Chapter 6: Bad Blood on the Diamond, Think Again

CHAPTER 6 Bad Blood on the Diamond

Diminishing Prejudice by Destabilizing Stereotypes

I hated the Yankees with all my heart, even to the point of having to confess in my first holy confession that I wished harm to others—namely that I wished various New York Yankees would break arms, legs and ankles. . . .

—Doris Kearns Goodwin

One afternoon in Maryland in 1983, Daryl Davis arrived at a lounge to play the piano at a country music gig. It wasn’t his first time being the only Black man in the room. Before the night was out, it would be his first time having a conversation with a white supremacist.

After the show, an older white man in the audience walked up to Daryl and told him that he was astonished to see a Black musician play like Jerry Lee Lewis. Daryl replied that he and Lewis were, in fact, friends, and that Lewis himself had acknowledged that his style was influenced by Black musicians. Although the man was skeptical, he invited Daryl to sit down for a drink.

Soon the man was admitting that he’d never had a drink with a Black person before. Eventually he explained to Daryl why. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist hate group that had been murdering African Americans for over a century and had lynched a man just two years earlier.

If you found yourself sitting down with someone who hated you and all people who shared your skin color, your instinctive options might be fight, flight, or freeze—and rightfully so. Daryl had a different reaction: he burst out laughing. When the man pulled out his KKK membership card to show he wasn’t joking, Daryl returned to a question that had been on his mind since he was ten years old. In the late 1960s, he was marching in a Cub Scout parade when white spectators started throwing cans, rocks, and bottles at him. It was the first time he remembers facing overt racism, and although he could justifiably have gotten angry, he was bewildered: “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?”

At the end of the conversation, the Klansman handed Daryl his phone number and asked if he would call him whenever he was playing locally. Daryl followed up, and the next month the man showed up with a bunch of his friends to see Daryl perform.

Over time a friendship grew, and the man ended up leaving the KKK. That was a turning point in Daryl’s life, too. It wasn’t long before Daryl was sitting down with Imperial Wizards and Grand Dragons—the Klan’s highest officers—to ask his question. Since then, Daryl has convinced many white supremacists to leave the KKK and abandon their hatred.

I wanted to understand how that kind of change happens—how to break overconfidence cycles that are steeped in stereotypes and prejudice about entire groups of people. Strangely enough, my journey started at a baseball game.

HATE ME OUT AT THE BALLGAME

“Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” It was a summer night at Fenway Park, my first and only time at a Boston Red Sox baseball game. In the seventh inning, without warning, 37,000 people erupted into a chant. The entire stadium was dissing the New York Yankees in perfect harmony.

I knew the two teams had a century-long rivalry, widely viewed as the most heated in all of American professional sports. I took it for granted that the Boston fans would root against the Yankees. I just didn’t expect it to happen that day, because the Yankees weren’t even there.

The Red Sox were playing against the Oakland A’s. The Boston fans were booing a team that was hundreds of miles away. It was as if Burger King fans were going head-to-head against Wendy’s in a taste test and started chanting “McDonald’s sucks!”

I started to wonder if Red Sox fans hate the Yankees more than they love their own team. Boston parents have been known to teach their kids to flip the bird at the Yankees and detest anything in pinstripes, and yankees suck is apparently among the most popular T-shirts in Boston history. When asked how much money it would take to get them to taunt their own team, Red Sox fans requested an average of $503. To root for the Yankees, they wanted even more: $560. The feelings run so deep that neuroscientists can watch them light up people’s minds: when Red Sox fans see the Yankees fail, they show immediate activation in brain regions linked to reward and pleasure. Those feelings extend well beyond Boston: in a 2019 analysis of tweets, the Yankees were the most hated baseball team in twenty-eight of the fifty U.S. states, which may explain the popularity of this T-shirt:

I recently called a friend who’s a die-hard Red Sox fan with a simple question: what would it take to get him to root for the Yankees? Without pausing, he said, “If they were playing Al Qaeda . . . maybe.”

It’s one thing to love your team. It’s another to hate your rivals so much that you’d consider rooting for terrorists to crush them. If you despise a particular sports team—and its fans—you’re harboring some strong opinions about a group of people. Those beliefs are stereotypes, and they often spill over into prejudice. The stronger your attitudes become, the less likely you are to rethink them.

Rivalries aren’t unique to sports. A rivalry exists whenever we reserve special animosity for a group we see as competing with us for resources or threatening our identities. In business, the rivalry between footwear companies Puma and Adidas was so intense that for generations, families self-segregated based on their allegiance to the brands—they went to different bakeries, pubs, and shops, and even refused to date people who worked for the rival firm. In politics, you probably know some Democrats who view Republicans as being greedy, ignorant, heartless cretins, and some Republicans who regard Democrats as lazy, dishonest, hypersensitive snowflakes. As stereotypes stick and prejudice deepens, we don’t just identify with our own group; we disidentify with our adversaries, coming to define who we are by what we’re not. We don’t just preach the virtues of our side; we find self-worth in prosecuting the vices of our rivals.

When people hold prejudice toward a rival group, they’re often willing to do whatever it takes to elevate their own group and undermine their rivals—even if it means doing harm or doing wrong. We see people cross those lines regularly in sports rivalries.* Aggression extends well beyond the playing field: from Barcelona to Brazil, fistfights frequently break out between soccer fans. Cheating scandals are rampant, too, and they aren’t limited to athletes or coaches. When students at The Ohio State University were paid to participate in an experiment, they learned that if they were willing to lie to a student from a different school, their own pay would double and the other student’s compensation would be cut in half. Their odds of lying quadrupled if the student attended the University of Michigan—their biggest rival—rather than Berkeley or Virginia.

Why do people form stereotypes about rival groups in the first place, and what does it take to get them to rethink them?

FITTING IN AND STANDING OUT

For decades psychologists have found that people can feel animosity toward other groups even when the boundaries between them are trivial. Take a seemingly innocuous question: is a hot dog a sandwich? When students answered this question, most felt strongly enough that they were willing to sacrifice a dollar to those who agreed with them to make sure those who disagreed got less.

In every human society, people are motivated to seek belonging and status. Identifying with a group checks both boxes at the same time: we become part of a tribe, and we take pride when our tribe wins. In classic studies on college campuses, psychologists found that after their team won a football game, students were more likely to walk around wearing school swag. From Arizona State to Notre Dame to USC, students basked in the reflected glory of Saturday victories, donning team shirts and hats and jackets on Sunday. If their team lost, they shunned school apparel, and distanced themselves by saying “they lost” instead of “we lost.” Some economists and finance experts have even found that the stock market rises if a country’s soccer team wins World Cup matches and falls if they lose.*

Rivalries are most likely to develop between teams that are geographically close, compete regularly, and are evenly matched. The Yankees and Red Sox fit this pattern: they’re both on the East Coast, they play each other eighteen or nineteen times a season, they both have histories of success, and as of 2019, they had competed over 2,200 times—with each team winning over 1,000 times. The two teams also have more fans than any other franchises in baseball.

I decided to test what it would take to get fans to rethink their beliefs about their bitter rivals. Working with a doctoral student, Tim Kundro, I ran a series of experiments with passionate Yankees and Red Sox supporters. To get a sense of their stereotypes, we asked over a thousand Red Sox and Yankees fans to list three negative things about their rivals. They mostly used the same words to describe one another, complaining about their respective accents, their beards, and their tendency to “smell like old corn chips.”

Once we’ve formed those kinds of stereotypes, for both mental and social reasons it’s hard to undo them. Psychologist George Kelly observed that our beliefs are like pairs of reality goggles. We use them to make sense of the world and navigate our surroundings. A threat to our opinions cracks our goggles, leaving our vision blurred. It’s only natural to put up our guard in response—and Kelly noticed that we become especially hostile when trying to defend opinions that we know, deep down, are false. Rather than trying on a different pair of goggles, we become mental contortionists, twisting and turning until we find an angle of vision that keeps our current views intact.

Socially, there’s another reason stereotypes are so sticky. We tend to interact with people who share them, which makes them even more extreme. This phenomenon is called group polarization, and it’s been demonstrated in hundreds of experiments. Juries with authoritarian beliefs recommend harsher punishments after deliberating together. Corporate boards are more likely to support paying outlandish premiums for companies after group discussions. Citizens who start out with a clear belief on affirmative action and gay marriage develop more extreme views on these issues after talking with a few others who share their stance. Their preaching and prosecuting move in the direction of their politics. Polarization is reinforced by conformity: peripheral members fit in and gain status by following the lead of the most prototypical member of the group, who often holds the most intense views.

Grow up in a family of Red Sox fans and you’re bound to hear some unpleasant things about Yankees fans. Start making regular trips to a ballpark packed with people who share your loathing, and it’s only a matter of time before your contempt intensifies and calcifies. Once that happens, you’re motivated to see the best in your team and the worst in your opponent. Evidence shows that when teams try to downplay a rivalry by reminding fans that it’s just a game, it backfires. Fans feel their identity is being devalued and actually become more aggressive. My first idea for disrupting this pattern came from outer space.

HYPOTHESIS 1: NOT IN A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

If you ever leave the planet Earth, you’ll probably end up rethinking some of your feelings about other human beings. A team of psychologists has studied the effects of outer space on inner space, assessing the changes in more than a hundred astronauts and cosmonauts through interviews, surveys, and analyses of autobiographies. Upon returning from space, astronauts are less focused on individual achievements and personal happiness, and more concerned about the collective good. “You develop an instant global consciousness . . . an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it,” Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell reflected. “From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a b*tch.’”

This reaction is known as the overview effect. The astronaut who described it most vividly to me is space shuttle commander Jeff Ashby. He recalled that the first time he looked back at the Earth from outer space, it changed him forever:

On Earth, astronauts look to the stars—most of us are star fanatics—but in space, the stars look the same as they do on Earth. What is so different is the planet—the perspective that it gives you. My first glimpse of the Earth from space was about fifteen minutes into my first flight, when I looked up from my checklist and suddenly we were over the lit part of the Earth with our windows facing down. Below me was the continent of Africa, and it was moving by much as a city would move by from an airline seat. Circling the entire planet in ninety minutes, you see that thin blue arc of the atmosphere. Seeing how fragile the little layer is in which all of humankind exists, you can easily from space see the connection between someone on one side of the planet to someone on the other—and there are no borders evident. So it appears as just this one common layer that we all exist in.

When you get to see an overview of the Earth from outer space, you realize you share a common identity with all human beings. I wanted to create a version of the overview effect for baseball fans.

There’s some evidence that common identity can build bridges between rivals. In one experiment, psychologists randomly assigned Manchester United soccer fans a short writing task. They then staged an emergency in which a passing runner slipped and fell, screaming in pain as he held his ankle. He was wearing the T-shirt of their biggest rival, and the question was whether they would stop to help him. If the soccer fans had just written about why they loved their team, only 30 percent helped. If they had written about what they had in common with other soccer fans, 70 percent helped.

When Tim and I tried to get Red Sox and Yankees fans to reflect on their common identity as baseball fans, it didn’t work. They didn’t end up with more positive views of one another or a greater willingness to help one another outside emergency situations. Shared identity doesn’t stick in every circumstance. If a rival fan has just had an accident, thinking about a common identity might motivate us to help. If he’s not in danger or dire need, though, it’s too easy to dismiss him as just another jerk—or not our responsibility. “We both love baseball,” one Red Sox supporter commented. “The Yankees fans just like the wrong team.” Another stated that their shared love of baseball had no effect on his opinions: “The Yankees suck, and their fans are annoying.”

HYPOTHESIS 2: FEELING FOR OUR FOES

I next turned to the psychology of peace. Years ago the pioneering psychologist and Holocaust survivor Herb Kelman set out to challenge some of the stereotypes behind the Israel-Palestine conflict by teaching the two sides to understand and empathize with one another. He designed interactive problem-solving workshops in which influential Israeli and Palestinian leaders talked off the record about paths to peace. For years, they came together to share their own experiences and perspectives, address one another’s needs and fears, and explore novel solutions to the conflict. Over time, the workshops didn’t just shatter stereotypes—some of the participants ended up forming lifelong friendships.

Humanizing the other side should be much easier in sports, because the stakes are lower and the playing field is more level. I started with another of the biggest rivalries in sports: UNC-Duke. I asked Shane Battier, who led Duke to an NCAA basketball championship in 2001, what it would take for him to root for UNC. His immediate reply: “If they were playing the Taliban.” I had no idea so many people fantasized about crushing terrorists in their favorite sport. I wondered whether humanizing a Duke student would change UNC students’ stereotypes of the group.

In an experiment with my colleagues Alison Fragale and Karren Knowlton, we asked UNC students to help improve the job application of a peer. If we mentioned that he went to Duke rather than UNC, as long as he was facing significant financial need, participants spent extra time helping him. Once they felt empathy for his plight, they saw him as a unique individual deserving of assistance and liked him more. Yet when we measured their views of Duke students in general, the UNC students were just as likely to see them as their rivals, to say that it felt like a personal compliment if they heard someone criticize Duke, and to take it as a personal insult if they heard Duke praised. We had succeeded in changing their attitudes toward the student, but failed in changing their stereotypes of the group.

Something similar happened when Tim and I tried to humanize a Yankees fan. We had Red Sox fans read a story written by a baseball buff who had learned the game as a child with his grandfather and had fond memories of playing catch with his mom. At the very end of the piece he mentioned that he was a die-hard supporter of the Yankees. “I think this person is very authentic and is a rare Yankee fan,” one Red Sox supporter commented. “This person gets it and is not your typical Yankee fan,” a second observed. “Ugh, I really liked this text until I got to the part about them being a Yankees fan,” a third fan lamented, but “I think this particular person I would have more in common with than the typical, stereotypical Yankees fan. This person is okay.”

Herb Kelman ran into the same problem with Israelis and Palestinians. In the problem-solving workshops, they came to trust the individuals across the table, but they still held on to their stereotypes of the group.

In an ideal world, learning about individual group members will humanize the group, but often getting to know a person better just establishes her as different from the rest of her group. When we meet group members who defy a stereotype, our first instinct isn’t to see them as exemplars and rethink the stereotype. It’s to see them as exceptions and cling to our existing beliefs. So that attempt also failed. Back to the drawing board again.

HYPOTHESIS 3: BEASTS OF HABIT

My all-time favorite commercial starts with a close-up of a man and a woman kissing. As the camera zooms out, you see that he’s wearing an Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt and she’s wearing a Michigan Wolverines T-shirt. The caption: “Without sports, this wouldn’t be disgusting.”

As a lifelong Wolverine fan, I was raised to boo at Buckeye fans. My uncle filled his basement with Michigan paraphernalia, got up at 3:00 a.m. on Saturdays to start setting up for tailgates, and drove a van with the Michigan logo emblazoned on the side. When I went back home to Michigan for grad school and one of my college roommates started medical school at Ohio State, it was only natural for me to preach my school’s superiority by phone and prosecute his intelligence by text.

A few years ago, I got to know an unusually kind woman in her seventies who works with Holocaust survivors. Last summer, when she mentioned that she had gone to Ohio State, my first response was “yuck.” My next reaction was to be disgusted with myself. Who cares where she went to school half a century ago? How did I get programmed this way? Suddenly it seemed odd that anyone would hate a team at all.

In ancient Greece, Plutarch wrote of a wooden ship that Theseus sailed from Crete to Athens. To preserve the ship, as its old planks decayed, Athenians would replace them with new wood. Eventually all the planks had been replaced. It looked like the same ship, but none of its parts was the same. Was it still the same ship? Later, philosophers added a wrinkle: if you collected all the original planks and fashioned them into a ship, would that be the same ship?

The ship of Theseus has a lot in common with a sports franchise. If you hail from Boston, you might hate the 1920 Yankees for taking Babe Ruth or the 1978 Yankees for dashing your World Series hopes. Although the current team carries the same name, the pieces are different. The players are long gone. So are the managers and coaches. The stadium has been replaced. “You’re actually rooting for the clothes,” Jerry Seinfeld quipped. “Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to a different team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt; they hate him now. Boo! Different shirt! Boo!”

I think it’s a ritual. A fun but arbitrary ritual—a ceremony that we perform out of habit. We imprinted on it when we were young and impressionable, or were new to a city and looking for esprit de corps. Sure, there are moments where team loyalty does matter in our lives: it allows us to high-five acquaintances at bars and hug strangers at victory parades. It gives us a sense of solidarity. If you reflect on it, though, hating an opposing team is an accident of birth. If you had been born in New York instead of Boston, would you really hate the Yankees?

For our third approach, Tim and I recruited fans of the Red Sox and Yankees. To prove their allegiance, they had to correctly name one of their team’s players from a photo—and the last year his team had won the World Series. Then we took some steps to open their minds. First, to help them recognize the complexity of their own beliefs, we asked them to list three positives and three negatives about fans of the opposing team. You saw the most common negatives earlier, but they were able to come up with some positives, too:

WHAT RED SOX FANS LIKE ABOUT YANKEES FANS

WHAT YANKEES FANS LIKE ABOUT RED SOX FANS

Then we randomly assigned half of them to go the extra step of reflecting on the arbitrariness of their animosity:

Think and write about how Yankee fans and Red Sox fans dislike each other for reasons that are fairly arbitrary. For example, if you were born into a family of fans of the rival team, you would likely also be a fan of them today.

To gauge their animosity toward their opponents, we gave them a chance to decide how spicy the hot sauce sold in the rival team’s stadium should be. The backstory was that consumer product researchers were planning to do taste tests of hot sauces in baseball stadiums. People who were randomly assigned to reflect on the arbitrariness of their stereotypes selected less fiery hot sauce for their rival’s stadium. We also gave them a chance to sabotage a rival fan’s performance on a timed, paid math test by assigning harder problems, and those who considered the arbitrariness of their stereotypes picked easier questions for the rival fan.

People weren’t just more sympathetic toward a single fan—they changed their views toward their rival team as a whole. They were less likely to see their rival’s failure as their success, their rival’s success as a personal insult, and criticism of their rival as a personal compliment. And they were more likely to support their rival team in ways that would normally be unthinkable: wearing the rival team’s jerseys, sitting in its dugout at games, voting for its players in the All-Star Game, and even endorsing the team on social media. For some fans, it was almost like breaking a religious code, but their comments made it clear that they were rethinking their stances:

I think it is pretty dumb to hate someone just based on the sports teams they enjoy supporting. Thinking about that makes me want to reconsider how I feel about some supporters of teams that I dislike.

If someone hated me because of the team that I loved, it would feel unfair. Almost like a form of prejudice because they are judging me based on one thing about me and hating me for that reason. After feeling these thoughts, I may change the way I interact with Red Sox fans.

The team they support is not necessarily indicative of who they are. Even though they are wrong.

We’d finally made some progress. Our next step was to examine the key ingredients behind the shift in fans’ views. We found that it was thinking about the arbitrariness of their animosity—not the positive qualities of their rival—that mattered. Regardless of whether they generated reasons to like their rivals, fans showed less hostility when they reflected on how silly the rivalry was. Knowing what it felt like to be disliked for ridiculous reasons helped them see that this conflict had real implications, that hatred for opposing fans isn’t all fun and games.

ENTERING A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Outside the lab, dismantling stereotypes and decreasing prejudice rarely happen overnight. Even if people aren’t on guard from the start, they’re quick to put their defenses up when their attitudes are challenged. Getting through to them requires more than just telling them that their views are arbitrary. A key step is getting them to do some counterfactual thinking: helping them consider what they’d believe if they were living in an alternative reality.

In psychology, counterfactual thinking involves imagining how the circumstances of our lives could have unfolded differently. When we realize how easily we could have held different stereotypes, we might be more willing to update our views.* To activate counterfactual thinking, you might ask people questions like: How would your stereotypes be different if you’d been born Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American? What opinions would you hold if you’d been raised on a farm versus in a city, or in a culture on the other side of the world? What beliefs would you cling to if you lived in the 1700s?

You’ve already learned from debate champions and expert negotiators that asking people questions can motivate them to rethink their conclusions. What’s different about these kinds of counterfactual questions is that they invite people to explore the origins of their own beliefs—and reconsider their stances toward other groups.

People gain humility when they reflect on how different circumstances could have led them to different beliefs. They might conclude that some of their past convictions had been too simplistic and begin to question some of their negative views. That doubt could leave them more curious about groups they’ve stereotyped, and they might end up discovering some unexpected commonalities.

Recently, I stumbled onto an opportunity to encourage some counterfactual thinking. A startup founder asked me to join an all-hands meeting to share insights on how to better understand other people’s personalities and our own. During our virtual fireside chat, she mentioned that she was an astrology fan and the company was full of them. I wondered if I could get some of them to see that they held inaccurate stereotypes about people based on the month in which they happened to be born. Here’s an excerpt of what happened:

Me: You know we have no evidence whatsoever that horoscopes influence personality, right?

Founder: That’s such a Capricorn thing to say.

Me: I think I’m a Leo. I’d love to find out what evidence would change your mind.

Founder: So my partner has been trying for as long as we’ve been dating. He’s given up. There’s nothing that can convince me otherwise.

Me: Then you’re not thinking like a scientist. This is a religion for you.

Founder: Yeah, well, maybe a little.

Me: What if you’d been born in China instead of the U.S.? Some evidence just came out that if you’re a Virgo in China, you get discriminated against in hiring and also in dating. These poor Virgos are stereotyped as being difficult and ornery.*

Founder: So in the West, Adam, that same discrimination happens to Scorpios.

Although the founder started out resistant to my argument, after considering how she might hold different stereotypes if she lived in China, she recognized a familiar pattern. She’d seen an entire group of people mistreated as a result of the positions of the sun and the moon on the day they happened to enter the world.

Realizing how unfair discrimination based on zodiac signs was, the founder ended up jumping in to help me build my case. As we wrapped up the conversation, I offered to do a follow-up discussion on the science of personality. More than a quarter of the company signed up to participate. Afterward, one of the participants wrote that “the biggest takeaway from this chat is the importance of ‘unlearning’ things to avoid being ignorant.” Having grasped how arbitrary their stereotypes were, people were now more open to rethinking their views.

Psychologists find that many of our beliefs are cultural truisms: widely shared, but rarely questioned. If we take a closer look at them, we often discover that they rest on shaky foundations. Stereotypes don’t have the structural integrity of a carefully built ship. They’re more like a tower in the game of Jenga—teetering on a small number of blocks, with some key supports missing. To knock it over, sometimes all we need to do is give it a poke. The hope is that people will rise to the occasion and build new beliefs on a stronger foundation.

Can this approach extend to bigger divisions among people? I don’t believe for a minute that it will solve the Israel-Palestine conflict or stop racism. I do think it’s a step, though, toward something more fundamental than merely rethinking our stereotypes. We might question the underlying belief that it makes sense to hold opinions about groups at all.

If you get people to pause and reflect, they might decide that the very notion of applying group stereotypes to individuals is absurd. Research suggests that there are more similarities between groups than we recognize. And there’s typically more variety within groups than between them.

Sometimes letting go of stereotypes means realizing that many members of a hated group aren’t so terrible after all. And that’s more likely to happen when we actually come face-to-face with them. For over half a century, social scientists have tested the effects of intergroup contact. In a meta-analysis of over five hundred studies with over 250,000 participants, interacting with members of another group reduced prejudice in 94 percent of the cases. Although intergroup communication isn’t a panacea, that is a staggering statistic. The most effective way to help people pull the unsteady Jenga blocks out of their stereotype towers is to talk with them in person. Which is precisely what Daryl Davis did.

HOW A BLACK MUSICIAN CONFRONTS WHITE SUPREMACISTS

One day, Daryl was driving his car with the chief officer of a KKK chapter, whose official title was Exalted Cyclops. Before long, the Cyclops was sharing his stereotypes of Black people. They were an inferior species, he said—they had smaller brains, which made them unintelligent, and a genetic predisposition toward violence. When Daryl pointed out that he was Black but had never shot anyone or stolen a car, the Cyclops told him his criminal gene must be latent. It hadn’t come out yet.

Daryl decided to beat the Cyclops at his own game. He challenged him to name three Black serial killers. When the Cyclops couldn’t name any, Daryl rattled off a long list of well-known white serial killers and told the Cyclops that he must be one. When the Cyclops protested that he’d never killed anybody, Daryl turned his own argument against him and said that his serial-killer gene must be latent.

“Well, that’s stupid,” the flustered Cyclops replied. “Well, duh!” Daryl agreed. “You’re right. What I said about you was stupid, but no more stupid than what you said about me.” The Cyclops got very quiet and changed the subject. Several months later, he told Daryl that he was still thinking about that conversation. Daryl had planted a seed of doubt and made him curious about his own beliefs. The Cyclops ended up quitting the KKK and giving his hood and his robe to Daryl.

Daryl is obviously extraordinary—not only in his ability to wage a one-man war on prejudice, but also in his inclination to do so. As a general rule, it’s those with greater power who need to do more of the rethinking, both because they’re more likely to privilege their own perspectives and because their perspectives are more likely to go unquestioned. In most cases, the oppressed and marginalized have already done a great deal of contortion to fit in.

Having been the target of racism since childhood, Daryl had a lifetime of legitimate reasons to harbor animosity toward white people. He was still willing to approach white supremacists with an open mind and give them the opportunity to rethink their views. But it shouldn’t have been Daryl’s responsibility to challenge white supremacists and put himself at risk. In an ideal world, the Cyclops would have taken it upon himself to educate his peers. Some other former KKK members have stepped up, working independently and with Daryl to advocate for the oppressed and reform the structures that produce oppression in the first place.

As we work toward systemic change, Daryl urges us not to overlook the power of conversation. When we choose not to engage with people because of their stereotypes or prejudice, we give up on opening their minds. “We are living in space-age times, yet there are still so many of us thinking with stone-age minds,” he reflects. “Our ideology needs to catch up to our technology.” He estimates that he has helped upwards of two hundred white supremacists rethink their beliefs and leave the KKK and other neo-Nazi groups. Many of them have gone on to educate their families and friends. Daryl is quick to point out that he hasn’t directly persuaded these men to change their minds. “I didn’t convert anybody,” he says. “I gave them reason to think about their direction in life, and they thought about it, and thought, ‘I need a better path, and this is the way to go.’”

Daryl doesn’t do this by preaching or prosecuting. When he begins a dialogue with white supremacists, many are initially surprised by his thoughtfulness. As they start to see him as an individual and spend more time with him, they often tap into a common identity around shared interests in topics like music. Over time, he helps them see that they joined these hate groups for reasons that weren’t their own—it was a family tradition dating back multiple generations, or someone had told them their jobs were being taken by Black men. As they realize how little they truly know about other groups, and how shallow stereotypes are, they start to think again.

After getting to know Daryl, one Imperial Wizard didn’t stop at leaving the KKK. He shut down the chapter. Years later, he asked Daryl to be his daughter’s godfather.