EQUALITY AFTER ELECTION DAY
The Cost of Reconciliation
What are you willing to give up?
Something for Nothing
It was a tempting offer. There can be no doubt. The country was in a recession, its leader was telling everyone to tighten their belts. With just a little hard work, we could all get through this. Not an easy message to pitch.
Then the challenger said we could all get something for nothing —the proverbial free lunch. If elected, we could all keep doing what we’re doing and the economy would change on its own.
The election of 1980 is remembered more for its optics than its seriousness. Reagan’s offer to America was an attractive fiction: that fixing the country’s woes wouldn’t require sacrifice. That we could change things by not changing at all. As electoral messaging goes, this was guaranteed to work. But as policy, it was merely magical thinking.
Four decades later, we are as broken and divided as we’ve ever been, both as a people and as a nation. Something never comes from nothing. It costs us. Every time.
This is much more than elections and politics. Dr. Catherine Meeks, executive director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing, recently described this as “the Age of Pandemics.” Plural. Because we’re dealing with a lot right now.
Resolving Pain without Action
I keep thinking about this message of resolving our collective pain without action, of reconciling with people who refuse to sacrifice anything. It’s like helping an alcoholic without expecting them to stop drinking.
This thinking isn’t only seductive, it is corrupting.
As Anand Giridharadas spells out in his brilliant book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, the problem isn’t rhetorical; it is power.
The main desire for those in power when dealing with conflict is not to find unity or agreement. Nor is it to broker a compromise. It is only to keep winning. And if we can’t find a way for them to win (i.e., through a win-win situation, perhaps?), they will simply disregard it as insufficient of their time. They’ll take their chances on the present course.
The true message of the win-win from the powerful is this: Motivate me to want everyone to win. Because right now, I’m doing pretty well.
Or frankly, like the appeal of racial reconciliation that loses all of its luster for white people if they aren’t assured of keeping their normative status.
And yet in an age of pandemics, when health has a universal effect even if care does not and environmental destruction affects your life whether or not you believe in it, externalizing the cost while internalizing the benefits will never lead to any form of unity. It is the engine of disunity.
At its core, selfishness is our worst pandemic.
Reconciliation Requires Sacrifice
Our history reveals blundered attempts at unifying a fractured people without reconciliation. From the fleeting generosity after September 11, 2001 to the bloody efforts to destroy Reconstruction, our history reveals the truth:
Not sacrificing for the course of unity is our norm.
Which is asinine.
The unity that politicians dream up is as fictional as the magic thinking behind its spontaneous generation.
Reconciliation, real reconciliation, takes work. It costs. And you don’t get to throw the debt onto someone else.
If we have any hope of reconciling America in the midst of these pandemics, we have to face this hard truth.
- We’re going to have to sacrifice something precious.
- Our sacrifices aren’t going to be equal.
No matter what we tell ourselves, we don’t all have the same debts to the body politic. There aren’t two equal sides dancing toward mutually assured destruction. In the real world there is usually one party that has to give up owning the power and the other has to give up the urge for retribution.
The Rabbit Hole of False Equivalency
As tempting as the fiction of a sacrifice-free reconciliation sounds, there is a secondary fiction just as compelling: bothsidesism.
Many of us treat all disputes like generational feuds. Think of the Hatfields and McCoys. We don’t even know how this got started! But they’re at it, each generation taking up arms against the hated rival. Equally and similarly bad. This fits a certain cosmological bias toward balance. There is something wonderfully symmetrical about the feud.
We foolishly apply this principle as a universal. But it isn’t. Sometimes there is a bad actor or side. Nor does the cosmos necessitate an equal will manifest itself for its own symmetry.
So our delusions says that if one side is behaving a certain way, then:
- there must be a “the other side,” and
- they must be just as bad.
Regardless of the evidence, we end up creating two equal sides as a certain manifestation of faith. Even when it appears nowhere in scripture, it appears everywhere in our arguments.
This false narrative makes it difficult to reconcile across lines of power, race, partisanship, gender, ability, mental illness, economics, etc.
Racial reconciliation, for instance, isn’t about the equal distribution of sacrifice, as Black people have born the brunt of a far greater sacrifice already. Nor is it merely the resolution of unpaid debts (thought that would certainly help). But it requires different sacrifices from each of the parties involved.
And it is precisely from within that recognition of difference that our obstructions rise up.
Confession
Any hope at genuine reconciliation and lasting peace doesn’t begin with calls for unity. Lofty aspirations can certainly inspire our hearts to begin the work. But they are just as likely to encourage obstacles to the work. Calls for unity, like calls for civility, are more cosmetic than they are the fundamental deep work of change. Similarly, the rallying around the flag or launching a crusade against a common enemy have a unifying character, but almost no longevity. It is quite like getting drunk to make the bad emotions go away.
I don’t mean to dismiss calls for unity during these pandemics. Even their performative nature plays a central role in the health of our community. But let us not mistake the words of a leader for the behavior of the community, let alone that of the leadership.
The reconciliation so many of us seek will take not only the hard work of activists, the electing of good candidates to public office, or even the resumption of a normalish presidency. It will require sacrifice.
And let us begin with that original fiction — that solutions to our problems can even come without sacrifices.
As if we can suddenly have white people incarcerated at rates proportional to the population and that total incarceration rates go down without the system admitting that it is structurally biased.
As if we can suddenly pay women at the same rates as men without rendering obsolete the structural systems and cultural norms that presuppose male success and removing them.
As if we can suddenly eliminate the inequality in medical care, particularly for Black women, without changing medical schools, diagnostic methods, or confessing that these health outcomes are actually quite preventable.
What we need is some serious public confession.
This Is Where We Start
With a common sacrifice. With something we all need to give up. But don’t worry, it isn’t the thing you hear from a financial planner: It’s not a coffee a day. Or from your doctor: You don’t have to give up dessert (though maybe take it easy, OK?). It is something more basic than that.
Magical thinking. Let’s sacrifice that on the altar of reconciliation.
The magic that says we can change without lifting a finger. Like a weight loss routine that will let you drop pounds while sitting on the couch. That says we can eliminate racism by claiming to be “color blind” or never putting anti-racists in Congress. As if we can reconcile across our divisions without ever changing our minds.
This is where we start. At the point of sacrificing this precious idea. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone.
Then we can start getting into what the next steps look like.
