Category: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging

A Note From NationSwell on the Surge in Violence Against AAPI Communities

Posted on by Anthony Smith

a supermarket snack run with my family. Ahead of me in line was a very nice lady who was having a very nice conversation with the cashier, also very nice.

As I bagged my groceries next to her, this very nice lady looked over at me, leaned in and said, “If you don’t know how to behave here, then maybe you and your family should go back to your country.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d experience racism in public for being Asian, nor would it be the last. But it’s the one that’s stuck with me while all the others blur together — how in one moment, a moment to which I bore witness, this person was so very kind and warm; and then, in the next moment, so cruel. 

I write to you, a little more than a decade later, amid a surge in targeted violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that shows no signs of stopping; one that seemed to start last year, around the time our former president started referring to COVID-19 as “the China virus.” I’m writing to you just one month after a Filipino man was slashed on a New York City subway train, his cries for help ignored by his fellow passengers. I’m writing to you the morning after a gunman opened fire at an Asian-run spa in Georgia, killing eight people, at least six of them Asian women who worked there. According to a witness, the gunman screamed, “I’m going to kill all Asians.” While in custody, the suspect told police that he was driven not by racial animus but by a drive to “eliminate… temptation.” 

And as I write to you today to tell you that I am afraid, that I am grieving, and that I share in your fear and your grief, I am also thinking about that moment in that supermarket. I am thinking about how these problems may have been exacerbated by our last president’s rhetoric, but they didn’t start with him. And if they didn’t, then the solution cannot be short term, either.

Building it back better for all of us means that the solution must advance justice for every last one of us. The solution must start with acknowledgments, at the federal and state level, of the centuries of racism and systemic violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. 

We cannot fix this if we do not name it first.

A Note on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Posted on by NationSwell Team

To Our Community,

This year, as we reflect on Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy, we are thinking about the painful gap between the world as it should be and the horrors we witnessed during the January 06 insurrection. We’re thinking about how, as NationSwell speaker Clint Smith wrote, “a new iteration of white supremacist violence” reared is ugly head on that day. 

At the dawn of a sacred national holiday, we are deepening our commitment to dismantling the structures and cultural strains that perpetuate racial injustice in all of its forms. We are proud to stand with those who unequivocally denounce white supremacy. We join them in demanding accountability for last week’s acts of violence and terror — and for the leaders and organizations who fuel, abet or enable such acts. 

The past year has shown us too many searing images of racial injustice in all of its brutality and impunity. In those images and in this unprecedented time, however, lies the hope that we might finally do what we’ve not yet done: squarely and collectively look at the legacy and plague of racism, reckon with its toll and work together to realize the promise of a truly free nation.

Historians will consider the significance of January 06, 2021 for centuries. May the story they write be about how we seized one of our darkest days to begin a new chapter of reckoning, healing and progress. May we each, in our own way, marshal the will and resources to contribute a verse to that chapter.

Yours in solidarity,
The NationSwell Team

To Build It Back Better, Give Ourselves Permission to Feel

Posted on by Anthony Smith

For #BuildItBackBetter, NationSwell asked some of our nation’s most celebrated purpose-driven leaders how they’d build a society that is more equitable and resilient than the one we had before COVID-19. We have compiled and lightly edited their answers.

This article is part of the #BuildItBackBetter track “The Relational Era: Building a Culture of Connection, Bridging and Belonging” — presented in partnership with Einhorn Collaborative.

Let’s get the obvious question out of the way first: What’s up with that title? Since when does anybody need permission to feel? True, we all have feelings more or less continuously, every waking moment without ever asking or getting anyone’s approval. To stop feeling would be like to stop thinking, eating or breathing. Not possible.

Our emotions are a big part — maybe the biggest part — of what makes us human. And yet we go through life trying hard to pretend otherwise. 

Too often we do our best to deny or hide our feelings—even from ourselves. Our mindsets about them get passed along to our children, who learn by watching and listening to us, their caregivers and teachers—their role models. Our kids receive the message loud and clear, so that before long, they, too, have learned to suppress even the most urgent messages from deep inside. 

So we deny ourselves — and one another — permission to feel. We toughen up, squash it down and behave irrationally. We avoid the difficult conversation with a loved one; we explode at a colleague; and we go through an entire bag of chips and have no idea why. When we deny ourselves the permission to feel, a long list of unwanted outcomes ensues. We lose the ability to even perceive what we’re feeling — it’s like, without noticing, we go a little numb inside. When that happens, we’re unable to understand what’s happening in our lives that’s causing it. Because of that we’re unable to label it, so we can’t express it clearly, either, in ways the people around us would understand.

And when we can’t identify how we feel, it’s impossible for us to do anything productive about our feelings: to use them wisely — to accept and embrace them all. In order to build a culture of connection, bridging, and belonging – in our homes, schools, workplaces and communities – we must learn to make our emotions work for us, not against us.

I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to unpack these issues. Through academic research and plenty of real-life experience, especially in the world of education. I also have a personal interest in the bad things that happen when we deny ourselves permission to feel. Meaning I’ve been there, but thanks to a host of interventions and one special person, in particular, I made it out alive. 

Only a few naturally insightful among us can claim to have these “emotion skills” without consciously pursuing them. I had to learn them. And these are real skills. People from all backgrounds with all personality types will find them accessible and even life-changing. And they can be acquired by anyone of almost any age.

These skills can be used privately, but their best application is throughout a community, so that a network emerges to reinforce its own influence. I have seen this happen—our whole-school approach to social and emotional learning, RULER, is being deployed in thousands of schools all over the world, with incredible results. 

A number of years ago, I was training leaders in an underperforming school district. At lunch on the first day, I was standing in the buffet line next to a principal, and to make small talk, I asked him, “So, what do you think about the session so far?” He looked me in the eye, then looked down at the food and said, “The desserts look pretty good.” 

I realized at that moment what I was up against. I’m used to resistance, but his response hit hard. I decided at that moment that I had to reach him. His superintendent was fully on board, but it was clear that we would succeed in this district only if the other 100 leaders were also believers.

At the end of a couple of days of intensive teaching, I took a risk and said to the principal, “The other day, when we met, you weren’t so sure this course was going to work for you. I’m curious, now that you’ve spent two days learning about your own emotional intelligence and how to implement the skills in your school, what do you think?”  He stood up, looked around the room at his colleagues, turned and looked at me, and, honest, he started to cry. He said, “I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Thank you for giving me the permission to feel.” 

Let’s begin there.

Marc Brackett, Ph.D., is the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a Professor in the Child Study Center of Yale University. He’s also the author of  “Permission To Feel: The Power of Emotional Intelligence to Achieve Well-being and Success.”

To Build It Back Better, Embrace Interfaith Diversity

Posted on by Anthony Smith

For #BuildItBackBetter, NationSwell asked some of our nation’s most celebrated purpose-driven leaders how they’d build a society that is more equitable and resilient than the one we had before COVID-19. We have compiled and lightly edited their answers.

This article is part of the #BuildItBackBetter track “The Relational Era: Building a Culture of Connection, Bridging and Belonging” — presented in partnership with Einhorn Collaborative.

Imagine if you woke up tomorrow morning and every institution founded by a religious community in your city or town had disappeared. Consider what would be lost: The most obvious answer would be churches, synagogues and mosques. Sad for those who regularly attend congressional worship, surely, but what does it have to do with the rest of America? 

A lot, actually. The synagogue is a local site for food distribution to the hungry. The mosque organizes regular visits to the senior center. The church basement is where AA meetings are held every Wednesday night. Each of the faith groups hosts an after-school program that children of all identities attend — and those programs are lifesavers for working parents in your neighborhood. 

The faith groups consider these programs part of their commitment to God to help other human beings — and they’re just the beginning. Consider for a moment who started the hospitals in your city. In Chicago, where I live, some of the best include Northwestern, founded by Methodists; Loyola, founded by Jesuits; and Rush, founded by Presbyterians. All those hospitals are connected to world-class institutions of higher education. 

In his book “Bowling Alone,” Harvard University social scientist Robert Putnam estimates that more than 50% of American civic life — from our philanthropy and social services to health and education institutions — is somehow connected to religious communities. 

But the religious contributions to the nation go far beyond concrete efforts like health care and education. For centuries, our ideals for American democracy have been expressed in religious language. We have thought of ourselves as a city on a hill, a beloved community, a cathedral of humanity, a new Jerusalem, an almost chosen people. Each of these phrases is drawn from religion, generally what has come to be called the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But America is no longer a nation of Christians and Jews. There are approximately twice as many Muslims in the United States as there are Episcopalians, and nearly as many Muslims as Jews. We are all well aware that the United States is soon going to be a majority-minority nation. We should be equally aware that we are the most religiously diverse nation in human history. We should be asking ourselves the question: how do we welcome the contributions of the emerging religious minority communities in our midst? A diverse nation needs bridges between its different communities, and a bridge to a collective future where everybody can thrive.

Unfortunately, too little attention is paid to the religious dimensions of American diversity. In a recent study of higher education co-sponsored by my organization, Interfaith Youth Core, in partnership with research teams at The Ohio State University and North Carolina State University, we found that 70% of students reported that they felt it was important to bridge religious divides. And yet these same students also highlighted that, while they spent substantial time focused on race, nationality and sexuality, their colleges spent little time teaching them about issues of religious diversity.  

If the United States is to thrive as a religiously diverse democracy, we are going to need all Americans to increase our interfaith knowledge base and grow our interfaith skill sets. Higher education is an excellent place to start. IFYC has programs that help campuses create courses in Interfaith Studies and integrate interfaith leadership training into their student affairs programming. Religious communities can play their part by organizing interfaith congregational partnerships, and cities can host events like Days of Interfaith Service. In the COVID-19 era, a range of educational and civic organizations can make use of interfaith campaigns like We Are Each Other’s.

The United States is long past being a Judeo-Christian country. It is time for a group of interfaith and interfaith-fluent leaders to help usher us into a new chapter.

Eboo Patel is an author, speaker and interfaith leader. He is the founder of Interfaith Youth Core.

Insights on Building a Culture of Connection, Bridging and Belonging

Posted on by NationSwell Team

In partnership with Einhorn Collaborative, we held a conversation with four luminaries — David Brooks, Jenn Hoos Rothberg, john a. powell and Jacqueline Novogratz — on how we can commit to building a culture of connection, bridging and belonging in our relationships, in our organizations, our communities and across our country.

Here are some insights from that conversation.

  • People are distrustful because society and each other have not been trustworthy. Trust is the residue of experience. We’re struggling as a people because we have walls of distrust and animosity. The big difference this year is that we used to be able to pull together in a time of crisis as a social body. One unit that would behave as a one nation in times of crisis. We failed to do that this year, because we failed to form a social body.
  • What happens when you leave people alone distrusting, they do what they’re evolutionarily told to do. You revert to tribe, you develop scarcity mindset, you get hostility and you get othering.
  • We’re at one of those moments of moral convulsion where culture changes in a fundamental way. We are faced with the challenge of how to rebuild trust. To me, trust is built on both a personal level by open and virtuous, reliable trustworthy  behavior to one another, but also built in organizations. Trust is built by small organizations of people tackling common problems.
  • Toxic belonging is when my belonging is based on your not belonging, my belonging is based on othering you. This is the great challenge for America. We have this amazing vision of creating a society where all people are created equal in the midst of genocide and enslavement of people. There is a movement in two different directions one of expanding equality and a movement to holding on to slavery and toxic belonging. Both of these impulses are still here today.
  • What’s also happening in the United States and around the world is that we are reckoning with what freedom actually is, and that it can’t exist without constraint. Yet we are still having a conversation that is in America that is based on a rather naive definition that is self-serving and not other-serving.
  • There are many ways to think about freedom. If it’s just about you, you have unlimited freedom. If you understand that what you do affects others, you don’t have unlimited freedom. But we forget that we don’t live in a binary.
  • Even when we are in close proximity to each other, we create distance in our minds that still has an effect on our moral imagination. How do we transcend difference even when we are looking right up close to each other.
  • Every society implies an ideal person that needs to live in that society. In a hyper pluralistic society, where there is no dominant majority but radical diversity, social range and social courage is a key trait that encourages the ability to have a pluralistic identity and live a pluralistic life, and the ability to also see across differences and probably to code switch.

If you missed that conversation, you can watch it here.

#BuildItBackBetter: Antiracism and the Possibility of This Moment

Posted on by NationSwell Team

On July 22, NationSwell held a virtual conversation on antiracism with two leaders guiding our country towards a more just future — Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Founding Director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, and Carmen Rojas, PhD, President and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Megan Ming Francis, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, moderated the discussion. In this conversation, our expert speakers discussed this critical inflection point in American society through the lenses of the individual and institutional change needed to build resilient, anti-racist systems in a post-COVID-19 world.

Here are some insights, practices and resources from their conversation.

Insights:

  • Antiracist work is an enduring project. We need to look at antiracist work as the continual work of individuals and institutions, and we need to look at the way these institutions have been able to normalize violence against BIPOC.
  • Antiracism means we are eliminating “not racist” from the American vocabulary — instead, institutions and people are either racist or anti-racist.
  • There needs to be less of a focus on how organizations are self-declaring that they are “antiracist” and instead focus on how you are embodying anti-racist practices, policies, behaviors and ideas.
  • Racist research asks, “what is wrong with people?” when instead we should look at everything that is wrong with the policies and power that is in place.
  • Philanthropy is intended to be audacious and help society re-envision a new way of operating, not be pragmatic. However, philanthropy has lacked courage and focused on incremental reform. Abolition is an innovation from the ground, but it’s not being funded despite the number of funders supporting criminal justice reform.

Practices:

  • There are policies already on the table that can eliminate police violence, change the racial wealth gap and eliminate poverty. The way we do this is through supporting initiatives to eliminate and defund the police, endorse reparations, and provide basic income to those experiencing poverty.
  • As an individual, don’t just read and have conversations, there are many active steps you can begin to take: Look at what organizations you can support or join. Vote. Organize in your community. Run for office.
  • As leaders, we need to ask ourselves, “who suffers by our slowness?” Who doesn’t get to live one day free because of our slowness? Reflect on these questions and then take action within your organization. Support policies that are equitable, that recognize people as individuals.
  • Wherever you can, make room for Black and BIPOC leaders to be resourced enough to make change possible. Acknowledge that your power as a leader may look like redistributing power and resources.
  • Ask yourself in two weeks from now: what have I done to shift power?

Resources:

To watch the digital conversation in its entirety, visit our Facebook page.

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#BuilditBackBetter is an ongoing initiative that will invite the NationSwell community to come together to surface the solutions and ideas that can help us to emerge from this period of crisis with a more equitable, inclusive, resilient society and planet. Learn more about it here.