CHAPTER TEN
The Practical Importance of Redressing Racism
Your answer probably depends on what you plan to do with the tools. If your only job is pounding nails, then you would likely choose the titanium hammers. However, if your task is more complicated—like building a shed—then you would be better served by a diverse set of tools. Having just hammers will only get you so far, no matter how top-notch they are.
This analogy illustrates what Scott Page, author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, calls “superadditivity.”1 With diverse components, the whole of a set is greater than the sum of its parts, as if 2 + 2 were equal to 5, 15, or even 50. In other words, a hammer, saw, screwdriver, and wrench working together offer exponentially more possibilities in terms of output than four hammers working together, regardless of their superior quality. The more complex the problem at hand, the greater the superadditive advantage of diverse tools over homogeneous tools. Page’s argument is that diversity trumps individual ability.2 Let’s explore this idea further with some real-world examples.
One organizational implication of this superadditivity principle is that diverse groups solving complex problems will very frequently outperform groups of exceptional individuals who lack diversity in their approach to the problem. This point is highlighted in the book The Medici Effect, by Frans Johansson.3 The title was inspired by the explosion of knowledge and creativity that characterized Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Medici family became patrons and sponsors of thinkers from a wide range of disciplines—astronomers, painters, philosophers, physicists, sculptors, engineers, architects, and writers. This concentration of diverse interests and expertise in one place led to a cross-fertilization of knowledge that gave rise to the period of renewed intellectual and cultural discovery that we call the Renaissance.
Johansson argues that an explosion of innovation and creativity is more likely to occur at what he calls the “intersection.” At the intersection, diverse pools of knowledge or cultural perspectives meet and mingle. One vivid example cited by Johansson is the design of the Old Mutual building in Harare, Zimbabwe. The seemingly insurmountable challenge was erecting a multistory building—without air-conditioning—where people on the upper floors wouldn’t feel like Cornish hens in a Crock-Pot. The solution was found at the intersection of two seemingly disconnected disciplines: architecture and entomology—the study of insects. It turns out that termites know a thing or two about building “skyscrapers,” constructing mounds that can rise to heights of over twenty feet—an astonishing feat for ant-sized insects. They build these structures not only as shelter but also as farms where they grow the fungus that they eat. Fungus farming requires a constant temperature of around eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit inside the mound, even when the temperature outside soars above one hundred degrees. How do the termites manage to keep the mounds cool under the searing African sun? They do it by cleverly engineering systems that use wet mud to cool air that is strategically channeled through wind tunnels.
By incorporating termite technology—the only building in the world to do so—the designers were able to create a structure that can maintain a constant internal temperature of around seventy-five degrees for most of the year, using less than 10 percent of the electricity consumed by other buildings of similar size.4
What are the organizational implications of this example, and many others? Homogeneity may be fine if you’re pounding nails, building standard old widgets, or doing a job that is routine and doesn’t involve high levels of creativity or problem solving. In fact, you may want people to think, work, and perform exactly the same way. For example, Marriott has meticulously created a sixty-plus-step guide to cleaning hotel rooms5—the idea being that all of the housekeepers should do it exactly the same way. This standardized approach streamlines efficiency and increases consistency and quality control compared with each individual adopting their own unique method. But if your job is to create new technology or to discover a cure for cancer, then you will benefit from people with diverse ideas, perspectives, methodologies, and approaches. In these situations, a question that every manager should be asking is: What perspectives are missing? Whose voice needs to be in the room?
Maybe some of you are thinking that too much diversity could be a negative—that diversity, if not properly managed, might create a veritable Tower of Babel, with people on so many different wavelengths that they fail to communicate effectively, creating conflict and discomfort. Research has shown that conflict is not detrimental to team performance and can actually be beneficial, as long as it is task conflict rather than relationship conflict. The former focuses on how to approach or solve a problem, whereas the latter involves hostility toward others in the group.6 Similarly, research has shown that a little discomfort doesn’t hurt either. In a 2019 study, ethnic diversity increased discomfort while also enhancing team performance.7 It’s also worth bearing in mind that the extra effort and challenge associated with diversity are front-loaded. In the long run, the advantages of diversity far outweigh the disadvantages, as people learn how to coordinate and cooperate.8
Let’s return to our example of the toolbox. If you have eight hammers, all you need to learn is one skill—how to use a hammer. Easy. On the other hand, if you have eight different tools, it’s going to be more daunting (and possibly frustrating) at first, because you have to master eight different skill sets. Over time, though, you’ll be in a better position to perform a much larger variety of tasks (e.g., building a shed). However, a diverse set of tools is of limited utility if one is not willing to invest the time to discover and appreciate the unique potential and capability of each tool.
Extending this metaphor to organizations, it’s not sufficient to just have diverse people on a team—it’s also important to recognize and utilize the unique capabilities that they bring to the table. This is a prerequisite for teams being able to achieve “superadditivity,” or what is also referred to as “collective intelligence”—when the performance capability of a group of people exceeds the average or maximum performance capability of any individual in the group.9 Imagine that a group has five members with varying levels of ability on a particular skill: Person 1 has a skill level of 80, person 2’s is 90, person 3’s is 100, person 4’s is 110, and person 5 has a skill level of 120. The average skill of the group is 100, and the maximum skill is 120 (i.e., person 5).
In theory, the group should only be able to solve a problem with a difficulty level of 120, because that is the maximum level of skill in the group. However, what the collective-intelligence research shows is that the five people working together can collectively generate a level of skill that allows them to solve a problem with a difficulty level of 130, 150, or possibly even 200. The reason that collective intelligence far exceeds individual intelligence is that persons 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 all have unique and nonoverlapping knowledge and information—sort of like architects and entomologists. Any given architect and any given entomologist may each know a thousand things, but together they know two thousand things (or more likely seventeen hundred things, for example, if there is a 30 percent overlap in their knowledge). When you aggregate all of this information, you expand the overall pool as well as create lots of new combinations, permutations, and possibilities. The trick to making it work, however, is that people have to be willing to communicate and share their unique information with the group. What are the conditions that maximize information sharing and collective intelligence?
Carnegie Mellon professor Anita Woolley and her colleagues have found three conditions under which collective intelligence is more likely to emerge. First, it is more likely to emerge in groups where the members show high levels of emotional intelligence, social sensitivity, and perspective taking—a finding that echoes other research.10 So paying attention to other people in the group is important. Second, collective intelligence is more likely to emerge in groups where members take turns speaking, rather than when one person or a subset of people dominate the conversation while the others sit silently. For example, if architects are discussing how to construct a building without air-conditioning, and the junior architect, who is interested in insects, never gets to speak because the senior architects have hijacked the discussion, then the unique information about termite mounds is lost to the design team. This shows that diversity cannot thrive without inclusion and equity—people need to have a sense of belonging and an equal voice before they will speak up.
Finally, the researchers found evidence that demographic diversity (gender, in their study) contributes to collective intelligence; teams with a higher proportion of women had higher collective intelligence than teams with fewer women. This result was explained, in part, by higher levels of emotional intelligence and social sensitivity among women in the sample. Similarly, other research has found that racial diversity can enhance the performance or decision making of groups.11 For example, one study revealed that simply having a person of color on a team of three people increases the likelihood that the two White people will express dissenting opinions, which brings unique information to the discussion and produces better-quality decisions. In contrast, a racially homogeneous group of three White people is less likely to express dissenting opinions or bring unique information to the table.12 Similarly, researchers have found that racially diverse juries consider a wider range of information, provide more facts, and make fewer errors than racially homogeneous juries.13
Although research on collective intelligence supports Scott Page’s claim that diversity trumps ability—as well as Frans Johansson’s claim that the intersection of different buckets of knowledge stimulates innovation and high performance—it also shows that positive outcomes are contingent on having the right social dynamics in place. Hiring candidates diverse in race, gender, or any other demographic category will not automatically release pennies from heaven. Whether people feel accepted, appreciated, and validated is critical to whether diversity becomes a liability or an asset. In an article appearing in the November/December 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review, Harvard business professor Robin Ely and president of Morehouse College David Thomas are explicit in their argument that an “add-diversity-and-stir” approach is insufficient. Rather, understanding how diversity is perceived, received, and managed is critical in determining whether it becomes an asset and benefit to the organization.14
To get diversity to work, organizations need to create an environment in which people from diverse backgrounds experience a sense of equity and belonging. Research suggests that this is more likely to happen in organizations that do not see the “business case” as their primary reason for caring about diversity. They should care because it’s the right thing to do—and caring for the “right” reasons will make people more likely to feel included and committed to the organization.15 This, in turn, will make it more likely that organizations will reap tangible benefits from diversity. In other words, the business case for diversity and the moral case for diversity are intertwined—the former requires the latter in order to work. A strictly diversity-for-profit approach runs the risk of alienating and offending the very people whom the company wants to attract.
Researchers at London Business School investigated whether this is the case by randomly assigning participants from underrepresented backgrounds (e.g., LGBTQ+, women in STEM) to read one of two versions of a corporate statement in favor of greater diversity. For half of the participants, the company emphasized the business case, with statements such as “We strongly believe in promoting diversity because it simply makes good business sense.” The other half of the participants read statements that emphasized the moral case, with statements such as “We strongly believe in promoting diversity because it’s simply the right thing to do.” Participants then answered a series of questions about how much they would feel that they belonged at the organization, based on the statement that they had read. Those who read about the business case anticipated that they would feel a weaker sense of belonging and a stronger sense of rejection at the company, compared with those who read about the moral case.16
However, as discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, not everyone will resonate with the “right thing to do” motive. Are there any other (rational) reasons for organizations to care about diversity? In a classic paper, Robin Ely and David Thomas outline three reasons for valuing diversity and how these three different approaches serve as milestones for diversity progress.17 In the first approach, which they label discrimination-and-fairness, diversity is a numbers game that can keep companies from getting sued. The idea is that the lack of diversity in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States reflected a deliberate effort to exclude women and people of color, which constituted discrimination and a lack of fairness. Now that such discrimination is both legally and socially problematic, companies must pay attention to the demographic composition of their workforce to avoid fiscal liability and public shaming. The goal of what I refer to as “Diversity 1.0” is to simply get people of color in the door and onto the roster. Failure to do so could result in lawsuits, as well as reputational damage that could hurt the company financially.
With what I am calling Diversity 2.0, or access-and-legitimacy, the assumption is that having people of color in an organization can provide a portal to new markets. A Vietnamese executive, for example, can provide useful information to the company about how to market its products to the Vietnamese community. Moreover, having a visible Vietnamese executive can help the company establish legitimacy with the Vietnamese community, increasing the likelihood that its members will support the business. One potential drawback of this approach is that people of color often end up feeling that their job is to play the role of spokesperson and cultural ambassador, rather than doing the technical work (e.g., electrical engineering) that they were hired to undertake. For example, imagine an American soldier of Iraqi origin who wants to be a helicopter mechanic. Because she speaks Arabic and has phenotypic Arab features, she is asked to serve as a cultural liaison between other American troops and Iraqi villagers. In many ways, her role becomes playing an Iraqi, rather than contributing her expertise as a helicopter mechanic. Or she ends up doing double duty—serving as both diplomat and mechanic—which can be psychologically and professionally burdensome. In short, the access-and-legitimacy approach can make people of color feel pigeonholed—and thwart their professional advancement—even if their presence and cultural knowledge benefit the organization.
Interestingly, some organizations and communities also leverage racial diversity to gain legitimacy within the White community. Once I worked with a mayor who did not strike me as personally passionate about diversity, but he nevertheless invested a lot of energy and resources into seeking it. When I inquired about his motive for spending so much time and effort on diversity initiatives, his response was simply “growth.” He continued by saying, “We’ve got to become better at diversity so we can grow our population. These gray-haired White people in our community are not going to be around that much longer, and White millennial and Gen Z families with children don’t want to move into a community that doesn’t have any racial diversity.” In essence, his focus on racial diversity was a strategy for shoring up the town’s tax base—and attracting young White people. Corporations have made similar claims—that having a more diverse workforce makes their company more attractive to young White job seekers. They also realize that the need for greater access and legitimacy will only grow in the years to come as the proportion of people of color in the population grows.
The holy grail—Diversity 3.0, if you will—is the integration-and-learning model, which reflects the idea that diversity is a valuable asset unto itself, and that diverse teams can generate higher levels of creativity and effectiveness—for all the reasons discussed throughout this chapter. But remember, it’s not simply an add-diversity-and-stir approach. As demonstrated by multiple lines of research, the company will have to be committed to equity and inclusion for diversity to pay dividends.
Finally, diversity can be a benefit not just to organizations but to communities more broadly. Scholars across multiple fields have demonstrated that there are social benefits of racial diversity, despite the fact that people often assume that diversity reduces social cohesion. When I interviewed Robert Putnam, author of the influential 2000 sociological work Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, he expressed to me his disappointment that his work is often cited out of context. Although diversity can undermine the sense of community in the short term, he emphasized that, in the long run, diversity improves the sense of community—and his work clearly demonstrates this. Other research confirms the idea that diversity benefits communities in the long run.
A 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides cross-national, longitudinal evidence—looking at a twenty-year time span across one hundred countries—that although diversity initially reduces trust and quality of life, over time diversity becomes a benefit rather than a detriment.18 Another study found that people living in more racially diverse neighborhoods were more prosocial and willing to help others than were those living in less diverse neighborhoods. This effect was explained by the fact that people living in diverse neighborhoods were more likely to identify with all of humanity.19 What’s also striking is that the study contains experimental evidence demonstrating that people who were asked to merely imagine living in a racially diverse neighborhood were also more willing to help other people in need, and that this causal link was explained by the fact that imagining life in a more diverse neighborhood led them to have a broader human identity.
Apropos of a broader human identity, it’s important to realize that racism can have a negative effect on all of humanity. We’ll explore why in the next section.
THE COLLECTIVE IMPACT CASE
In addition to the business case, strong reasons for ending racism can be made on the basis of both self-interest and collective interest. Systems of racial oppression don’t just harm Black people; they harm other people of color, and many White people as well. People who are prone to racism, such as right-wing authoritarians, tend to be hostile toward any group that is perceived as deviating from the conventional establishment—including immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and nontraditional women. This means that people who are prejudiced against one social group are very likely to be prejudiced against multiple social groups.20 In a classic investigation of the “prejudice as general attitude” idea, people were asked to rate their feelings toward a variety of different social groups, some real (e.g., Blacks, Jews) and some fictitious (e.g., Danerians, Wallonians).21 Results showed that people who reported disliking Jewish people, for example, also tended to dislike Black people and other social groups. What’s fascinating is that this antipathy extended to groups that weren’t even real, such as the Danerians and Wallonians. Simply put, they didn’t like anyone who was different, regardless of whether they knew anything about them or not. More recent research has refined this idea by showing that generalized prejudice is not just about “us” versus “them” but tends to be aimed specifically at groups that are socially stigmatized.22
We see tragic examples of this phenomenon in the real world. For example, the Poway shooter who viciously murdered worshippers at a synagogue north of San Diego in April 2019 posted a lengthy online diatribe denouncing not just Jews but also Muslims, immigrants, and various racial and ethnic groups. Providing further support for the notion of generalized hatred, he confessed to being inspired by the Christchurch mosque shooter in New Zealand, who murdered fifty-one Muslims. Prior to that rampage, the shooter posted a seventy-plus-page manifesto vilifying numerous non-White and non-Christian groups.
The sad irony here is that Jews and Muslims in the United States, and abroad, are often viewed as being two sides of very different coins. So the fact that a man who perpetrated the mass murder of Muslims could serve as the inspiration for a man who wantonly murdered Jews speaks to the incredibly indiscriminate and generalized nature of prejudice. The moral of the story is this: When you condone hatred against one group, you simultaneously enable or increase the likelihood of hatred against other groups, including, quite possibly, your own. Hypothetically speaking, a Jewish person living in the United States who might have initially felt that the attack on Muslims half a world away in New Zealand had nothing to do with them—or actually made them safer because hatred against Muslims would signal indifference or affinity toward Jews—would have been terribly mistaken. Working to ensure compassionate and socially just practices can be a benefit to everyone, regardless of whether you are a member of the (initially) targeted group. This sentiment is powerfully captured in the words of Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who spent many years imprisoned in concentration camps in Nazi Germany:
First, they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
History shows that the establishment even came for many of the early White American immigrants. There is a reason you’re much more likely to come across surnames such as Hancock, Franklin, Middleton, Witherspoon, and Walton than Romano, Lewandowski, Sarkisian, Schwartz, and O’Reilly if you peruse the list of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence. Among other reasons, it is because the vast majority of the Italian, Polish, Armenian, German, and Irish immigrants to the United States arrived over a century later—after the country was already established. And they were not universally welcomed, nor were they universally considered “White.” Entire books have been written on the capricious conceptualization of Whiteness through American history, including The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter, How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev, and How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America by Karen Brodkin.
Religion was just as important as ethnicity in early America. For example, anti-Catholic bias was profound and pervasive. The movie Gangs of New York, directed by Martin Scorsese, touches on the ethnic and religious conflict of nineteenth-century America. It references the Native American Party (the “Know Nothings”), which wasn’t a party of Native American Indians, as one might guess, but rather a party of native-born White Protestant Americans who were against recent immigrants—mainly the newly arrived Irish and German Catholics. Whenever there is a hierarchy, anyone who is not at the top of it can become the target of discrimination. And in the past, many White groups were indeed targets, and some still are (e.g., Jews, the poor, LGBTQ+, etc.).
Given this history, it’s shocking that many Whites today see themselves as being more “American” than Native Americans (who have the oldest and strongest ties to the land), Blacks (who have been here since the beginning and built the economy), Hispanics (who were the original owners and inhabitants of the entire southwestern portion of our nation), or Asians (who have been in America for centuries and built the transportation infrastructure of our nation). In a nutshell, the presence and contributions of people of color to the United States are as real and valid as those of Whites. Recognizing this basic fact will not only fortify historical accuracy; it will also strengthen our national unity. The indisputable fact is that we are all Americans, despite our diversity.
Therefore, it is important to be concerned about systems of racism, oppression, and persecution, because they could affect anyone who is not able to check 100 percent of the boxes that define the elite hegemony within a given society. A very small minority of individuals (perhaps 1 percent within most societies) check all the boxes. Even groups that enjoy some measure of individual or institutional privilege can quickly become targets of discrimination if a context or situation changes.
The marked surge in anti-Asian racism due to persistent political attempts to racialize the COVID-19 pandemic shows that Asian Americans, often seen as the “model minority,” are not immune to the sting of racism.23 According to a 2020 Pew survey, a majority (58 percent) of Asians in America believe that it became more common for people to express racist views toward Asians after the coronavirus outbreak than it had been before.24 But a closer look at history reveals a detailed record of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States: from anti-Chinese practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the forced relocation and detention of roughly 120,000 Japanese (but not Germans) living in the United States during World War II—most of whom were American citizens. Even today, Asian Americans are at least as likely as Blacks or Hispanics to report being the target of verbal harassment, if not more so. According to a 2019 Pew survey, 61 percent of Asians said that they had been subject to racist slurs or jokes, whereas 52 percent of Blacks, 46 percent of Hispanics, and 37 percent of Whites said the same. Even when it comes to intelligence, a higher percentage of Asians (36 percent) than Whites (26 percent) reported that people acted like they thought they were not smart because of their race.25
Arab Americans witnessed a similar increase in racism against their group in the wake of September 11, 2001, when their “honorary White” card was essentially revoked.26 In one heartbreaking example, a former student confessed to changing their last name from their father’s name, which sounded Arabic, to their mother’s maiden name to avoid constant hassles at the airport. By contrast, consider that White people do not have to undergo an identity transformation when a heinous act (e.g., the 2017 Las Vegas shooting massacre) is perpetrated by another White person.
Nevertheless, oppression against people of color can even have negative consequences for working-class Whites. Sociologist Matthew Desmond argues that “low-road capitalism,” or the most base form of economic exploitation, first created by slavery and the plantation economy, was one of the major sources of working-class White poverty, historically speaking. The existence of slave labor lowered wages—and therefore economic security—for most Whites in the South. Because abject poverty was better than the horrors of slavery, poor Whites accepted the deal rather than fighting the system. Desmond writes:
Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners….Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse. So they generally accepted their lot, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage…a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter.27
Thus, racism, slavery, and the low-road capitalism that it supported also created a perverse conception of freedom and miserable standard of life for most Whites in the South. And it’s not just the past. In the book Dying of Whiteness, Jonathan Metzl makes a similar point—namely that present-day poor and working-class Whites would be better off if they did not fall victim to the allure of racism and instead focused on the systemic oppression that faces all nonelites.28 It’s a general theme that, in various forms, crops up time and time again. In the book Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Hochschild discusses the negative impact of rapacious capitalism on White communities in southern Louisiana—particularly pollution and hazardous waste.
Long-standing research has documented the prevalence of “environmental racism,” or the observation that toxic industries, substances, and contamination are disproportionately likely to occur near people of color. A notorious example is the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—a city that is predominantly Black, with over 40 percent of the population living below the poverty line—where the city’s water became undrinkable due to excessively high levels of lead. Such hazardous contamination is likely to occur in low-income areas more broadly, making poor Whites more susceptible than rich Whites to exposure to toxic materials.29 This is depicted in the 2019 film Dark Waters, starring Mark Ruffalo, which highlights the true-life poisoning of a rural White community in West Virginia by the DuPont corporation. Another example is the 2000 biographical film Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts, which deals with Brockovich’s efforts to seek justice for those afflicted by the contamination of groundwater by Pacific Gas & Electric in California. The main idea here is that racism leads to inequality, which leads to suffering, for many people of many backgrounds—including Whites.
What’s unfortunate, however, is that the temptation to avoid stigma and shame causes poor and working-class Whites to direct their frustration about their economic plight toward Blacks rather than the elite Whites who are the source of the oppression. Although the derogation of one stigmatized group by another stigmatized group is an effective way to remove oneself from the very bottom of the barrel, it serves merely as an emotional salve that temporarily assuages feelings of threat and shame. It does nothing to address the actual problem and, if anything, enables and exacerbates it by ignoring its real source.
When the social justice tide comes in, all boats rise. For example, Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times piece, makes the case that poor Whites in the South also benefited from post-Reconstruction legislation following the Civil War. She writes:
Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education. But newly freed black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were desperate for an education. So black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-funded system of schools—not just for their own children but for white children, too.30
Rights for some groups can lay the foundation for rights for many groups. In their book The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett present compelling data showing that greater equality reduces all manner of personal and social ills, including bullying, gambling, cheating, hostility, homicide, imprisonment, child abuse, mortality, obesity, depression, drug abuse, and psychosis—while increasing trust, cultural participation, social mobility, educational attainment, environmental sustainability, and solidarity.31
Each of these elements, in turn, has potential ripple effects on other issues. For example, greater solidarity can also bolster national security. The motto of my home state of Kentucky is “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” We want to stand. Lincoln invoked this sentiment to condemn slavery when he quoted the scripture:
And Jesus knew their thoughts and said unto them, every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.
Diversity does not mean divided. Indeed, history suggests just the opposite. As previously discussed, diversity is not new to the United States. It is also not new to the world. Many ancient civilizations (e.g., Rome, Egypt, Persia) were multiethnic and multicultural. This occurred, in part, because they were located near the intersection of three different continents—Africa, Asia, and Europe. Indeed, the name Mediterranean comes from the fact that it is a sea located between different large land masses. Based on what you just read about the Medici effect, do you think it is a coincidence that so many civilizations emerged in that geographic vicinity? Or might it be possible that the rich intercontinental diversity was a factor that contributed to the cultural and technological advancement of the region? There is considerable empirical evidence, obtained from samples all around the world, that living abroad and having extended contact with and exposure to other cultures is linked to increased creativity and cognitive complexity.32
The main point here is that multiculturalism is neither new nor negative. It has existed in the world for a long time—and it seems to be a good thing. Furthermore, racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity have existed in America since the nation’s inception. We have always been diverse; we will always be diverse. The only question we must ask ourselves as a nation is whether we want that diversity to be an asset or a liability. Our country’s growing racial divisions are not just a social justice issue. Racism harms us all in various ways. Our challenge is to explore the most effective way to end it.
How do we begin the work toward improving racial attitudes and creating greater social justice for everyone? Part 3 of the book provides some answers.