The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  In the United States, we are living at a time of enormous contradiction. We believe ourselves to be a nation premised on equality and care, and yet economic values penetrate every aspect of our daily life as we witness all things public being handed over to the private sector. Swelling inequality gaps abound, government-funded safety nets are fraying, and the very public institutions that have bound us together—public education, public housing, civil rights protections, trade unions, higher education, environmental protections, public parks, and health care—are threatened by disinvestment. At the same time, however, there is ample evidence that people—even people with privilege—are organizing throughout the United States and globally to demand more just social arrangements and a redistribution of resources, opportunities, and dignity. Just as infants crave relationships (Winnicott, 1971), we believe that the desire for solidarity is natural and essential to our collective well-being.

  ROOTING SOLIDARITY IN (OUR) NATURE

  We begin with a simple and well-researched premise that shared fates and solidarities are critical to collective well-being and sustainability. We offer initial thoughts about our natural roots in solidarity.

  Sylvia Cremer is an evolutionary biologist studying the social life of ants. Her experiments have demonstrated that if one ant in a colony is contaminated with smallpox, the other ants do not exclude the sick one but instead organize to lick her clean until she is healthy (Konrad et al., 2012). And what Cremer has found is that not only does the one ant survive in more than 90 percent of the cases, but the collective immunity of the colony rises.

  Similar findings come from the writings of science writer Janine M. Benyus (1997), who places human problems under a microscope and asks, “How would nature solve this?” (Elizabeth and Goldsmith, 2011). Benyus has studied, for instance, how trees survive natural disasters, including Katrina, and she tells us that in every forest, there are sacrifice trees (you know these sacrifice trees too well). But she also tells us that the secret to survival lives in the mighty oaks. Oak trees, standing tall, almost unbowed, grow in communities, expansive, bold, and comfortably taking up lots of space. Although they appear autonomous and free-standing, the truth is that they are held up by a thick, entwined maze of roots, deep and wide. These intimate underground snuggles lean on each other for strength even, and especially, in times of natural disaster. Beynus and Cremer, like Deutsch, implore us to understand that we are profoundly interdependent; we are only as strong as our weakest members and strengthened by licking others’ smallpox away. Moving from nature to realpolitik, we see “revolting” evidence of intersectional solidarities across the globe.

  Consider the Occupy movement, engaged by a wide range of young and old, rich and working class, people with summer homes and people with no home at all. In legal struggles for gay marriage or undocumented youth to be granted citizenship, there have been significant stories of heterosexual “allies” and American Indian/Native-born people fighting for the Dream Act. In Checkpoint Watch, journalist Amira Hess writes about coalitions of Jewish women standing arm in arm with Palestinian women, bearing witness to the occupation at checkpoints into the occupied territories, to make visible their rejection of and outrage against the occupied territories (Keshet, 2006). In community-based activist and consciousness-raising groups of white antiracist organizing, or Men Organized against Rape, young adults of racial or gender privilege are interrogating the damage done by racial or gender hierarchies and presumptions of superiority, by colluding in white or male privilege and passively ignoring the violence of inequality gaps. CEOs of flourishing corporations are increasingly deciding to sell their companies to the workers and convert the business into a worker-owned cooperative, because “if I like owning and making a profit, they probably would too.” And of course many were relieved to hear Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the wealthiest men in the country, advocate taxing wealthy Americans more heavily than they have been.

  Thus, in this chapter, we join Noam Chomsky who explained to a reporter from the Observer (2003):

  Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.

  And so we in turn ask, under what conditions do persons of privilege take up this responsibility, linking arms with others, for redistributive justice and collective dignity?

  UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS DO PERSONS OF PRIVILEGE CHALLENGE UNJUST SOCIAL ARRANGEMENTS?

  Much of social psychology would tell us that persons of privilege are unwilling to relinquish their power (Jost, Banaji, and Nosek, 2004; Sidanius and Pratto, 1999). Ample studies demonstrate that elites, whites, Christians, heterosexuals, and men, compared to their less powerful counterparts, hold more rigid and resistant views about existing social relations and justify their advantage as though it were meritorious and legitimate inequities as “the ways things have always been.” College football coach Barry Switzer said it well: “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple” (Shatel, 1986). Marx too was doubtful that elites could ever be induced to act in solidarity with workers. And yet we would argue that the complex sympathies, contradictory identifications, and varied activisms enacted by persons of privilege have been underestimated, undertheorized, and understudied.

  The classic experiments on “equity motive,” designed by Walster, Berscheid, and Walster (1973), discovered that people, if unrestrained, will maximize their own benefits at the expense of others, but that groups are better off if group members behave equitably and will therefore develop policies that will lead to more equitable behavior. They proposed that those who discover that they benefit from inequitable relationships will feel distress and try to resolve the inequity.

  This line of work on elite and oppressed class consciousness has been advanced more recently by Jost and colleagues (2004) studying what they call system justification and by Sidanius and Pratto, who advance social dominance theory. They argue that the institutional nature of social dominance—the structural assurance of cumulative privilege in laws, systems, and structures that benefit the dominant group in a society both materially and psychologically—requires almost no activity by individuals in order to maintain group dominance. According to Pratto and Stewart (2012), social reproduction is effortless: “No one intends for group dominance to occur” (p. 32). A decade earlier, critical race theorist Beverly Tatum (2003) published Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? where she unpacked the historic, effortless reproduction of racism in schools, conjuring the metaphor of the automatic walkway in an airport. In order to participate in a racist society, Tatum explains, all one has to do is step on. No one has to start the engine. Participation in injustice is passive; resistance, however, requires activity (see Stetsenko, 2012).

  Together these researchers argue that the historic, structural, institutional, and intimate nature of inequality facilitates a cloud of denial by many dominant group members who can move unencumbered through a system that normalizes and reinforces their privilege as if earned. In other words, these researchers argue that privileged people typically cannot see their own unearned advantage. The greater the inequality gaps are, the less likely they are to interact meaningfully with those experiencing oppression. Unaware and seemingly unaffected by inequitable historic and structural arrangements, these women and men are likely to support policies that reinforce their (unfair) advantage, in all likelihood without realizing that they are perpetuating injustice. However—and this is crucial—when inequities are made visible, members of dom
inant groups may become uncomfortable and advocate for change.

  A number of justice researchers have begun to investigate how to most effectively induce persons of privilege to confront injustice. Iyer and Ryan (2009) found that men are most willing to engage with women on gendered grievances when they experience sympathy and identification with women and perceive the grievances to be highly legitimate. In analogous research on the willingness of white people to act on behalf of Aboriginal grievances, Leach, Iyer, and Pedersen (2006) found anger about in-group advantage to be a stronger predictor of willingness to act than guilt about out-group disadvantage. Powell, Branscombe, and Schmitt (2005) also discovered that focusing on white privilege rather than black disadvantage was correlated with higher levels of collective guilt and lower levels of racism. Taken together, this body of research suggests that persons of privilege are more likely to act against injustice when they view the problem as unfair advantage rather than unfair disadvantage.

  Within the social psychology literature, however, studies on the motivations for those with greater privilege to act in solidarity with groups having less privilege are limited. The topic of solidarity, or the conditions under which people will act as groups versus as individual actors in order to achieve social mobility, was addressed in Tajfel’s (1975) early work on intergroup dynamics. Subsequent work has narrowed, unfortunately, and in lopsided fashion, into studies of intergroup conflict rather than solidarity. Even the vibrant literatures on liberation psychology focus primarily on the consciousness and action of historically oppressed persons, with seemingly little hope for action by members of the privileged or oppressor group (Martin-Baro, 1994; Freire, 2007).

  This does not mean that relatively privileged people are irrelevant to social movements for justice. Indeed, the research of Subašić, Schmitt, and Reynolds (2011) on solidarity of consumers with sweatshop workers suggests that consumers who share a sense of common injustice, or “co-victimization,” with sweatshop workers report an inclusive social identity that increases their willingness to act in solidarity. Similarly, in a variety of field studies, social psychologist Maria Elena Torre (2009) has documented how “contact zones” of differentially positioned persons, that is, those living in privilege and those in more oppressive social conditions, can be mobilized to take up collectively important questions of power, difference, and solidarity. Relations of solidarity are not automatic; they must be cultivated in deep, power-sensitive collaboration with persons who have historically been oppressed through intergroup dialogue by organizing and strategic attention to challenging dominant narratives, stereotypes, and ideologies (Burton and Kagan, 2009; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999).

  Thus, a growing number of experimental and field studies suggest that persons of privilege do indeed experience discomfort about their unfair advantage, particularly when their advantage is made salient, or when collaborating with others on projects rooted in shared action for social justice. We may actually be living in a “control condition” where there is a virtual blackout of policy, media, and social science attention to examples of, and evidence from, intersectional coalitions for justice. This chapter is written in part to expose and circulate these images, pierce the anesthesia that naturalizes injustice and our powerlessness to promote social change, and break the silence on the social psychological dynamics of inclusive coalition work.

  CHALLENGING INEQUALITY, CONFRONTING PRIVILEGE

  At this historic moment, when local, national, and global inequalities seem inevitable and irreversible, it is important to make visible and accessible concrete examples of how and why everyday people have joined together to redesign work spaces toward greater equality, more inclusion, and deeper participation. We present three case studies of strategic designs for solidarity, situated within and across social organizations, launched by coalitions of historically privileged and marginalized persons. Allied with larger movements for social justice, these initiatives are located within the efforts of everyday people trying to create more just workplaces, schools, and public agencies. We sketch three prototypes:

  Policy changes initiated to reduce inequality gaps: Policies and practices designed to compress social and organizational hierarchies toward the redistribution of opportunities, resources, and power

  Psychoeducational strategies designed to foster inclusion: Policies and practices designed to transform organizational culture to be more inclusive, participatory, and diverse at all levels

  Organizational transformation and development: The redesign of companies into worker-owned cooperatives to facilitate the redistribution of finances and ownership, democratize participation, and cultivate material and psychological shared fates

  The Equality Trust: Structural Policies Designed to Reduce Inequality Gaps

  The Equality Trust is a national advocacy organization, located in London, designed to produce research, develop policy, and advocate for “more equal” societies and organizations. Over decades, director Richard Wilkinson and colleague Kate Pickett have amassed a wealth of evidence demonstrating that more equal nations, states, cities, and organizations have better outcomes than unequal societies in terms of rates of infant mortality, life expectancy, incarceration rates, high school completion, teen pregnancy, obesity, and diabetes. Their argument is simple and their evidence compelling: advanced economic democracies with relatively narrow inequality gaps enjoy a higher level of collective well-being than nations, states, cities, and organizations with wide inequality gaps.

  In 2011, Wilkinson and Pickett published The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Strong in which they demonstrated that severely unequal societies produce high rates of social pain: adverse outcomes including school dropout, teen pregnancy, mental health problems, lack of social trust, high mortality rates, violence and crime, and low social participation. Their book challenges the belief that the extent of poverty in a community alone predicts negative outcomes. They assert instead that the size of the inequality gap sculpts the material and psychological contours of the chasm between the wealthiest and the most impoverished, enabling various forms of social suffering and dissociation to saturate a community and appearing natural. In societies with large gaps, one finds rampant state and socially reproduced disregard, dehumanization, policy neglect, and abuse. As one might guess, the inequality gap of the United States ranks among the highest in their international comparisons and, in comparison to other “developed nations,” we suffer a disproportionate share of social problems ranging from infant mortality to incarceration, homelessness and civic disengagement, obesity and diabetes, teen pregnancy, homicide and violence, and poor academic performance. Wilkinson and Pickett demonstrate that the size of the gap, even more than the proportion living in poverty, predicts negative social outcomes.

  With the reduction of inequality gaps as their political goal, the Equality Trust has mobilized a national and international campaign, throughout the United Kingdom and beyond, to expose top-to-bottom pay ratios for major corporations and public sector organizations in the country. The trust publishes the salary ratio of the lowest- and highest-paid civil servants in an agency and has inspired, and embarrassed, local governments to take the equality pledge, promising to limit the ratio of the top salary to the lowest wage earners among civil servants. These public agencies not only reduce their internal gaps but pledge to contract only with private firms that also have relatively small wage gaps. By so doing, the Equality Trust has activated a national campaign to regulate top wages, advocate for livable wages, and maintain economically responsible and ethical public institutions and contractors.

  In 2010, the Equality Trust website reported: “The Greater London Assembly have voted in favour of Darren Johnson’s proposal to limit pay ratios within the GLA and associated bodies to 1:20—with a long term goal of reducing them to 1:10.”

  In the United States, pay disparities between CEOs and employees has accelerated swiftly over the past twenty years jumping from a ratio of 201:1 in 1992 to 3
54:1 in 2012 (AFL-CIO, 2013).

  A year later, Crabtree (2011) wrote, “Wall Street has deployed an army of lobbyists to try to whittle away as much of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill as possible, spending $242.2 million on 712 hired guns to press their message on Capitol Hill since the beginning of 2010, according to a new report by Public Citizen.”

  The Equality Trust is a compelling example of a national, and increasingly global, advocacy organization dedicated to limiting economic hierarchy through policy change and public campaigns. It addresses a range of topics, including state policy, tax reform, and health disparities but also livable-wage campaigns and the intimate dynamic relationship between those at the top and those at the bottom.

  Bringing Social Justice Home to School: Psychosocial Education for Diversity and Inclusion

  We turn now to a case study of a school that has dedicated resources toward maximizing a culture of inclusion as a way to challenge themselves to identify and undo all forms of social inequity, systems of unearned privileges, and acknowledging the existence of racial preferences and bias. Through interviews with a teacher, a psychological consultant (the school psychologist), and the director of diversity, we track the transformation of an independent school with espoused beliefs in diversity and multiculturalism to the implementation of a social justice and civil rights mission. The work was accomplished through the cumulative mobilization of many individuals and their networks of support within and outside the school and the accumulation of struggle over time that organically widened the net of those engaged in the work. Over time a dedicated minority of school faculty and staff became committed to developing a social justice orientation of diversity at the school. Essential to this work was a consistent focus on structural inequality and interpersonal and group dynamics, as well as the inclusion of multiple perspectives through the consensus model of decision making.