching for is that we were in tribes for almost 2 million years. We’ve only come out of tribes in the last 10,000 years, and that in the sense of evolutionary processes were being made while we were in tribes, and so we are naturally tribal. That leans into the notion that we’re just wired, us and them. That’s really interesting. It’s just wrong, and it’s wrong for some obvious reasons when you think about it. First of all, most tribes, although there’s a book called The History [sic: Dawn] of Everything, this suggests that the way we understand tribes was always wrong. But the general proposition is that tribes were people that you were with your entire life. You had face-to-face contact. They ranged from anywhere from 50 to 200. And that was it, that was your tribe. Your tribe, your trust of each other. Your familiarity of each other was that you were constantly depending upon each other.

So when we talk about the conflict that’s happening today in the world and these cleavages, they’re along the issue of race. Well, just in the United States, there are 350 million people. Close to 200 plus million of them call themselves white. That’s not a tribe. 200 million people is not a tribe. There are 2.5 billion people in the world that call themselves Christians. There are 2 billion people in the world that cause themselves Muslim, that has nothing to do with a tribe. Most of those people don’t speak the same language, they will never meet each other. They eat different food. How are they a tribe? And then if we push even further, we realize that war, which is ravaging the world right now in the name of authoritarianism and polarization, I think it’s better to call it fragmentation, not polarization. War is ravaging the world. War is a modern invention. Tribes did not engage in war. They engaged in conflicts, but the conflicts were episodic. They were short, and they were done. These things that go on for months and years, the Hundred Years’ War could not even been conceivable for tribes.

And then there’s this funny notion that we looked down on Indigenous people. That was part of modernity. They were tribal, they didn’t wear enough clothes. The women showed their breasts. They were hunter-gatherers. Ooh. And if they had a god, there were many gods. They believed gods were in the trees, were in the animals. They believed they were part of nature. That’s all associated with tribalism. Many of us think some of those things might’ve been OK, even better. When we say tribalism, we’re taking our most pernicious behavior and projecting it on people that didn’t have that behavior. We got to own that tribes did not create the nuclear bomb. That was a modern civilization’s scientific phenomenon. Tribes did not create nation states, and the kind of pernicious breaking that we have. What’s new is basically saying we got to own this stuff.

So if we’re not propelled to this by the deep wiring of tribes, then maybe something else can happen. And I’ll stop for now and just say this, there’s a book by McMahon called Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea and another book by someone named Harari, which I’m sure many of you know, called Sapiens, and others. And what they argue is something quite interesting. They say that about 70,000 years ago — humans of various sorts have been around about 2 million years … not homo sapiens, but humans — and we were sort of evolutionarily being pushed along, evolutionary determinism, if you will. And about 70,000 years ago, something happened. Sapiens, not all humans, but sapiens developed the ability to imagine and tell stories. And in that new ability, they could tell stories about things that hadn’t existed before. They could tell stories about way of trading, and they told stories about something called money.

Money’s just made up. That’s a story. It’s not real. It’s only real because we invest in it. They could tell stories about religion, they could tell stories about gods, they could tell stories about each other so that instead of being 20, 50, 200, they were thousands. And that ability to imagine and tell new stories, which also created new relationships, new collaboration, is what gave birth to modernity, if you will. And so our secret gift is telling stories to collaborate, and that’s not necessitated by nature. How far can we go with those stories? We can go as far as we can imagine. So what we’re trying to do is actually release the imagination so that people can imagine a world where everyone belongs. And for those who insist that, well, if you have a circle, you have something, what’s outside of it? For those of you who like astrophysics will realize that the universe, at least according to some physicists, is a giant sphere with nothing outside of it.

What’s outside of the universe? Unless you believe in the multiverse, nothing’s outside of the universe. So my point is this. We don’t know how far we can go. And we’re asking for a different paradigm, and we’re saying if we can hold onto the paradigm, that’s 90% of the work. If we can believe in it. I’ll end just by saying this, I could say more, but think about the Declaration of Independence. 250 years ago, a committee including Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. One of the statements in the Declaration of Independence is that we hold certain truths to be self-evident.

What’s self-evident 250 years ago, Mr. Jefferson? That all men are created equal. That’s not self-evident to me when you have 600 people enslaved. So how is that self-evident? And so some people say Jefferson was a huge hypocrite. I think that’s too simple. It’s a more complex story. But he also, whether he was a hypocrite or not, whether he’s complex or not, many historians will say that’s the most important phrase in the American lexicon. It put us on a journey. In a time where most people were enslaved or serfs, whether they’re white, Black or otherwise, Jefferson suggested that all men, all people are created equal. There was no physical manifestation of that. You couldn’t look around the world and say, “Yeah, just look at France. All the people there’re equal.” Or maybe not France. What about England? There was no place. And yet that has oriented much of our political history for the last 250 years. We could do the same thing with belonging.

Stephen Menendian: Just to add to that, I think partly what john is saying is that when the Declaration of Independence was written, that statement could not have been less true, but as an aspiration, it oriented our society. And over the ensuing 250 years, that aspiration has motivated us to try and realize it, even though we’re still not there. And our book is about how much further we have to go. Another thing on tribalism, it’s interesting, and we discuss it in chapter two in the book, is that anthropological studies of tribes showed that in many ways tribes are much more egalitarian than current societies. And john referenced the Dawn of Everything, which is a book that sort of excavates that history. Part of it is that for traditional societies, so-called traditional societies, it depends how leaders behave. Do leaders cultivate norms of openness and inclusion or do they cultivate and represent and model norms of exclusion and toughness?

Really it depends in large part on what our leaders do. We can see these debates playing out in our societies today. We have demagogues, some of the fiercest, nastiest we’ve ever seen, in oursize. In fact, some of the anti-immigrant sentiment that you’re seeing out of one of the major political campaigns right now is, in my opinion, the worst I’ve ever seen in American history. Even worse than the 2016 campaign. Even worse than the Know Nothing campaigns of the 19th century, even worse than Pat Buchanan campaigns of the ’90s. So what does that tell us about where we are and where we have to go? I think the paradigm shift here, and I’m going to borrow a phrase that john used in our book, is that we want to move beyond inclusion. Inclusion is like the guest model. Right?

You have a party, you invite people in, but you’re the host, and guests are provisional. They’re welcome so far as it’s on your say-so. We want to make everyone party planners. We want to redesign the institution, we want to redesign the calendar. We want to make people co-creators of these institutions that we participate and inhabit, and not just guests. And so that’s what we have to move beyond is the narrow version of inclusion. And we tell a story about how the Ivy League institutions in the late ’60s finally decided to admit women and what that was like. Tokenized, marginalized, couldn’t participate in the social clubs. That’s inclusion. We want to move beyond that. So this is a paradigm shift. And I think, we don’t just want belonging, because you can have belonging based on othering and the demagogues show how to do that, right? We want belonging without othering. It’s a profound difference.

john a. powell: Let me add two other quick things and you have more questions. The other thing that we’re very clear on is that everybody belongs. So sometimes we get in fights, it’s like winners and losers, and whoever the losers are, they don’t belong. And sometimes that’s along gender preference. Sometimes it’s along race, sometimes it’s along religion. We’re saying no, everybody belongs. And we had a public conference some years ago and somebody said, “What about the Koch brothers?” Yes, they belong. It doesn’t mean you embrace everything they say. It doesn’t mean we won’t struggle over ideas, but everyone belongs. There’s two quick things. Let me sound very idealistic. How does everybody belong? At the beginning of the 20th century, there were four countries that had eliminated the death penalty. Now there are 144 countries. And you sort of watch them go through this projection. One of the things they discuss is, is it right for the state to take a human life?

And sometimes they discuss it in moral terms. Sometimes they discuss it in utilitarian terms. Sometimes they discuss it in religious terms. But most of those 144 countries come to the conclusion that it’s not right for the state to take a human life. There’s some contradictions because many of them still have armies and whatever. But when they do that, they don’t say, “We’re not going to take any human life unless you’re the Koch brothers. Unless you’re a jerk, unless you’re a fascist or a communist.” They don’t make exceptions. They say all life. All life. That’s an amazing thing that has happened over the last 100 years, saying no life can be taken by the state. In our neighbor Canada, not only have they eliminated the death penalty, but they’ve eliminated solitary confinement. They looked at, how long is it possible to put another human being into solitary confinement and treat them humanely? The United States has embraced that question, and they were like, “Maybe 250 days?” And Canada said 0.

Canada’s not so different from us in some ways. So can we actually state that? The last thing I’ll say that’s a paradigm shift is that in this space, in this time, it’s easy to believe in othering. It’s easy to believe in the power of breaking and othering because we see it all around us, and it looks like sometimes they’re winning. We see authoritarian leaders become more popular in Germany, in France, and in South Africa, in India. It’s a global phenomenon. And so it’s like, is it naive then to be talking about belonging when othering is being supercharged? So here’s the thing. Most othering is in service of belonging. Yeah, interesting, huh? People other in order to belong. It’s a misguided attempt to belong. You want to belong? Hate those people. You want to belong? Kill those people. And so the very purpose that a lot of people embrace othering is a misguided attempt to belong. So even at the foundation of that othering is still a desire, a need, a yearning to belong, but without the imagination that they can have belonging without othering.

Ashley Gallegos: Thank you. I love seeing all of your faces just enthralled. And I want to thank you for that. It’s beautiful to see and to witness. And two, just to plant a reminder seed of my invitation at the start, of each of you being a co-creator. And I can share that when listening to Stephen and to john, there’s a lot of big ideas that reach my body, my mind, my heart, all at the same time. And so I just want to extend the reminder to take in what you’re hearing tonight. Maybe if you are … We want to be sure to make you a part of this and will have time for questions. So I guess this is just my plug to each and every one of you to sit with what might be rising for you as a question or a curiosity, something you’d like to unpack together so that you can bring it forth when we go to Q&A near the end.

But before then, I am going to ask a few more questions. OK. So when I’m thinking about belonging, and I think about how it, as a term … Sometimes, for right or wrong, I say it feels like it’s having a moment, right? We’ve seen one of our researchers within the Institute, Shad, has done research on how belonging as a topic, as articles, as books, has been progressing in the last 10 years. And we’re seeing, when I look at the graph, a really steep incline towards the amount of materials being created about belonging. And they tell different stories. Some of them are memoirs on how people come to belonging on their own. Some of them are looking at how, this kind of coined as an intrinsic nature, maybe more closer to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where belonging is a fundamental human need for each and every one of us.

And then when I think about the Institute’s conception of belonging and what this book really also articulates about belonging is the important connection and positionality that structures play, institutions play, in each of us either accessing belonging or being denied belonging, if you will. So in thinking about that, thinking about institutions and how tonight and always we’re situated within a university, my mind is being drawn into the current state of DEI and the ever-pressing and present backlash that we’re witnessing to their efforts of advancement. And we’re seeing universities facing a lot of challenges around their governance, employment. They’re seeing reducing in funding related to advancing of their efforts, their social change efforts. And so the question that I’d like to ask is, how does belonging as a framework overcome some of the problems that DEI has faced, including backlash? And what’s your hope for how belonging can help drive change forward?

john a. powell: You want to go first?

Ashley Gallegos: Nice pass.

Stephen Menendian: The challenge the DEI faces right now is really intense and profound, and we’re seeing rollbacks systematically across the country. And the universities are under tremendous strain right now, with protests, free speech, funding crisis. There’s so much. And at the same time, these are places, really important places where these practices get played out. If we can’t figure out how to model belonging or greater DEI here, how can we do it in society writ large? So I think universities are really important places where we’ve got to figure out how to create a sense of belonging. So this university does climate surveys every year, and they ask students and they ask faculty and staff if they feel as if they’re seen, as if they’re heard, if they belong, how they feel about classes. And when the responses come in, it’s very predictable. The most marginalized groups often feel the least amount of belonging on campus.

So how do we change that? Well, we have a number of different ways of doing that. We have bridging practices, we have programming, but we have to. However we do it, we have to change that. I think belonging has immense potential to overcome some of the limitations of traditional DEI. We talked about the limitations of the inclusion model, as a guest. How can we really make something much more robust? I think belonging begins to show us how. But I also think there’s a different set of stories that can be told about it. One of the more interesting parts of the book … So if we wanted just to sell as many copies of the book as we really wanted to, we probably would just start with Chapter Five, just on belonging. But we really wanted people to be grounded in the concept and how we think about othering first.

So you have to get through the hard part before you get to the fun part because we really wanted your conception of belonging to be grounded in belonging without othering rather than based in … And there’s a number of real challenges in society right now, but one is the problem of so-called toxic masculinity. And think about how that’s playing out in the election right now. You’re seeing all these young men, so-called Gen Zers swinging towards one side. And what’s going on with that? And in the passage in the book, there’s a number of passages in the latter chapters about white people. I was telling john, I said, “john, people are going to think I wrote this,” I say, because it seems like an apologia in some ways, for white people.

But what john was writing and what we sort of tacked on in terms of gender is that if you design a society and your story, your organizing narrative, you know john was talking about these collective myths like Harari, what we call organizing narratives, is that all white people are bad or all white people are evil, what do you think is going to happen? You’re going to get backlash. You’re going to get white … What we say in the book is that if people don’t see themselves in the story, not only will they reject the story, but they will reject it violently. People have to have a place for themselves in that future story.

And what we’re seeing right now is a lot of young men feel lost. So we have in this society, the problem of non-belonging isn’t just among marginalized people, although it is, it’s among everyone. Our societies are shot through with crises of belonging. Loneliness, alienation, disconnection, lack of community. And we have to have positive stories. So what we say is, what is the story for young men? This one story of young men is that men are evil, toxic. And the APA put out this notice that said traditional masculinity is harmful to men and others, that it leads to emotional repression among men. And so the stories we have are, we have to corral young men, confine them and get them to stop doing bad things. But we don’t have a positive story for young men.

We don’t have a positive story of what a healthy masculinity could look like. And that’s why, in part, so many young men are lost, because our societies don’t tell positive stories. So the belonging story, where everyone belongs, we can tell a complex nuanced story for everyone and where everyone has a role. And so I think that’s where we can begin to move beyond some of the stories that are shot through in DEI, which is just where white people, bad. Men, bad. X group, bad. So belonging can give us a fabric, a framework in which we can tell a positive, we can provide positive space for everyone. That’s not the end though, because then we have to figure out what those scripts are, and we have to do that collectively and together. And we don’t presuppose what those are, but we have to create space for that.

john a. powell: So part of your question presupposed that maybe there’s a collective agreement as to what is the attack on DEI, and I think there probably is not. But what we know is that it’s a strategy. That you always have people distributed across different lines. Some people are really just confused. Some people are not confused, but they want to use, we talk about conflict entrepreneurs, they want to use the toxicity for their own ends. And when critical race theory first started being attacked, first of all, I didn’t think it was going to stick because I thought, “That’s just ridiculous,” right? I was wrong. And then I was asked to come on a conservative radio station to talk about critical race theory. And I started off by saying, which is true, that I was at the second meeting of critical race theory. I’m one of the people who had a hand … It’s no universal agreement as to what critical race theory is, but there’s some trends of it, there’s some strands of it. And I started talking about some of those strands. I said, “It really is a lean toward structural racialization.”

And the person is basically saying, “Don’t confuse me with the facts. We’re not interested in what is … It’s evil. It’s saying you don’t like white people. It’s saying you hate the country.” I said, “No …” And the point is that the person had no interest in really understanding critical race theory. And so part of the attack on DEI … And people said this, they sort of throw stuff up against the wall. What sticks? OK, now this sticks. Why does it stick though? One of the reasons it sticks is that we are anxious as a country. We’re anxious as a world. We don’t know, regardless if you’re white, Black, Asian, Latino, whatever, there’s a deep anxiety about the world. And the root of that anxiety is, will you belong in the next world?

And most of us do not feel very secure. And some writers, which is interesting, they’re saying, so when that happens, and we talk about this in the book, when you have this deep anxiety caused by a rapid change, we make sense of it through stories. We’re sense-making animals. And the stories that … Two large stories. One story is you’re uncomfortable because of the other. If we could just get rid of the other, whether they are people crossing the border, whether they’re people who have loved differently than we do, you would be better off. So all of your feelings of anxiety is, they become the scapegoat. That’s called a breaking story. And 90-plus percent of our stories are breaking stories. And it’s not symmetrical between the right and left, but it is on both sides.

And another story, it’s just, the world is changing. We don’t know what it’s going to be. And part of that change, it’s a demographic change. The neighborhood you grew up in, that your parents grew up in, probably doesn’t look the same. The world is changing, it’s changing fast, demographically, technology, and we can’t quite get a handle on it. Think about the pandemic, think about the anxiety. The WHO came up with a thing saying, “Fear your neighbor.” Right? Everybody might be carrying a deadly disease. And I actually contacted them. I said, “That’s a terrible message. You’re telling people to keep social distance. You should tell people to keep physical distance, but social proximity.” It’s the wrong message. You’re saying be afraid of everybody. Be afraid of the male person.

And we’re susceptible to that because we’re complicated beings, and most of our processes are unconscious. So DEI fall prey to that because in the midst of this anxiety, and people know something is off in all people, then you have someone come along saying, “You, it’s the DEI people who are really the problem.” And there’s a kernel of truth in what they’re saying, in the sense that oftentimes the DEI story is demonizing the white other. We just did a study looking at the percentage of white people who organize around white dominance. And there are some, and they really believe that white should dominate or western civilization, however you put it. But let me just ask, what do you think that number was? What percentage of whites do you think … Assuming the study is accurate, what percentage of whites do you think organized around the need for whites to dominate?

Audience: 8 to 12%.

john a. powell: Say what?

Audience: 8 to 12%. Around 10%.

john a. powell: That’s pretty close. About 10%. 10%. So I’m talking to people getting up to the election, literally I talked to an organizer, and they’re saying, “We want to talk about the resurgence of toxic whiteness and how that’s driving the election.” And I said, “Slow down, because you’re really only talking about 10% of people who organize around that.” Now, there’s another 20% that has racial resentment. Together they represent 30%. But they’re coming from different places. And most of our stories can’t carry that nuance. It’s white people.

And so I just was up in Alaska speaking to judges, Supreme Court. First question I get, “What do you do about white privilege?” Which is another way of saying all white people. Anyway, a complicated question. And so, one of the reasons the book is a little bit turgid is we try to unpack some of that stuff. We try to go through it systematically. So part of the reason that I shifted from talking about equity to targeted universalism is I felt that the practice of equity most of the time was that there was essentially good people and bad people. And it was a binary.

And the admonition is, we need to focus our resources on the marginalized good people, and which might mean taking resources from the dominant good people. That got translated largely in a racial justice movement to white people and Black people or white people and people of color. And I said, “That’s the wrong message.” It’s not the wrong message just because of the wrong message. It’s also not accurate. I just sent some stuff off to SEIU this morning. Second-largest union in the country. They spent millions of dollars trying to embrace some of our ideas. They said it wasn’t working. In the last election, I forget the exact date, but 35% of their union voted for Trump. They were not happy with that. And they’re saying he’s peeling off all these white people. He’s telling them, you belong in my future. You don’t belong in their future. And they said, “We keep trying to tell them that they have to give up white privilege.” And I said, “Look, if someone’s in your union, they’re much more aware of their lack of privilege. A nurse or nurse’s aide that’s in your union is barely getting by, otherwise they wouldn’t be in your union.”

So when you talk about white privilege, if you’re talking about Elon Musk and Bill Gates, OK, we can have a conversation, but you’re talking about a single mom working as a nurse’s aide, trying to make a living. You haven’t seen her. And so that became the toxic part of equity of saying to that mom, that 20%; not the 10%, that 20%; saying that you should feel bad because you’re white and you got all this privilege.

Now if we fix that; we should; it’s not going to take you under 10%. People are going to still have anxiety. But can we tell a story without flattening it? People are not the same. It’s the situation of most Black people and most white people and most Latinos. They’re all different. Can we tell a more complicated story? But our story is how do we get everybody to thrive? Everybody to belong?

And there’s some concrete examples. I’ll just give one then I’ll stop. One of the ways we talk about this is something called adequacy in education. Every state has a provision in it saying something to the equivalent of every student is guaranteed an adequate education. We actually took that concept and started suing states. And there’s a long history. I won’t take you through all the history. But Washington for example, just came up with a case, I think it’s Moore vs. the state of Washington saying there’s a guarantee for every child have an adequate education and the state is not meeting it. You have the 20% of students that look like they’re doing OK, and the 80% that’s not. And the 80% that’s not, it’s also racially coded.

State, you have an obligation to affirmatively do whatever is necessary to close the gap between the 20% and the 80%. Now that’s good, but that’s equity. That’s not targeted universalism, because they’re saying the 20% have too much and 80% have too little. We need to do something about that. The court went on then to say the 20% doesn’t have what they need to really thrive either. So you have to do something not just for the 80%. You have to do something for the 20% as well. Everybody deserves more, but different kinds of more. Now they’re talking about target universalism. Now they’re talking about belonging.

And let’s give that example because the concrete example, it just been embraced by the state Supreme Court of Washington. So I think if we can make the claim to the SEIU mother living in a suburb that, “We care about you and we care about African Americans and we care about Latinos and we care about the people at the border, but caring about them doesn’t mean we don’t care about you.” I think that’s a much more powerful story.

So that story about everybody means everybody, and it’s a positive story. I’ll just stand by saying this. It also has to be a sincere story. It can’t be a strategic story. We have to really care about everybody.

Ashley Gallegos: Yes, I’m with you over there, single clapper. Thank you. So just checking time and I feel confident in asking one more good question with spaciousness for a robust full answer from each of you and then moving into other or additional beautiful questions from our audience members, from you all.

So the question that I want to move towards is one that’s been brought up in both of your responses. We’ve mentioned bridging and you’ve mentioned breaking through a number of examples as well. And when I think about bridging in relationship to belonging and the application of belonging or the moving towards belonging in practice, I often turn towards bridging as a frame or as a practice that helps belonging express itself more fully. I imagine it, I see it as an act of this actively expanding, the circle of who we care about or what did you say, john, earlier? The universe in which we care about.

So when we’re bridging, we’re reaching towards one another and across difference expanding the circle. And when we are breaking, we are fracturing the connection that could be there, that is naturally there with ourselves and others. And without a whole lot more description, I’m imagining that each of you can directly imagine, bring to mind many forms of breaking that are alive and unfortunately taking place in all kinds of shapes and forms across societies in the world right now.

So this question is getting into, OK, how do we move towards bridging? This helps us get toward belonging. Actually, I’m just going to ask the question so I don’t get expansive in my thoughts. So I’m going to say what do you recommend as a pathway forward through the current multitude of breaking that is occurring within our society or within society?

Stephen Menendian: john’s giving me the cue, so I’ll go first here. So one of the things that we say in the book is that you cannot defeat the demagogue by critiquing, condemning, saying what a bad person they are. That doesn’t work, unfortunately. We just have too much experience with that. The way you defeat the demagogue … And unfortunately again, all of our societies from India with Modi, Turkey … We see demagoguery in an apex formation right now. And with it authoritarianism and ethnocentrism and all these ethnocracy and pernicious forms. The way to defeat the demagogue is with a better, more hopeful, compelling story. That’s the only way to do it. So we have to have a positive story, again, where everyone belongs and everyone can see themselves in the future.

What a lot of these demagogues do is they point towards the mythical past. Make America great again or whatever it is. It’s pointing towards a mythical past. And john had a great line, which we wove into the book saying that no, people are pointing towards the past, but they can’t see the future that’s rushing on right now. And we can’t just embrace the future. We have to shape the future. We have to make the future. We have to co-create the future together and we have to tell that story and we have to live that story. That positive aspirational story where we’re all together. And to do that, we have to do a lot of things. And the book has, I think, a menu of them. I’m not going to go through every item on the menu, but part of it is bridging. And bridging means reaching outside of your identity group. And bridging is not about persuasion. It’s really important. It’s not telling someone they’re wrong and why they need to come to your side. It’s about seeing their humanity. It’s about psychological proximity, which builds trust.

There’s been an amazing amount of fascinating social psychological research on persuasion and so forth and we all know that reasoning, reason, facts, data doesn’t cut it. But what does cut it, if someone trusts you, they will hear you. If they trust you, they will hear you. But if you say, “I’m not even going to talk to that person because they’re racist or sexist or whatever,” how can you even build trust? We have to bridge. We have to bridge with people we don’t necessarily even feel comfortable with. That’s the hard part, is bridging.

So we get these questions, john. I heard john say this in videos a million times. How do you bridge with the devil? How do you bridge with whatever? And it’s been done. How could you solve problems in Northern Ireland without bridging between Catholics and Protestants? You couldn’t, so how could you do it in the Balkans without the Dayton Accords between the Protestant Serbs and the Muslims and the Catholics? We have to do bridging. If we’re going to build belonging, we have to communicate, we have to coexist, we have to live peacefully. We cannot do it without a lot of bridging. And we have to co-create this larger story together where everyone has a positive role and no one is consigned to being the categorical permanent villain.

john a. powell: So Stephen is working on a book on structural racism, and he’s done a compendium of examples of structural racism that’s on our website you can look at now and think of it as a teaser for his book. And I mentioned that because structures can actually other. Othering is not just what we do to each other. We actually live in structures and structures shape us. So we know this when we think about the American Disabilities Act. So if a building, someone comes up in a wheelchair and there’s no ramp, they basically send a message. “You don’t belong here. This is not your space.”

We have thousands of examples like that. Structures are not neutral. They’re actually carrying certain norms and values and we have to address that. We just did a thing on the back porch. So those of us who are older than 50 remember porches used to be in the front and it was a way of inviting people into a community. And there’s all this research about just how much time people would take walking past someone else’s house, stopping to say hello. It’s not a long, protracted, curated thing. It’s just walking down the street. And then in the 1960s and ’70s, we start moving porches to the back and garages so that you can open it without ever getting out your car.

And I remember being recruited for a job in Dallas and I wanted to know what it was like living there. And I was talking to this guy and I said, “So what’s it like living in this neighborhood?” He said, “Oh, it’s wonderful. I’ve lived here for 10 years. I’ve never even seen my neighbors.”

So part of this, how do we make structures work for us? We’ve done some incredible work, partially led by Stephen, about zoning. We know sometimes deliberately, sometimes happenstance, the zoning does a lot of stuff in terms of separating people. I want to move to Miami. The realtor was showing me around. She said, “Well, what kind of neighborhood would you like to live in?” And I said, “I’d like to live in a neighborhood that’s integrated racially and economically.” And she looked at me. She said, “Where are you from?” So we have to think about the structures themselves.

The other thing is that we sometimes are hard on people and soft on structures. We have to flip that to be hard on structures and soft on people. We have to challenge the othering process, not the other. It’s the othering processes that’s doing most of the work and people get confused or whatever. And so bridging is summed up in really one word, a South African word, sawubona, which means I see you. It’s also interpreted to mean the God in me sees the God in you.

It’s looking not just with the eyes, but with the mind, with the heart. Acknowledging someone’s humanity. And sometimes we say, “Well, this person has nothing in common with me.” In her book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson talks about … Isabel Wilkerson, if you don’t know her, she’s a small African American woman. Lives in the D.C area, and she called to have her pipes fixed because she sprung a leak. And you only have to spend 30 seconds with her to realize she’s liberal, if not progressive. And this mega guy comes up dressed in the full regalia. He’s big, he’s white, and he’s also, I guess, apparently a plumber. But he’s not into plumbing for her. And so they’re at the house by themselves and she’s already feeling uncomfortable being in the house with a big guy, a big man, and she’s a small woman and he’s giving off all kinds of hostile vibes and he’s not interested in fixing her leak.

And she’s getting frustrated because there’s water on the floor and he won’t even look to see where the water’s coming from. And so at some point, she said, for some reason she asked a question came to mind, and she said, “How’s your mom?” And she says she saw the guy tear up and he said, “My mom passed two years ago.” And she said, “So did mine.” And within no time at all, they’ve connected. And now the guy’s not only fixing her leak, he’s saying, “I got a bunch of tools outside. What else do you need?” Not, “What is your position on abortion?” Not, “What do you think about the war?” It’s like, “I see you’re a human being.”

Again, you could have said those two people have nothing in common, but that’s a fiction. I know we’re going to open up. I just want to make two of the quick points. From my perspective; not necessarily from others; from my perspective, we all belong. Full stop. We may not live our life that way. We may create structures and institutions that say otherwise, but to take Jefferson’s word, there are certain truths that are self-evident that all human beings belong. Period. Don’t have to prove they belong, don’t have to have a certain amount of money, don’t have to have a certain … Everybody belongs, but we haven’t organized our society to reflect that. And I think that’s the charge. How do we organize our societies to reflect that?

And I want to also suggest that’s hard work, but it’s wonderful work. It’s joyous work. And I’m just really happy that all of you signed up to be part of that work.

Stephen Menendian: I hate to follow john’s poetry with a more prosaic comment, but I wanted to add one final note on this. So we live in a society that’s centrifugal. It’s spinning and we’re pulling apart. Instead of one that’s centripetal. And the porch is just one example of many. john’s comment led me down a rabbit hole. I found a famous essay from the ’70s called “From Porch to Patio,” where someone was observing this trend and the social implications of it, where just the familiarity, the accidental interactions with neighbors and familiarity, people are in the back facing inward instead of outward. But our entire society is organized like that. The fact that a 100 years ago people were in street cars. Now we’re in private cars. The fact that we have single-family zoning instead of communal living. People 150 years ago were mostly or often in extended family homes or SROs. Instead, we live in detached units.

More and more of us are alone. More Americans are living alone than ever before. It leads to a profound sense of loneliness and lack of togetherness. And when you survey Americans, it doesn’t matter whether you’re bright red in MAGA country or Berkeley. They all say, “We want more community and we want more togetherness.” Yet our institutions and our cultural practices do not facilitate that. So we have to rethink not just the stories we want to tell, but the institutions that we live with and our cultural practices if we want this society of belonging without othering.

john a. powell: Thank you both for that response and for every response you’ve shared. I want to just prime that as if the discussion on bridging that was just warmed up here was of interest and you see it as a powerful next step forward, you’re right. And john is releasing a book early December, I think Dec. 4, called The Power of Bridging. And as I started today’s talk saying that this book was identified as the book of the year, that book is already forecasted as the next big idea. And so I want to warmly welcome you all into pre-ordering that.

Audience 1: Or two.

john a. powell: Or two. Yes, thank you. Audience reminder. Great holiday presents.

Ashley Gallegos: OK, so now I’m looking to my OBI colleagues who might be running a mic or identifying where there could be … Oh, Christian. Thank you. OK, I see a pocket right over here. Yes, please identify yourselves. And the golden rule of this is to please be sure to ask a question. Thank you.

Audience 2: Hi, first, I want to say thank you to all of you for the very good and hopeful work that you do. It seems to me that one of the threats to belonging is a belief system in majority populations of the zero-sum game. And that if you get something you need, you’re taking something from me. For you to get something, I lose. And how can we foster belonging in a sense of coming together if people have that notion that anything that benefits you hurts me?

john a. powell: Do you want to take a couple questions or … just have a response?

Ashley Gallegos: How do you feel? A couple questions and then … I think I’d like to see them weave together really beautiful tapestries of answers so how about we take a couple of questions and then we’ll have them respond to all of them, each of them.

Audience 3: So …

john a. powell: Tell us your name if you don’t mind.

Audience 3: I’m Dorian. Go Bears. OK, sorry.

Ashley Gallegos: Thank you.

Audience 3: So my question is, so I think you mentioned about looking forward of creating a future or story that everybody has a place in it. I’m curious about inter-generation healing and identity work because I was thinking about how nowadays, I think especially the popular culture, social media, people become superficial about their identity. So that’s why there’s a Black and white or you has to be this or the other. But I feel that if we do invest more in terms of our identity work, and then we will find a lot more. I wouldn’t say gray areas, but a lot more commonality, a lot more places to bridge instead of breaking.

Ashley Gallegos: Thank you.

Audience 4: Hi, I am Larry Best and totally love this conversation. And I’m on board and the hard part is the details and the next steps. And I struggle in my own thinking about this as trained in political science, the institutions vs. the individual. It can become a bit of a loop.

And I’m saying when that there’s now the Democracy Policy Initiative at the Golden School here. So I want to ask you one part of my question is, so to really dig into the institutional part; and I think they’re trying to get to that. And it requires, as they speak about it at the Democracy Policy Initiative, that people feel like they have a stake, that it matters. And that’s the problem, is that people don’t. Which reminds me of if we look at the DNC Convention a couple months ago and there was a lot of belonging happening. It was really beautiful, I thought, and yet we’re eight days out and we’ve gone othering because the other side’s othering.

So I use that as a example of now. So you could either speak to that and/or how the work of another institute here is focusing on the institutional piece and how your work can get us out of this morass so we are not in this constant cycle.

Ashley Gallegos: OK, yes. I feel like that pocket was rich with questions.

john a. powell: So the first, in terms of zero-sum, you’re absolutely correct. So zero-sum is a fertile ground for breaking because basically saying somebody’s going to lose. And oftentimes we start with a scarcity mentality, which is kind of interesting. And there’s a way of reframing and thinking about these things. Robert Sapolsky down in Stanford, he makes the observation that most wars, if not violent conflict, have been fought over sacred symbols. Fought over sacred symbols. And on a first blush that might seem like, no, no, no, aren’t they fighting over land or he said, “No, really.” And then you think, oh yeah, there was that a 100-year war. What were they fighting about? About whose God was the biggest God or whose God had whatever. I mean, literally two and three generations sending their sons off to die. The Holy Wars. Today that seems crazy because it is crazy.

And so why I’m saying is that our material stuff is always going to be finite, but in terms of giving and acknowledging people with dignity, there’s not a finite amount of dignity we can. We actually dignify everyone. And we’ve done a lot around TU. And again, the Equity Project is here. When people hear that group A is going to get more than group B, but group B is going to get something too, and here’s why, they’re actually OK with it. They’re OK with it. We actually do something to be a little bit more concrete. We do something called opportunity mapping where we map out the distribution of opportunity. We did this with California Endowment. And then we had different groups see where they were geo-coded in terms of who had more stuff.

So for example, in Texas, there was an effort to have parks within a mile of where you live. Well, some communities had three parks within a mile of where you live, so you’re not going to get another park. Some parts, some communities didn’t have a park within five miles. So the city investing money in those parks that didn’t have a park within five miles, there was no pushback. Oh, wait. And those communities that don’t have parks, they’re almost all Latino. So it wasn’t saying we’re going to give something to Latinos because they’re Latinos. It was saying everybody should have a park and they don’t have them. And then in terms of stories, here is something that’s a little bit counterintuitive. We do better with more complicated stories, but oftentimes, when we talk about the other, it’s a very simple story. What do we know about the other? Isabel Wilkins didn’t know this guy’s mother had died two years ago. He came in with a mega hat. She knows he’s a Trump supporter. So oftentimes we know the other in two-dimensional terms, not really much at all. So how do we tell a more complex story? So the point that you make in terms of when we tell a more complex story, it creates new possibilities of finding commonality.

But these simple stories create binaries. And that’s why I told the story about only 10% of whites. I wish it was only 1%. I wish it was none. But still, only 10% of whites are organized around racial dominance. It’s interesting, when other whites hear that, they actually are mad at that 10%. But oftentimes, in our discourse is white people or Black people or Latinos, instead of telling a more complicated story. And yes, we will work with Goldman School. We think the dean over there and the work they’re doing is great, but we are also doing stuff as well. And so you may know that virtually every city is rethinking its zoning policies. That’s partially a result of our work and Stephen in particular.

People don’t think about zoning as a organizing, othering mechanism is exactly that, right? And sometimes also, we have to be able to tell a story without a villain, right? Because like, OK, say all right, zoning in Elmwood, well, maybe there was a villain there, but they zone basically for white only. But sometimes there’s stuff that happens and there’s no villain behind it. There’s a spider web and there’s no spider. So we spent, it’s like, “Where’s the spider?” Just fix the web.

And so there are a lot of examples like that and learning from Belfast or Northern Ireland, learning from Chile, learning from people who have been through incredibly violent conflict and at least partially come out of the other side. With Care Lab, for the last two or three years, we’ve been having dinners. I think you have a series of three dinners between people in DC on the Republican side and democratic side, who at the Senate level, and it’s going extremely well. The difficult thing is looking at Cecily. We can’t talk about it publicly. The Democrats are afraid that if the other Democrat constituents know they’re meeting with Republicans and having a nice dinner, they won’t get reelected. The Republicans are afraid that if … So it’s like they will have the conversation. They will even build trust. They will actually even pass bills. But you can’t talk about it yet. It’s a private event. So we have to change that. We have to change the incentive so that instead of being punished for bridging, you’re rewarded for bridging.

Stephen Menendian: I’ll just add a couple things. We want to get more of you into the conversation. There are a couple of stories in the later chapters of the book that sort of talk about leaders who have told these more hopeful future-oriented stories and embodied it. An obvious one is Mandela and the Rainbow Nation. A less obvious one, but perhaps equally important is Mary Robinson, who was the president of Ireland, who inaugurated and ushered this new Ireland concept where everyone, they could move beyond some of the traditional ideas. It put Ireland on a completely different trajectory and to this day, is still one of the most popular European leaders, even though she hasn’t been in the presidency for, I don’t know, over a decade or so. To the zero-sum question, some things are zero-sum. Not everything though. And the number of things that aren’t zero-sum is hard to appreciate.

So it’s like it may feel zero-sum. Can we just give everyone, every kid school lunch? Can we do that? There’s economies of scale in doing that. It may seem zero-sum, but it’s not. Now voting is probably zero-sum. If you vote, someone gains a vote but in some real sense, it’s not. We feel an expansive sense of democracy when more and more people can participate. There are some things, there are zero-sum, but much of the economy is not zero-sum. You take $1 and you channel it through five businesses, that is positive-sum. So much of our world is more positive-sum, but the stories we’re told feel zero-sum. So that’s the problem is the stories in the areas that we have we’re told are zero-sum when they’re really much more likely to be positive-sum.

john a. powell: We can just … Affirmative action is a great example. And this is one of my pet peeves. And so every couple of years, there’s a new … Maybe now it’s over, right? But every couple of years, there’s a new attack on affirmative action and there’s a storyline with it, what it means, why are there so many or so few, depending on your perspective, Black and Latino kids going to school at Berkeley and Stanford when they didn’t test as well as some other kids. And so we ended up fighting for this elite schools and we put the fight in terms of zero-sum, I think mistake on a lot of levels. And I think there’s another story, another practice. And I asked the question. A few years ago, there were 900 students, mainly Latino, but some Black, who sued and lost because they didn’t get into Berkeley or UCLA. They had 4.0. They had perfect scores on their grades. They’ve gotten 4.0, which means all As for those of you who have been out of school a long time. The average student coming into Berkeley has a 4.3.

Yeah, 4.3. How do you have a 4.3, right? It’s AP classes. AP classes give you a boost. So those kids go to schools where there are no AP classes. So they did everything they possibly could have done at those schools and they still don’t get into Berkeley. And they sued and they lost. OK. And then we sued. And my question is this. We have these really brilliant young kids in Berkeley, Black, Latino. Sotomayor said, “Brilliance is everywhere. Opportunity is not.” Why aren’t we suing the state saying “Build another Berkeley”? If we got thousands of students who are clearly qualified, who are clearly brilliant, but we say, “We don’t have room for you.” We’ve been able to build more prisons.

But we can’t build more universities. So I’ve been waiting for someone to sue the state saying, “As a state, you’re supposed to provide a ladder for these students and you’re not doing it.” And even if you lose just to change the discourse. So it’s not between this brilliant white student and this brilliant Latino students, both of you go for it and realize as you go for it, as you get this great education at Berkeley or Stanford, wherever you go, it’s a public good. It’s not something you hoard yourself. But anyway, that’s shifting the discussion away from zero-sum. Can we think about how we all benefit? And if the resources are tuned. I’ll tell you one more story.

I work with a foundation in Sacramento. They had done a study and they found out that Black children were dying, Black infants were dying at five times the rate of white children and Latinos were dying at three times the rate of white children and white children were dying too high at a higher rate. And so they had limited resources. So they said, “We are going to give all the money that we have, which is limited, to the Black students.” And it was an internal fight because they had been reading some of our stuff that had been there to talk to them a couple of times. And they were saying, “This is not what Professor Powell suggested in terms of target universalism. We shouldn’t have said. We have limited resources. We have to make some priorities. And Blacks have been left out a long time.” They went back and forth.

So they asked me to come back and they said, “What would you suggest we do?” And I said, “Well, it’s your money, sort of.” Because I believe in Commonwealth. I don’t believe anyone really controls, is anyone’s wealth. $200 billion doesn’t belong to Elon Musk, it belongs to all of us. That’s another story.

But I said I would not give all the money to the Black student, the Black families. I would give a disproportionate amount to the Black families, but I’d also give some to Latino families. And I’d also give something to the white families and I’d tell a story about it as to why you were doing it, to have meaning, for you not to wait for some conflict entrepreneur to interpret your actions. You need to interpret your actions and your actions, the story should be something like “We don’t have enough resources, but we care about everybody. Everybody counts.” And so this is how we’re managing that. And they did it. And what happened was, with that story and that practice, resources flooded in and they were able to actually do something for all the families.

Ashley Gallegos: We have just about got to the end of the time that we’ve scheduled for tonight, but I don’t want to leave you with just … I know we promised one more question. So I am going to field one final question and an answer, and mostly because I want to also stay true to my promise and our intention of feeding you and having drinks together and communing and having conversation. So the thing I want to also plug is if you don’t get to ask your question in this particular forum, please know that this forum is taking a different shape. Ask a neighbor, ask john and Stephen while they’re up here signing books. Write in an email however your question lives on. But please, Christian …

Stephen Menendian: Can we do a batch of two or three for a final thing?

Ashley Gallegos: If you would like. I mean, it’s your night, Stephen. So two questions and then it’s a wrap folks.

Audience 5: Hi. Thank you for such a wonderful conversation. I’m curious, as you were talking about Indigenous folks, and I’m wondering what the role is of the cosmologies and the stories of belonging that have been unbroken or still exist in the role they have in this time?

Audience 6: Thank you. Hi, my name is Tara McGrew and thank you so much for this space and thank you so much for the work that you’re doing. I have three in one question. One is, when did competition come into all this to create that whole separateness in the evolution of the human species? Secondly, I’m getting back to where you just blew my mind when you said belonging. You said that we would have to othering. Oh, no, it says, “Othering is a misguided attempt to belonging.” And then you said, you went into talking about how we have to create a script. So in my head it’s like, “OK, this is good because I could create anything in my head, but I have to bring it into a tangible form into the human form so that we can all relate.” I just got a little confused there because if it’s a misguided attempt, then that means we have to start thinking about it differently. And that’s what shocked the whole way of my thinking pattern, which I like and thank you.

But then you said that we have to, which I believe, we have to move towards a future where we’re creating a script. But isn’t that what we’ve been doing, creating a script of separateness? And so who, I know that we’re all practitioners, we are, and I’m right now in the formation of creating stories to make connections and it seems that that’s sort of a reoccurring theme this evening. And I take that in my practice with people as I am trying to dismantle racism in those structures. But then if we are coming back and we are creating a different script, isn’t that sort of going back to the same script or is it just a different variation of a script that we’re creating? Do that make sense?

john a. powell: Makes a lot of sense.

Audience 6: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

john a. powell: Very quickly. First of all, these are great questions and I realize and I appreciate them, and I realize we’re not necessarily spending the time that they all deserve. So we’re creating stories all the time, period. Can we consciously create stories? And it’s not that I create a story or you create a story. We have to have all of our stories. So also part of belonging is you get to tell your story. And I oftentimes say, so you tell your story, it’s a long answer, but the short answer is who’s the audience for your story? Who are you talking to?

And one audience member that I want you to make prominent in your story is the lizard, right? The lizard. And the lizard, for those of you who are new to this, the lizard is the amygdala, the old part of the brain, the old part of the brain that we share with the lizard that’s organized around fear. That’s part of the audience. Talk to the lizard. The lizard doesn’t speak research. The lizard doesn’t speak data. And the lizard is afraid. What is the lizard afraid of? The lizard is most afraid of not belonging.

So when the proud boys are marching in Charlottesville, they’re telling you, the lizard is on full display. They’re not hiding the lizard. The lizard is saying, “The Jews will not replace us.” What is that telling you? First of all, it’s not factual. You don’t go to them and say, “Excuse me, there are no Jews who want to replace you.” That’s talking to the front of the brain. That’s not talking to the lizard. The lizard is saying, “I’m afraid that I’m not going to belong.” So the stories you have to tell is that you are going to belong. Everybody’s going to belong. And what’s your story? Tell me your story. It’s not enough for you to hear my story. And I could go on and on. I’ll just give you one other example. I spoke to four or 500 people who were all mega people. I was put in front of them to try to convince them to have Medicaid expansion. My host, as he was pushing me out on the stage, he said, “We had somebody here two weeks ago talking about this. They were booed off the stage. Good luck.”

And I walked on the stage and I started off with a lie. I said, “It’s good to be here.” My lizard was saying, “Man, what the hell?” But what I did is I went around the room and I said, “I want you to tell your story. I want you to tell your story about healthcare. Have you lost insurance, any of you because of your children having a preexisting condition or you’re losing your job or your doctor prescribed something and the insurance company says “No”? And I said, “Stand up if any of those things …” And by two or three more questions, everybody’s standing up. And then I said, “Before I get to my remarks, I want to hear your story. Tell me your story about that.” Now, there are no folded arms. Everybody’s completely animated. They’re yelling and cussing out the insurance companies.

And at the end of the session, they tell the host, “We like this guy. Can you have him come back?” What they were really saying is, “This guy saw us. This guy saw our lizard. And he didn’t say, ‘You’re stupid to believe that they’re going to kill your grandmother.’” Which is in the New York Times that the mega people are basically … So that’s the way you do it. You listen, not just your story, but other people’s story as well. And it’s not just Democrats and Republicans. Had a friend I talked to last night about Dan Siegel. Dan Siegel has a thing where he says, “With children, when they act out, connect and redirect. Start off with connecting. Start off with connecting.” Instead, we start off with redirecting, not just with children, with each other. You just said something really stupid. Let me tell you how stupid that is. I don’t feel connected. In fact, I’m feeling mad, right? Talk to the lizard.

Stephen Menendian: Well, again, I hate to follow up poetry with prose, but I’m going to do it. So there is a wonderful TED Talk by Chimamanda Adichie, American Nigerian author, called The Danger of a Single Story. It goes to your question, Dorian, about really the flattening that happens to our identities, that we can’t just reduce our identities to a single identity. I was working with john on the manuscript. He’d send me over manuscript texts and often my breath would be taken away by a wonderful line. One of my favorite lines in the book is where he wrote, “One of the keys to belonging is embracing our multiplicity and fluidity that we have to do, that we have to resist essentialism.” And so that means really leaning into broader identities, doing more bridging, recognizing our multiplicity. And there’s a lot in the book about that. I won’t go into too much about that, but part of it’s the stories we tell around identities not allowing to flatten us into a single identity.

Unfortunately, we live in a society right now and have for some time that’s not just radically individualistic individualism, but it’s radically separate. So we are separate from each other. We don’t just live in separate homes and drive in separate cars. We also have a real sense of separation from the planet and from each other. And that is partly a product of enlightenment thought. The subject-object duality, the human-non-human duality, reason over emotion. And the amazing thing about the last hundred years of science and really the last 30 years is it’s radically overturning that. Everything we thought about cognition and emotion turns out to be wrong. It’s radically integrated into our … And I think that’s actually getting us back to these pre-enlightenment epistemologies, our recognition of our radical entanglement, our radical embodiment. And we have to get back to that. And we have to do that without jettisoning the things we like about liberal democracy and liberalism but we have to usher ourselves into the next paradigm. And that’s our next project.

(Short applause)

Ashley Gallegos: All right. Hey. I want to thank you all for contributing to a lovely evening. I want to remind you that there are books available just in the lobby, and john and Stephen will be signing books for a little while here this evening over here at this table. We do have food and drink that Ivan is pointing towards now being in the hallway. OK. Not outside anymore. It is towards the hallway. Last but not least, I just want to end with tremendous gratitude for each of you for showing up and contributing to this event for the belonging builders you are and will be when you leave this room and during your time here, and to OBI staff and everybody who helped contribute to this event and make it wonderful and available for each of us. And last, but certainly not least, to john and Stephen for the tremendous amount of work and love they put into writing and offering this book and for what it will bring to each of us. Thank you.

(Applause, quickly fades out)

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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