"We live in a vastly unequal society"
Shannon McGregor and Daniel Kreiss discuss their latest work, and Tressie McMillan Cottom gives a commencement address
Following the release of “A review and provocation: On polarization and platforms,” (open access), Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor have been discussing their research and its implications for social scientists, journalists, and anyone concerned with how to uphold American democracy.
Shannon joined Thomas Zimmer and Lilliana Mason on their podcast “Is This Democracy” to talk about why polarization is such a popular way of understanding American politics right now, and the appeal of imagining we can resolve our differences and restore cohesion:
It's not in the paper, but… we were going to have these two statements on one slide. And both use this language of polarization. And one is from “Political Sectarianism in America,” talking about how political sectarianism cripples a nation's ability to confront challenges and these identity-based struggles. But the other one is from a bill from the Alabama State Legislature that's trying to ban Critical Race Theory using the same sorts of language around sectarianism and identity exclusion. I don't think those pieces are making the same argument. But one of the reasons that [polarization] has been taken up so much not just by social scientists and journalists but by those on the right is because it is hard to argue against. It's a very easy thing. And it's a naturally appealing thing, especially for white people in this country, to say we should just be able to get along. And the idea that the problem is that we can't get along, and that's it. And it's not about civil rights and human rights and justice. That's a lot easier to talk about. That's a lot easier thing to sort of make sense of, even if it's the thing you're concerned about. And you're not weaponizing it like I think some folks on the right absolutely are, because it suggests that the solutions are easy, suggests the solution is if we could just get along better and talk to one another and all make a little bit of compromise, then we wouldn't be in this crisis. But that's not true.
At another point in the conversation, she made an analogy to a popular children’s book: “I don’t know if you’ve read the book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt? So it's like, we're going on a bear hunt. Here's a deep dark forest. We can't go over it. We can't go under it. We're going to have to go through. Yes. And that's sort of what it feels like with this upheaval. And the polarization research is saying, we have to go around it somehow. We can't go around it.”
Daniel sat down with Paul Rosenberg for Salon, who asked about the relationship between this work and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. Daniel noted that:
White moderates historically have held up this idea of a politics of solidarity as the thing we should always value from a democratic perspective, that idea of cohesion. The political work that that does, however, is to paper over larger differences and discrepancies when it comes to social groups that are positioned very differently in social structures and fight for change in various ways.
Think about an example: the gay rights movement in our own time. They had to push and agitate and protest and cause backlash from people who didn't want things to change, who didn't want to accept equality. And that backlash is not the problem. The problem is that we had a society that didn't accept people's civil rights and didn't treat them as people deserving of equal protection under the law. That was the issue then, and that's also the issue with Black Lives Matter now. The problem is not that people are protesting in the streets. It's that some people just don't have equal protection under the law.
Later, he summed up why it’s so important to center questions of power and inequality over polarization when we study and discuss democratic movements: “A functioning democracy is premised on equality. You certainly need political equality, but also a certain degree of social equality, in order to be a democratic society. The concern should not be that certain groups are fighting for equality. The concern should be that we live in a vastly unequal society. That's really the critique that we want to make front and center.”
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Want to be part of the CITAP affiliate community for the 2023-24 academic year? We’d love to have you! We welcome researchers whose subject matter and normative commitments align with our own. The affiliate community is open to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and professional researchers across a broad range of institutions, especially within North Carolina.
For this coming year, we have three goals for our affiliate program:
Promoting public scholarship and research translation efforts that help policymakers, civil society groups, and others better understand the impact of technology on our public lives.
Supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career researchers navigating the challenges of doing interdisciplinary and publicly-engaged work.
Providing a community for researchers who could benefit from a broader network.
These goals inform our affiliate programming and are not intended to limit who should apply! (We also welcome well-connected senior researchers interested in sharing their time and talents, for example).
Publications and appearances
“They said to make this inspiring, but I’m a sociologist and that’s not really my specialty,” Tressie McMillan Cottom joked in her commencement address for the University of Michigan’s Marsal School of Education. She offered graduates a blend of practical, praxis, and philosophical advice: thank your haters, avoid secret meetings, take opportunities that don’t play to your strengths and practice “being stupid,” and remember that your job and your work may not always be the same.
“The tort of defamation is not about saving democracy from liars, it’s about saving the reputation of the people who have been lied about and making those liars compensate them for the harms to their reputations.” Affiliate Enrique Armijo spoke with the New York Times about the effects of Fox-Dominion settlement.
Just Security is oragnizing a repository of expert statements submitted to the House Select Committee on January 6, and we’ve submitted Alice Marwick and Francesca Tripodi’s joint statement for addition to their catalog.
Coming soon
May 25-29: We’ll be out in force at the ICA conference in Toronto. Look for details about a CITAP/UNC Hussman/UNC Department of Communication happy hour event coming soon!
May 30: Release date for Alice Marwick’s The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media. Early reviewers are excited.
June 5: Deadline to apply to join the CITAP 2023-24 affiliate community.