Introduction

What's true about race and social change?

It's a seemingly simple question, but what's at stake in the search for an answer is nothing less than the soul of a nation.

America came into being in a manner that was laced with paradox and hypocrisy. On the one hand, the choice to launch a revolution against the monarchy in England was inspired by the most noble and advanced ideas of the Enlightenment. The founding fathers decided to take up arms against the mightiest empire in the world out of a commitment to the following ideals:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

These words represented a revolutionary and enlightened notion in the eighteenth century, and they articulate an ideal that continues to inspire America and much of the world today.

However, at the same exact moment that the founding fathers were writing the Declaration of Independence, one could find an advertisement in the local newspaper with the following copy:

Figure depicts a copy of an advertisement for selling Negroes in the local newspaper.

This is the inescapable truth of the founding of the United States: The most noble of humanistic ideals coexisted with the cruel reality of one of the most unjust and dehumanizing institutions in human history.

As the American experiment in democracy has unfolded, the struggle to narrow the gap between the brutal reality of racism and the inspiring aspirations of our espoused values has played out at the center of our civic life. Race relations often seemed stuck in some unjust, unchanging—and seemingly unchangeable—status quo that would endure for decades, until the nation found itself rocked by spasms of dramatic and rapid change. The institution of slavery endured from before the Revolutionary War through the founding of the nation in 1776 and on through another century, until the slowly accumulating tensions around the issue finally erupted into a Civil War that convulsed the nation. When the dust cleared and the hundreds of thousands of dead were buried, the Union prevailed and slavery officially ended.

What followed was another hundred years of the scarcely improved status quo of “Jim Crow” segregation, in which Black people continued to endure vicious discrimination. Examples of mistreatment in this era included frequent lynchings and murders with no consequences for the killers; policies such as redlining, which kept people of color segregated and impoverished; and deeply unethical medical practices such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. This was the American reality for nearly another century, until the nation once again found itself rocked by waves of protest and activism in the 1960s that wrought significant social change. Myriad racial injustices that had endured for decades were transformed in just a matter of years.

All that was not so long ago, and in the decades since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the issues of race and social change have remained—as ever—central to American civic life. In 2008, America elected its first Black president, and whatever you think of his politics, there can be no denying that for a nation in which Black people were once owned as slaves and legally declared to be less than human, his election was a historic moment in American history. A man who just a generation ago would have been unable to drink from the same water fountains as Whites in many states had been elected to the highest office in the land. It was an undeniable sign that some meaningful degree of social change had occurred in America.

And yet.

Today's news reports are filled with stories of unarmed Black people—mostly men—shot and killed by police: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Dontre Hamilton, Tanisha Hamilton, Akai Gurley, Eric Harris, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile…sadly, the list could go on and on. On June 17, 2015, a twisted White supremacist joined a prayer study group at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and then shot nine Black congregants dead. It was an act of cold, vicious racial hatred that could have been ripped from the headlines of the darkest, ugliest days of Jim Crow. During the 2016 election season, we watched Black and Brown Americans get physically assaulted at multiple political rallies for the leading candidate of one of America's major political parties.

It is apparent that each of these race-related incidents functions as a real-life Rorschach test: Different people look at the same images and facts and arrive at dramatically different understandings of what it all means. Some see indisputable proof of the persistence of a vast system of racial oppression and discrimination that has endured since the nation's founding. Others see something quite different: the regrettable consequences of a flawed mental health system perhaps, incidences of excessive use of force by the police, or a lack of individual responsibility among people of color—all dynamics that are understood to be unfolding in a nation that is so color-blind and post-racial that it has twice elected a Black president. There is, it seems, no solid ground on which to stand; only the idiosyncrasies of personal experience, the shifting sands of public opinion, and the void of moral relativism.

What's true about race and social change? It's a vital question. Any answer we arrive at is sure to inform our understanding of why we find ourselves in this difficult, polarized place and how we might heal our racial wounds, live up to our highest aspirations, and step together into a brighter, more promising future.

This question has burned in my soul for decades, and it has animated a lifelong quest for insights. My search began in the nearly all-White middle class suburb of Connecticut where I grew up, where my inquiries into matters of race and social change unfolded among family and peers in classrooms, living rooms, and at kitchen tables populated by people who looked much like me. In my mid-twenties, I experienced a life-changing adventure with a group of Black and Jewish adolescents on a month-long civil rights tour across the United States that took us through the secluded back roads of Philadelphia, Mississippi; the churches of Birmingham, Alabama; the classrooms of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas; and across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. As I explain in Chapter 1, it was on that trip that the veils of blindness first began to fall away.

My quest led eventually to the classrooms of Harvard University, where my personal journey evolved into a rigorous empirical inquiry. In the early years of my doctoral studies in human development and psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I stumbled on the exercise that forms the heart of this book. I was investigating the topic of youth leadership and was conducting field research involving the observation of youth leadership programs. I wanted to know how these programs understood leadership, and then taught it to participants. It was in the course of that research that I visited a program called Camp Anytown, run by an organization now called the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ). What I encountered on that visit changed the course of my life.

Camp Anytown is a week-long residential youth leadership experience that focuses on teaching young people about diversity and social justice. It occurs in multiple states across the country each year, and each Camp Anytown program brings together an extremely diverse group of 30 to 50 high school students who live together for 5 days immersed in intense experiential programming. Over the course of the week, participants engage in deep conversations about “isms” such as racism, sexism, ageism, and more in activities and sessions led by experienced educators.

On the last morning of the program, participants were separated into groups—Whites, Asians, Jews, LGBTQ, Latinos, Blacks—and told not to talk to or make eye contact with members of other groups.^* The program directors then created and enforced an unjust, segregated, hierarchical social system in which the White kids experienced tremendous privilege and opportunity and the darker-skinned kids experienced discrimination and oppression. They called it the Separation Exercise, and it was designed to simulate a Jim Crow–style social system in which participants would have a chance to practice challenging these unjust norms. Challenge them they did, and over the course of just a few hours events unfolded that were at times stunningly similar to what occurred during the real-life civil rights movement.

Watching the events of that morning, I realized that Camp Anytown's Separation Exercise was essentially a simulated civil rights movement. Here, at a rustic New England summer camp, I had stumbled on an opportunity to study the process of social change in something as close to replicable research conditions as I could imagine. I wondered: What might we learn by carefully observing multiple civil rights movements in a petri dish?

The next 3 years of my life were spent developing a rigorous research methodology, observing three more of these Separation Exercises, and then analyzing the findings that emerged from across the multiple observations. I spent the next decade of my life refining my understanding of the meaning and implications of this research into the ideas presented here.

As you'll see, this analysis of these provocative exercises led to several important insights. Here are just a few that emerged from this research that you'll encounter in the pages ahead:

Dynamics of obedience and conformity play a powerful role in preserving the status quo of unjust systems. The unwillingness to question a troublesome status quo—even in the face of strong personal feelings that something is not right—is the major force in preserving current conditions. Equally important, these individual decisions contribute directly to the emergence of vast, system-wide patterns and structures in ways that most of us scarcely comprehend.
Individuals at the top of systems of privilege and oppression have very limited insight into the nature of those systems. This system blindness need not result from intentional racism or malice, but it has the effect of making it maddeningly difficult for individuals immersed in these systems to achieve a shared understanding of the reality of what's actually going on.
Individuals immersed in these systems tell stories to understand their experiences, and some of these stories hew closer to reality than others. Exploring the relationship between how individuals understand their experience and how events actually unfolded in these exercises provides important insights into matters of race and social change.
In complex social systems, some groups get enormous amounts of attention, and other groups remain completely ignored. With a higher consciousness concerning how that happens, we develop our ability to compensate for that dynamic and attain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the truth of these systems.
Achieving higher consciousness about what is true about race and social change can only occur through an experience that can best be described as a journey of awakening. This is not a process of internalizing facts and data; it is about discovering that much of what one believes to be reality is in fact an illusion. This experience of awakening unfolds for White people and people of color in ways that are distinct and different, yet also complementary and related.
Social change is nonlinear, meaning that seemingly minor events have the potential to trigger waves of dramatic transformation. This nonlinearity contributes to the emergence of “tipping points”—moments of sudden, major change that follow long periods that appear to be stuck in a state of unchanging stasis.
Social change is fractal, meaning that underneath the complexity of phenomena as diverse as feminism, civil rights, the emergence of “flat” organizations, democratic revolutions, and recent shifts in global geopolitics lies a remarkably simple and elegant process of evolutionary change. Once we learn to look for it, we see this process everywhere, unfolding with unmistakable symmetry at every scale of analysis from the interpersonal to the geopolitical.
Current-day experiences of discrimination and oppression can and often do evoke powerful memories of historical traumas. An understanding of how and why this happens reveals the fractal nature of race and social change in surprising ways. It is clear that in the absence of a clear understanding of this dynamic, we are certain to find ourselves stuck in an endless, repetitive cycle of pain and misunderstanding.
The outer-world systems and structures in which we are immersed are actually a manifestation of our innermost ways of being. In other words, inner change and outer change are not simply parallel processes; they are deeply interconnected. We do not simply live in the world; we are each actively calling forth and cocreating the world in which we are immersed, and the day-to-day world we encounter right now needs be understood as a reflection of our current state of consciousness. When we undertake the inner work required to awaken to a higher consciousness about the nature of the self and the system in which we are immersed, we will begin calling forth and cocreating transformations in the systems and structures that exist beyond the self.

In the pages ahead, I'll be demonstrating that these findings are not abstract philosophy: They are insights that emerged from empirical research and careful analysis of the data gathered from Camp Anytown Separation Exercises. This book was written to explain these insights in detail.

Here, then, is what you'll find in the pages ahead:

Chapter 1 presents a brief narrative of my own personal quest for insights regarding the workings of race and social change. It's an effort to be transparent—and a bit vulnerable—about the journey that I've had to undertake from the perspective of my personal background. I describe my own experience of awakening to a higher consciousness regarding the existence of a reality in which I have always been immersed but had not always perceived. I explain how it came to be that this personal quest led to the scientific inquiry at the heart of this book.

Chapter 2 presents an overview of a long tradition of classic social psychology experiments such as those of Stanley Milgram, Solomon Asch, Philip Zimbardo, and others. This body of research has illuminated some of the darkest shadows of human behavior in productive and compelling ways, and the Separation Exercise presented here clearly represents an extension of this tradition. A review of these past experiments provides invaluable context for understanding why this research represents a meaningful contribution to this provocative line of inquiry.

Chapter 3 presents part one of an introduction to a level of analysis that is central to this research: the whole system. Here, we encounter and explore systems dynamics such as nonlinearity, interdependence, self-organization, and the meaning of complexity itself. We also learn about fractals, a phenomenon in which the same structures or patterns appear across dramatically different scales of analysis.

Chapter 4 presents part two of this introduction to systems. Here, we learn how relatively simple human social systems develop over time into more complex social systems. And we discover that when we combine the two concepts of development toward complexity and fractals, we discover a hidden process underlying and driving social change across myriad seemingly unrelated dimensions throughout all of human history.

In Chapter 5, we encounter the detailed narratives from the three Separation Exercises at the heart of this research. We learn how the activity was run, what it was intended to achieve, and how it was studied, and how all three of these exercises unfolded. This is our chance to view these three exercises through the bird's-eye view of the team of researchers who observed and documented the three separate activities.

Chapter 6 presents the findings that emerged from the Separation Exercise research related to the first two levels of analysis that were explored in this study. At the interpersonal level, how did participants understand their experiences? How did they feel about being a member of their particular group? What were their reasons for challenging—or not challenging—the unjust norms of the system? In addition, at the intergroup level, what did participants think about the other groups in the system? What groups received attention in the system, and which were ignored? Why?

In Chapter 7, we take a look at lessons learned at the third and highest level of analysis: the whole system. First, we'll explore what patterns appeared across all three exercises and what shared narrative of social change emerged across all three exercises. Then, we'll dive into what turns out to be a far more complex question: Why did each exercise unfold so differently? We'll investigate some seemingly paradoxical insights that explain dynamics unfolding at this highest level of analysis.

Chapters 8 and 9 explore the real-world implications of this research. In Chapter 8, I discuss the foundational need to recognize the existence of a system of racial privilege and oppression in the real world and deepen our understanding of how to think about that system. I also discuss the process of awakening that we must undergo to arrive at a higher consciousness regarding these systems and share some important moments in my own ongoing journey of awakening. In Chapter 9, we explore questions of power and control: Who designed the system? Who is in charge? And what are the implications of the finding that there is a connection between our inner ways of being and the outer-world systems in which we are immersed?

The book will conclude with Chapter 10, in which I present a dual call to action on an individual and a national dimension based on the insights presented in this book.

Before wrapping up this introduction, I'll offer a few more thoughts intended to orient you, the reader, to the journey ahead. First, who am I? Second, who did I write this book for? And third, how do I understand the purpose of this book? Once these questions are answered, we'll be ready to set off on this journey together.

First, who am I?

I am a White, middle class, Jewish, straight, cisgendered male. I'm married and I live with my wife and kids in a Boston suburb. The path I have walked in my journey has been that of awakening from a place of privilege, with the inevitable result being that I have had to learn a great deal about race and social change through dialogue with people of color as opposed to lessons learned through direct personal experience.

I have completed a doctorate of education (EdD) that involved a dual focus on developmental psychology and leadership—specifically, the adaptive leadership model developed by Ronald Heifetz. Because both of these disciplines inform the ideas presented in the pages ahead in foundational ways, they merit some brief explanation.

As a developmental psychologist, I've been trained to view life as an ongoing developmental process unfolding over the course of time. This process flows generally from a state of relative simplicity toward a transformed state of greater complexity. The developmental process is rarely a simple, linear progression, however. Development often happens in fits and starts; metaphorically speaking, life takes two steps forward and one step back. Long periods may go by with little development occurring to be followed by rapid spurts of change. Also, development is not inevitable. Under the right conditions, it may advance rapidly; under the wrong conditions, it may be delayed, arrested, or reversed. This professional training to view all of life as undergoing a constantly unfolding process of developmental change is foundational to the ideas presented in the pages ahead.

My training in adaptive leadership results in two key theoretical distinctions that inform the way I understand the world. First, I have learned to make a distinction between two types of challenges: technical and adaptive. Technical challenges are defined by the fact that we understand the problem and already have in our repertoire a set of responses that enable us to effectively address the problem. Adaptive challenges are different. With an adaptive challenge, the nature of the problem itself is often not at all clear, and whatever technical solutions we've already mastered are insufficient or ineffective at addressing the challenge. I have come to view matters of race and social change as adaptive challenges: There is no clear agreement on the nature of challenges embedded in these matters, there are no simple technical solutions that will quickly transform race relations in this nation, and any meaningful change will involve transforming some long-standing beliefs, values, and norms at work in our civic life.

The second theoretical distinction that I have learned to make involves differentiating between authority and leadership. Although we often conflate the two terms and use them interchangeably, that is problematic—especially when trying to understand matters of race and social change. According to this model, authority is a formal position of power in a community or organization. It is the president, CEO, principal, teacher…whoever is in the box at the top of the hierarchy on the organizational chart. Leadership is something different: It is an activity that can be undertaken by anyone in the system intended to mobilize a group to address an adaptive challenge. An individual in a position of authority may try to exercise leadership…but that individual may also use authority to preserve a problematic status quo. And one need not be in that position of formal authority to attempt to exercise leadership. With this theoretical distinction, we have a powerful way of understanding the process of social change throughout history. After all, individuals such as Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Malala Yousafzai did not have positions of formal authority, yet they exercised tremendous leadership.

Over the course of conducting the research presented here, I've had to engage deeply with some other subject areas as well. As you'll see, this research is grounded in the fields of social psychology and complex systems, and I've sought to digest enough of those literatures for this work to represent a contribution to those fields. I've worked hard to weave together insights gleaned from fields such as critical race theory, organizational development, personal transformation, and studying the lives of towering figures such as Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X.

I am keenly aware of the fact that the terrain explored in this book relates to a great many other disciplines that focus on matters of race and social change. The Separation Exercises at the center of this book would provide a rich source of exploration for scholars of critical race theory; racial identity development; gender studies; queer studies; group psychology; the history, psychology, and sociology of social movements; adolescent and adult development; and much, much more. On many occasions, I make passing references to bodies of literature with which I have some familiarity and are relevant to the matter at hand, but those references are undeniably cursory and the attempt to reference related fields is incomplete.

I understand this to be the inevitable result of grounding this research in the fields of leadership and complex systems: The opportunity inherent in these interdisciplinary approaches is the chance to explore dynamics that transcend traditional boundaries in ways that provide important new perspectives. The risk is that anyone working in these fields opens themselves up to the critique by scholars in dozens of related fields that they are uninformed dilettantes because they do not know and say more about disciplines that are undeniably directly relevant to the matter at hand.

So be it. If I have learned anything from this quest, it is that we live our lives immersed in a web of relationships so vast, complex, interconnected, and interdependent that it can never be described or revealed in its totality. As with all mysteries that transcend the limits of human understanding, these matters can only be encountered properly through the cultivation of humility. Given that understanding of the deepest nature of these phenomena, my intention here is to make a contribution, albeit in some small and inescapably limited way. I am the first to declare that there is a great deal more to learn about all of this, and I look forward to continuing my own learning journey in the years ahead.

In my professional life, I have spent the last 10 years working for City Year, a national service organization that engages young adults (ages 17–24) in a demanding year of full-time service focused on keeping students in high needs schools on track to graduate from high school. I've spent the last decade working with the thousands of diverse, idealistic young adults—and the remarkable staff members who support them—serving in urban schools across the nation in a pragmatic, collaborative, and data-driven effort to positively transform the nation's high school drop-out crisis. Currently, I'm involved in a non-partisan effort to recruit and support alumni of service programs (both military veterans and alumni of civilian service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps) to run for political office. This focus on developing leaders through service is the theme that runs throughout my career.

Regarding the question of who I wrote this book for, I've kept an image of a particular audience in mind throughout the writing process. Although I know that this book will be read, most likely, by individual readers, the audience I've been writing for in my mind has not been a solitary individual but a small, highly diverse group of thoughtful, engaged, concerned citizens. They might be university students discussing course work in a classroom, activists connecting across communities in a local coffee shop, employees connecting across silos in a meeting room, congregants gathering in fellowship in the basement of their place of worship, engaged citizens gathered for an evening in a local school cafeteria, and elected officials coming together in a town hall or state capitol. The key detail is that the group is, in some infinitely variable way, a microcosm of the whole that is the United States: individuals of different races, creeds, backgrounds, sexual orientations, and beliefs sitting together in a circle with a desire to inquire, learn, and connect in a manner that happens far too rarely in our civic life today.

These readers feel called to engage with this topic out of a deep sense of pain at the discord, coarseness, violence, and suffering so prevalent in our civic life today, mixed with a deep pride in this country and an unshakeable idealism regarding the values and ideals it stands for. They dream of creating something better for themselves and for their children, despite the sense that the path out of all this darkness, strife, and confusion is not at all clear. Although they may not understand themselves in these terms, they are, in essence, a fractal microcosm of a society yearning for wholeness amidst the pain of disconnection. They are the incomplete parts of a living whole system that simply does not know itself fully yet and whose capacity to heal and thrive depends on achieving a deeper awareness and higher consciousness of the reality of that wholeness. It is my hope that if this group were to come together to share their reactions and responses to the ideas in the pages ahead, they might take a few meaningful steps toward not only understanding that wholeness but also actually experiencing it.

As a final thought and to answer the third question about the purpose of this book, I'll state that the process that led to this book was most eloquently illuminated by the Bohemian-Austrian mystical poet Rainer Maria Rilke (2013), who shared the following advice with a fellow poet in 1903:

I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

After decades of living the question of what's true about race and social change? I feel that I have—at long last—lived into an answer that feels thorough and complete enough to merit sharing with the world. The insights presented here are offered in a spirit of humility, with a keen awareness that there is much about race and social change that I do not yet understand and have yet to learn. Still, it is my hope that this collection of insights gained over the course of a decades-long journey of awakening might represent a productive contribution to a dialogue about a matter of central importance to the past, present, and future of our nation.

Race and Social Change

A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action

Foreword

Introduction

Note