Why are we yelling?

Published on 06-04-2020 | By Jasdeep Garcha

On May 26th, 2020, protests broke out after police allegedly (it appears, definitely) murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis. This is yet another example of the inequality in justice that Black people in America face relative to other races/ethnicities.

Over the last week, I have struggled with how to respond to another example of injustice - as a nation, we’ve seen this before with the killings of Rodney King, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Philando Castillo, and more. This has only been compounded by the disproportionate impact of the recent COVID-19 pandemic on Black communities.

In my view there are several ways to approach this, and I’ll try to apply the framework I just read about in Why Are We Yelling? by Buster Benson. In it, he posits that in every disagreement, there are several planes that one may be on - the head, the heart, or the hands. He makes this more tangible by framing each as a question - Is it true? Is it meaningful? Is it useful?

Benson argues that one reason that disagreements get derailed is a concept that Denial Kahneman wrote about at length in Thinking, Fast and Slow. When reacting to situations, we may engage in System 1 thinking or System 2 thinking. The former is reactionary/impulsive — “fast” --, and the latter is slower, one wherein we actually process the situation before reacting.

To have better disagreements, we must do several things in a System 2 fashion - first, establish what the argument is about (head, heart, hands), then decide how we want to react to it (power, reason, avoidance, or possibility), and finally determine what we want to gain from the discussion (security, growth, connection, or enjoyment).

Benson's thesis and main conflict, then, boils down to a fundamental inclination for humans and System 1 thinkers: we aim to solve disagreements. What if we approached disagreements as things not to solve but to explore? What if we recognized that humans have fundamentally different lived experiences and we can learn from each other? What if the goal of disagreements was not to win but to collaborate?

I found the book to be one that aims for simplicity but instead leans towards complexity as the author tries to layer on multiple frameworks to his argument. Ultimately, that provides good guard rails, but fails to adequately distill a simple lesson. Moreover, the conclusion is a bit unsatisfying and flowery, one rooted in a sort of philosophy that prioritizes individual growth over collective progress.

That, in part, makes it an apt exploration for the reaction to the Floyd murder and racial inequality in general. Why are we yelling? How do we each grow from this? Applying Benson’s high level framework, maybe we can parse out a way to think about this:

• 1. Head - What is true?
  • Many disagreements in the past have come back to this place. Benson would argue this is the simplest argument, and one many rationally-minded folks tend to prefer because it’s comfortable and based in reason.
  • It’s clear to me that what is true is there has been a history of systemic racism in the US that has led to the segregation of cities, the concentration of wealth, and limitations in social mobility. Even if some of those systems have been diminished in recent times, the compounding legacy of what was done in the 19th and 20th centuries is hard to unwind without some kind of economic or social accelerant.
  • It’s also clear that the weak economic progress in black communities is correlated with systemic health issues and crime, that in turn has led to unconscious discrimination.
• Heart - What is meaningful?
  • This is at the core of many of the disagreements about racism. There is a desire to be listened to and for meaningful steps to be taken towards equality. You hear it in the questions folks ask - When will we stop being murdered in the street? Can I live in America safely? Are we all part of the same social contract? The reaction people are looking for may take the form of repentance or symbolism - public apologies, commitments, etc. Many, though, are probably past this posturing.
• Hands - What is useful?
  • It feels like the debate is shifting here. What can we do that is practical and actual steps towards a sense of justice? Some view this as prosecution of those involved, but others view it as defunding police departments, shifting money from PDs to black communities for economic development. In some ways this bleeds into what is meaningful - I think most would agree that addressing a system of racial injustice is complex, and any one solution probably isn’t that useful.

It feels like what we’re seeing is a couple of things: 1) a general sentiment that we need to move past what is true … it is unequivocally true that the system is broken for Black Americans yet this is somehow still debated, and 2) that we want useful reform but don’t quite know what that is, so we’re arguing in a middle plane between what is meaningful and what is useful.

The secondary question to all of this, then, is how do we talk about this to quickly move past #1 and productively into #2? I'm not sure what the answer is, but what feels key is that everyone is committed to having a productive disagreement; otherwise, we’ll all still just keep yelling.