The
weather has turned cool and crisp (or so I’ve heard… I’m in California, where
it’s hot out and everything’s on fire). We’ve entered the time of year when
soon we’ll get together with our loved ones, share a traditional holiday meal,
and bicker over politics.
There
are two major fallacies that prevent Americans on both sides of the political
aisle from understanding one another.
The
first is the assumption: “If you knew what I knew, you would believe what I
believe.”
I
hear this on both sides: If the other side just knew
what we knew. If they knew the planet was warming, if they knew
about all the plastic in the Pacific Ocean, if they knew we’ve been working
hard for decades and still haven’t gotten ahead…
Often
a debate will focus on adjudicating the facts. What percentage of scientists
believes in human-caused catastrophic climate change? Or what are the
scientific arguments for and against genetically engineered crops?
The
problem is that the debate, at its core, is often not over facts. The two sides
have different values and different identities. Our values and our political
positions tie us to the groups we identify with.
For
one thing, our differing values will lead us to different positions no matter
what the facts are.
If I value a multicultural American that welcomes immigrants from all over the world, and you believe America is a white nation and non-white immigrants are changing its character in an unacceptable way, we’re not going to agree about immigration. The facts won’t matter.
Each
of us identifies with groups that share these values. Asking a Trump supporter
to denounce Trump’s policies or Trump himself is also asking that person to
give up a part of their identity. It’s asking them to give up their membership
in a group.
The
same can be said of membership in other groups, including Hillary or Bernie
supporters. All people resist taking in facts that jeopardize our membership in
groups we identify with.
The
second false assumption is: “Because that never happened to me, it never
happens.”
The
truth is that we often have no idea how other people live in this country. This
is particularly true of people who are members of dominant or more privileged
groups: wealthy people, white people, men, heterosexuals, able-bodied people,
and so on.
The
effects of privilege are more obvious when you don’t have it. As a white woman,
when I get pulled over by a cop, I’m bummed out, but not scared for my life.
Usually I have an amicable exchange with the cop even if I get a warning or a
ticket.
I
might assume that all people are treated so respectfully by cops. I might think
that if a person of color was shot by the police, he or she must have been
doing something wrong. Surely, the police did not act improperly. I’ve never
seen a cop act improperly.
It’s
only when I accept that my life as a white woman in America tells me very
little about what it means to be a person of color in America that I can begin
listening and learning.
That
willingness to listen and learn from one another is needed on all sides. Each
of us can begin to accept that our experiences in this country aren’t
universal, which is a much bigger step toward agreeing on the facts than just
looking at the same data.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in
sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in San Diego.
Distributed by OtherWords.org.
