Is “depolarization” the new DEI?

Editorial note: this essay originally appeared at The Giving Review.

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A few years ago, the Woodson Center applied for a grant that was (paraphrasing its own language) meant to fund projects that bring together groups of people that normally do not get along. Someone in the philanthropic world thought this would be a great opportunity for our Voices of Black Mothers United (VBMU) initiative—which empowers mothers who have lost children to neighborhood violence to work in their communities to, among other things, develop better relationships with law enforcement. We crafted a proposal detailing the many successful efforts of our VBMU mothers helping law enforcement improve its community-policing skills, while also helping community members—particularly young people—develop more empathy for the challenges police officers face.

We did not get the grant. The projects that were funded were almost exclusively “courageous conversations”-type interventions, intended to alleviate partisan animosity among middle-class neighbors. Had we known that the funders were more interested in increasing emotional comfort in the suburbs than they were in lowering homicide rates downtown, we would not have applied.

American partisan animosity is of course unhealthy and occasionally violent, although it does not appear to drive crime and violence in low-income neighborhoods, where most citizens are not politically engaged and tend not to vote. But even if one believes addressing political polarization is a higher moral priority than transforming impoverished communities, I have serious doubts about how well the “courageous conversations” approach will work to improve it. I am also very confident our VBMU mothers could teach would-be depolarizers a thing or two.

Does persistent direct confrontation make people get along better?

It is probably too soon to draw conclusions about how well these newly minted depolarization efforts are going, but early results are not promising. A meta-analysis of 77 treatments from 25 published studies and two large-scale experiments reveals only “modest effects” that evaporated in two weeks. The authors conclude that these interventions “serve as valuable tools for testing the psychological mechanisms of polarization, but our findings indicate they are not, on their own, a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.”

I am not a social scientist, but this reminds me of the decades-old diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts designed to increase workplace diversity and harmony that often ended up having the opposite of the intended effect. In an article that is now nearly 10 years old, Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev explain, “The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash.”

Many of these well-intended, but misguided DEI and depolarization efforts appear to use tools that might be suitable for marriage or family therapy, but not for relationships in the workplace or community, where they don’t work as well. If you are getting to the bottom of an ongoing conflict with your spouse or child, it is probably important to root out incorrect assumptions and directly address underlying sources of disagreement. But when you are trying to get along better with coworkers or neighbors, it is far more important to brush up on good manners, the Golden Rule, and focus on the shared human activities that make less-intimate social interactions smoother and more comfortable.

We understand this principle in other areas of life. From time immemorial, efforts at international diplomacy have involved a lot of bread-breaking, ceremonial gift-giving, and other shared rituals to organically diffuse tension before anyone gets down to the brass tacks of negotiation. Can anyone imagine asking an American President to confess three false assumptions he has made about the culture and customs of a foreign country before pressing its leader to redirect their tactical nuclear warheads?

Grassroots wisdom

For decades, my boss Bob Woodson has urged think tanks and other concerned outsiders to stop trying to address social problems by funding failure studies. In his 1996 book The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today’s Community Healers are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods, he writes, “‘Experts,’ whose careers … depend on the existence of a problem, can write about the problem, consult about it, and speak about it on talk shows—they can do everything but solve the problem.” This problem-obsessed lens leads to interventions that center on sharing extensive research on the nature and effects of the problem as the primary mechanism of trying to solve it.

Lecturing managers about the negative effects of discrimination does not usually create a more-harmonious work environment, and instructing groups of neighbors on the root causes of their differing opinions is probably not going to create a tighter-knit community. Thousands of words detailing the effects of cows and horses being left out in the cold has very little to do with the blueprint and lumber needed to build a barn.

Indigenous problem-solvers know better. They regularly demonstrate that the most-effective teen-pregnancy prevention programs focus on empowering young ladies to find their own good reasons not to get pregnant, rather than telling them how much a baby will mess up their lives. They see marriage rates increase in their neighborhoods when they form moral communities to get young men out of gangs and into the workforce, not when they preach about the “success sequence.” And our VBMU mothers don’t improve police-community relations with lectures and binders. They help people from differing points of view and experiences work together toward the shared goal of making their neighborhoods safer for everyone.

When the Woodson Center saw the history of Black America being told as a story of unmitigated suffering and victimhood, rather than the triumph over adversity that reflected our founder and grassroots leaders’ own experiences, we didn’t respond with an empty rhetorical critique. We created ready-to-teach classroom resources that help educators tell the stories of how Black Americans responded to oppression with achievements almost unheard of in any other formerly enslaved group. These resources, now downloaded more than 325,000 times in all 50 states, have received positive feedback from teachers and administrators all over the political and ideological spectrum, arguably “depolarizing” them far more effectively than the most-courageous conversation ever could.

Maybe depolarization efforts based on getting people to talk directly about their disagreements will eventually bear significant fruit that lasts more than a week or two. But if they don’t, only funders will decide if they become the next decades-long blackhole for time and money. A cynic might argue that charitable giving is always about meeting the psychological needs of elites and that donors will always favor programs that claim whatever is bothering them at the moment also happens to be the most-pressing problem facing humanity. But donors who are concerned with the real impact of their dollars will fund projects that see beyond passing fads and build on proven solutions.