conflict. They can certainly not exac-
erbate it and get out of the way. They
can offer constructive solutions to real
problems like COVID and joblessness
and racial injustice that can start to
reduce the resonance and grievances
of many of the communities and take
the heat out of a lot of the current ten-
sions. But this really needs to be part
of a social movement.
What kind of “constructive
solutions” might Biden offer?
The principal thing I would recom-
mend that Biden do is not talk about
unity and healing yet. One of the
things we’ve learned from peacebuild-
ing is you don’t go into a war zone
and tell people to reconcile. Instead,
you talk about toxic polarization as
a pathology in our communities, our
homes, and the impact it has on us
personally, our children’s health and
our community’s health.
The framing is critical. [The Biden
administration] should say, ‘we need
to address this pathology of toxic
polarization like we’re going after
COVID, because it’s a first order prob-
lem. If we can’t come together in our
problem solving, we can’t tackle these
other problems.’Biden needs to genuinely listen to
communities. But what it really is
going to take is a social movement,
and the infrastructure for that social
movement is already there.What do you mean by
existing infrastructure?
At Columbia, we’ve been gathering
the names of bridge-building orga-
nizations. In America, most are com-
munity-based. They’re not like the
professional organizations that work
overseas. They mostly spring out of
community tensions, maybe a local
issue that divided a community in a
church or local government and then
if they’re effective they last. There are
thousands of those groups across the
country. In addition, there are groups
in journalism, and in politics, and in
media, and elsewhere that are actively
working to try to bridge divides. You
have these instances of “positive devi-
ance.” These are people effectively
staying in communication and build-
ing bridges in places where most peo-
ple can’t because we can’t stand each
other or tolerate each other.
Gabriela Blum at Harvard stud-
ied Kashmir and the Israel-Palestine
conflict and other long-term pro-
tracted conflict zones. She finds that
groups and individuals are somehow
effectively managing, even under the
most difficult circumstances, to stay
in communication with the other
side and to build bridges. They’re
sometimes surprising groups, like
fishermen in Mozambique, who
would fish and be able to go across
enemy lines, because people needed
their food. They were bringing nour-
ishment to the combatants, but they
were also a source of connection
and information that helped peo-
ple begin to understand each other.
These are what I call the community
immune systems.MAD AS HELL
Although the current
state of affairs is
dangerous, the nation
may be ripe for a new
approach. Clockwise
from top: A protest
near the Reʀecting
Pool, Washington,
D.C. ; President Joe
Biden; Peter Coleman.NEWSWEEK.COM 13