Building Empathy in A Divided America

A Decent Meal

Michael Carolan

Audio by Paper2Audio.

Chapter 1 Journeys to the Heartland

this Book's Origin Story involves strawberries—what I've come to call the strawberry study. A dozen individuals were recruited from middle-class and higher economic backgrounds from northern Colorado. The stated purpose of this exploratory study was to better understand what information participants absorbed about strawberry production—from facts to feelings—and whether this knowledge had any effect on their attitudes about industrial strawberries and the invisible labor that supplies eaters with this delicate fruit. I was especially interested in whether these outcomes varied depending on the knowledge-delivery method. Participants were first told about the processes and people involved through handouts and a documentary about immigrant strawberry laborers. Later, they experienced it by picking. They were also asked to use their phones to take photos while in the field.

The images were the biggest surprise, lending unexpected empirical weight to the qualitative interview data. They changed substantially over the course of the day. Morning frames were remarkable in their repetitive sameness—landscape shots broken up with the occasional arm's-length selfie.

Yet by afternoon, with the sun hot overhead, the images told a different story. Selfies were closer, suggesting that the focal point was not the face but the exhaustion. Sweaty faces and wet, matted heads of hair. Upturned baseball caps showing sweat-drenched bills. A pair of soil-stained bare knees. A half-dozen pictures of trays held by fingers caked with dirt. By day's end, everyone—everyone—had taken photos that not only documented their physical exertion but accentuated it.

A week later, after bodies had had time to heal and minds the opportunity to reflect, I met with each participant. What I heard verified what the photos had shown me. One individual, Nick, had commented at the beginning of the study that “illegal aliens are stealing our jobs.” “A bleeding-heart liberal” is not a term that has ever been applied to Nick; certainly, he would not see himself as one—Thank Christ! I'm sure he would add. He affiliates with a political tribe that watches Fox News religiously, prime-time Fox specifically. Yet, by the study's end, Nick's tone toward immigrants had changed.

Asked to reflect on his time in the field picking, he said, "Yeah, that probably isn't a job many Americans would want." He then took a long breath and exhaled. The air rushed between his teeth and made a whistling sound, buying him time to think, either about the actual answer or about the one he wanted to give. "Maybe we do need immigrants for some things; maybe I can be too harsh."

Granted, Nick's growth as an empathetic individual toward this group is far from complete; after all, immigrants are here for much more than just manual labor. But if this pivot represents the beginning of something more, then I welcome it.

What is remarkable about Nick's response is not so much the content of his words but what they represent, and what that might imply about society on a much larger scale. Nick lacked empathy for agricultural workers (especially foreign-born ones), and this experience created a space within him for it. Empathy, I've found, starts not by changing minds but by changing our opinions of others. As for how those opinions get changed, you might be surprised by what I found.

Palms turned up and raised off the table, Nick's apologetic repose was not unique to the group; many described similar attitudinal shifts after exposure to that fieldwork. And they did this without ever meeting a single immigrant laborer. I am not saying the experiment changed their political loyalties, that it somehow changed their cognitive filters. By study's end they remained motivated partisans, just a little less so when it came to issues of immigration and immigrant labor.

I was reluctant to draw too many conclusions from this study. It was exploratory, after all. Without getting very specific, something had happened to those participants. Wanting to learn more, I set out from there.

We All Have a Duane Story

His skills as an arborist were put to work on a blustery winter day in 2017. Surrounded by peach trees and a couple dozen men from Mexico, Duane pruned as I chatted with one of the farm's owners. It was mid-February. We were at a fruit orchard in western Colorado. Duane was providing research assistance—his Spanish was better than mine. We were investigating how federal immigration policies had impacted the state's fruit farms, a project that included interviewing some of those workers for whom the United States is a foreign land.

Though it was early afternoon, the winter sun hung low in the horizon. The skeletal trees looked as though they were decorated with flickering lights, such was the effect when the praners' lopping shears caught the midday rays and glinted brightly. Duane looked remarkably at ease, not just with the shears but with those he was working alongside.

He had teamed up with another gentleman. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the exhaust of their breath in the cold air mixed between their almost-touching baseball-cap bills. Even at 100 yards, I could make out bits of Spanish: ...aquí...; ...más bajo...; ...está bien... The cold air and gentle breeze proved an especially good conduit for their laughter. It registered as if they were standing directly in front of me.

The next day, Duane was behind the wheel, driving an under-powered four-cylinder Ford Ranger over the 7,834-foot Raton Pass on the Colorado-New Mexico border. I was seated at the other end of the tattered bench seat. We were leaving the state to continue the research that had taken us to that western Colorado fruit farm. It was then that he shared with me some of his biography, which put into context the interaction that I just described.

Before attending college, Duane had been a hired hand on a farm. Best friends with the son of a large-scale fruit-and-vegetable grower in Washington State, Duane had been put on the payroll by the farmer as a favor to his son—those skills as an arborist the result of on-the-job training. Duane eventually proved his worth as a “gear head”; he was a prodigy when it came to small-engine repair.

Physically, Duane was a pretty nondescript guy. Being of what I consider average height and weight—about five feet, nine inches and 180 pounds—his brown hair had that just-got-out-of-bed look without appearing disheveled. This averageness stood in sharp contrast to his voice. He sounded like the baritone in a barbershop quartet.

Reflecting on his recent experience pruning, he remarked, “Seeing those immigrants, that brought back memories.”

He admitted to being “a little racist” as a teen. I'm not sure that particular noun can be modified, but those were the words he used. Those sentiments extended to non-English-speaking immigrants. “I can't tell you how many times I got in trouble for arguing with my high school Spanish teacher,” he confessed, adding, “I didn't need to learn another language, I thought. Immigrants should have been the ones learning a new language: English.”

Events from that day working alongside Mateo—the other half of the aforementioned pruning team—stirred something within my thirty-year-old, white, middle-class companion: self-reflection. "I'm not that person anymore," he intoned.

“My parents would tell me repeatedly that I was wrong, and show me, show me data in some cases, which would refute my ignorance, like how I thought immigrants don't pay taxes or that they committed crimes at higher rates than other groups.”

“What changed?” I asked.

Duane scratched the top of his head with the hand that had been resting on the manual stick shift before answering.

“Farmwork is all about getting into a rhythm. Focusing on the task at hand lends itself to forgetting who you're working alongside. You begin treating them, and they you, like a human being.”

He glanced in my direction. “I guess my attitudes about immigrants changed after I got to experience them as fellow humans, during those moments when the baggage of our social and political allegiances is not so immediate.”

Duane's parents repeatedly told him that his biases were unfounded and presented him with facts to support their position. Yet it took being put into a situation where he got to know this group as fellow humans. This stands in contrast to what usually happens when confronting someone different—an almost-reflexive need to assign people into political (Republican/Democrat, national/immigrant, etcetera) and value-laden (e.g., friend/enemy) categories. The farmwork was disarming in that sense, a point he described in terms of it affording a rhythm. The migrants he got to know while tinkering with engines did not have brown skin but bodies that bled red and that hugged and held family members, just as Duane did, bodies that faced threats instead of representing them.

You probably know someone like this, someone who viewed a group through a narrow lens until, thanks to a series of transformational experiences, a lot more became visible. This book describes individuals like this, people who underwent a transformation. But rather than the result of happenstance, the experiences described were intentional, like in the strawberry study. You will be introduced to people who started at one place, entered into a meaningful experience, and came out with a more encompassing and empathetic view of others. The conclusion I keep coming back to is that facts alone cannot heal today's caustic political environment. We therefore need to rethink what I call the headland model of social change.

A body of land battered by waves of factual information is not impervious to change. But most of these alterations are matters measured in degrees—inches lost to erosion and the like. Changes of kind, of substance, are rare. Headlands do not change by nature of their experiences as headlands.

A Decent Meal gives voice to what we learn that cannot be easily reduced to words or statistics: the experience itself—the heartland. The project described is about amending the soil of our existence, creating encounters and experiences that afford new ways of living, feeling, and knowing. My use of the term heartland is not meant as a geographic reference. (In addition to the title of a popular Canadian drama series, available on Netflix, the heartland is commonly associated in the U.S with the Midwest.) Instead, the metaphor helps me describe a fissure in how Western thought has traditionally broken down experience.

One way focuses on the head, cognition, and reason. The other, what I am calling the heartland, is a catchall for everything else, where you find such phenomena as emotion, embodiment, and affect—not that heart and head are actually separate, but we'll get to that later.

This book is testament to why the heartland matters and, more than that, how it just might be key to saving modern democracies.

The Headland Model: Faith Misplaced

My experiences as an educator have been sobering. It has not reached the level of an existential crisis, but it is close. Etymologically, a professor is someone who professes—to make declarations that, I used to think, advanced the human condition or at least got people to reevaluate attitudes and behaviors. How foolish to think that telling people facts will elicit changes in how they think and act. Long gone are the starry-eyed days of thinking that minds and actions of the next generation can be fundamentally changed by my fact-based lectures.

What data will change the mind of a bigot or a xenophote? If you think Donald Trump supporters are a basket of deplorables, what could I possibly tell you to make you feel otherwise? Part of the problem with the headland model is that it overlooks the overwhelming empirical evidence concerning how cultural and political beliefs filter the facts we choose to see and acknowledge. Traditional liberal political theories continue to advance the idea that good old-fashioned, well-reasoned talk holds the potential to solve any social ill. How can that be if we hear only what we want?

We have a term for this: motivated reasoning. Rather than using facts to objectively arrive at a political decision—or any decision, really—this framework argues that we rationalize our way into the decisions we originally wanted to make. This occurs thanks to both confirmation bias, a tendency to look only for information we agree with, and disconfirmation bias, which involves systematically dismissing information that we disagree with. These biases are also especially strongly correlated with partisanship. This explains the tendency to reduce debates to being about the Left versus the Right, whether talking about climate change, covid-19, mask wearing, or whether Black lives matter. The more we identify with a political party, the more we work to find ways to have our beliefs confirmed.

In 2018, Bell County High School student and valedictorian Ben Bowling gave the commencement speech. Nearly 80 percent of the county, located in southern Kentucky, voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

“This is the part of my speech where I share some inspirational quotes I found on Google,” Bowling is reported as saying. “'Don't just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.'—Donald J. Trump.”

The crowd erupted in applause.

Before the commotion had a chance to subside, Bowling cut in. "Just kidding," he said, adding, "That was Barack Obama."

According to the 18-year-old, the crowd quickly went quiet.

The headland model for understanding attitudes and behaviors would have you believe facts speak to us like numbers in an equation, where “4+4” is to “8” like “exposure to similar information” is to “consensus.” That is not the scenario described by young Mr. Bowling. The audience did not judge the merits of the quote by the principles it espoused but by who allegedly said it. I am not saying facts no longer matter, though that would make for a fitting refrain in this so-called age of alternative facts. Facts are important, just not in the way they are conventionally portrayed by the headland model.

In one study, authors analyzed climate change survey data from three populations: the U.S public, scientists actively publishing on energy technologies, and congressional policy advisers. Its findings uncovered “evidence that the ideological divide about global warming gets significantly larger according to respondents' knowledge about politics, energy, and science.” More knowledge, in other words, was shown to increase the divide between climate change skeptics and those believing it to be real and human induced.

Strategies forward need to be informed by these realizations. You will read about experiences that touched participants so deeply that some of those cognitive filters changed. But I show how, in other instances, partisan-motivated reasoning was leveraged to enroll participation of the very individuals you would expect to be least interested in fostering empathy toward historically marginal groups. Yet, once enrolled, these hardheaded individuals reported a change of heart. Some experiments described even provide clues about when facts are more likely to matter, but only after individuals were primed by heartland encounters.

The Heartland Model: Closing Distances

Let us not forget that people in opposing political groups generally do not like each other. And if federal hate crime statistics are any indication—the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports roughly 250,000 annually —many in these groups hate one another. If you hate or even mildly dislike those who do not share your social and political affiliations, what are our options to moderate those biases and filters in the hope of providing a fighting chance for healing?

I propose that our search for possibilities can be aided by the idea of proximity.

When groups live physically, socially, and emotionally separate lives, they are far less likely to empathize with each other. In this environment, stereotypes rule the day.

Take society's evolving attitudes toward L.G.B.T.Q communities. More than two-thirds of U.S adults think gay marriage should be legally recognized. Back in 1996, that figure was 27 percent. One thing that has been particularly helpful in moving the attitudinal needle: the reduction of social, emotional, and geographic distance. Nearly nine-in-ten U.S adults now say they know and regularly interact with someone who is gay or lesbian. We have all heard stories of religiously conservative politicians undergoing a change of heart after the “coming out” of a loved one. That empathy can overpower religious dogma speaks volumes to its political potential.

I am not talking about geographic proximity. The proximity we need to mitigate against hate cannot just be measured in inches or feet. Something else has to happen, too, as evidenced by recent demographic happenings, where diverse groups, whether they like it or not, are finding themselves living, working, studying, worshipping, and shopping within the same zip code, if not closer. There was a strong correlation between support for Trump throughout his presidency and a community's growing Latino population. White Democrats who previously backed Obama were among those included in Trump's base. This aligns with other research detecting a positive relationship between recent Hispanic immigration and state-level variation in anti-Hispanic hate crimes. Is this that kumbaya moment we think results from bringing different people physically together without attention to how these groups feel about each other?

This physical closeness might instead be correlated with white nationalism and xenophobia. This is where strategies to reduce social and emotional distances come into the picture—approaches that promote connecting with others on affective (“I can feel his pain”) and social (“She's not so different from me”) levels.

My reference to the heartland is to nudge our focus beyond the unsubstantiated belief that facts alone will bring us together. Being told you're wrong and why. When does that ever work?

Total Eclipse of the Heart

As I work to identify what those heartland phenomena are, let me start by highlighting a distinction made by social psychologists and political scientists between values and attitudes. The former refers to the deep beliefs we all have about how the world is and ought to be, whereas the latter speaks to what we think about particular worldly aspects. Values are incredibly sticky, hard to change. Values help explain what gets filtered, while attitudes are among those outlooks that emerge from the process. A series of experiments has shown that tailoring advocacy to a person's values can shift attitudes toward a policy.

In one study involving self-identified liberals and conservatives, the latter's attitudes shifted dramatically in the pro-environmental direction after exposure to what the authors called a “binding moral frame,” where protecting the environment was portrayed as a matter of obeying authority, defending nature's purity, and advancing American patriotism. This exposure included having participants read statements like, “Show you love your country by joining the fight to protect the purity of America's natural environment,” which spoke to conservatives' values more than the frames directed at, say, righting environmental injustices. This pro-environmental shift in attitudes was especially apparent when the binding message was perceived as coming from an in-group.

The power of in-group identification. Sound familiar? It should. Value-motivated cognition is not a reasoning deficiency but a reasoning adaptation directed at promoting the interest that individuals have in wanting to be part of a larger group.

While interesting, this literature leaves me unsatisfied. Where do these deeper values come from, and how might they be changed? I am also not convinced that the solution to our current incivility and hate—the dissolution or ripping of the American fabric into factions—is better messaging. It feels like a superficial and insincere response considering the level of healing needed.

All of this brings me back to the origins of this book. This dissatisfaction, coupled with a few pivotal observations about proximity, germinated into an idea, which led to one exploratory study after another, until—well, now I have a book's worth of data. I suggest looking for solutions in actions rather than in solely the transmission of facts, which entails reevaluating the value of what we do and with whom. The conclusions add an important twist to how we think about how people perceive and respond to the world around them.

Why Food?

We all eat. No matter your political allegiances, spiritual beliefs, legal residency status, gender identity, or sexual orientation, food is your intimate. And like the other intimates in your life, there is a desire to know it, well, intimately.

Recently, I spent an entire weekend trying to learn how to make kolaches; there's something you have to do, over and over again, if you want to know it well. Our individual cultural heritage, what our ancestors did, is arguably connected with numerous activities—sewing, knitting, soap and candle making, tanning hides, gunsmithing. Yet food-related practices hold a special place in our hearts, as evidenced by the growing interest in heritage food. This includes not wanting a family recipe to die with one's grandparents, as in my case with kolaches.

Grandma also knew how to make buttons from clam shells caught in local rivers. No one bothered to learn that aspect of my family's heritage. That knowledge died with her, even though the Heritage Crafts Association included button making as one of its endangered crafts.

We might not know a lot about matters relating to food—we've all read statistics revealing the belief among some eaters that, for instance, milk comes from wheat —but at least we are curious. While more than 70 percent of Americans say they know nothing or very little about farming or ranching, more than half report taking steps over the last year to learn more about where their food comes from. Perhaps that curiosity links to wanting to live a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. A 2018 survey of 1,009 Americans, ages 18 to 80, found that 60 percent of participants considered it important that the food they purchase or consume is produced in a sustainable manner. This helps explain why the late 20th-century Food from Nowhere regime is undergoing a transformation, as evidenced by enormous investments in the tracking and tracing of food for purposes of food safety, not to mention how this helps food firms minimize the potential for bad publicity, liability, and recalls. Or take the growing interest in cooking, especially postpandemic. One pre-covid survey found that more than 90 percent of U.S shoppers watch cooking shows. More recently, a survey of more than 1,000 American adults conducted in early April 2020 had over half report cooking more (54 percent), and almost as many said they were baking more (46 percent) than before the pandemic, a finding supported by some of my own research.

Our inquisitiveness toward food seems to know no bounds, as the following chapters detail. Food is not a Red American or Blue American issue, just as it is not something that interests only the rich or poor. Household income may mediate what people eat, yet wealth has nothing to do with one's dependence on a wonderment of food systems.

What if that inquisitive appetite could be used to engender something culturally healing in addition to more informed eaters?

Coming-to-Tables-and-More

We know from countless experiments that communication breaks down almost immediately when people with contrasting lived experiences are unwillingly brought together to hash out differences. There is a reason why most families abide by the “No talk of politics or religion at the dinner table” rule: it's a conversation killer. But what if we changed the expressed purpose of the encounter? What happens when we are brought together not just to get along but also to learn more about our food systems? With that amendment, our response to others in the same space changes, often dramatically, as I illustrate through a variety of novel experiments.

This is not, however, one of those “come to the table” books. Commensality has been a long-studied and discussed topic in the food-studies tradition. Another book on the topic would struggle to express anything that has not been written before. Besides, this book is really about what precedes those encounters. I am all for people eating together.

But what about those who hate each other? The real work in that instance would be whatever got them to the table. Regardless of what transpires at most of these meals, getting them to agree to sharing the meal is itself a huge win.

I inserted the qualifier most into the previous sentence because of my chapter on wild-game dinners. Sometimes tables hold the potential to bring people together that would not otherwise knowingly share in the breaking of bread. What I found especially interesting about these events is how they disarmed participants enough to have honest, thoughtful discussions about a subject that usually starts with shouting and devolves further from there: guns.

What about those who cannot eat together? How are empathy and understanding afforded among those separated by great distances? How does sharing a meal or a hoe help resolve the bigotry and terror fueling the Darfur genocide? Political realities also have to be taken into consideration.

And concerns over one's personal safety are important, too. No undocumented immigrant would ever willingly partake in a meal with designs to bring them to the table with a bunch of white nationalists.

The experiments discussed engage food in various ways, including self-proclaimed welfare warriors taking the snap (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) Challenge, urban foodies detasseling corn on a large-scale conventional farm, white nationalists picking berries while mimicking certain conditions encountered by immigrant berry pickers, and deep-red Republicans gardening alongside progressive Democrats. Not only is this book about more than dinner tables; it includes practices other than eating.

It was surprisingly easy to enroll participants in these numerous food-related experiments. I doubt I would have had as easy a time convincing people to participate in other forms of cultural consumption, like had they been asked to participate in a foreign sport, watch Chinese Opera, or use a Serger sewing machine, like in a sweat-shop. That would have felt to participants a strange ask, whereas the aforementioned activities involving food did not.

Food also has a long history of providing touchstones for everyday politics and symbolic boundaries. We know that attempts to position family meals as solutions to today's social ills place a disproportionate burden on working-class families and, in particular, mothers. (Countless studies detail the discourses of “good mothering” and how strongly food ties into those societal pressures and performances.) Just as food has the ability to bring people together and positively change attitudes, it is also used to push citizens apart—a way of signaling either approbation or disdain about others' choices. There is a level of judgment associated with food that does not exist for most other things we consume. And even that isn't consistent.

There are more than a hundred recipes for deep-fried Twinkies on Pinterest—yes, they are now a thing in certain foodie circles. But when the dessert is eaten at a state fair by an overall-wearing midwesterner, it is often coded as lowbrow and gluttonous.

I am especially disheartened when food becomes weaponized, as it often does in welfare debates. For those who use what are colloquially called “food stamps” to supplement food purchasing activity, which is exactly what these benefits are supposed to do, what is wrong with people purchasing a treat once in a while? While middle-class families might be able to afford more than a bag of Cheetos to help their kids feel special, as sociologist Priya Fielding-Singh points out, “food serves as a symbolic antidote to a context of deprivation” among parents in low-socioeconomic households. Put another way, inexpensive food (read: junk food) is often these parents' sole avenue for obliging their children's requests. Yet parents using food stamps to purchase, say, a cake—lest we forget that poor kids have birthdays, too—report getting the stink eye and receiving snide comments from judgmental cashiers and bystanders. (Birthday cakes are eligible if nonfood decorations are less than 50 percent of the cake's value.) How food is being politicized, in other words, reflects broader sociopolitical trends. That is not to diminish its potential value for the task at hand. The points just made do not diminish food's unique ability to suspend some of the very judgments that it, at times, helps to amplify. The trick is to figure out how to take advantage of food's unifying qualities and to do so in a way that transcends the coming-to-the-table trope.

Why Now?

From a national poll taken in 2018: 69 percent of participants believe we have a major civility problem; 75 percent think our incivility is a crisis; 97 percent say it is important for the president to be civil. Another national poll found that 90 percent believed it important for politicians to be civil to one another, a finding I find hard to square given that Trump garnered just under 47 percent (more than 74 million votes) of the popular vote in 2020. Being civil must not have been too important for some of that 90 percent. The American Psychological Association cites the “current political climate” as a major stressor for its members' clients. Among Gen Z adults, 69 percent feel very or somewhat stressed about our national future, with 55 percent calling out specifically the political environment as a source of stress. It is such a mess out there that I am reluctant to call what we are seeing “incivility,” which seems tame—Mom and Dad fight, but this is something worse. Look at what we are facing: mass shootings, some intentionally targeting immigrant communities; pipe bombs mailed to politicians; chants of “Send her back,” directed at a Somali-born congresswoman; teens being physically assaulted for their choice of pro-Trump apparel; misogyny; sexism. The “why now?” question ought to be obvious.

One strategy growing in popularity for restoring civility to our politics is professionally facilitated conversations. I have attended dozens, where people with divergent outlooks and political beliefs gather and talk things out. The problem with this solution is that the conversations are designed for those already willing to jump headlong into the uncertain. Inspiring stories come from these events, where self-proclaimed enemies become friends. But that only happens when both sides open themselves to the possibility. And there's the rub: these events are aimed principally at tackling incivility among individuals who can already demonstrate a level of civility and respect to those confronted.

A 2019 report on the prevalence of hate speech in higher education surveyed equal-opportunity professionals from around the U.S, which generally meant those queried were employees of university diversity or student affairs offices. Of those surveyed, 82 percent personally encountered a hate crime. In terms of types of hate-bias acts, about 64 percent of the professionals reported that in the prior two years, they encountered pamphlets with racist or Nazi symbols.

Twenty-two individuals—seven were Mexican nationals—were murdered in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019, at the hands of a white nationalist. One in five teenagers in the U.S is bullied online. In late 2019, a (now-former) high-school teacher in Waterloo, Iowa, threatened the then-16-year-old climate-change activist Greta Thunberg with a Facebook post that referenced his “sniper rifle.” In October 2020, an 80-year-old was killed after asking a fellow bar patron to wear a mask. What are we to do about all this hate?

While it is important to provide spaces for people who are open to working through their differences, what about those who retreat further into their homo-jee-nee-us in-group when faced with diversity and difference? You know the type: they see brown skin and think “illegal,” their mind goes to “terrorist” at the sight of a turban, or they associate pickups and came with terms like bubba and gun nut.

My optimism for these professionally facilitated conversations is further tempered by how they look. The demographics of those I have attended lean middle-class and slightly older, just who you would expect could take an afternoon or evening off for something like this. A bunch of white, middle-aged, well-to-do folks are learning to get along—great. It's a start, but only that.

What makes people want to participate in these events in the first place? That is the unasked question we need to be finding answers to.

To claim that empathy can be powerful and that it can bring about change is not new. The Bible is full of passages urging this kind of thinking: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them”; “If one member suffers, all suffer together; If one member is honored, all rejoice together”; “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body”. The idea of learning to walk a mile in another's shoes is not especially new either. Desegregation, Equal Employment Opportunity legislation, and the rise of reality television have in their own ways reduced the distances separating populations. Similarly, people like Barbara Ehrenreich—of Nickel and Dimed fame—have been trying for years to get us to understand how hard it is to be part of the working poor by talking about their own personal experiences temporarily living life in another's shoes.

More than 100 years ago, however, such empathetic journeys inspired a revolution in the U.S and England. The revolution went by various names, most commonly known as American pragmatism or the settlement house movement. For pragmatists (e.g., Dewey, James, Peirce), thinking is an iterative process whereby thought and action are inseparably connected. Head and heart, in other words, are united. Settlement house activists, most notably Jane Addams, put this philosophy into action by having middle-class volunteers live and work alongside the tired, poor, and huddled masses. The movement espoused the power of physical proximity and social and emotional interconnectedness. For Addams, “sympathetic understanding” was a relational process that had both social and psychological dimensions, achieved through disruptive experiences (what she called “perplexities”) that challenged traditional (read: xenophobic, classist, racist, etcetera) values, attitudes, and beliefs. This is all to say that a late 19th-century movement was founded on going to the “heartland” and increased public awareness of issues relating to the health, sanitation, and education of urban poor communities.

Requiem for Partisans

While this book is political, I have tried to avoid making it partisan. We need to break from the politics of hate, fear, and exclusion that the Trumped-up corners of the Right so masterfully gin up and prey on. Yet I am equally frustrated with elements coming from the Left, their lack of empathy for rural America being especially infuriating. While my politics have leaned left for a long time, and I would gladly describe myself as a progressive were it not for others who already do, I am pretty disgusted with both parties right now. Neither Blue America nor Red America has a monopoly on empathy. Both are guilty of whipping up the flames that have set democratic institutions ablaze.

On the one hand, we know those on the Right are particularly attuned to in-group cues, causing many to be resistant to difference and dissonance. Two factors have been identified as driving this position. One deals with the fact that the country is becoming more liberal—think same-sex marriage, marijuana laws, movements for universal health care, support for environmental regulations and gun control. As political scientist Lilliana Mason explains, “With a generally left-leaning citizenry, Republicans do better by calling attention to identity differences, not policy differences, since the former allows them to connect more directly with the greatest number of voters." This response is amplified by the fact that the party is especially homo-jee-nee-us—the second factor. This one-two punch has made some Republican voters worrisomely attuned to prompts suggesting that their in-group status and way of life are threatened and incentivizes party leaders to engage not around policy but at a level that indicates a country under “attack” (such as along the U.S-Mexico border) and that calls on (white) Americans to take “our” nation back.

On the other hand, the Left also has some explaining to do.

Jonathan Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, asked more than 2,000 respondents to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third were instructed to fill it out normally, answering as themselves, one-third were told to fill it out as a “typical liberal” would respond, and one-third filled it out as they thought a “typical conservative” would respond.

What did Haidt learn? That liberals had the most difficulty opening their minds. Wait—what?

Self-described liberals, especially those calling themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. The takeaway: liberals on average do not understand conservatives. Haidt attributed this blind spot to the group being convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness, and enlightenment.

Or take the 2019 study published in Socius, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Sociological Association. Based on the results of two internet-based survey experiments involving a total of 1,797 respondents, its authors write that a subset of liberals, not conservatives, are the group “most responsive to the implicit—and sometimes explicit—racial appeals of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.”

I found something similar after interviewing two groups: the first, 48 white Colorado residents, from rural and urban counties, who voted for Obama in either 2012 or 2008 before voting for Trump in 2016; the second, 28 Colorado residents of color, from rural and urban counties, who did not vote for Trump in 2016. That aforementioned support among a subset of liberals toward implicit, dog whistle-type racial coding stems from, I believe, the strong norms of colorblindness in liberal political cultures. This is the idea that you are supposed to see the person and not the color of their skin, especially in a post-civil rights, post-Obama presidency era. Colorblindness provides these Americans with discursive devices that can be used to defend the status quo by denying that racism persists while presenting outcomes in ways that are themselves colorblind. Examples of this include justifying residential and school segregation patterns as matters of individual choice; explaining education, employment, and incarceration inequities between whites and nonwhites as matters relating to differences in familial structure (e.g., single mothers versus two-parent families) or culture; or opposing affirmative action on the grounds that it goes against the American principles of treating everyone the same.

Examples of colorblindness, while often subtle, abound. Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg made headlines in 2018 after video emerged, from 2011, of him explaining educational underperformance in “minority communities” by saying, “There isn't somebody they know personally who testifies to the value of education.” He was swiftly criticized, and rightly, for casting those education gaps as being about cultural deficits versus systematic racism.

This language works at multiple levels. We are horrible at talking about and engaging with difference. We have that small-l liberal ee-thoss to thank for this, a political philosophy that celebrates merit and demands we treat everyone the same—that is, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." So, at one level, even the well-intentioned risk repeating racist tropes without even knowing it thanks to this language. The other way colorblindness operates is by giving the not-so-well-intentioned cover, by providing those committing hate crimes an avenue to moderate and mainstream their language.

This book identifies strategies for nudging the electorate and the public—Red and Blue America and everyone else—in a direction that should help us heal as a nation and to do so in a way that celebrates difference. This means finding ways to equip citizens with the tools to see things like skin color, sexual orientation, and the like, which is the only way to take on systems of oppression working overtime to ensure that we don't see that stuff. In the face of this complexity, our collective response must be intentional and multifaceted. This book helps give that response direction, while offering people who are sick of it all a repertoire of options and a navigable path forward … into the heartland.

The Journey Ahead

While written for a general audience, this book is an example of unsettling scholarship, with unsettling serving as both verb and adjective. As the former, this is not conventional scholarship. Some will find my experimental sensibilities, as evidenced by the use of pre-and post-“exposure” exercises, as too contrived and perhaps a bit unsettling themselves—there is a long-standing debate as to whether social scientists should merely study the world or seek to change it. Others, meanwhile, will find the approaches taken as not experimental enough.

Where's the control? The randomization? The double-blind element? Many of the usual signposts, and jargon, that academics use to mark their territory and amplify their identity as scholars are also intentionally disguised. I do this mainly to improve readability. and make arguments more accessible. Some of the concepts and approaches with which I engage, without always calling them out explicitly, include affect theory, critical race theory, alterity and difference, extended mind, phenomenology, embodied cognitive psychology, and social identity theory.

At the same time, I want this book to unsettle you. Here, unsettling is an adjective in that it qualifies the noun scholarship. I hope you leave this book different from when you approached it; off-centered enough to approach problems in a different light and with new purpose. In truth, it is this latter meaning of unsettling that I most care about.

The next chapter gets right to work, describing the experiences of individuals who had attempted to put themselves behind the shopping cart of someone using snap benefits. I make a brief pivot in chapter 3, exploring questions around why we cannot get along. Phenomena interrogated include globalization, geographic sorting, the marketization of everyday life, and the fragmentation of media markets. The stories recounted lend weight to the argument that the problems are deep, meaning the responses must be collective, intentional, and multifaceted.

Chapter 4 gleans insights from a longitudinal qualitative research project, lasting from 2011 to 2018, involving individuals from a variety of different walks of life participating in community supported agriculture (C.S.A) platforms in Colorado. (The C.S.A model is a system connecting producers and consumers more closely by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms.) The experiences described occurred on C.S.A's where customers could volunteer on-farm labor in exchange for lower subscription rates, a practice with the potential to facilitate unique empathetic affordances. Chapter 5 recounts two experiments: in one, a group of right-leaning individuals, which included at least one white nationalist, picked berries; in the other, progressive urban foodies detasseled corn on a large-scale rural grain farm in Minnesota. The impact these experiences had on what participants thought they knew and felt about certain “Others” are discussed. In addition, evidence is provided that helps me to draw conclusions on how such physical encounters can be leveraged to mitigate the effects of motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases.

Chapters 6 and 7 continue with the review of food-related, empathy-evoking experiments. In particular, they highlight activities with the potential to repair a suite of divisions that cut especially deep: so-called rural-urban rifts. The experiences described in chapter 6 include the emergence of food-based supply chains that connect urban eaters and rural producers.

Chapter 7, meanwhile, offers observations from wild-game dinners, where metropolitan, left-of-center foodies were brought into contact with Republican hunters from the countryside. It does not get more politically tribal in the U.S than when talking about guns.

The final chapter ties up loose ends and intentionally frays others. I also make appeals to broaden the conversation beyond food. Given my position as a professor and university administrator, I discuss, for example, the role higher education can play in mending some of these tensions.

I remind readers, too, of the importance of critically unpacking what it means to say, “We have an incivility problem.” On the one hand, incivility is so obvious because there is SOOO much animosity out there. But on the other hand, hate is not the same as boorish behavior. Killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, is not commensurate with telling someone that they suck.

I am also aware that the elite have long used the discourse of “incivility” to criticize dissent directed at the status quo. Am I saying we should only be polite? Definitely not, but that is a subject for a later chapter.

Positionality: My Journey and Yours

While “I” make appearances throughout this book, it might be useful to establish my own positionality up front; after all, the book's key thesis is, to put matters simply, positionality matters. So: who is behind these journeys, and what did the journeys do to … me?

I am a white, heterosexual male. I am married with two kids. My day job: university professor and research administrator. I currently reside in Colorado but grew up in a small—350 people—town in rural Iowa. My politics have oscillated on the political spectrum between left-of-center to progressive left for more than 20 years, having volunteered for both Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, though I started off calling myself a Republican. Heck, I caucused for Pat Buchanan in the 1996 Republican presidential primary!

Given my own journey, I feel like I know of what I speak. I attribute my transformation in significant part to countless encounters with socially othered groups who I had only known as a child through stereotypes and caricatures. This is not to suggest that my politics align with the Goldman Sachs—supporting wing of the Democratic Party. (I cannot believe how both parties handed out trillions in bailouts with little accountability, in response to the 2008 global financial crisis and again with the covid-related Cares Act, passed in late March 2020.) Nor do I care for the haughty highbrow vibe occasionally wafting out of the Left toward those said to be clinging to their guns and “backward” beliefs.

Was I changed by the encounters described in the following chapters? Lest we forget, I was there, too, for every experiment and interview. Yes. Whom “I” am today is not equivalent to whom “I was” a decade ago. And I have this research to thank for those opportunities for embodied-inspired reflection.

I have new friends—dozens, perhaps hundreds, from an almost unimaginable array of standpoints and political and social positionalities. The total experience also confirmed my belief that there are some truly despicable people in the world. For them, hope, I fear, is lost. But that segment of the population is not nearly as large as is often assumed. That is another insight I acquired while conducting the experiments recounted herein; people generally have the capacity to care for others not of their political tribe if given the opportunity to experience that difference firsthand.

I am also aware of the irony in writing a book telling readers about what we ought to be doing to foster an empathy-based revolution whose principal premise is that telling people does not do much to change minds and actions. I therefore try my best to show readers these journeys, hopefully to the point of unsettling complacencies and animating a change of heart.

Pandemic Partisanship and Social Distancing

It is late-2020. A few months ago, one in five people around the world was under lockdown. While viruses are politically agnostic, how we perceive and respond to them has proven highly partisan as the world reels from coronavirus. With county-level Google Mobility Report data and individual cell phone data, scholars have already demonstrated how the activity of Americans during the covid-19 pandemic is highly correlated with political party affiliation, with Democrats observing social distancing protocols at a far greater rate than Republicans, even after controlling for things like population density and local covid cases and deaths.

Meanwhile, masks have become a new flashpoint in the partisan culture wars. A study based on national polling data from more than 2,400 Americans noted that, after controlling for a range of potentially confounding variables, partisanship is a strong predictor of one's likelihood of wearing a mask. Things are so bad that people are getting beat up and severely hurt—even killed—over these important facial accoutrements.

A narrative has emerged on the Right that wearing a mask is a sign of weakness, whereas refusing to wear one demonstrates strength. There has also been a tendency to lean on visual racist tropes to cover the covid-19 outbreak, such as where Asians in masks have become the “face” of the coronavirus, most notably early in the outbreak. It's “the China virus,” remember.

The crisis has also heightened the importance of our food supply and how fundamentally brittle those supply chains are. In April 2020, at the height of the global lockdown, prices paid to livestock and dairy farmers crashed while the retail cost of products like pork and milk skyrocketed. I know farmers in Iowa who were feeding their hogs a special ratio of meal designed specifically to keep them at the same weight, while euthanizing entire litters to keep herd and head numbers steady—many slaughterhouses had closed owing to outbreaks—while meat counters at nearby grocery stores were bare. covid reminds us we need a food revolution as much as one rooted in empathy. Perhaps we can do things that have a positive impact on both fronts.

Lastly, what better time to have some grand political project designed to get people together. But as a sociologist, I know full well the power of routine and habit—remember, again, embodiments matter. Just as I know people who act as if covid were the common cold, I know plenty of others who still live in fear of physical proximity.

The latter group has not entered an establishment other than their grocery store for the last ten months—no restaurants, coffeeshops, gyms, stores. How will covid impact our collective capacity to want to be with others who are different from us? Even with medical-grade protections, including face masks and rubber gloves, many today have a negative visceral reaction when their six-foot bubble is breached, even in some cases when that “other” is family. If there ever was a time for federal policy directed at increasing conviviality, that time is now.