The concept of “beloved community” is perhaps too dated for contemporary use. But it does point to the value of keeping the endgame in mind: achieving a climate in these places in which our identities— the full breadth of them— feel safe and like they can belong and flourish.
Related Quotes
Tarrant paints a vivid picture of how challenging this can be. In one of my favorite
passages, he puts it like this:
If you are used to living in a small room and suddenly discover a wide meadow, you might feel unsafe. Everyone thinks that they want happiness, but they might not. They might rather keep their stories about who they are and about what is impossible. Happiness is not an add-on to what you already are; it requires you to become a different person from the one who set off seeking it.
Put more generally: In settings that are important to us and where we could be devalued based on stereotypes about our identity, we feel safer with our own kind.
Things like: How are people like me seen and treated here? Will I be supported here? Will it be a fair place for people like me? Diversity puts us in a state of mind in which identity is top of mind. Stressful emotions can arise. Thoughts scramble as we work to decipher and make meaning. To capture the anxious, ruminative nature of this state, my term for it is “churn,” a term whose utility I suspect will increase as the diversity of our life settings increases.
This book’s interest is to expand this approach to include a focus on mobilizing the settings of society themselves to foster successful integration. It sees these settings as having a capacity of their own, bottom-up, to foster successful integration— a capacity, perhaps underappreciated, to build trust across otherwise tenacious identity divides. It explores how to do this at several levels in society: in personal relationships and mentorships; in midsize settings like classrooms, sports teams, and small businesses; in larger institutions like universities and corporations; and in the overarching paradigms we use to design institutions like K-12 schooling.
Welcoming. When we enter a setting that is important to us— a university, a recreational area, a diversity workshop, a workplace— a churn-causing question hangs in the air: How will my identity— who I am— affect my experience here? To build trust in diverse settings, it’s important to give people a welcoming experience that addresses that question.