What Washington Can Learn About Elections—From Abroad

By Ashley Quarcoo and Thomas Carothers

One America is proud to work with Ashley Quarcoo, an international development practitioner and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focus is on threats to democracy, social and political polarization, and comparative approaches toward building social cohesion and democratic renewal.  Through her work, we get a better view of how polarization affects political systems and what the United States can do to address that within elections.

“Competitive elections may be a hallmark of democracy, but in severely polarized political contexts they can exacerbate tensions that end up ripping apart democratic norms and institutions. They can trigger unfounded accusations of fraud, fuel claims of an election that has been stolen, and drive losing candidates and their supporters to reject legitimate results—sometimes violently. Those dangers are unfortunately evident in the United States as the country moves into what is likely to be the most divisive presidential election in decades….”

To read the rest of the article, please click here.

 

 

Photo by MATTHEW CAVANAUGH/GETTY IMAGES

 

Identities

By Chandra DeNap Whetstine

It is no secret that America is a divided country. Conservatives and liberals have long disagreed about all kinds of policy issues from tax reform to marriage equality. Even the founding fathers were divided over the issue of states’ rights versus a strong federal government. But these days our divisions seem deeper and somehow impossible to cross. It affects not only how we vote but also how we engage with our community and even with our family.

So what has changed? What is making our divisions seem so intractable? Across the board, America is experiencing a persistent trend: our divisions are morphing from disagreements over policies to clashes across identity lines. The consequences are significant. 

All societies experience some level of polarization. People disagree, and the free expression of disagreement is the bedrock of democracy. In healthy societies, our identities are tied to many different groups – religion, race, political affiliation, favorite sports team. Because these different identities overlap across dividing lines, we can maintain the “connective tissue” that keeps Americans tied to each other.

When polarization becomes bad, identities become singular and rigid. In other words, those common bonds dissipate as we increasingly believe that the only question that matters is “which team are you on?” As our political beliefs become deeply tied to that “team” affiliation, our disagreements stop being about what we think and start being about who we are. 

Arguing about identity raises the stakes and turns policy discussions into “winner take all” battles. The more closely we hold the identity associated with the policy debate, the more an attack on the policy issue can feel like an attack on who we are. And those are battles we cannot afford to lose.

When we argue about policies, we can debate fine points, concede ground and sometimes find solutions. But when we argue on the basis of identity, any concession feels like a loss of self. Our ability to negotiate is curtailed, and we are left with a negative feedback cycle of distrust and hate that leads to violence if left unchecked. Indeed, just last year, 13% of Republicans and 18% of Democrats said that some violence would be justified if the other party won the 2020 Presidential election. 

What is even more alarming is that extremists latch on to these high-stakes dynamics and hijack them, claiming their hatred and violence are justified because they are acting on behalf of a larger segment of the country that is under attack. In Pittsburgh and El Paso, the perpetrators used the political debate over immigration as justification for violence that targeted minority populations. It is this dynamic which has brought social scientists working abroad on issues of hate, group-targeted harm and mass atrocities back to work here in the United States. 

Reversing identity-based divisions, and the hate and extremism that feed off of them, will take work. There are no shortcuts. No app, no election, no lawsuit, no policy change will be enough. New research by the organization Over Zero suggests that building resilience to political violence in the US involves building networks that transcend political, religious and racial divides. These networks can lower the threat level, speak out against extreme or violent actors on “their side” and better understand the beliefs and motivations of the other side —something we are currently very bad at understanding. Lowering the threat level doesn’t mean compromising our values or even compromising on our policy aims in the name of “unity.” It means moving the debate back to where it belongs: on issues. Heck, it might even mean persuading somebody that your policy views are right.

To build those networks, we need to actually get to know each other. With each passing day in 2020 America, that’s an idea that seems scarier and scarier — and more and more important. One America provides the space for such relationships to flourish and, better yet, uses these new networks to solve the very real problems our communities face. What we’re doing isn’t just nice. It isn’t even just helpful. It is critical for the fabric of our society. Join us?

 

Polarization and the Zipper Merge

by Chandra DeNap Whetstine

I live in the Washington, DC metro area where traffic is notoriously bad. The other day, I was in the car with my husband when the route on my GPS app turned red. Immediately I saw tail lights ahead and traffic in my lane slowed to a crawl. We were about a half-mile from our exit, and I could tell there was a problem. 

I sighed heavily and turned the music up, frustrated, but ready to wait it out. Just as we were about to reach the exit, a car sped up on my left and slid in right ahead of me. “What a jerk,” I said to my husband. “We’ve been waiting ten minutes and he just zooms in. How selfish.” 

My husband is a regular commuter, driving over an hour to get to work everyday. He just laughed. “Nope. That’s how everyone should do it. Did you know the zipper merge is the most effective way to keep traffic moving? Everyone stays in two lanes until the last possible second, then each car merges into the exit one at a time. It uses the most surface area on the highway to get people onto the exit. I do it everyday.” 

Oh?

In that moment, I realized I had succumbed to what social scientists call “motive misattribution,” assuming someone’s intentions are evil or misguided while your own are virtuous. I had assumed the driver ahead of me was a selfish, wreckless cheater who cuts in line, when actually if we all merged one at a time like he had, everyone might get where they are going faster. 

This phenomenon plays out all across our lives. We mutter about the person who cuts us off in traffic or the fans of the opposing team. We call people who disagree with our politics “evil” or  conversely, “snowflakes.” Recent research shows that we are particularly bad at understanding the motivations of people across the aisle, and that’s part of what’s  driving our polarization today.

Because we maintain false assumptions about people we disagree with, much of our polarization is also false. We assume people hold more extreme views than they actually do, which makes it even harder to find solutions to our common problems. Why negotiate with someone if you believe their view to be so extreme as to be abhorrent to you? 

The thing is, it’s hard to understand someone’s motivations, especially when you have no meaningful contact with people who hold different views. And our society has done a very efficient job at segmenting itself into like-minded echo chambers, especially online. The more we disengage from people who are different from us, the more difficult and scary it can feel to re-engage once false polarization and motive misattribution have taken hold. 

This is one reason why, here at One America, we bring people together across divides to form deep and lasting relationships through service. New research from our friends at Over Zero suggests that building resilience to political violence in the US involves building networks that transcend political, religious and racial divides. By building One America chapters we are creating those networks. We encourage our chapters to have the difficult conversations that reveal true motivations, while breaking down misunderstanding, fear, and polarization. At One America we aren’t asking people to agree or to compromise their beliefs or values, we are just asking that people try to understand why someone may hold a different view, so that when push comes to shove, we can maintain the connective tissue that keeps our communities strong. 

Looking back, I shouldn’t have been so upset by the driver who zipper merged ahead of me. It didn’t cost me any extra time, and it probably was more efficient than adding one more car in the long line waiting for the exit. I was lucky to have my husband – someone I love and trust – there to help me understand the motivations of that other driver. 

What if we had that kind of relationship across big divides, not just the little ones like how we handle traffic or what kind of peanut butter we prefer? What if, when we encountered a view or opinion that opposed ours, rather than making assumptions, we could reach across the aisle and ask what might be driving that belief? How could that strengthen the fabric of our country?  One America aims to find out. Join us.

Why America Needs Your Service

 

by Andrew Hanauer

Last year, One America CEO Andrew Hanauer had the privilege of being the keynote speaker at ServeOhio’s 25th anniversary event. AmeriCorps is America’s national service program that places volunteer Corps Members in communities around the country, and ServeOhio is AmeriCorps’ Ohio chapter. While speaking in front of more than 700 Corps Members and dignitaries including the Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and the Administrator of the Corporation for National and Community Service, Andrew had this to say about why service is so vital to building resilient communities:

Service connects us to something bigger than ourselves. It’s humbling and empowering at the same time, an amazing combination. Service connects us to people who aren’t like us. It gets us out of the house, out of our own heads, out into the world, and yes, off social media.

And it unites us. When we serve side by side, we’re building what scientists call “cross-cutting identities” – I’m a Republican, You’re a Democrat, but we both care about the victims of domestic violence in our city.”

That’s not “nice” – it’s how we prevent society from collapsing into two warring camps. It’s how we ensure that our country doesn’t go farther down the road toward dangerous outcomes, it undercuts divisive political rhetoric, dangerous hate speech and all the noise coming out of our televisions, radios and smartphones. Serving together is how we stay together as a country. 

You know, as part of my job, I spend a lot of time out in the community, participating in One America projects that bring Americans together across divides to serve their communities. To build those cross-cutting identities. 

I’ve seen 400 people show up on a Sunday afternoon to a soup kitchen in Tulsa, looking for a warm meal. I’ve been to sober living homes for former opioid addicts in West Virginia, to homes in Houston still being rebuilt two years after Hurricane Harvey, to a women’s shelter in the basement of a synagogue in Georgia, in what used to be a nuclear bomb shelter, where our participants came together across divides to paint that shelter for the residents.

The pain out there is real. The need is real. And I’m concerned that the people in Washington, the people yelling on social media, need to go out and experience that for themselves. With no agenda. Just go serve. Go listen. Don’t bring cameras. Leave your talking points and your preconceived notions at home. In other words, be more like AmeriCorps members.

So yes, service can unite. But here’s the reality – service unites because it matters. Because one of the biggest problems with polarization is that it makes it harder to solve the actual challenges that we face.

We have some deep chasms in our country. Some profoundly deep challenges. We have an opioid epidemic that is devastating communities and families. We have millions of children living in poverty. We have enormous inequality, a hallmark of societies in decline. Right now the gap in life expectancy between our richest counties – mostly on the coasts – and our poorest counties – in West Virginia, Kentucky and Mississippi – is roughly 20 years, that’s larger than the gap in life expectancy between Japan and Yemen. YEMEN. Where there is a civil war and a cholera outbreak. You know what percentage of Americans live paycheck to paycheck? 78%. Immigration. Gun violence. Racism continues to be pervasive in our country.

And at the heart of all of that is a crisis of our country’s soul. Suicide rates and depression rates are up. We’re addicted to smartphones, to opioids, to materialism and social status, to becoming internet celebrities. According to the CDC, almost a third of teenagers “experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in 2017. Almost 20% contemplated suicide. We are buried in our smart phones and on social media even as the consequences play out in front of us in a generation of young people feeling new levels of despair. We are desperate for meaning and belonging, and some of us find it in our political identities, finding community in our loathing of the other side. We haven’t been polarized in such a toxic way since the Civil War.

We are desperate for something better, something that speaks to our values and not our tribalism, something that calls us up and out and into the world in a positive way. 

YOU are the people who can offer that to our country. You are the people who have gone out and served your neighbors, your fellow Americans, regardless of what race or religion they are, regardless of what they believe or how they worship or don’t worship or how they identify or yes, even who they voted for. You are the ones who are out there building communities, serving hot meals to hungry people, sitting with people who are lonely, painting fences on a hot day when you’d rather be watching football or watching other people paint fences on HGTV or whatever you like to watch.

We need you. We need you to help call us to something better, something healthier, more inspiring. Something that brings us together. 

We can be so much better. We can do so much better. But we can’t lose touch with each other. Now, more than ever, we need to commit to each other. We need to serve our country, our communities and our neighbors. And we need to do it together. Thank you for your service.

Harry Potter and Polarization

by Andrew Hanauer

 

When I think about polarization, I think about Neville Longbottom.

In the first Harry Potter story, “The Sorcerer’s Stone,” Harry and his friends sneak out in the middle of the night to stop what turns out to be the evil Lord Voldemort from stealing an object that will give him eternal life. As they are leaving, their loyal but socially awkward friend Neville tries to stop them, worried that their sneaking around at night is breaking school rules and will get Gryffindor house (their “team” within their school) in trouble.

Normally a pushover, Neville decides to take a stand, literally. He stands in the doorway and tells his friends – some of the few people who don’t mock or ignore him, people who are more popular and talented than he is – that he will not let them break the rules, and that if they try to ignore him and do it anyway, he will be forced to stop them. With no time to explain to Neville the urgency of their task, Harry and his friends temporarily paralyze him with a curse and go on with saving the world.

Their heroism is rewarded, of course. At the final school banquet, the detested “Slytherin House” is set to win the school championship until the school headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, announces that Harry and his friends have won Gryffindor a ton of points for their heroism. It’s not, however, enough points to win Gryffindor the championship.  And then Dumbledore awards Gryffindor a final 10 points, enough to clinch victory, to honor Neville’s actions. He explains, “it takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”

Neville, you see, is an “in-group moderate.”

In highly polarized societies, including in societies where divisions have turned to violence, one of the key roles in reversing those divisions is that of what social scientists would refer to as “in-group moderates,” people who stand up against the worst impulses of their own side. They say, in effect, “hold on, guys. I’m on your team, but we don’t want to do this.”

To understand why, we have to understand how groups work. Human beings are wired to belong to groups and to retain their membership in those groups at almost all costs. The fear of being kicked out of one’s group is terrifying because the stakes are so high. Losing that sense of belonging and community is existential to most human beings. We desperately want to belong.

What are we willing to do to keep our membership in a group? Almost anything. Research found, for instance, that whether or not  Hutu Rwandans participated in that country’s genocide was not determined by how much they hated members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group, it was determined in part by whether or not their neighbors or housemates were participating in the killing. On a less significant level, all we have to do to understand the power of group pressure is to imagine typing a political message into Facebook that most of our Facebook friends would strongly disagree with. How does that make us feel? A little anxious maybe? Maybe more than a little anxious?

When in-group moderates speak out, they are often called traitors or worse. In Rwanda, some of the first people killed were not Tutsis, they were Hutus who spoke out against killing Tutsis. Here in the divided United States, we see this every day on social media. The loudest voices demand absolute fealty to their team, dissenting voices are shouted down and most of us are just silent, exhausted by the toxicity and/or scared of becoming a target.

In-group moderates are often kicked out of their groups. If they are kicked out, the loud voices that are pushing the group in a negative or extreme direction gain even more power. The group members who are silent see what happens to the in-group moderate and decide that staying silent is probably best…unless they band together and push back, inspired by the in-group moderate’s courage. And that’s truly how things change for the better.

In our work to combat toxic forms of division, we often teach religious leaders about the concept of “in-group moderates.” And almost always they want to understand the word “moderate.” In many cases, they rightfully reject that word – after all, in most cases, they aren’t moderate politically. And they’re almost never moderate in their convictions or in their faith. They simply don’t want to see the groups they belong to become dominated by the loudest, most negative voices.

In-group moderates aren’t moderate. They are the people willing to speak truth even when it’s not popular. They are the people whose convictions are strong enough that they are willing to risk everything, including their own ability to have belonging, to have a home, in pursuit of the truth.

Neville wasn’t a moderate, he was a hero. (And spoiler alert, his heroism was just getting started in Book 1…)

In our highly polarized America, we need more Nevilles.

One America Voices: Nancy Bower

Nancy Bower

Community Outreach Coordinator

New Life Presbyterian Church

Q: You are the Community Outreach Coordinator for New Life Presbyterian Church. What led you to work at the intersection of community engagement and faith?

A: I’ve been a member of New Life for 25 years. I was a teacher, but when my kids were born I left full-time work and became the youth administrator here at the church. At that time, our outreach was more focused on international work, so I lost the real connection to the community that I had as a teacher. When the opportunity to move into an outreach role came up, I took it, and eventually we shaped the outreach program to focus on our local community.  The church should not only exist for the benefit of its members but also for the wider community that surrounds it. 

New Life got involved with One America through a connection with Andrew Hanauer. A very respected church member came to me and said that Andrew was starting this organization and that we should get involved.  We are constantly seeking ways to connect our church members to people outside of the church so they can better understand each other, so working with One America seemed like a win-win.

Q: You have been instrumental in bringing youth into the work of One America Philadelphia.  As a mother of a high school student, why is getting youth involved in bridging divides so important?

A: Our kids have seen a whole lot of division in society in the last few years.  Both my kids go to one of the most diverse schools in the area, so they see diversity every day, but they don’t have a chance to truly understand people with different beliefs. It is important for our youth to talk to people who believe differently than they do so they can understand why they believe what they believe. With One America they can have conversations with others about faith without being disrespectful.  They can learn to talk across these divides. Society would have us believe that you can’t do that without fighting, but One America shows it is possible. 

Q: One America Philadelphia has been a model of relationship building for the One America community.  What’s your “secret sauce”?  What makes the coalition here in Philadelphia so successful?

A: We have a leadership team that is really committed to our work together. We truly enjoy each other, getting to know each other and learning from each other. We have formed good friendships among the leaders, so that when things come up in the news which may paint one group in a bad light, when society is pitted against each other, we can call each other and say “hey, the news is saying this about your group, help me understand it.”  And we can have real conversations about these things. We don’t always agree and it is okay. It doesn’t turn into a fight, and that is a beautiful thing. 

And it helps that we love Areesa, our One America Program Manager!

Q: Tell me about a time when your chapter was really living out what you believe to be the core mission of One America. What did that look like and how did you get there?

A: There have been a lot of these moments. One that stands out was right after the shooting in a mosque in New Zealand. Our partners at Willow Grove Islamic Cultural Center organized a service of loss and remembrance and our pastor was asked to speak.  So often you hear of terrible things happening and you wish you could reach out to the community that is affected, but without the relationships you don’t know how. Because of One America, we were able to support the Muslim community. We were able to live out what we were practicing together through our work at One America. 

Locks & Love: The Difference in Our Doors

~By Alden Groves~

First-Time Feeling

I travel for work.

Not excessively, but enough that I often find myself walking up to buildings I’ve never been in before. Sometimes it’s just a coffee shop—the weary millennial’s safe haven in any unfamiliar city. But most often it’s a house of worship of one form or another.

Despite the different faith groups behind each door I approach, one thing is usually the same: when I walk up for the first time, I feel my nerves heighten ever-so-slightly as I knock, or buzz, or slide my fingers through the handle and give a soft tug.

Because there’s no guarantee I’ll gain entry. No promise it will swing wide and admit me to a handshake, a smile, a cup of coffee, and a “right this way.” It might just remain fast.

Rejection or acceptance—a matter of mere inches.

Come Right In

I get the same feeling at just about every door the first time.

But recently I experienced something new. I was hurrying toward a church I’d never visited for a meeting I was late to, and, when I grabbed the handle and gave a pull, I was startled out of my stress to feel the door swing open.

Then I was surprised by my own surprise.

Why should an unlocked door catch me off-guard?

Growing up, I’d been to more churches than I could count. Sometimes they were locked, and sometimes they weren’t. It depended on which door it was, what time of day/week/year it was, how forgetful the custodian was, and a hundred other things. It was enough of a toss-up that I could hardly develop a clear expectation.

So why had I become so certain the door would be locked?

What I realized sobered me.

I’m walking up to different doors now. Not just different wood or glass, but doors to different groups. In my youth, I was mostly among white churches. And even now, when I approach such churches—evangelical or mainline—it seems like there’s about a 50/50 shot the door will be unlocked.

And if the door is locked, it often unlocks with a Fort-Knox-like CHUNK while I’m still approaching. The receptionist must see me coming and, after deciding I look like I belong, simply unlock it to save us both time.

[Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash]

The Other Doors

But as you’ve no doubt already guessed, there’s a different group of doors I can practically bank on staying locked as I approach. When I walk up to a predominantly black church, or a synagogue, or a mosque for the first time, the smiles are no less prevalent, but I have to prove my purpose before I get to see and return them.

Are these groups less welcoming? No. It’s just that, I imagine in the back of the receptionist’s mind is:

Charleston…

Pittsburgh...

Christchurch…

And the fear: What if we’re next?

It’s strange now for me to pause as I approach and realize I’m likely not the only one with a butterfly or two in my stomach.

Better butterflies than bullets.

Opening the Door.

Certainly, in this day of frequent mass shootings, I could be struck down anywhere I go. But I don’t live with a regular fear that I’ll face a physical attack for what I look like or where I worship. I am growing daily in my understanding of what that fear is like for others. And it’s affected the way I open doors—literal and figurative.

A person’s deepest fears say a great deal about them. Our fears surround the things we hold dear, and they intensify proportionally with the degree of importance the thing under threat holds in our hearts. I believe that, to truly know someone, you must know something of their fears and their hurts and be willing to share your own. I suppose this is a fancy way of suggesting we need to learn to be vulnerable with each other—especially where we are divided.

I recognize my experiences with these doors are anecdotal. I don’t mean this as a sweeping moral lesson or a means to browbeat one group or another. I simply share it as an example of how entering into new spaces continues to open my eyes to experiences and perspectives different from my own.

How about you?

Are there “doors” in your life you can open to encounter a different perspective, a challenge to your expectations, an opportunity to enter into the life of a neighbor with whom you may seem to share very little in common? If so, let me encourage you to step through, to step into the difficult work of crossing a divide in pursuit of love, casting out fear and inviting others to do the same.

Otherwise, I believe fear is crouching at our own doors, eager to control us and set us against each other.

[Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash]

Alden Groves is the Virginia Coordinator for the One America Movement.

*[Header Image]: Photo by James Sutton on Unsplash

Board Chair Afia Yunus reflects on the Legacy of 9/11

On August 4, 2019, my phone rang. I answered with a cold hello. “There’s been another shooting.” A friend of mine and fellow agent of change informed me in four simple words explaining the horror and violence that too many of us in America have become disgustingly accustomed to. For the first time in my adult life, I did not respond with the fear ridden question that I had responded with for so many years – “Was he Muslim?” 

Since the unforgettable, life altering attacks of 9/11 when I was 14 years old, I have braced myself after each shooting to hear that the answer to this question was yes. So ingrained in me was the expectation that national media will immediately label the deranged perpetrator as an “Islamic extremist” the moment it’s confirmed that he attended a local masjid, had a Muslim sounding name, had Muslim family members, or wore a beard.  

For the first time, that thought and question did not even cross my mind. The past two years of mass shootings perpetrated by violent white supremacists has transformed the image of terrorism from a brown skinned “foreigner” to your neighborhood white male.  Violence by extremists claiming a Muslim identity has declined and continues to be outnumbered by domestic, home-grown terrorism spewed by white supremacists that is on the rise. This is our new reality. 

This new reality begs the question: Will we respond to it by isolating and vilifying an entire group of people as we did after 9/11? When a handful of people who identify as a particular race, religion, or followers of a particular ideology commit violent acts, will we demonize the entire race? 

Those who committed violent attacks in the name of a religion of 1.8 billion worldwide hijacked my faith. My fellow Americans, most notably the U.S. national news media, would not only watch the hijack, but win points for the assist by feeding into the false narrative that Islam is a religion that condones and even encourages violence against innocents. The blatant lie that adherents to the world’s second largest religion, including nearly 4 million in the United States, would subscribe to a religion that rewards mass murderers with virgins in Paradise is at best sheer ignorance and at worst insulting, demeaning, and anti-Islam hate speech disseminated by Islamophobes.

As a Muslim woman, I refuse to do to an entire group what my nation did to me and my fellow Muslims. I will not dehumanize and hate all white men, all Democrats or Republicans, all advocates for gun ownership, all Christians, and, more importantly, all who look, act, speak, or believe differently than me. I refuse to entrench further into my tribe, otherize an entire group of people, fear them, villainize them, and blame them for the acts of a few. Instead, I will commit to reach across divides, get out of my comfort zone, and attempt to develop meaningful connection in direct opposition to the toxic polarization that feeds its belly with ignorance, hate, and divisiveness. 

That is why I support The One America Movement.  Because I know, from lived experience, that meaningful connection through shared human experience, deep listening, and service can evaporate the drowning waves of toxic polarization. Much of our polarization is rooted in false narratives about the “other.”  If I know from lived experience that not all Muslims are terrorists, must I not also realize that not all white males are white supremacists? 

As Brené Brown writes in Braving the Wilderness, “People are hard to hate close up. Move in.” One America brings people together across divides to act on issues that matter in their community. By being involved with this organization, I have gotten “close up” with people I never would have otherwise.  People across the political, religious, and racial divide come together in shared vulnerability to engage in the deep listening necessary to transform our perspective of others. I have learned that it is our scar tissue, our difficult experiences and personal trauma, that make us all part of one group: human. Instead of sorting ourselves into grouped identities, where Republicans only associate with Republicans and Democrats only associate with Democrats, let us create a new group of humanity wherein empathy, compassion, and grace reign. 

On this anniversary of 9/11, I am reminded of the power of fear and how it can drive hate. I encourage myself first and you all to resist the urge to hate and entrench further into our silos. Let us open when our minds want to close, let us engage when our bodies want to armour, and when we seek to push the “other” out, let us find connection through service.

Building Resilience

This month has been hard.  Our country has been rocked by horrific mass shootings.  We’ve commemorated and grieved the anniversaries of both the Charlottesville white supremacist violence of 2017 and the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. The Amazon is on fire. And right now, a hurricane is barreling toward Florida.

We recognize that the 24 hour news cycle does two very damaging things simultaneously. It pushes us to seek easy solutions to difficult problems, and it pushes us to move on to the next piece of breaking news as soon as possible, leaving communities behind so soon after we collectively profess our thoughts and prayers. So we recognize that our job is not to react, but to build…to build resilience to the toxicity that fuels these dynamics.

And that is what we at One America are committed to doing.  In this month’s newsletter you will find an inspiring story about how One America Utah is bridging religious divides; hear more about the ways our director, Andrew Hanauer, is changing the narrative around polarization and hate; and get a glimpse into some of the big things that are coming for One America.

Check out our full newsletter here.

On the Occasion of Violence in our Country

One America is heartbroken about the violence in our country, and about the hate, isolation and racism that pervade our society.

Like many of you, we offer our thoughts and prayers, and at the same time, we call on Americans to act affirmatively to reverse course. We need action – meaningful, substantive steps to address racism and violence and to confront the dangerous rhetoric that fuels attacks like these.

Science, research and the experiences of numerous other countries teach us that extremist violence is fueled in part by growing divisions in society – and that this violence can then further deepen those divisions. Our work is not about bridging divides between terrorists and the rest of us. Our work is about making sure that this country we love doesn’t fracture to the point of no return – an outcome that would only increase the violence we’re seeing now.

In the days and weeks to come, we will have much more to say about the root causes of hate and violence and about what we all can do to take meaningful action together.

Stay tuned.