“In a country as big as ours, there’s almost always a way to view any problem as either very serious, or as relatively small in context. How we perceive the seriousness of a problem will be influenced by our preferred narratives and our preferred outcomes. This is not to argue the rightness or wrongness of these various perceptions, but just to examine how it is that people are able to see a problem as either very serious or as not that serious.”
— excerpt from Defusing American Anger, from chapter on Guns

Even a single death can be seen as a highly significant event; some may perceive that death as telling us many important things about our society and the threats we face from various societal aspects or various subsets of people. On the other hand, even many deaths of a specific type can be seen by some people as fairly minor or unavoidable, especially when placed in the context of a country of 340 million people.

The conclusions and meanings we take from a tragic or violent event will depend on how we parse that event, and clearly the significance we can assign to all sorts of things can and will vary widely. Much will depend on our experiences: our personal narratives, our personal fears, our political preferences, how we weigh different outcomes, and so on. If there’s one thing you can say about humans, it’s that it’s easy for us to disagree about morality and the nature of harm.

When violent or tragic events happen that makes your blood boil, and make you instinctively feel “This is all their fault,” you should consider if you’re filtering for worst-case interpretations. You should consider if that is also what’s happening on the “other side”: you should consider if people on the “other side” are also interpreting violent, tragic events in ways that build their us-vs-them anger and fear? This of course isn’t to say that all anger and judgment are uncalled for: it’s just to provoke more curiosity about the dynamic we find ourselves in and the processes by which toxicity and contempt build.

This will be a compilation of several excerpts from my book Defusing American Anger, touching on some contentious topics (Covid, gun violence, George Floyd) and how our polarized, divergent views can be influenced by whether we decide to take a “this is highly significant” view or a “this is bad but a small thing in the big scheme of things” view. As we grow more toxically polarized as a society, more of us will filter tragic events in ways that align with our preferred narratives and fears; our reactions to those events will confirm to us the badness and contemptibility of our opponents.

Our different parsings of tragic events can help us understand how both “sides” in a conflict can have rational reasons for their polarization.

(Some of the following excerpts come from an early version of Defusing American Anger. All original essays on specific issues can be found here.)

Excerpt from Covid chapter: How tragedy can skew perceptions

“Living with covid” and other language

It doesn’t seem likely that covid is going away, barring some huge and very unlikely worldwide shutdown, so in some sense it seems like we might agree that, in some sense, we’ll be forced to learn to “live with covid.”

But that fairly simple phrase has been the source of a lot of anger. For some people, the phrase is offensive: it’s interpreted as someone being okay with a large number of covid deaths, and therefore lacking compassion. But some people aren’t using it in that way: they’re using it to describe the goal of trying to manage covid in such a way so that it becomes something more like the flu.

Here, we can see how polarization can make people perceive the same phrase in vastly different ways, which often happens with language in a polarized environment.

Elizabeth Stokoe works on conversation analysis, which is the scientific study of how we talk. A 2022 piece she helped write was titled What can we learn from the language of “living with covid”? Here’s an excerpt describing some of the different ways in which that phrase was interpreted in the United Kingdom:

The start of 2022 saw a heavy emphasis on “living with it” in media and political discourse, with the different stances clear.

For example, on 1 January 2022, in an article focused on medical solutions (vaccine, testing, anti-viral treatments) and the need to avoid “curbs on our freedom,” the secretary of state for health and social care, Sajid Javid said, “we must try to live with covid.” Three days later in the Financial Times, another article focused more on learning: “Planning for a permanent pandemic, rather than pretending it does not exist, is what learning to live with the virus really means.” Illustrating the different positions together, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, Michael Gove, said on 11 January that “the country had to learn to ‘live with covid’” and “admitted he was wrong to advocate within government for further restrictions.”

Last week, on 21 February 2022, the prime minister turned the “living with covid” phrase into the title of a formal statement to the House of Commons to articulate the UK government’s current strategy. The two positions in the rhetorical battle over what “living with covid” means—politically, personally, and practically—are further apart than ever (e.g., two articles in The Telegraph on 18 February 2022: “‘Gung-ho’ living with covid strategy could backfire…”; “Time to move on from covid for good: The point of living with covid is that individuals should make their own minds up…” 6).

We argue that we need to move past clichéd phrases if we are to achieve a less binary and more productive point of connection. [emphasis added]

I talked to Elizabeth Stokoe for my podcast, and she talked about some of the ways we might be more persuasive and less polarizing with our language. For example, she talked about how unhelpful and polarizing it was to lump a broad range of vaccine-hesitant people, or people critical of vaccine mandates, into a category of “anti-vax” or “vaccine deniers” or “covid deniers.”

The more simplistic and insulting our language is, the more we’ll amplify polarization and add to the very problems we’re angry about.

Death and tragedy can skew our perceptions

One of the obstacles to having nuanced and non-angry conversations about covid is that most of us are just simply bad at thinking about and talking about risk. We can easily live in fear of terrifying but very rare scenarios that only affect a few people a year, like terrorist attacks or plane crashes or school shootings, while thinking hardly at all about the common and numerous risks around us that are far more likely to harm us, like car crashes, or obesity-linked health risks, or pollution-caused illness, or whatever.

And not all ways we might die are equally scary to us. The more suffering and violence is involved, and the more preventable the method of death seems, the more we’ll likely find it scary.

And when death and heartbreak are involved, it’s easy for us to use those things to form pessimistic, polarized narratives about the world around us. And we can see this playing a role with covid.

On social media, there are occasionally posts from people about their relatives or friends who have died from covid. These posts are sometimes shared with emotional and angry messages about America’s failures in handling covid, or Republicans’ failures. Sometimes immense anger is directed even at the Biden administration for their perceived failures at handling covid.

Someone dying from covid is of course a tragic thing, and it’s not surprising that such stories are capable of evoking a lot of emotion and anger. But it’s worth seeing that stories of people dying from covid are not evidence, on their own, that covid-related laws should be more strict. In the same way, flu-related deaths are not evidence, on their own, that we need more strict flu-related laws.

Many people will continue to die from covid each year, just as tens of thousands of people have been dying from the flu each year. And we’ll need to “live with” that reality, unless our stance is that we need to go into extensive societal lockdown to prevent almost all covid-caused deaths. And clearly, we can’t do that. Even if that were a policy you’d advocate for, it would never be politically feasible. And it’s not even clear that such an approach would solve things: it might only delay us facing reality a bit longer.

Put another way: if your stance is that, because covid deaths are still happening, we need to enact very strict covid-related rules, then would you feel a similar approach should be taken for the flu? If not, why are those things different? Is it possible to see how some people view such deaths as unfortunate but necessary costs of having a functioning society—similar to how most people in America had probably previously viewed flu-related deaths?

To be clear: this is not to say that we can’t work towards minimizing covid cases and covid-caused deaths. But it’s to examine our collective weakness at thinking about risk. For some people even a small amount of harm will be seen as unacceptable, as horrible, even though the reality is that it’s nearly impossible for us to avoid some amount of harm.

A tweet from 2019 about a young girl’s death from the flu. Covid-related deaths are capable of causing highly emotional takes about whether our response to covid is good enough, but it’s worth recognizing that, no matter our response to covid, it would be almost impossible for us to avoid a significant number of covid-related deaths.

Conservative-side covid skepticism

If you’re someone who thinks we’ve over-reacted to covid, is it possible to see that much of the world reacted in a similar way?

One way to see how real the concerns were is to examine the way so many countries reacted to covid, and see the covid deaths they reported. Even Russia, by the end of 2021, reported 300,000 covid deaths. Researchers estimated that Russia was undercounting and that its true numbers were probably closer to 1 million. But the point is that even Russia, not a country likely to follow blindly along with American or Western trends, reported hundreds of thousands of covid deaths.

A January 2022 article on Nature.com was titled The pandemic’s true death toll: millions more than official counts. It examined covid-related deaths from multiple countries. Here’s an excerpt from that:

For countries covered by the WMD, official figures suggest that 4.1 million deaths since the start of the pandemic are down to COVID-19—around 10% of all deaths during that time. But the duo’s calculations suggest that, when excess mortality is taken into account, deaths related to COVID-19 are 1.6 times greater, at around 6.5 million deaths (or 16% of the total). In some countries, the relative impact of the virus is even higher. One-third of all deaths in Mexico can be attributed to the virus, Karlinsky and Kobak’s data suggest.

Some countries enacted much more strict lockdowns than America did. I personally knew people in Barcelona, Spain, who, at the height of their lockdowns, weren’t allowed to leave their apartments without having an approved reason.

Is it possible to see why people and organizations responded the way they did? Is it possible to see that many people were genuinely scared, and that many people genuinely wanted to minimize deaths as much as they could?

Even if you think some covid responses were unnecessary and harmful, is it at least possible to see why people were worried and why they believed strict measures were necessary?

Is it possible to view some conservative-side pushback to covid policies as being at least partly due to those policies being associated with liberals?

When we’re polarized, we’re prone to confidently embracing us-versus-them narratives, like thinking someone who is pro-mask-mandate is “pure evil.”

Some people have beliefs that organizations requiring masks or vaccines are limiting their freedom in problematic ways. But every country has a multitude of laws and private-company policies that people must abide by. Our freedom is limited in many fairly arbitrary ways. When it comes to, for example, a cruise ship requiring proof of vaccine to travel; that’s not any more a violation of your freedom than is the multitude of other restrictions we face from private companies or from governments, like the fact that you can’t give blood if you’ve been to certain countries recently, or that you can’t vote in some states if you’ve committed a felony, or that airlines limit the types of things you can bring on airlines.

If you’re someone angry about perceived restrictions to your freedom, is it possible you’re being overly entitled in thinking that your perceptions of the world must be everyone else’s perception? Is it possible that you’re over-reacting to what are completely comprehensible precautions being taken by concerned and rational people and organizations just trying to do what they think is the right thing? If you believe liberals sometimes over-react to perceived infringements of their rights, can you see how you might also be seen as over-reacting?

Is it possible that a lot of the anger around covid and other issues are due to more and more people, on both sides, who simply can’t bear not getting their way?

Is it possible to see how some conservative-side conspiracy-minded theories about covid make conservatives seem very unreasonable? For my podcast, I interviewed Peter Wood, who believed the 2020 election was illegitimate. One thing he wrote on this subject was: “Progressives manipulated the Wuhan virus epidemic by turning a manageable health crisis into a major economic disaster, an excuse for stripping Americans of their civil liberties, and an incitement of mass hysteria.”

To Peter’s way of thinking, America’s covid responses were part of a huge malicious plot. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that many countries across the world reacted in similar ways: that many countries tried hard to contain covid. No, American reactions to covid were part of a big secret plot by liberals. Hopefully you can see how strange and paranoid that seems to many people.

And Trump has done his part in promoting these conspiracy-minded theories. This was one email sent from the Trump team in mid 2020: “They want you to be AFRAID of the coronavirus, because that's how they MANIPULATE you into voting for their liberal puppets. FIGHT BACK. We can't beat the Liberal Billionaires trying to steal this Election unless every Patriot takes action.”

Can you see how such extreme views taint the perception people have of conservatives? If you’re someone who believes that liberals are responsible for a lot of bad decisions about covid, are you able to see that conservative leaders have a lot to answer for, too, in promoting divisive and unproven narratives?

For a longer version of this essay online, see american-anger.com/covid.

If your response to this was something like “okay but I still think strict covid responses were part of a big plan,” you might enjoy this piece of mine on conspiracies and polarization.

Polarized views on gun violence

The following is an excerpt from Defusing American Anger on our polarized views of gun violence…

One conservative-side argument is that we’re overreacting to relatively rare events. To take school shootings, for example: school shootings are of course horrifying, but all the mass shootings we’ve had at schools represent dozens of children’s deaths out of 100s of millions of school-attending children over several decades.

And gun-related deaths at schools have actually gone down over the last few decades. Here’s an excerpt from a 2018 Northeastern University article:

[...] while certain policies may help decrease gun violence in general, it’s unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings, according to James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern. [...]

Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said. “There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.

And mass shootings in general, while they get a lot of our attention due to their uniquely horrifying nature, are a small part of our overall gun deaths. To quote from a 2022 Time article:

“In general mass shootings account for less than 1% of all firearms deaths in the United States, that’s for all ages,” Dr. Los Lee, an associate professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School says. “When you look at it for children, it’s also less than 1%. So they account for a very small number.”

This is not to downplay the horror of mass shootings, especially mass shootings at schools, but to help explain the views of Second Amendment supporters. It’s possible to view our nation’s gun deaths as being somewhat similar to the nature of automobile deaths in this country (which are actually quite close in number): as unfortunate and tragic, but also as something that may be one of the many costs of living in a free society—especially a society with a tradition of respecting gun rights.

To make an analogy: Conservatives are very concerned about Islamic terrorism, and some liberals would criticize their fears as being illogical and exaggerated, considering how relatively rare such terroristic events are. Some conservatives see liberals’ concerns about guns in a similar light.

In a country as big as ours, there’s almost always a way to view any problem as either very serious, or as relatively small in context. How we perceive the seriousness of a problem will be influenced by our preferred narratives and our preferred outcomes. This is not to argue the rightness or wrongness of these various perceptions, but just to examine how it is that people are able to see a problem as either very serious or as not that serious.

From the other side, though: if you’re someone who thinks that liberals have exaggerated concerns about gun violence, is it possible to see the point of view that gun deaths are much too common in the U.S.? Roughly 40,000 people die from firearms in the United States every year. Our rate of deaths by gun is 100 times that of the U.K. Hopefully it’s possible to see why that concerns people.

The argument that we need to just accept our high rate of murder and suicide can seem callous and even barbaric, considering many other comparable countries don’t have to deal with this level of violence and anxiety.

For the full chapter on our polarized stances on gun violence, go here.

Team-based reactions to the assassination attempt on Trump

An op-ed I got in Newsweek on team-based reactions to the assassination attempt on Trump: www.newsweek.com/us-vs-them-narratives-are-wrong-response-trump-shooting-opinion-1925274.

Our divergent views on the Middle East conflict

Here’s a piece I wrote about the very different ways we can perceive tragedy and violence related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Polarized reactions to George Floyd’s death

The following comes from a section on race and racism in Defusing American Anger. (I purposefully use the word ‘death’ here, instead of ‘murder’, to intentionally try to speak to a maximally wide audience, which includes some people who don’t believe Derek Chauvin was guilty of murder.)

The death of George Floyd in 2020 played a big role in amplifying our divides. To many American liberals, and to many people across the world, the death of George Floyd was a story about racism. It was a demonstration of how the racism of America, in its policing systems and other systems, leads to uncaring and cruel and deadly results for black people and other minorities. To many people, Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of killing George Floyd, was perceived as a racist cop, or of representing racist cops.

To quote from the United Nations website: “The death of George Floyd in May 2020 galvanized people worldwide to protest racism and discrimination and prompted global discussions on racial justice [...].”

Here are some examples of how people perceived George Floyd’s death and its connection to racism in America:

“...the disrespect that the children of Eric Garner or George Floyd experienced as they watched their respective fathers choked to death at the hands of the callous, racially insensitive police who found it hard to see any thread of humanity embedded in those men’s Blackness.” – Kenneth Hardy, from The Enduring, Invisible, and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness

“Those racist cops who killed George Floyd really fucked things up for racists everywhere.” – tweet from 2020

“There is no justice for Jacob Blake, Trayford Pellerin, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, or any other Black victim of police violence. They are victims of a brutal, racist system that cannot be salvaged or reformed.” – tweet from 2020

“The Arab Spring was a wave of uprisings and rebellions that swept the Arab starting in 2010. It was sparked by the suicide of a frustrated Tunisian youth. May the unjust death of George Floyd in the hands of a racist system spark our own Black Spring.” – tweet from 2020

For many people, George Floyd’s death contained a deep meaning about racism in America and in American policing.

But many people do not agree with these framings. Many people find them illogical and divisive. And if our goal is understanding our fellow Americans, we must be willing to see what they see.

So I’ll start by asking a couple questions that I’d ask you to give a little thought to:

What evidence is there that George Floyd’s death actually had anything to do with racism?

What evidence is there that his death tells us anything significant about the United States and race?

If these questions anger you, I’d like you to pause a moment and examine your anger. You may feel angry because you’re entirely certain about what George Floyd’s death means, and this certainty leads you to be angry that someone would dare question something so blatantly obvious.

I’d suggest that, if my posing of these questions makes you angry, your anger can be seen as one of the primary ways us-versus-them polarization works. Us-versus-them polarization is often built upon narratives that it angers us to even hear questioned. And the liberal-side narrative about George Floyd’s death is one that goes almost unquestioned for many people, so engrained is it in liberal-side narratives about America and racism and policing. To question it at all can seem taboo and unthinkable.

But the process of questioning narratives is important and necessary for reducing our collective anger. If we’re going to reduce our anger, we must be willing to question the narratives many of us are certain about, on both the left and the right. And the very different perspectives one can have about George Floyd’s death, and the emotion that can be associated with those narratives, make it an important topic to examine.

There are some people who look at George Floyd’s death and see no good evidence that it was related to racism. And that includes some progressive people, and it includes some black people.

Why would someone believe there’s no evidence George Floyd’s death was related to racism? One reason is that there are white people who have died under police custody in similar ways.

One example of a white person who died in a similar way to George Floyd was Tony Timpa. The following is from a 2019 Dallas Morning News article:

Tony Timpa wailed and pleaded for help more than 30 times as Dallas police officers pinned his shoulders, knees and neck to the ground.

“You’re gonna kill me! You’re gonna kill me! You’re gonna kill me!”

After Timpa fell unconscious, the officers who had him in handcuffs assumed he was asleep and didn’t confirm that he was breathing or feel for a pulse.

As precious minutes passed, the officers laughed and joked about waking Timpa up for school and making him waffles for breakfast.

Body camera footage obtained Tuesday by The Dallas Morning News shows first responders waited at least four minutes after Timpa became unresponsive to begin CPR. His nose was buried in the grass while officers claimed to hear him snoring -- apparently unaware that the unarmed man was drawing his last breaths.

The officers pinned his handcuffed arms behind his back for nearly 14 minutes and zip-tied his legs together. By the time he was loaded onto a gurney and put into an ambulance, the 32-year-old was dead.

Let’s imagine that a white man had died that day in Minneapolis in May of 2020, instead of George Floyd, in exactly the same circumstances. I think most of us would likely agree that if that had happened, few of us would know that man’s name. Clearly, no one would argue that his death was caused by racism. There might be other examinations of factors involved, such as the bad training and callousness of police, or the impacts of being poor in America, but racism wouldn’t be mentioned as a factor.

If we can see how there can be two incidents entirely the same except for race, and they can result in such vastly different narratives and emotions, then we’re in a better position to understand our divides on this issue.

One incident that springs to mind for me was a story I saw around 2015 or so, that involved a young white man in the Southeast who had a psychotic episode in the car while his family was driving. The police were called by the man’s family. In an attempt to prevent the man from hurting himself and others, the police ended up piling on top of the man in the back seat and asphyxiating him.

It was a tragic story, and it was thought that the police might have acted badly. As part of my research for this book, I’ve searched online for that case several times and haven’t been able to find it.

Do you think if he’d been a black man, it’s possible you and I and many other people would know that man’s name? Do you think it’s possible, if he’d been black, that incident would’ve been held up by some antiracist activists as another example of racism?

This hopefully helps show how it is that a rational and non-racist person can be perplexed by the common liberal-side framing about George Floyd’s death. This hopefully helps show how one can see the liberal-side narrative as not just unfounded but also divisive, in how it seeks to arouse a righteous anger at racism for an event that’s not clearly about racism.

There’s also no evidence that Derek Chauvin, the man convicted of killing George Floyd, was racist or that his actions were influenced by racism. In other words, it’s possible that he might have made the same decisions if George Floyd were white. You might disagree and think that, obviously, if George Floyd were white, things would have gone differently. But that’s only speculation. We can see that cops have done similar things to white people. And we can see that kind of speculation as being common these days—for example, speculation like “If Kyle Rittenhouse had been black, he would have been found guilty of murder.”

We can see this as similar to speculation that some conservatives make. For example, some conservatives, in an attempt to make a case about anti-white racism in America, speculated that if George Floyd had been white, Derek Chauvin would’ve never been punished because society doesn’t care much about white people.

There are other aspects of George Floyd’s death that can be seen to show that the event had more nuance and complexity than is often included in the mainstream liberal narrative. To name a few of these things:

• George Floyd was saying that he couldn’t breath several times even before he was placed on the ground. This can help explain why the officers might have been skeptical that he actually couldn’t breathe.

• The knee-on-neck maneuver that Chauvin used was a legal and approved method of restraint in Minneapolis, which only involved light pressure on the neck. This maneuver was often described in the media as if it involved heavy pressure on the neck, or as if it were something Chauvin himself decided to do and not a technique recommended by his police department. To be clear, the technique can still be criticized, and it has been—very few police departments use it—but there’s nothing inherently malicious or racist about the technique.

• The crowd of people who were gathered and yelling at the police could have been a source of confusion and distraction for the police. The officers might have even believed the crowd posed a physical threat to them—an idea presented by Derek Chauvin’s defense team at his trial.

[Some of my learnings about this case came from my talk with a politically liberal police captain on the topic of George Floyd and police violence. You can hear that here.]

And to be clear: one can find nuance in this situation and still believe Chauvin deserved punishment. One of the most objectively damning things Chauvin did was that, apparently, when a pulse wasn’t found on Floyd by one of his fellow officers, Chauvin, the most senior cop present, did not do CPR or order it to be done, and instead waited for the medics to arrive.

There’s no evidence I’ve seen that Derek Chauvin is racist but let’s suppose, for argument’s sake, that he was clearly a racist. Let’s suppose that it was discovered that he was a neo-Nazi and had even written about wanting to kill a black person. Even in that scenario, it begs the question: What do the actions of a single person tell us about a nation of 330 million people?

Or, for that matter, what do the actions of even quite a few bad or racist people tell us about the nature of our country? In a country of our size, with so many bad, dumb, or just unlucky people, and so many unfortunate and violent events, won’t it always be possible for someone to pick and choose various things to form any sort of narrative they want? A large nation has millions of stories, and those stories can be assembled to form larger narratives in all sorts of ways.

It’s possible to bring these same types of questions to the death of Michael Brown, who in 2015 was shot and killed by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri. After Brown’s death, there was much protesting and rioting and property destruction, and the National Guard was called. These reactions could be seen as a kind of precursor to and template for the later reactions to George Floyd’s death.

The shooting of Michael Brown was explained by many people as being a result of racism and use of excessive force. But when you look at the details of the incident, you’ll find that witnesses said that Michael Brown had fought once with the police officer, attempting to take his gun, and then shortly after that, despite being told several times to stop, he had charged back at the cop, who then shot him. Based on this evidence, a grand jury did not indict the police officer.

Also, a Department of Justice investigation led by Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, who happens to be black, also failed to find a reason to charge the police officer. To quote from a press release by Holder: they “released a comprehensive, 87-page report documenting our findings and conclusions that the facts do not support the filing of criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in this case. Michael Brown’s death, though a tragedy, did not involve prosecutable conduct on the part of Officer Wilson.”

In 2020, a new investigation by St. Louis County was opened and again they found no reason to charge the police officer.

Shelby Steele is a black conservative writer who made a documentary titled What Killed Michael Brown? Regarding the narrative that Brown’s death was due to racism and police brutality, Steele calls this a poetic truth, meaning a truth that appeals to people’s vision of the world but doesn’t reflect objective reality. (If you’re politically liberal, I recommend watching his documentary. Besides the specifics about the Michael Brown case, the movie can help a liberal audience reach a better understanding of some conservative views, and how those views can co-exist alongside compassion for struggling people.)

When looked at in this light, we can see how the immense public anger in response to George Floyd’s death would strike many people as illogical—as a dangerous overreaction. It’s possible to perceive Floyd’s death as containing no more meaning about our country than the many other tragic events that happen frequently in our country.

Not only can the liberal-side narrative be seen as causing problems in the form of us-versus-them anger and associated rioting behaviors and other violence, but it also helps create a precedent where any one-off tragedy, whether purposeful or accidental, whether racist or non-racist, might be used to justify a large, destabilizing outpouring of anger.

And such a precedent gives an immense amount of power to the most antisocial and troubled people among us. Troubled people have learned that, if they do something horrible that’s associated in some way with the issues that divide us, there’s a good chance their actions will further derange and destabilize us, and drive many of us into an us-versus-them frenzy. And for troubled people looking for meaning and attention, that knowledge can make doing horrible things more tempting.

The high-emotion reactions to George Floyd’s death could be seen as a symptom of us losing all sense of proportion about our huge, complex country and its problems. It could be seen as a symptom that we were deranging and destabilizing ourselves in dangerous ways.

If you’re liberal, there’s a good chance you disagree with me on these points: you may be thinking of reasons why George Floyd’s death was due to racism and why angry reactions to it were justified. But for now, hopefully you can see how it’s possible for someone to question liberal-side narratives about Floyd’s death, especially the more angry and racially divisive ones. Hopefully it’s possible to see that questioning those narratives doesn’t mean that one is morally flawed, or a racist.

And as we work through various issues in this book, I hope you keep in mind that just as you have narratives that it can make you angry to hear questioned, so do people on the other side. If we care about reducing animosity, we should try to listen to disagreements on important topics without jumping to the worst possible conclusions about those doing the disagreeing.

For the full essay on our polarized views on race and racism, go here.