Debate vs. Dialogue (or, The Truth is Out There)

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Debate and dialogue, while both tools for political exchange, are important to distinguish as philosophically different approaches.

To be sure, the two are similar in many ways. Perhaps most fundamentally, they both seek the Truth. Furthermore, they both rely on information exchange to try to discover the Truth. They both require rational arguments, and may or may not accept rhetorical, emotional, or experiential statements.

Yet the two are importantly different.

Consider, for example, a political debate. Candidates not only state their views and highlight points of disagreement – they make the unwavering case for why they are right.

In true dialogue, on the other hand, people share their views while trying to understand the views of their peers.

I am not sure how to best quantify this difference, but most fundamentally, it seems – in a debate, participants try to win; in dialogue they seek to agree.

That’s not to say that debate is bad and dialogue is good. Debate can help protect against bias, for example. A group that agrees without carefully considering all the options may well agree on on something inaccurate or suboptimal. The process of debate – in which each idea is vigorously and equally defended – can therefore help ensure that each idea is considered fully by its merit.

But I do wonder if debate is the best format for politics and discussion amongst candidates. Debate feeds into an “us” versus “them” mentality which here only serves to reinforce existing polarization.

The approaches also imply different theories as to where Truth lies. In dialogue, Truth most clearly resides in the wisdom of the whole. Participants are supposed to share rational arguments for one view or another, but the fundamental assumption is that – if everyone enters this process with an open mind – the Truth will be surfaced through this process.

I’m not sure the same can be said for debate. In this setting, Truth seems to take on a somewhat technocratic air – capable of discovery by the most skilled rhetoricians.

That may be a somewhat unfair generalization of debate, yet it is enough that it ought to give us pause regarding the ubiquity of debate – and the lack of deliberation – in political settings.

The question, then, is: what would a more dialogue-centric democracy look like?

Horse Races and Political Journalism

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

The advancement of the calendar year has brought a whole new energy to political campaign coverage. The Iowa Caucus is just over two weeks away, with the New Hampshire primary a week and a half after that.

Political journalism is aflutter with polling data and predictions – Cruz is expected to win the Iowa primary, and the second spot seems locked down as well. But other republicans vying for the nomination have the chance to make waves with a surprise third place finish.

“‘Exceeds expectations’ is the best headline a candidate can hope for coming out of Iowa,” a reporter shared in a recent NPR Political podcast while discussing what he referred to as the “Iowa Tango.”

The dance is not dissimilar on the democratic side – Clinton is expected to win Iowa, but Sanders has been slowly chipping away at her lead. An “exceeds expectations” in Iowa – and certainly a win – could lead to a big bump for the Sanders campaign.

This is all very exciting.

For those of us who are political junkies, presidential horse race coverage can be exhilarating. It’s like a (nerdy) action movie where you never know what’s going to happen next, where you’re on the edge of your seat because there’s no guarantee of a (subjectively) happy ending.

This sort of coverage is engaging for a certain segment of the electorate, but is it good journalism?

In We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, my former colleague Peter Levine illustrates an alternative model:

An important example was the decision of the Charlotte Observer to dispense with horse race campaign coverage, that is, stories about how the campaigns were trying to win the election. Instead, the Observer convened representative citizens to choose issues for reporters to investigate and to draw questions that the candidates were asked to answer on the pages of the newspaper.

Rather than asking “who will win the election?” this type of political coverage seeks to answer “who should win the election?”

One could argue that this isn’t an appropriate question for a news outlet to ask. If an ostensibly fair and balanced news outlet was actually biased in a particular candidate’s favor, for example, that would indeed go against the democratic process.

Yet we already know that horse race coverage can be prone to bias – resulting in early or inaccurate calls of elections while voting is still taking place.

Similarly, while certainly prone to bias, the question of who should win is not inherently biased. In the example above the Charlotte Observer answered the question not with their own editorial views, but through a combination of citizen voice and candidate response.

This is hardly the only model for political coverage addressing who should win. For example, outlets could put more emphasis on political investigative journalism – scrutinizing candidate policies for likely impact and outcome. There is certainly some of this already, but it is absent from some outlets while others treat such long-form critiques as secondary to the quick news of poll numbers.

Arguably here we have a market issue – perhaps journalists want to provide this sort of thoughtful analysis, but lack the reader interest to pursue it.

Walter Lippmann – a journalist and WWI propagandist – would certainly agree with that assessment. “The Public” as a faceless, unidentified herd, will always be too busy with other things to invest real time and thought into a deep understanding of political issues.

As Lippmann describes in his 1925, The Phantom Public:

For when private man has lived through the romantic age in politics and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is sober and unimpressed…You cannot move him then with good straight talk about service and civic duty, nor by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to make him vote.

To the extent that it is popular, horse race coverage succeeds because it is sexy and exciting. There are some people who have the interest and energy to read more provocative thought pieces on politics, but their numbers are not significant enough to affect so-called “public opinion.”

Lippmann does not fault the generic masses for putting their attention towards other things – it is only natural to have more interest and awareness in those topics which effect you more profoundly.

There is an important and subtle distinction here – just because the unnamed masses have no interest in politics does not mean that all people do not have an interest in politics. In one of my favorite Lippmann quotes, he writes that “The public must be put in its place…so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.”

Lippmann does not mean to argue for a technocratic society in which the voices of the common people are excluded. Rather, he highlights an aggregation problem – individual voices are important, while the collective voice of “the Public” – while easiest to hear – is nonsense.

This is, perhaps, what is most attractive about a model such as that used by the Charlotte Observer. Individual voices shaped the process, but on a scale that didn’t aggregate to meaninglessness.

A similar strategy can be seen in work such as that by the Oregon Citizen’s Initiative Review. A the review regularly gathers “a panel of randomly-selected and demographically-balanced voters…from across the state to fairly evaluate a ballot measure.” Each panel hears professional testimony about the measure and participates in several days of dialogue before produce a statement “highlighting the most important findings about the measure” which is then included in the official voter pamphlet.

This type of approach provides a balance between engaging diverse citizen voices and the infeasiblity of having every single person participate in such a process.

The Charlotte Observer provides one example of how this balance might be found in political journalism, but there have been so few attempts it’s impossible to know what’s best. It’s an area that’s desperate for greater innovation, for finding new ways to cover politics and new ways to think about journalist’s and citizen roles in politics.

Radical Acts of Kindness

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

The phrase “random acts of kindness” is most commonly attributed to author Anne Herbert. In 1982, in Sausalito, California, Herbert wrote on a placemat:

Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty

The phrase was then popularly refined to “practice random acts of kindness.” Growing up in California in the 1980s, this phrase was everywhere.

I never really liked it.

I appreciate the sentiment – kindness towards others is generally a good thing – but random acts of kindness? Here’s what I imagine:

I am out in the world. I see a person in distress. I have the ability, with little cost or effort, to provide help or support. I flip a coin.

Randomly, I decide whether or not to be kind.

Surely, this is not what Herbert intended, but nevertheless, the phrase seems inappropriate. Random kindness removes intentionality, agency, context. Random kindness is predictable, perhaps, on average but generally no better than fumbling around in the dark. A random choice between kindness and inaction.

I propose a different phrase: radical acts of kindness.

Perhaps kindness seems so passé as to be the opposite of radical. As a social norm, kindness is generally accepted to be good.

Sort of.

Consider the work of philosopher Peter Singer. In his 2002 book One World, he shares a example he conducts with his class. He starts by quoting Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick:

We should all agree that each of us in bound to show kindness to his parents and spouse and children, and to other kinsmen in a less degree: and to those who have rendered services to him, and any others whom he may have admitted to his intimacy and called friends: and to neighbors and to fellow-countrymen more than others…

Singer writes, “When I read this list to my students, they nod their heads in agreement at the various circles of moral concern Sidgwick mentions.” And this all does seem more or less reasonable: you care most for your closest family, and then for your closest friends, and then more generally for your acquaintances and connections. Every person in the world can be mapped to your various circles of concern, indicating, approximately, how much kindness you ought to show to them.

But Sidgwick is not through. He did, after all, write more than a century ago. His quote continues:

…and perhaps we may say [we are bound to show kindness] to those of our own race more than to black or yellow men, and generally to human beings in proportion to their affinity to ourselves.

Well, that got awkward. Singer shares that at this point, his students “sit up in shock.”

And it is shocking. To go from caring more for your immediate family to being an racist seems like quite a leap. It hardly seems immoral if I prefer to donate a kidney to a loved one rather than a stranger, yet, as Singer points out, there is something troubling to these circles of concern.

This element is particularly troubling in conjunction with the numerous studies which show that people tend to self-segregate into “like” groups. Again, it doesn’t seem intrinsically immoral to want to spend time with people you can easily relate to – yet if we grow closest to those most like us, and we care most for those we are close to…the ultimate result is a self-fulfilling loop of power and supremacy.

Singer argues that we need to reset our sense of “like”, seeing all humanity as part of our global community. Our neighbors are suffering, and it makes no different whether they are 10 blocks away or 10 thousand miles away. He proposes a specific policy solution – donating a minimum of 1% of your income to those most in need. But even with this practical implementation, he provides little guidance on how to shift one’s thinking and feeling.

This is where we get to radical acts of kindness.

Perhaps there are circles of concern – even Singer concedes that it’s reasonable to care for your family more than strangers. I’m inclined to agree with Singer that, especially among strangers, we need to shift who we see as “like” ourselves, but this shift doesn’t address the fact that there’s a basic inequity to the circle of concern model.

Singer’s plan would address global poverty while doing little to confront the deep racial and social injustice experienced in our own country.

A radical act of kindness is being kinder than social norm would generally dictate. Showing true care for someone you hardly know, regardless of their distance from you, regardless of their likeness to you.

Radical kindness is pushing the boundaries of those circles, changing the norms of how much kindness is proper to show. Radical kindness seeks to go beyond social obligations.

Such radical acts of kindness are not easy, and those circles of concern will never – and perhaps should not – go away. But we can each push the boundary of what it means to care for our fellow man, each seek to make the word a little better – not randomly, but radically.

Words as Actions

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

A common critique of dialogue is that it is “just talk.” That is: it’s useless to talk about injustice if we don’t act to confront injustice.

This is a reasonable complaint, yet it minimizes the value of dialogue – relegating words to a hollow role of little to no meaning.

I’ve been reading J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, a compilation of notes from his 1962 William James Lectures. Far from deriding words as “just talk,” Austin starts by examining words as actions.

These performative statements, as he calls them, are verbal actions. Words that accomplish an act.

When getting married, a person says, “I do.” That statement is the act of marrying. When naming a ship, a person might declare “I name this ship…”. To make an accusation, one would rightly say: “I accuse…”

These words are actions.

Austin spends much of his time examining how performative statements such as these may be “unhappy” or infelicitous – a person may not have the authority to name a ship, one person may say “I do” while the other has a change of heart. And, of course, there are those particularly devious forms of infelicity – a person may be insincere in their statements, they may lie or have other intentions.

Such infelicity may abort or debase an action, but Austin has no doubt that there is a class of felicitous speech-acts, which are, indeed, acts.

Consider the sentence, “I promise that…” This, Austin argues, is an action in itself: “It is not a description, because (I) it could not be false, nor, therefore, true; (2) saying ‘I promise that’ (if happy, of course) makes it a promise, and makes it unambiguously a promise.”

Not all talk is performative, of course, though Austin concedes that in a certain sense, all speaking is an act.

When we issue any utterance whatsoever, are we not ‘doing something’? Certainly the ways in which we talk about ‘action’ are liable here, as elsewhere, to be confusing. For example, we may contrast men of words with men of action, we may say they did nothing, only talked or said things: yet again, we may contrast only thinking something with actually saying it (out loud), in which context saying it is doing something.

Yet, Austin’s true interest in performative statements is deeper than simply the act of speaking as an act itself. To clarify this point, Austin sorts the act of “issuing an utterance” into three categories: you can make a sound, you can say a word, or you can – essentially – make a performative statement. Austin here calls this a “rhetic” act.

To be clear, not all sounds are this type of action, but Austin is voracious in his argument that rhetic acts are important and should not be dismissed as “just words.”

Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them…

And here we have the crux of the matter: words not only have meaning, they have consequences. Words that are true acts, which are more than “just talk,” have impacts on everyone around us.

Those who decry “just talk” are right to deride hollow or infelicitous comments when action is what’s needed. But Austin, too, is right to highlight the value of words: the value of words as actions, words which can make change.

Madness and Biotypes

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

There’s an interesting article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. The study, Identification of Distinct Psychosis Biotypes Using Brain-Based Biomarkers, uses bio-markers to identify “three neurobiologically distinct psychosis biotypes.”

As the researchers explain, clinical diagnoses remain “the primary means for classifying psychoses despite considerable evidence that this method incompletely captures biologically meaningful differentiations.” The study aims to classify psychoses more rigorously and accurately by examining the underlying biological factors.

Researchers recruited individuals who had been diagnosed with some form of psychosis, as well as a comparative “healthy” population. They “collected a large panel of biomarkers of known relevance to psychosis and functional brain activity” and “refined a subset of the biomarker panel that differentiated people with psychosis from healthy persons.” Clustering the relevant biomarkers, researchers found three distinct biotypes (“biologically distinctive phenotypes”).

Interestingly, the three biotypes identified “did not respect clinical diagnosis boundaries.” That is: the biological expression of psychoses differed from their clinical diagnosis, highlighting the need to refine current diagnosis techniques.

However, the clusters did reveal a meaningful lens through which to view psychosis. For example, “the biotypes significantly differed in ratings on the Birchwood Social Functioning Scale, which assesses social engagement, psychosocial independence and competence, and occupational success; biotype 1 showed the most psychosocial impairment, and biotype 3 had the least impairment.”

Particularly interesting are the implications of this work:

The biotype outcome provides proof of concept that structural and functional brain biomarker measures can sort individuals with psychosis into groups that are neurobiologically
distinctive and appear biologically meaningful. These outcomes inspire specific theories that could be fruitfully investigated. First, biotypes 1 and 2 should be of greater interest in familial genetic investigations, while perhaps biotype 3 would bemore informative for explorations of environmental correlates of psychosis risk, spontaneous mutations, and/or epigenetic modifications.

This is fascinating research and certainly worthy of further study, but it also raises the haunting specter of modernity. As Gordon Finlayson describes in Habermas: A Very Short Introduction:

There is a sinister aspect to the assumption that science and rationality serve man’s underlying need to manipulate and control external nature: that domination and mastery are very close cousins of rationality. Not only science and technology, but rationality itself is implicated in domination.

James C. Scott emphasizes the difference between the dangerous ideology of “high modernism” and genuine scientific practice in his excellent book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

Unlike true scientific scholarship, high modernism was “a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimist about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.”

In short, high modernism is the authoritarian imposition of a planned social order, designed by bureaucrats foolish enough fancy themselves as benevolent conquerors of nature.

To be clear, the study itself is not inherently high modernist. Better understanding and diagnosis of psychosis is a worthy scientific goal. But you’ll forgive me if I’m somewhat weary of the profession which considered homosexuality a mental ailment until the 1970s. Social understandings of “mental health” have long been propped up by the scientific understanding of the day – with the currently scientific research miraculously changing to validate social norms.

Michel Foucault perhaps best documents this phenomenon in Madness and Civilization, a brilliant historical account of “madness” as a social construct which shifts to fit the norms of the day.

Perhaps this seems unlikely in our modern world – surely our modern scientific understanding of biology far out shines the dark, half-science of the middle ages. Finding biological underpinnings of madness, biotypes that reveal psychosis, seems, on its face, reassuring: madness can be rationally explained.

Yet it is exactly that reassurance which ought to give us pause. Perhaps we have only found what we wanted to find – irrefutable proof that the mad are somehow different than the healthy, that there is something fundamentally, biologically, different about “them.” And, of course, it’s the implied outcome which should surely give us pause – if we can define the root of their madness, we can at last fix these poor, broken souls.

Reclaiming “Citizens”

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Like many who work in the civic realm, I use the word “citizens” a lot. Usually with the clarification that I don’t mean the term as a legal status, but rather as a way of describing people who are part of the same community or who live in the same area.

This difference in meaning is significant. To talk about the work of improving communities as relying on the engagement of citizens (of legal status) has wholly different moral and political connotations than seeking the engagement of all citizens (who are connected to a community, regardless of legal status). .

For that reason, many civically-minded organizations have elected to drop or minimize use of the word “citizens.” In my days as a marketer I would have advised them to do so. It’s a bad enough sign if you have to explain a term to your audience, but you definitely don’t want people to interpret something as exclusive when it is intended to be inclusive. That is not a miscommunication you want to have.

So why persist in using a term that is so widely understood to mean something different than what I mean by it?

First, there’s the poetry of it. “Citizens” is a simple word, and there is no other term that so concisely indicates “people who are part of a community.”

But more importantly, citizens have rights.

Again, this could be interpreted in the legal sense – legal citizens have legal rights – but the word has a broader civic meaning as well.

All people who are part of a community or who are affected by a decision have the right to participate in shaping that community or making that decision. Regardless of legal status, citizens have the right to participate as full members of the community.

I think of this non-legal use of the word “citizens” as a reclamation of sorts, though truth be told the word “citizens” has always been problematic.

It is a word whose function is to divide the haves from the have nots; to indicate who has power, who has the right of full participation. The precise legal and social understanding has changed – “citizens” were once only wealthy white men; our current understanding is only slightly more benevolent.

That’s why it’s so important to reclaim – or perhaps simply claim – this term. All people have rights; all people have the right and responsibility to participate in their communities as citizens. This right is not bestowed by some legal definition; it is an intrinsic human right.

Until we recognize all our neighbors as true citizens and as equal partners in shaping our communities, we not only impinge upon this important right, we shut out important voices and energy, harming our communities through a narrowed perspective.

Civic Voice and Civic Duty

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Earlier this month, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) and the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) released research showing that Americans’ volunteering rate remains strong. Over a quarter of U.S. adults volunteered through an organization last year, while nearly two thirds volunteered informally.

This is welcome news, but also disconcerting: recent trends point to steady volunteering rates but drops in other civic activities. A December 2014 report found that “16 of the 20 civic health indicators dropped,” with volunteering as one of the few positive outliers. Collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, civic health indicators cover topics including voting, volunteering, political expression and group membership.

Personally, I am quite concerned about indicators related to civic voice. A 2010 NCOC report found that, among Americans who are not engaged with a community group, less than 15% express their political voice in one or more ways. This number rises significantly for those who are involved in a group (about 40%) and especially for those with a leadership role within a community group (nearly 70%).

But the disparity indicated by these gaps is alarming. Under 10% of the population falls into the category of “leaders,” raising important questions about the socioeconomic and gender disparities represented in that gap.

For example, a 2012 study by my former colleagues at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) looked specifically at the civic lives of young people with no college experience – some of the most underrepresented people in our society.

When one focus group was asked whether they had a voice in their school, they all simply laughed. One young man in Little Rock argued that student voice in school was a myth: “Even when you are class president and school president you still don’t have a say, so … it’s only a show.”

Another student is quoted as saying, “even if you do voice your opinion it won’t do any good—the suits are the ones who are gonna make all the decisions.”

That is deeply problematic for civil society.

Too many people feel as though their voice does not matter, as though their perspectives don’t add to the world.

This is a fallacy. A myth perpetuated by false social standards laying claim to what types of people have value and what types of views have value.

All people have value; all voices matter.

Unfortunately, too many people have been taught that their voices don’t have value – that they would only add to the noise if they ever dared to speak up. Once this message is internalized, the civic silence is hard to break.

But that’s why it’s important to remember – speaking out is not a luxury, its not an activity you do to show off how important you are. It is a civic duty. Sharing your own voice and perspective – particularly for those whose voice and perspective is often overlooked – is critical to transforming the state of civic dialogue. Everyone’s voice needs to be heard.

There’s this great and terrible irony in the world – it’s the people who worry about being rude or incompetent or otherwise being a terrible person who are the least likely to be rude, incompetent or an otherwise terrible person.

The same can be said about civic voice – if you never speak up because you are so convinced that your own voice can’t possibly add value, then you are depriving the rest of us of your wisdom. I know it is awkward, and I know it feels self-aggrandizing, but forget about all that: we need your words and your perspective. It’s a civic duty to share your voice. Really. We can’t tackle the hard problems without you.

Civic Studies and Network Science

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I had the delightful opportunity today to return to my former place of employment, Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, for a conversation about civic studies.

The “intellectual component of civic renewal, which is the movement to improve societies by engaging their citizens,” civic studies is the field that set me on this path towards a Ph.D. Civic studies puts citizens (of all legal statuses) at the fore, bringing together facts, values, and strategies to answer the question, “What should we do?”

Ultimately, this is the question that I hope to help answer, as a person and as a scholar.

So, perhaps you can appreciate my former colleague’s confusion when they learned that my first semester coursework is in physics and math.

These are not, I suppose, the first fields one thinks of when looking to empower people to improve their communities. I am not convinced that bias is well founded, but irregardless, civic studies did primarily grow out of the social sciences and has its academic home closest to that realm.

So if my interest is in civic studies how did I end up in network science?

I hope to some day have a clear and compelling answer to that question – though it’s complicated by the fact that both fields are new and most people aren’t familiar with either of them.

The most obvious connection between civic studies and network science is around social networks. Civic studies is an inherently social field – as indicated by the “we” in what should we do? Questions of who is connected – and who is not – are critical.

For example, in Doug McAdam’s excellent book Freedom Summer, he documents the critical role of the strong social network of white, northern college students who participated in Freedom Summer. These students brought the problems of Mississippi to attention of the white mainstream, and these students went on to use the organizing skills they learned in the summer of 1964 to fuel the radical movements of the 1960s.

But networks also offer other insight into civic questions. Personally, I am particularly interested in network analysis of deliberation – exploring the exchange of ideas during deliberation and exploring how one’s own network of ideas influences they way draw on supporting arguments.

More broadly, networks can be seen throughout the civic world: not only are there networks of people and ideas, there are networks of institutions, networks of power, and the physical network of spaces that shape our world.

Networks and civics, I think, are closer than one might think.

Othering

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I’ve been noticing a troubling trend in the wake of our ongoing cycle of tragic news stories: othering.

Othering is by no means new, but I’ve been struck lately by the ease with which it slips out into the open, from people of all political backgrounds. One person might other Muslims while another might other Christians, but neither form of othering should be welcome in the good society.

Sociologist Steven Sideman has a great paper exploring the theory of othering, in which he explains the term:

An elaborated account of otherness assumes a social world that is symbolically divided into two antagonistic orders: a symbolic-moral order conferring full personhood and a respected civil status and its antithesis, a defiled order. Othering is a process in which certain persons and the spaces they occupy are excluded from what is considered to be the morally sanctified civil life of a community.

Typically, as sociologist Stephen Sapp writes, othering is a “processes that dominant groups use to define the existence of secondary groups,” but I am inclined to agree with Sideman that “disadvantaged status in one or more social spheres does not necessarily mean subordination across all spheres.”

Our American red state/blue state rivalry is indicative of this: some liberals other conservatives just as some conservatives other liberals. It’s hard to say which group is dominant, but either way, we are unlikely to find a way out of our political gridlock until we stop othering each other.

Othering itself may be endemic to the human condition and may have its roots in less insidious thinking.

Sociologists Keith Maddox and Sam Sommers talk about the related field of implicit bias in terms of heuristics, or mental shortcuts: “Humans often rely on cognitive shortcuts to get things done. We categorize people and place them into preconceived notions.”

We literally could not function without these cognitive shortcuts: these are the same mental processes that allow us to navigate a subway system in a new city or recognize an object as a “table.” Humans categorize things to make sense of the world, and we’re very, very, good at doing so subconsciously.

This logic illustrates for Maddox and Sommers the problem of a “color-blind” approach to racial injustice. We can’t simply wash away our implicit biases: rather we must be made aware of them and we must work to confront them in ourselves.

Othering at times may be similarly implicit – I am certainly guilty of my own biases, and it’s easy to think of people different from oneself as an “other.”

But, just as color-blindness is not a solution, we must call ourselves out for our othering, and we must actively seek to not hold whole groups responsible for the actions of a few.

Following the recent attacks at a Planned Parenthood, it is fair to ask why white shooters seem to be perpetually treated more justly than unarmed black men. It is fair to point to the injustices in our system and to demand that all people be treated justly. But it is not fair to make jokes about registering Evangelicals or shutting down churches: we should never judge the whole by the actions of a few.

In the last few days, I have been heartened to see some of my pro-life friends share messages of support for Planned Parenthood. But, of course, I should hardly be surprised: regardless of how one feels about abortion, any reasonable person would be saddened by the shooting in Colorado. Only an extremists wanted that to happen, and we should never judge the whole by the actions of a few.

Making a Difference: Friday’s Close Up Broward Youth Policy Summit Expo

Posted on November 23, 2015 by stevemasy

As you will recall from my last post, I was headed down to Broward County to see the great work being done there by the ESOL department within the district and by the Close Up Foundation. I am happy to say that it was a wonderful experience to see so many young immigrants dedicated to improving their communities and learning what it means to be a citizen. These 200 young people, almost all of whom have been in this country for three years or less, presented their civic-oriented proposals for feedback and discussion with local citizens, community leaders, and other interested parties. An overview of the expo can be seen below.

What do I like about this? Where to start! It gives young people, new to this country a chance to engage in the process of civic life and civic work. It gets them thinking not only about problems, but about solutions. It develops their communication skills and their ability to talk with leaders and community members, such as district superintendent Robert Runcie, who can make a difference in their lives. No, let me revise that. It allows these kids to have a sense that THEY are making a difference THEMSELVES. Isn’t that what we want for our young people? That sense of belonging, of advocacy, and of efficacy as citizens?

Over 200 fresh young immigrants share policy proposals with the state and Broward community

I had the great pleasure of talking with many of these kids about their proposals, and it was incredibly refreshing to hear them articulate a passion for change and a desire to make a difference as residents and, yes, as citizens. They addressed issues of concern to both them and their community, were open to feedback and suggestions to strengthen their proposals, and demonstrated an understanding of the difference they could make, and why this effort mattered. It was wonderful to see. In the rest of this post, you can take a look at just a few of the dozens of proposals that these young immigrants shared.

How can we reduce testing in schools and still ensure kids are learning?

Let’s make sure that everyone has access to quality health services!

How can we make sure that schools have equitable access to resources?

Let’s make sure that all able-bodied people can both work and support their families!

It doesn’t have to be 15 dollars an hour to make a difference and help both business and the community!

We need to address issues with teen violence in schools, especially in low SES areas!

These are just a few of the many different policy proposals that these wonderful kids came up with. Others involved protection of the environment, changing the role of the school counselor away from a testing coordinator to actual counselling, medical marijuana, school bullying, teen pregnancy, and so many more areas of relevance and concern in the immigrant community, in Broward, in Florida, and in the nation. Kudos to both Broward ESOL and the Close Up Foundation in this work. You can find additional images on the Expo at the Broward ESOL Facebook page, as well as through the Close Up Foundation’s Twitter feed (and they worth a follow!). I am excited to see what comes next, and I hope that we here at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship might find ways to help in this effort down the road. So much promise!

Civic Studies

An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies

Category Archives: civic studies

Debate vs. Dialogue (or, The Truth is Out There)

Horse Races and Political Journalism

Madness and Biotypes

Civic Studies and Network Science

Othering