Anand's Challenge

A few days ago, New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas (‏@AnandWrites) went on a tweet storm that describes his pragmatic vision of how we can achieve more equity in our society:

1/ I'm going to tweet a bit now about empathy for anxious white men.

2/ I went to a diversity conference this week in Minneapolis, which proves that you can have a diversity conference anywhere...

3/ And it made me see more clearly how so many rooms in America are fully on board with the diversity agenda, the cosmopolitan future...

4/ Rooms you may not think would be. Older guys from the Air Force Reserve. Elderly white ladies from northern Minnesota. But they are...

5/ And then, in so many other American rooms, it's another story. A story of anxiety about the cosmopolitan future. About relative decline...

6/ And, look, I'm a brown guy with Indian parents who lives in a Brooklyn neighborhood where every infant seems bi- or tri-racial. But, even so...

7/ I think those of us who live in that future America already, that cosmopolitan America, need to take responsibility for something we don't now...

8/ And that is to have real, genuine empathy for the people made anxious by this relative decline, by this passing of power into new hands.

9/ Not just intellectually knowing the anxiety is there. But feeling for it, and thinking meaningfully about it, and answering it...

10/ We are very bad at managing relative decline.

11/ And here's why, I think: Relative decline is a problem of people with unearned privilege losing it...

12/ And, as they lose it, there is a great deal of lashing out that makes it hard to empathize with the lasher. Very hard.

13/ And those suffering relative decline have that privilege, so people say: Don't fuss over them. We've been fussing over them for 400 yrs.

14/ Many in cosmopolitan America feel, I think, that all of U.S. history has been fussing over anxious white guys. Progress means fussing's end.

15/ The combined result of the lashing-out that comes from the relatively declining, and this question of who deserves fussing, is: you guys figure it out.

16/ And I think that unspoken you-guys-figure-this-out mantra has some role in where the politics of this country is now.

17/ To be clear, I'm not saying anyone owes anyone anything. I'm not saying people of color and women owe white guys their fussing energy...

18/ But we do live together. And we retain the capacity to make each other's lives wondrous or miserable...

19/ And I just wonder where we'd be if cosmopolitan America spoke up, loudly and beautifully, to the fears of that other country...

20/ Saying: We are NOT going back to any paradisiacal white-picket-fence-and-whites-only-fountains past. But we get that any loss hurts...

21/ And we want to help you see that the next America, perhaps the one in which we already live, is great. And there's a place for you in it...

22/ And some, by how they've processed relative decline, may not deserve a surge of empathy. But things may get worse for all of us without it.

23/ I get how hard this is. Trust me. I've lived it intimately.

24/ But if good people, tolerant people, integrative people, don't speak to this angst, only the demagogues are left.

25/ [Some people] make a great point about a truth and reconciliation process as a prerequisite for this kind of empathy.

26/ That would be great. Save me a front-row seat. But I think those of us in cosmopolitan America need to really make a choice here.

27/ Even if you think empathy isn't deserved, and prerequisite measures of apology and truth haven't been taken, do we surge that empathy?

28/ I don't have answer. But I think this is what choice boils down to. Does cosmopolitan America insist on the other side moving first?

29/ Or does ascendant cosmopolitan America, in the Mandela spirit, lead with love and empathy that it may not believe is deserved, yet do it anyway?

30/ Grave moral choices face anxious, older, white America today. But this, I think, is a less-discussed moral choice facing cosmopolitan America.

I came across these thoughts while I've been reading Eric Foner's history tome, Reconstruction. Which makes me wonder if Anand's idea of empathy would make a difference, since after the Civil War newly freed black Southerners' concessions and attempts at connection with poor whites did not.

But clearly, it helped in South Africa, which now serves as our best example for reconciliation. I think less anxious white people (or, dare I assume any exist, nonanxious white people) need to step up and act as a bridge across this divide, and a shield to cushion the many macro- and microaggressions that will be directed at the people of color who accept Anand's challenge.