A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dolly Chugh is a Harvard educated, award-winning social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she is an expert researcher in the psychology of good people. In 2018, she delivered the popular TED Talk “How to let go of being a ‘good’ person and become a better person.” She is the author of A More Just Future and The Person You Mean to Be. Find out more at DollyChugh.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: See the Problem

– 1 – See the Problem

You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history.

—ANTHONY DOERR

Meghan Lydon’s mom was confused. Her daughter was graduating from high school and had a peculiar request. A talented performer with a terrific voice, she had starred in theater productions like Fiddler on the Roof and Hello, Dolly! She was a funny, outgoing, “pretty mainstream” white student who rarely got lower than an A-minus and played on the tennis team.

Meghan wanted a “not cheap” high school souvenir. “I wanted to keep my Advanced Placement History textbook,” Meghan says, laughing. She had finished the course and aced the test. “We weren’t able to cover everything from the huge textbook in the course that year,” she recalls. “But I really wanted to read the whole thing.” With an amused shrug of her shoulders, her mom agreed.

Unsurprisingly, dinner table conversations in Meghan’s Rhode Island family often included recaps of what she and her siblings were learning in American history class, Meghan’s favorite subject. She had passionate teachers who inspired love of country. The underdog narrative “is so inspiring,” she reflects. “It makes you feel patriotic and prideful because you think, That’s us, we did it!” This attitude delighted her father, the type of dad who was visibly overcome by awe and reverence when visiting the monuments in Washington, D.C. The anything-is-possible-if-you-work-hard-enough American narrative permeated her history class and her family’s belief system. She went to college to major in musical theater with this sense of determination and her high school history textbook, taking nearly enough college history courses to declare a second major.

Meghan is now a twenty-seven-year-old personal trainer (my personal trainer!) and professional actor living in New York City. After an hour of planks and push-ups, we sat in the lounge outside the gym as she shared her story. “I still own that textbook,” she says. “But I think about it differently now.”

Not a One-Off

A shift began in college. In one course, a professor drew upon current events, including a recent viral video in which white fraternity members on a bus were singing a song about lynching black people. “The national response was that this was a horrible, one-off incident, not us as a nation,” Meghan recalls. “I felt that way, too.”

Course assignments required students to read primary sources and study what had happened after slavery. “I realized there was no formal taking of responsibility, just generationally sweeping it under the rug,” she says. With her classmates, she began to connect the dots from the 1800s to this viral video in present times. “There is a pretty clear cultural and historical line between point A and point B.” Reluctantly, she concluded that the “viral video was not a one-off.”

She recalled what she learned in high school about slavery, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the treatment of Native Americans. Slavery was terrible, but a necessary evil for the southern economy. Internment was terrible, but justified by the attack on Pearl Harbor. The treatment of Native Americans was terrible, but more about smallpox than genocide. “The narrative was typically that people didn’t know better, or people were scared, or people had no other option,” she reflects.

Looking back, she notices a few things. “None of it was in the horrific detail as the reality. I don’t remember any first-person accounts,” she recalls. “Also, there was an air of ‘this doesn’t relate to America today.’ The emphasis was ‘and then we fixed it.’ It was very easy to detach yourself from it.”

She pauses, and then says, “In contrast, the pride I felt at the good things was not detached at all. It is as if I was deeply moved by the good things but not as fully moved by the bad things. I guess it is hard to reconcile this idea we have of ourselves as the ‘best country’ with these bad things. That’s what people—and I—am grappling with now.”

Summer of 2020

In the summer of 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained wider visibility, Meghan read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,1 a book that appeared to suddenly materialize on many white people’s nightstands and in book groups. Both influential and controversial, the book prompted thought among many, including Meghan. She recalls thinking, Oh my God, why am I so defensive? Around the same time, she noticed that many of the people she followed on social media were white. “I purposely started seeking out a more diverse group of people to follow,” she says. Then Meghan started seeing startling infographics in her social media feeds. She rattles off a few. One offered “your daily dose of unlearning” (“Martin Luther King Jr. was more radical than we remember”); another looked at the origins of the police; yet another examined the segregated history of the American beach.

She pulls out her phone and opens up Instagram. As she scrolls to the post she is describing to me, I ask about the dozens and dozens of posts that she has saved for easy access.

“I used to just use Instagram for scrolling through posts from friends along with fitness content and recipes. Then I realized I could use it to broaden my perspective,” she explains. She started following a more diverse group of content creators, in the fitness and recipe spaces relevant to her work, as well as the historical topics that have long fascinated her.

Meghan learned of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which city officials supplied weapons to white mobs who burned down entire black neighborhoods—killing many, leaving thousands homeless, and destroying a vibrant business community known as “Black Wall Street.” She learned that her home state of Rhode Island played a central role in slavery, particularly at the ports, with economic exploitation through trade and labor. She learned that her new hometown of New York City had enslaved people in almost every other household,2 defying the common northern misconception of slavery as a solely southern institution.

Upsetting revelations kept coming. With each one, the history lover in Meghan felt “embarrassed and guilty,” but she kept scrolling. Using the research skills she had learned in college, she consulted reliable sources to verify the new information and distinguish it from “alternative facts.” To her astonishment, these revelations and more were accurate. “I realized I needed to unlearn and relearn some things,” she told me. “And I realized that progress I took for granted like the civil rights movement was far from a given.”

Meghan’s original sense of inevitable progress exemplifies “hindsight bias.” This mental illusion affects everyone and occurs when past events appear predestined, despite much uncertainty at the time.