In 1890, my great-grandfather, Edward Klinenberg, moved from a small village outside Prague to Chicago, and within a few years he settled down on the city’s South Side. The University of Chicago was founded nearby that same year, but Edward didn’t come to the United States to study—that would be a luxury for future generations. Chicago already had a string of small Jewish neighborhoods, with tightly knit communities organized around a synagogue, a school, a kosher market, and all the other establishments Jews had relied on in the European ghettos. Edward wanted none of that. He was intent on escaping military service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and experiencing the kinds of opportunity America promised. His first challenge was to make ends meet, which he did by selling small batches of coal on street corners. Soon, Edward found work steering cattle from agricultural towns south of the city into the sprawling Chicago stockyards, making him one of the few Jewish cowboys in the great Midwest. As he rode through the borderlands of Illinois and Indiana, Edward couldn’t help feeling awe at the massive industrial facilities for steel and manufacturing that were quickly transforming the landscape. Nor could he help noticing the streams of migrants—Germans, Irish, Scots, Serbians, Croatians, Poles, and Italians—who were flocking to the area to work in the mills or start their own small businesses. South Chicago, as the area would become known, was exactly the place he’d been hoping to find.
Edward spent most of his life on the far South Side of Chicago, raising eleven children in an ethnically diverse neighborhood that was unmistakably American. Although he refused to confine himself to a religious community, Edward’s “primary group,” the term that the pioneering University of Chicago sociologist Charles Cooley introduced to describe the core network of close friends and family with whom one maintains the deepest and most enduring bonds, consisted mainly of people with his background, Bohemians and Jews. Such “homophily” was, and still is, quite typical. Aristotle famously wrote that “people love those who are like themselves,” and Plato believed that “similarity begets friendship.”1 (Although elsewhere both also claimed that opposites attract!) Even in diverse societies, most people seek out confidants who are, in some important way or another, like them. Once they find each other, “birds of a feather” grow closer by engaging in recurrent, shared activities: eating, drinking, praying, playing, learning, and the like.
Had he stayed in his home village in Europe, Edward would likely have spent most of his life with members of his primary group. In Chicago, however, he developed a large “secondary group” of casual friends, colleagues, and associates, with whom he spent a considerable amount of time. Many of Edward’s relationships developed through business. Industry dominated the area, and industrial life—rooted on the shop floor and the marketplace but extending out into the neighborhood’s clubs, taverns, restaurants, and political organizations—set the terms for most local social interaction. Ethnic groups clustered together in certain churches and on particular residential blocks. People tended to marry their own kind. But South Chicago was not yet racially segregated, and in addition to bonding with members of their own ethnic communities, the area’s residents built bridges that transcended group lines. Factory workers of different ethnicities helped one another out during long, grueling days in steel mills. They joined unions, picked leaders, and learned to bargain as a collective. They drank together, competed with one another in sports leagues, and took their wives dancing in neighborhood music halls. They got to know each other’s families, and helped each other’s sons get hired when they reached the right age. They got involved in local political clubs. Often, if not always, they fought on the same side.
In the 1960s, the sociologist William Kornblum moved into South Chicago’s “blue collar community,” taking a factory job so that he could understand how the neighborhood’s social dynamics worked.2 By then, dark-skinned, non-European migrant groups—Mexicans and African Americans—had established themselves in the area, and they’d been subjected to the kinds of prejudice and discrimination for which Chicago had grown infamous. The white ethnic industrial workers were willing to accommodate Mexican Americans when they first came to South Chicago, but for blacks it was a different story. There were race riots when African Americans crossed the neighborhood’s unofficial color lines. Whites strictly enforced the boundaries of racial segregation, and blacks had no choice but to build residential communities of their own. Kornblum came to South Chicago expecting to find that these divisions would extend into the factory and its social environment. Instead, he discovered that members of different groups shared a surprising level of trust and intimacy. “Men from interracial work groups routinely share wakes, funerals, retirement parties, weddings, and a host of family activities over the course of their lives in the mill,” Kornblum observes. “And out of this interaction between peers of different races comes the possibility that black men may be treated not only as peers but as leaders in competition among peers.”3
Taverns, athletic fields, and political clubs were especially important sites of social bonding. Some tended to attract mainly people from one ethnic group, but many others were places where white ethnics, Mexicans, and African Americans came together regularly to converse, commune, and compete. Sometimes talk turned to things that happened on the factory floor. But more often coworkers and neighbors used their social time to take up other topics: family, sports, travel, politics, and all sorts of personal matters. Union newsletters and local newspapers helped the residents of South Chicago imagine their community; the neighborhood social infrastructure allowed them to build it.
Segregated neighborhoods and workplaces are breeding grounds for stereotypes and suspicion. But in the factories of industrial South Chicago, laborers developed intimate, face-to-face, sometimes heated but often jovial relationships with one another. “The white ethnic steelworker routinely works next to black men from the South Side ghetto; the Mexican worker from Millgate shares a locker room with Serbian steelworkers from Slag Valley,” Kornblum writes. After work, “South Chicago families could attempt to segregate themselves within ethnic cultural worlds, or they might associate with diverse groups of neighborhood friends, but in every case ethnic segregation was limited by the more universalistic experiences of life on rolling mills, blast furnaces, coke ovens, ore docks, and the switchyards of the steel industry.”4 Of course group divisions did not disappear altogether. Churches, social clubs, and, especially, intimate relationships were largely insular affairs. Ethnic tensions were always just beneath the surface, and occasionally they erupted into violent clashes. But in that social environment, prejudices didn’t hold up well.
Unfortunately, the industrial communities that developed in places like Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Kansas City didn’t hold up well, either. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the social world that the steel mills had created was already breaking down. Massive deindustrialization hit American and European cities and continued through the last decades of the twentieth century. As factories shuttered, so too did the union halls, taverns, restaurants, and civic organizations that glued different groups together. Unmoored, unemployed, and unable to find new opportunities, people moved away. Between 1970 and 1990, nearly six hundred thousand people left Chicago, and most of them came from industrial areas like the one my great-grandfather settled in a century ago.
Sociologists have thoroughly documented how deindustrialization devastated neighborhoods, making cities and suburbs throughout the United States even more segregated by race and class.5 But we are only now coming to terms with how much damage deindustrialization and the decline of blue-collar communities did to the body politic, how fractured and distrustful we have become.
The presidential campaign and election of 2016 was hardly the first sign of America’s social and political polarization, and deindustrialization is by no means its only cause. Until recently, though, leading public opinion scholars showed that pundits and policy elites were more polarized than voters. America, claimed the Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina in 2005, was “closely divided,” not “deeply divided.” Citizens identified strongly with or against one of the two major parties, but—with exceptions for issues such as abortion, sexual morality, and capital punishment—they generally did not have firm or extreme views on most major policy matters.6
That’s changed in the last decades, however, as social inequality and class segregation have deepened, national news programs that transcended ideological lines have lost viewers, and the Internet has generated the rise of “filter bubbles,” where everyone can find facts and opinions that confirm their beliefs.7 All of this feeds the kind of in-group connection that social scientists call “bonding social capital,” but starves us of the “bridging social capital” we need to live together.
Since 2008, Americans have become deeply divided on a wide variety of issues, and on some, such as climate change, criminal justice, and immigration, leading political officials and popular media personalities champion “alternative facts” over mainstream scientific findings. Moreover, as the sociologist Mike Hout has found, today almost every attitude or identification has a political edge, and believing in one seemingly innocuous thing and not another puts people squarely among the reds or blues. In 2015, research by the political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood showed that “the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased,” such that today “partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, doing so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race.”8 The intensity of partisan disdain was visible during the 2016 election, when 55 percent of Democrats said that the Republican Party made them “afraid” and 49 percent of Republicans said the same about the Democratic Party, while more than 40 percent from both parties said their opponents’ policy ideas “threaten the nation’s well-being.”9 Polarization is even more evident in collective gatherings. During the 2017 California Democratic Party Convention, for instance, the chairman stuck out his middle finger and got the crowd to chant “Fuck Donald Trump!” At the 2016 Republican National Convention, an entire arena chanted “Lock Her Up!”
Americans have always disagreed about politics and policy, but today our beliefs have hardened, as have our negative views of the people with whom we disagree. Sixty years ago, the nation was divided. But back then roughly one-quarter of employed Americans worked in factories, one-third of nonagricultural workers belonged to unions, and there were neighborhoods like South Chicago throughout the United States. Voluntary organizations were more diverse, write the sociologists Peter Bearman and Delia Baldassarri, “with respect to social class, race, ethnicity and religious orientation.” So too were partners in marriage. While today, people in the United States and Europe are more likely to marry someone from a different ethnic background, they are also far more likely to marry someone from the same social class. The United States was segregated and unequal, but the social infrastructure supported shared experiences and forms of group mixing that are uncommon today.10
“We are living in different political universes,” writes the Harvard political scientist and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. “Of course mixed groups are no panacea…. But mixed groups have been shown to have two desirable effects. First, exposure to competing positions generally increases political tolerance…. Second, mixing increases the likelihood that people will be aware of competing rationales and see that their own arguments might be met with plausible counterarguments.”11 Sunstein draws on classic studies and experimental research to show that, as in South Chicago during its industrial heyday, in-group attachments and prejudices against others diminish when people interact across the usual social boundaries. Democratic politics, Sunstein argues, works better when we are regularly exposed to different people and competing positions. Civil society does too.
Sunstein’s book #Republic focuses on the Internet and social media, whose “architecture,” he warns, insulates us in echo chambers and shores up group identity. I’m also concerned about the digital divide, but it’s only one part of the problem. The architecture of division extends beyond our screens and onto the sidewalks, streets, and shared spaces where we make and unmake our communities every day. It’s encroaching into the entire social infrastructure, polarizing us at a moment when we need to build common ground.
But if, in some places, the driving spirit behind new infrastructure projects is best captured by the refrain “Build a Wall,” in others it remains “Only Connect!” The integrated blue-collar community may no longer be a viable model for large-scale development, but there are other exemplary forms of social infrastructure—some small scale, some large, some old, some relatively new—that suggest better ways to work and live together. It’s urgent that we understand them.12
Iceland is a small, homogeneous nation, without the fierce racial, religious, and regional divisions that make civic life so challenging in places like the United States and the United Kingdom. But it’s not without its share of social problems and divisions, many of which deepened after the country’s economic crisis in 2008. For much of the year Iceland is cold and dark, yet in recent decades the place that has best sustained warmth, intimacy, and spirited interaction across generational and class lines is the sundlaug, or public pool. The sundlaug, which often includes large swimming areas, “hot pots” for adults, and shallow children’s pools, is a relatively recent invention: one guidebook reports that in 1900 less than 1 percent of Icelanders knew how to swim. But today, thanks to public investment in a geothermal heating system that runs throughout the country and social infrastructure projects that help residents commingle despite the frigid weather, there are more than 120 public pools in the nation of some 330,000 people, one for every 2,750 residents. Most Icelanders live near a pool, and they use them day and night, throughout the year, as a social space for gatherings of friends and family and as a forum for casual banter or more political debate among strangers. Access is basically universal, since most hot pots are free and the select swimming complexes that charge ask for only a modest entrance fee. “People from all walks of life go to the pool,” says the folklorist Valdimar Hafstein. “So you have, mixing in the same hot tub, people living in the area, whether it’s the professor or the student, construction worker or the businessman, the billionaire or car salesman—they all meet up.”13
The diversity of users, and the rule that everyone must strip naked and wash off in a public area before entering the tubs, make the pools an equalizing force in Icelandic society. So too does the substance of the conversations. When Dan Kois traveled to Iceland to do a story on its civic culture, he met immigrants in small towns who told him that the pools were ideal places to get to know neighbors and learn local customs, and new parents who recounted going to the hot tubs for tips and advice. Young women told him that seeing a variety of other female bodies at the pool helped them feel more comfortable and secure in their own skin. In Reykjavik, he learned, local council members routinely go to the pools to speak informally with their constituents, even if it means getting an earful of complaints. “The pools are more than a humble municipal investment, more than just a civic perquisite that emerged from an accident of Iceland’s volcanic geology,” writes Kois, who left the country convinced “that Icelanders’ remarkable satisfaction is tied inextricably to the experience of escaping the fierce, freezing air and sinking into warm water among their countrymen.”14
Unfortunately, swimming pools and other social infrastructures with potential to facilitate sustained, intimate interaction across group lines can easily be used to segregate instead. Attractive places, after all, are only one element of good social infrastructure; programming, which can be inclusive or exclusive, welcoming or forbidding, is also important. The modern American history of municipal swimming pools, which is elegantly told in the historian Jeff Wiltse’s Contested Waters, provides an object lesson in how to turn a community resource into an instrument of division. Swimming pools, Wiltse argues, have been key sites of cohesion and conflict “because they are places at which people build community and define the social boundaries of community life…. Swimming with others in a pool means accepting them as part of the same community precisely because the interaction is so intimate and sociable. Conversely, excluding someone or some group from a pool effectively defines them as social others.”15
In the late nineteenth century, northern cities like Boston and Philadelphia built austere pools, mainly in slums for immigrants and the poor. They were open to all working-class men and women, albeit on alternate days. “The facilities lacked showers,” Wiltse writes, “because the pools themselves were the instruments of cleaning.” But that didn’t reduce their popular appeal, nor did their policy of ethnic and racial integration. By the end of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s nine municipal pools attracted about 1,500 swimmers daily, and blacks and whites swam together in relative peace.16
American municipalities built thousands of public pools during the 1920s and 1930s. They transformed from small bathing pools into massive spaces for communal leisure, often surrounded by lawns, decks, restaurants, and playing tables where the middle classes could spend an entire day. Millions of people flocked to these new hubs for social activity, and as social and sexual mores relaxed, they opened up across gender lines so that men and women could mix. With gender integration, Wiltse shows, came rising anxieties about intergroup contact, particularly between blacks and whites. Pools, after all, are places where large numbers of scantily dressed people come into close physical contact. Whites expressed concerns about contamination, sexual assault, and inappropriate relationships. City leaders responded with a policy tool that’s usually associated with the South. They created segregated facilities, with racial divisions that were often enforced informally, but with unmistakable power.
By the 1950s, swimming pools had become flash points for racial segregation, and occasionally outright violence, throughout the North. (There were hardly any swimming pools for blacks in the South, and those that existed were formally segregated with official police enforcement.) Wiltse recounts the story of a Little League Baseball team in Youngstown, Ohio, that celebrated its city championship in 1951 at a beautiful municipal pool in South Side Park. The team had one African American player, Al Bright, and lifeguards refused to let him past the perimeter fence while the other players swam. When several parents protested, the supervisor agreed to let Al “enter” the pool for a few minutes, but only if everyone else got out and Al agreed to sit inside a rubber raft. While everyone watched, a lifeguard pushed Al around the pool, shouting, “whatever you do, don’t touch the water!”17
This was not an isolated incident, nor was it restricted to certain parts of the United States. Two years later, in 1953, the great African American film star Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toes in the swimming pool at the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, which welcomed her as a performer but banned her, and all other blacks, from the water. The hotel responded by draining the entire pool.18
Civil rights attorneys challenged the legality of segregated swimming pools, but integrating social facilities proved just as difficult as integrating schools, if not more so. Shortly after Brown v. Board of Education, for instance, a federal judge in Baltimore ruled against the NAACP’s demand that the city integrate its public swimming pools, on grounds that “pools were ‘more sensitive than schools’ because of the visual and physical intimacy that accompanied their use.” The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overruled this decision, forcing Baltimore to desegregate all public pools. But the city resisted and didn’t give up its legal challenges until it lost the last one possible, when the US Supreme Court declined to review the case.19
Baltimore was no outlier. Cities in the North and South responded to the desegregation orders by abandoning public facilities, building new private clubs, or closing down municipal pools altogether. Some cities were more creative. St. Louis reimposed sex segregation, so that black men and white women could never swim together.20 In Marshall, Texas, where the court ordered integration, city officials voted overwhelmingly to sell the city’s recreational facilities. The public pool was subsequently purchased by the Lions Club, and operated as a white-only facility.21 Montgomery, Alabama, didn’t merely shutter swimming pools. In 1959, local officials closed all public parks and the municipal zoo to head off a lawsuit.22 The local YMCA, however, remained segregated through the 1960s, and opened white-only swimming pools on the condition that the city provide tax exemptions, free water for its pools, and free park use. This secret deal went unchecked until 1970, when news of the arrangement leaked and courts forced the YMCA to end its segregationist practices.23
In private, however, white families had another way to deal with forced desegregation: they retreated from public spaces and built pools in their own backyards. Between 1950 and 1975, the number of residential in-ground swimming pools in the United States increased from about twenty-five hundred to more than four million.24 Racism was obviously not the only factor in this building boom, but it played an unmistakably important role in the demise of public social infrastructures that supported collective life. Today, there are far fewer municipal swimming pools than there were during the mid-1900s. The resort-style pools, with decks and restaurants and other recreational facilities, have all but vanished. In the United States, they exist primarily in private clubs and resorts that are inaccessible to the middle and lower classes.25
African Americans and civil rights activists protested this form of inequality well past the 1960s. In 1975, for instance, blacks in Pittsburgh (where in 1962 a sign posted outside one public pool stated “No Dogs or Niggers Allowed”) fought against an order to close “Sully’s Pool,” a public pool used primarily by African Americans, arguing that the pool is “a way of life for us.”26 In 1971, the Supreme Court had narrowly ruled that closing swimming pools in response to integration orders was not unconstitutional, even if the closure had discriminatory intent, because it affected whites and blacks equally. Perhaps sensing the fallout, the court specified that the decision would not apply to public schools, because it deemed swimming pools a “convenience or a luxury,” whereas public schools are a “necessity.”27 Of course, no one disputed that schools are necessary, but this reasoning failed to recognize how segregation in other public facilities would shape our civic life and culture. To this day, there are wide racial disparities in swimming ability in the United States, with whites twice as likely to know how to swim as blacks, and black children being three times more likely to die from unintentional drowning.28 Wiltse, the historian, argues that unequal access to pools meant that swimming never became a significant part of African American culture.29
Pools, however, remain charged sites for discrimination and conflict. In June 2015, McKinney, Texas, gained the national spot-light after local police got involved in a conflict at a private community swimming pool. The interaction between the police and several black teenagers who had been attending a party at the pool was caught on phone cameras, and an uploaded YouTube video capturing a particularly forceful encounter between a police offer and a young girl amplified the national conversation about police abuse of African Americans. The swimming pool, while technically only accessible to members of a gated community, was being used by a neighborhood resident who was hosting a party. White residents approached a group of black teenagers who were there, accusing them of trespassing and telling them to go back to their “Section 8 homes.”30 After receiving widespread media attention, the town placed the police officer involved in the incident on administrative leave. Soon after, residents posted a sign reading “Thank you McKinney Police for keeping us safe.”31
Stories like these help explain the popularity—or perhaps the necessity—of social infrastructures that serve as safe spaces for members of excluded groups that are subjected to prejudice, discrimination, and violence. Oppressed communities often endure extreme social and economic pressures that inhibit the formation of stable, enduring relationships. In the United States, as the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has argued, the history of slavery, ghettoization, segregation, and mass incarceration has led to high levels of instability within the black community. “Afro-Americans are the most unpartnered and isolated group of people in America,” Patterson writes, “and quite possibly in the world.”32 Black Americans, and all other groups that face severe discrimination, need spaces that foster support and cohesion.
From ancient times, oppressed people—women, slaves, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, the working classes, and the like—have built special places and institutions where they can assemble to make sense of and plan responses to their situation, free from surveillance by the dominant group. The political theorists Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner call these social spaces “counterpublics,” and argue that despite—and partly due to—their insularity they are essential tools for civic engagement in unequal societies, because they give marginalized groups the private forum they need before engaging other groups.33
History offers countless examples of these protected social infrastructures. Many, from the mikvahs where observant Jewish women have long convened to provide mutual support to the bath-houses that anchored gay men’s social life for much of the twentieth century, involve closed doors that facilitate safe intimacy. But most places that sustain counterpublics are out in the open, available for everyone to see.
In contemporary America, the black church and the black barbershop are among the most prominent social infrastructures that support a robust counterpublic. Black barbershops have been vital parts of African American culture and commerce since the first Africans arrived in North America, in part because whites knew little about how to style black hair and showed little interest in learning. In a context of racial discrimination, segregation, and inequality, argues Melissa Harris-Lacewell, the protected space of the black men’s barbershop is a valuable resource that, counterintuitively, diversifies and enriches American civic life in the long run.34 “The barbershop is the black man’s way station, point of contact, and universal home,” write William Grier and Price Cobbs, in Black Rage. “Here he always finds a welcome—a friendly audience as he tells his story and a native to give him the word on local doings.”35 In Black Metropolis, the landmark study of African Americans in Chicago, the sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton report that, as of 1938, black hair salons were by far the most popular form of black-owned business, with 494 enterprises, compared with 257 groceries, 145 restaurants, and 70 taverns across the city.36
Recent ethnographic studies depict precisely how black barbershops help to advance the race. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who hired a male student to closely observe a Chicago barbershop where managers give exclusive access to black men, finds that insular salons allow people who are generally on the defensive to let their guard down, especially in discussions of racism. They also provide a common meeting ground to people in different generations, facilitating productive, if often contentious, exchanges between younger and older men. “The barbershops and beauty parlors, more than the churches, the schools, or the radio, exist as spaces where black people engage each other as peers,” Harris-Lacewell writes, “where nothing is out of bounds for conversation, and where the serious work of ‘figuring it out’ goes on.”
In one conversation Harris-Lacewell recounts, a young man blames police bias for high rates of traffic tickets given to African Americans, only to be challenged by an older customer, who says the man made himself a target by riding with the music blasting and the seat leaning way back. “Although deeply critical of whites and keenly aware of contemporary racism, [the men] were rarely willing to blame whites exclusively for the problems facing African Americans,” Harris-Lacewell writes. “Even within the context of the deeply strained historical and contemporary relationship between Chicago police and Chicago’s black residents, the men resisted blanket condemnation of police actions.”37
It also exercises the men’s rhetorical muscles. Social exchange in the barbershop can be brutally honest, leading to heated exchanges between verbal combatants. It can also be extremely funny, as the blockbuster film series Barbershop shows. In one memorable scene, Eddie the barber, played by Cedric the Entertainer, tells his patrons: “Now, I probably wouldn’t say this in front of white folk, but in front of y’all I’ll speak my mind…. One, Rodney King shoulda got his ass beat for driving drunk and being grown in a Hyundai. Two, O.J. did it. And three, Rosa Parks ain’t do nothing but sit her black ass down.”38 Eddie, who’s loudly challenged by nearly everyone around him as he makes these claims, is clearly not speaking on behalf of the film’s writer or director. It’s not the substance of the lines that matters. It’s the fact that the barbershop allows patrons to articulate controversial ideas, and to argue them out until everyone has a better sense of who they are, why they’re in their situation, and what they believe. When the barbershop closes, the men who spend time there feel a little less isolated and vulnerable. The bonds they form provide strength for the social bridging that comes later, making them better prepared to engage the world outside.39
Bridging divisions in a highly segregated society is notoriously difficult, but, as we saw in industrial Chicago, some social infrastructures invite us to cross group lines. In recent years, social scientists have found surprisingly robust evidence of how community organizations and nonprofits bring neighbors together, increasing trust and civic engagement, and even reducing violent crime.40 Community organizations bolster civic and cultural life in every neighborhood fortunate enough to have them in abundance. They are critical parts of the social infrastructure, because they provide physical places where people can assemble, programs that bring people together on a regular basis, and local leaders who become advocates for the community. People usually do not volunteer in a community garden, teach children to read, attend a church picnic, or participate in a rally for better local air quality because they’re trying to generate social cohesion. But, inevitably, the process of doing these activities creates or strengthens social bonds.
Consider the Elmhurst-Corona neighborhood in Queens, an area that was 98 percent white in 1960 but transformed dramatically in the following decades, becoming 45 percent Latin American, 26 percent Asian, and 10 percent black by 1990.41 The early stages of neighborhood change were predictably contentious. Both newcomers and old-timers harbored strong stereotypes and prejudices about their neighbors. During the 1960s and 1970s, distrust divided the community; conflicts and misunderstandings were common. The neighborhood had real problems to manage: Land-lords started subdividing residential units to increase their profits as migrants entered the area and demand for housing increased. Blocks and buildings grew congested, as did local schools. Youth programs were disappearing. Parking was in short supply. Crime was rising, and the city, mired in a historic fiscal crisis, was cutting local services. Police response times slowed.
Most whites fled during this period, but many who remained were disoriented by the rapid changes in the neighborhood’s commercial and religious establishments. Some insisted, vocally, that the Latinos and African Americans who were moving in were welfare recipients, although few in fact were. Blacks and whites often referred to Latinos as “illegal aliens,” though most were not. In 1974, the chairman of the neighborhood community board referred to immigrants as “people pollution” during a public meeting, and said he hoped the INS would root them out.42 Ethnic slurs became standard features of the local parlance. Elmhurst-Corona was bursting at the seams. Many feared that it would explode.
Elmhurst-Corona survived the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, but residents still faced an abundance of social problems, from outdoor drug dealing and prostitution to illegal vending, garbage accumulation, and housing code violations. Some New York City neighborhoods buckled under these pressures, becoming sites of arson, abandonment, and blight. In Elmhurst-Corona, however, civic associations brought neighbors together to work on quality-of-life issues, small and large. Often, ordinary residents with no background in politics or activism started hyperlocal organizations to combat problems on their own block, and over time joined with neighbors on nearby streets to scale up their campaigns. A key to their success was getting access to the neighborhood’s small public and semipublic places, including church basements, senior centers, and common rooms in large apartment buildings, where they hosted meetings and events.
Consider one typical example of a civic association that residents created to protest an announcement that their neighborhood police station would be relocated farther away, leaving them more vulnerable. Lucy Schilero, a freelance beautician who’d initially gotten involved in the neighborhood because of concerns about parking, took on the warden role, circulating a petition to keep the station nearby. She quickly learned that getting more signatures would require translating the document into all the local languages, and she called meeting after meeting to get the work done. “All the people on our block helped, 50 people,” she told the anthropologist Roger Sanjek, who led an ethnographic research project in the neighborhood for thirteen years. “We had everything in Spanish, Greek, Italian, Chinese, Korean, [and] French. I met Iranians [and] Turkish [people], to help translate.”
Schilero was so energized by the experience that she created the Coalition of United Residents for a Safer Community, an organization that grew to two thousand members, including residents of surrounding blocks and small business owners. The process of local collaboration, as sociologists like Robert Sampson explain, yielded more than a protest; it also changed the way neighbors thought about one another and helped them establish solidarity across group lines. “Now I have new ethnic friends: Hindu, Spanish—a lot—Chinese. My Ecuadorian neighbor … is a good friend, and in touch with Spanish residents. [White] friends in Maspeth and Middle Village [in southwest Queens] say to me, ‘How can you live here? It’s like Manhattan.’ I tell them we have to live with one another or we won’t survive.”43
During his extended fieldwork, Sanjek learned about all kinds of neighborhood organizations that helped the residents of Elmhurst-Corona live with one another and survive. In 1980, a Puerto Rican migrant named Haydee Zambrana created Ciudadanos Conscientes de Queens (Concerned Citizens of Queens) to advocate for better Spanish-language services in the neighborhood. But during that decade she grew frustrated that Latino groups in Elmhurst-Corona spent most of their time working on Puerto Rican national issues and not enough engaging on local problems. “My priority is to help the Hispanic community become part of the American political process,” she told a city commission in 1986. The organization pivoted, promoting civic engagement in both formal and informal forums. Zambrana joined Community Board 4 (community boards are New York City’s local political bodies), and within a year she’d recruited three other Hispanic members, doubling their level of representation.44
The largest local campaigns Sanjek observed grew out of threats that touched everyone in the neighborhood, regardless of age, gender, or ethnicity. In 1986 and 1987, for instance, residents from different civic associations joined together to address a problem at the popular Lefrak City branch library. For years, the branch employed a security guard to oversee interactions in the building. This was quite standard in New York City, where young children, teens, the homeless, freelance workers, the mentally ill, and the elderly, all with their own needs and codes of conduct, packed into branch libraries, competing for space every day. Inevitably, there were tensions, and librarians could not manage them while also performing their other duties. The security guards became important local actors, so the community was outraged when the city announced that, due to budget cuts, the guards would be fired.
At a community board meeting in early 1987, a coalition of concerned neighborhood groups protested the decision and demanded that the city retain the guards. A library official responded by blaming “latch key kids” from black families for the problems, and condemning their families for failing to supervise their children. A decade before, this argument might have resonated with white, Asian, and Hispanic residents and deepened the wedge between them. But after years of working together in neighborhood associations, Sanjek writes, the people who packed the community board jumped to the defense of local black families. Thousands of good parents in Elmhurst-Corona sent their kids to libraries after school, they argued, precisely because these places promised safe, positive, educational experiences for everyone. This argument, forcefully articulated by a community that stood together, proved difficult to counter. Library officials found the funds they needed to keep the guards on duty.
Although some large-scale social infrastructure projects are expensive, in general communities do not require massive funding to build places or institutions that bring diverse sets of people together for sustained interaction. Consider how, throughout the world, athletic facilities attract people of different backgrounds into a shared social space, allowing for competitive, playful, often joyous activity, and sparking relationships that would never have been formed off the field or court. Athletic fields can be sacred places, set aside for community purposes, where categories and hierarchies that matter so much for social and political life often lose their significance. The great anthropologist Victor Turner referred to such places as “anti-structural,” because they allow people who might otherwise be hostile to one another play together in an experience that he calls communitas: a liminal moment when all participants have the same social status and forbidden social bonds are suddenly encouraged. In some cases, these special interactions have lasting significance, helping divided groups recognize their common humanity, and paving the way for more meaningful relationships off the field.45
In Netherland, Joseph O’Neill’s elegant novel about dislocation in New York City after September 11, a cricket field in Brooklyn plays a starring role.46 “Bald Eagle Field” is the place where Hans van den Broek, the Dutch banker who narrates Netherland, rediscovers the America he’d lost, and himself as well, after his anxious wife takes their young child to London, leaving him alone in New York. The field has been leased and carefully cultivated by Chuck Ramkissoon, a charismatic, entrepreneurial Indian from Trinidad who insists that cricket is “the first modern team sport in America … a bona fide American pastime,” and makes himself president of the New York Cricket Club. Before he meets Chuck, Hans appears unmoored. He rents an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel and floats around the boroughs with a flaneur’s eye, taking in the lights, the commerce, the colorful characters, but always at a distance. The city is not his.
That changes once Chuck invites Hans to join his cricket club. A wealthy, white European, Hans is an outlier on a field full of brown people from Asia and the Caribbean who are trying to establish legitimacy in the United States. For such men, the New Yorker book critic James Wood writes, cricket is “an immigrant’s imagined community, a game that unites, in a Brooklyn park, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Indians, West Indians, and so on, even as the game’s un-Americanness accentuates their singularity.”47 For Hans, Bald Eagle Field becomes the sacred ground where he must prove himself as “a real American,” by which he means an aspiring immigrant who’s trying to find secure footing.48 The games he plays test not only whether he belongs on the field, but whether he belongs. Eventually he passes, and only then does he find his place.
In real life, the social action on athletic fields is usually less poetic than it is in good fiction, but it’s no less consequential for our relationships and sense of identity. Consider how many young people meet their closest friends—and also get to know themselves a lot better—while playing in a ballpark. Consider how many parents forge lasting relationships on the sidelines while their children practice and compete on the diamond, field, or court.
As a young child in Chicago, I spent countless afternoons on a makeshift soccer pitch near the Lincoln Park Zoo, where a neighborhood organization called the Menomonee Club ran practices. In the 1970s, the Menomonee Club was a meeting place for kids from Old Town, which was quickly gentrifying, and the housing projects immediately to the south. The director, a garrulous soccer fanatic named Basil Kane, charged something like $6 per season, so that everyone could afford to play. As a result, the experience I had playing “the beautiful game” was unlike most of the other experiences I had in the grotesquely unequal and segregated city.
My neighborhood public school, for instance, had a playground basketball court that was popular among kids from Old Town as well as the housing projects nearby. My friends and I used it often, but one year, when I was around ten, vandals took the hoops off the backboards so that no one could play there. When the city installed new ones, the vandals removed them again. I was furious, and I’d heard so many people complain about crimes committed by poor African Americans from the projects that I presumed they were responsible for destroying the basketball courts too. But one day, when I was visiting a white neighbor who lived in one of the nicest houses in the area, he asked if I wanted to know a secret. His teenage brother and his friends had been taking down the hoops, he explained, because they didn’t want black kids from the projects in our neighborhood. I’d never considered that possibility.
In retrospect, I probably should have. Nearly everything in Chicago was segregated: neighborhoods, schools, social clubs, religious institutions. But on the soccer field, at least, I got to know people whose race and social class—and therefore homes, cars, and meals—made them different from the people I met in other circles. And yet, during the season we were on the same team. Playing together was hardly enough to form deep and lasting friendships, but it provided an opening, a chance to connect.
Now that I’m a parent, the time I spend on athletic fields—albeit on the sidelines—is once again shaping my family’s social and community life. During the week my wife and I shuttle between our offices at the university and our children’s school, squeezing in an occasional date night, dinner party, work event, or show. On weekends our schedules are less constricted, but since our son joined his first soccer team they’ve revolved around his games and tournaments, some of which take us far from home. Friends whose children don’t play on travel teams are puzzled by our commitment to this lifestyle and the impositions it poses. To be honest, sometimes I am too! But then I remember what makes the experience so valuable and compelling: the relationships we build with the families who share our commitment, and with our own child as well.
The community we’ve built around the soccer field has been a significant part of our life since our son was seven, but when my family moved to Stanford University for a sabbatical in 2016, it proved especially important. My wife and I knew only a few people there when we arrived, and they were primarily friends from work. My children had no friends, and, naturally, they were anxious about the change. But on our first day in Palo Alto our son was invited to play on the travel team of a large local soccer club, and his teammates quickly became pals. After a few weekends of games around the Bay Area, other parents had invited our whole family to barbecues, beach trips, and holiday meals. Our daughter befriended the players’ sisters. We got advice about local schools, doctors, grocery stores, and after-school programs. We formed car pools, so that everyone could help each other get through the week.
No one would mistake our team for a fully integrated community. Silicon Valley is astronomically expensive, and—as is too often the case in modern American youth sports programs—so was participating on the region’s travel team. But about 20 percent of the players lived in poor or working-class neighborhoods like East Palo Alto, a primarily minority community that’s physically separated from prosperous Palo Alto by a large highway. Because the club offered financial support, the team had more class and ethnic diversity than other local social groups. There were a few soccer parents who worked in the tech industry and drove Teslas or Mercedes, but most had Nissans, Subarus, and more conventional professional or middle-class jobs. There were families from Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India, Israel, Tunisia, France, and Germany. There were Democrats, Republicans, independents, and progressives. Our team formed during the most heated moments of the 2016 presidential election, and occasionally we suspended the debate over Messi vs. Ronaldo to argue Clinton vs. Trump. We didn’t agree or change each other’s minds, but we liked and trusted each other enough to listen to opposing positions. Through face-to-face interactions, we came to understand where people with different viewpoints were coming from; on the sidelines, our social distance narrowed.49
It turned out to be a hard year of politics but a sensational year of soccer, with the boys developing individually and gradually gelling into the division champion, one of the strongest teams in California. My son, who might otherwise have struggled with the transition to a new school in a distant state, had never felt more confident or socially connected. My wife and I found ourselves looking forward to the long weekend tournaments in small towns like Manteca and Davis, and to the long afternoons and evenings that we’d spend with families who were unlike our academic colleagues and friends. The end of the season was more emotionally difficult than the end of our dreamy fellowships at Stanford—not because the games were over, since there are always more games, but because the team was moving on and we were moving back.
When we returned to New York City in 2017, finding the right soccer club became a major family project. We knew we weren’t just choosing a sports team for our child, but a community for our family as well. There’s a terrific neighborhood soccer program not far from our apartment, and we had every reason to send our son there—except one. He was invited to try out for Metropolitan Oval, a legendary club located in Maspeth, Queens, on a gorgeous field built by German and Hungarian immigrants in the 1920s. They designed the field to be a community center, and it has remained exactly that for the past ninety years. Naturally, the club’s composition has changed along with the city, and today the coaches, players, and families reflect the diversity of Queens. We fell in love with the organization, and the fact that they played beautiful soccer didn’t hurt. My son was overjoyed when he was offered a spot in their academy, but all of us have benefited from being around the club.
Our experience is typical. Sociologists have consistently found that participating in organized sports teams increases social capital and leads to more participation in non-sports-related collective activities as well. A recent British study, for instance, reports “substantial correlations between measures of social capital and measures of sporting participation, both at the national level and, within Britain, at the individual level.” Eighty percent of people who play an organized sport have friends in the organization, considerably higher than the rate for those who participate in humanitarian, environmental, or consumer organizations. That’s not surprising, since the latter groups typically “require a more passive, often subscription based, involvement” rather than the deeply physical, interpersonal engagement required by athletics. What is surprising, though, is the finding that, after people who regularly attend church, people who play organized sports are more likely than others to volunteer in other civic and associational projects. The authors argue that learning to lead or work with teammates on the field helps players develop skills that transfer to other domains of social life. “This is not only beneficial to the individual,” they conclude, “it can also make a valuable contribution to the civil renewal process by providing skills that can also be employed elsewhere in the community.”50
A recent study by the anthropologist Eric Worby shows how this happens. In the 2000s, Worby conducted ethnographic fieldwork on neighborhood soccer pitches around Johannesburg. When Worby and his family moved there, friends and colleagues offered lots of advice on how to protect and defend themselves, but little on how to build relationships. He and his daughter discovered that on their own, in pickup soccer matches played on “dusty, flat soccer pitches … with solitary cement trash bins as targets for goals.” In postapartheid South Africa, Worby discovered, fields like these were sites of “urban social freedom,” places where people could open themselves to encounters that had long been feared or forbidden. Playing soccer across racial and class lines did not make the entrenched divisions disappear, of course, but it helped South Africans “rehumanize” one another, a modest yet necessary step in the nation’s attempt to integrate and democratize a deeply divided society.51
Because, in so many modern societies, athletic fields are quasi-sacred sites for playful social integration, acts of violence committed on them take on special symbolic significance. In June 2017, for instance, a lone assailant shot several people on a baseball diamond where Republican members of Congress were practicing for their annual ritualistic game against the Democrats. Mass shootings are always horrific, but commentators noted that this one was especially offensive. “Baseball and softball provide common ground in political Washington,” declared the New York Times. On National Public Radio, congressional officials attested that the field provided an important break from everyday life in the Capitol, where too many partisan members have come to see one another one-dimensionally, as enemies. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, cofounded a softball game so that women in Congress could have that same experience. “I have sponsored and passed laws with colleagues who I likely wouldn’t have spoken to, let alone gotten to know, without this team” she said.52
Establishing meaningful connections with people we conceive as different is not only a challenge in historically divided places like South Africa and politically contentious cities like Washington, DC. Scholars such as Sherry Turkle, Cass Sunstein, and Jonathan Haidt argue that the rapid rise of the Internet has changed the ways that people everywhere view and treat one another, creating vast terrains of social distance, even between friends.
There’s no doubt that parts of the Internet bring out the worst in human behavior, but does it actually cause polarization? Sunstein and Haidt believe it does. “As a result of the Internet, we live increasingly in an era of enclaves and niches—much of it voluntary, much of it produced by those who think they know, and often do know, what we’re likely to like,” Sunstein claims. “So long as we are all immersed in a constant stream of unbelievable out-rages perpetrated by the other side,” Haidt writes, “I don’t see how we can ever trust each other and work together again.”53 But other research casts doubt on the causal relationship between political polarization and use of the Internet or social media. Drawing on data from the American National Election Studies, one team of economists finds that, surprisingly, “the increase in polarization is largest among the groups least likely to use the internet and social media.” For instance, polarization has risen far more among people over the age of seventy-five, who are avid consumers of cable television news channels such as Fox, than among those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine, who are the heaviest users of online media. This simple fact “rules out what seem like the most straightforward accounts linking the growth in polarization to the internet,” the authors write. Social media may well contribute to our widening ideological divisions, but if the Internet doesn’t explain changes in the group that has grown the most polarized, it cannot be entirely to blame.54
In some ways it has been a force for good, allowing people to develop relationships with those they might never have otherwise met. A recent study shows that Americans and Germans who find their romantic partner online are significantly more likely than those who search through friends, family, or school to couple up with a person who has a different education level, ethnic identity, or religious affiliation.55 And, following the divisive US election of 2016, a number of socially engaged entrepreneurs are using the Internet to help people with opposing political viewpoints start conversations about the sources of their disagreement. One project, LivingRoomConversations.org, allows anyone who’s interested to join a civil dialogue on contentious topics with strangers through a group video chat. Another, HiFromTheOtherSide.com, matches two individuals with conflicting perspectives, verifies their identities on Facebook, and sends them an introductory e-mail—along with links to a conversation guide—so that they can get to know each other in real life.
In some cases, such as gay and lesbian teenagers who live in small towns or conservative communities, dissidents who live under repressive political regimes, and refugees fleeing war zones, the Internet isn’t just a way to get to know someone, but a lifesaving source of support and connection. Facebook, for all its problems, helps people see that they’re not alone in their struggle, and provides a forum where they can exchange ideas about how to make things better, or even escape. In recent years, thousands of Syrian refugees in Europe have used Facebook for all kinds of information, from which gear to purchase before traveling to the names of affordable hotels on the trail. They’ve also used Facebook to find old friends or townsmen in their new country, to build communities in foreign places, and, once they’re settled, to get news from home.56
At the most mundane level, websites like Nextdoor facilitate connections between neighbors who lack a convenient way to meet each other or start group conversations, whether about important civic matters or parochial concerns. On college campuses, students who are heavy users of Facebook are more likely than light users to develop weak—but nonetheless meaningful—social ties with a diverse set of peers.57 When I did fieldwork in New York City libraries, I got to know a group of immigrants—from China, Russia, Mexico, and Poland—who met one another in English or citizenship classes and formed an active social group on WhatsApp. They remain connected, years later, in part because the technology makes it so easy to stay in touch.
There are countless other instances when people use the Internet to build more unlikely social bridges. Often, they involve conversations about issues such as health, music, or sports that have limited or indirect connections to political or ideological matters. These topics allow people who might be divided by their convictions to establish common ground.
Recently, for instance, I learned about an anonymous chat room for people with HIV who are unwilling or unable to attend traditional support groups.58 One relationship that developed there involved a trans woman of color who helped a rural white Trump supporter get through his recovery from addiction. That’s by no means anomalous. People with difficult health problems routinely use the Internet to give and get support from others who are unlike them in every way except the one that is suddenly most relevant. They know from experience: if we use the Internet wisely, or design it with our common humanity rather than our differences in mind, the technology we so often blame for polarizing us can be palliative instead.
Social distance and segregation—in physical space as well as in lines of communication—breed polarization. Contact and conversation remind us of our common humanity, particularly when they happen recurrently, and when they involve shared passions and interests. In recent decades, we’ve lost the factories and industrial towns where different ethnic groups once formed blue-collar communities. We’ve made our neighborhoods more segregated by class. We’ve seen private companies organize competitive, professionalized sports programs for affluent children, and left most low-income kids to play in leagues of their own. We’ve watched cable news programs and listened to radio talk shows that tell us what we already believe.
These conditions facilitate social bonding within certain groups but make social bridging difficult. They foster polarization, and divided we fall. There’s no easy way to restore the sense of common purpose and shared humanity that makes civic life possible. But the hard work that lies before us will be impossible if we don’t build better social infrastructure. The future of our democracy is at stake.