MICHELLE WILLIAMS: Welcome to The Forum,
live streamed worldwide from the Leadership Studio
at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
I'm Dean Michelle Williams.
The Forum is a collaboration between the Harvard Chan School
and independent news media.
Each program features a panel of experts
addressing some of today's most pressing public health issues.
The Forum is one way the school advances
the frontiers of public health and makes
scientific insights accessible to policymakers and the public.
I hope you find this program engaging and informative.
Thank you for joining us.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PHILLIP MARTIN: Well, welcome, everyone.
This is going to be an extraordinary discussion
and one that is timely, to say the least.
My name is Phillip Martin.
I'm a senior investigative reporter with WGBH in Boston
and also contribute to The World, PRI's The World.
And I'm today's moderator.
Our panelists starting from my immediate right
here are Oren Segal.
He's the director of the Anti-Defamation League
Center on Extremism.
We also have David Williams, my friend David Williams,
who's been on the panel with me, or I've been on panel with him
several times.
He's the chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral
Sciences at the Harvard Chan School here.
We have Dipayan Ghosh, who is a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy
School and an expert on social media.
We'll be talking about that.
Maureen Costello, all the way in from Montgomery and Birmingham,
Alabama, director of Teaching Tolerance
and member of the Southern Poverty Law Center's
senior leadership team.
And my friend joining us remotely again,
Jim Doyle, former senior Menschel fellow
and former governor and Attorney General
of Wisconsin, a state that's really in the news these days,
isn't it?
This event is being presented jointly with PRI's The World
and WGBH.
And we're streaming live.
Just want everyone to get to your Facebook
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This program will include brief questions and answers.
And you folks, you can email questions
to theforum@hsph.harvard.edu.
I'm going to repeat that again--
theforum@hsph.harvard.edu.
And you can also participate in a live chat
that's happening on The Forum site at this very moment.
We've seen it.
All you have to do is turn on your television,
turn on your radio.
You've heard people and seen people
marching in Virginia shouting, "The Jews will not replace us."
We've seen a synagogue where a massacre took place.
We saw supermarket-- people going out shopping and shot
to death because of the color of their skin.
Acts of hate and racism, whether online or in person,
are painfully visible these days.
Statistics from the FBI, as well as
from organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law
Center and the Anti-Defamation League,
confirm that hate crimes are on the rise.
Such acts are, of course, not only in the United States.
We see this in Europe and other places globally.
Just take a look at the streets of Poland.
Or look at Hungary or the Philippines or Brazil.
And you see what they have in common besides the populism--
that is the term of choice--
is a lot of hate.
And today, during Black History Month, we pause.
We take a moment to ask, what forces are fueling
the rise of hate and racism?
What's contributing to what we're seeing out here?
And what can we do about it?
That's the operative question.
To give us a snapshot of one disconcerting
facet of extremism, let's just take a look
at a clip from the Anti-Defamation League.
This clip illustrates the explosive growth
of white supremacist propaganda on college campuses.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm going to turn to Oren right now.
Oren, your organization's been tracking--
looking at the data for years.
What exactly is going on?
I've seen posters, for example, at local colleges
in Boston of basically where folks have essentially
been recruiting.
Can you talk about what the data shows
and how you've been tracking these organizations?
OREN SEGAL: Sure.
So at ADL, we're tracking both extremist-related data,
but also hate incidents and hate crimes of all types.
And I think the discussion today about what
is driving hate and racism and what we can do about it really
needs to start with the data.
So what I'd like to do is just provide some of that.
FBI hate crime statistics recently
came out for 2017, which demonstrated
a 17% increase in hate crimes around the country.
That was over 7,000 incidents that were reported.
Now one of the key pieces of data that, I think,
was not necessarily underscored but is as critical
is that in over 90 cities with people that have over 100,000
in population either reported zero hate crimes
or didn't report hate crimes at all.
So even that number, we know, is much lower.
At ADL, we also track anti-Semitic incidents, not
just crimes but other forms of harassment and intimidation.
And in 2017, we saw a 57% increase
in those anti-Semitic incidents from the previous year.
And that included an over 90% increase
in just k-through-12 through 12 schools.
Right, our kids are watching the public discussion.
They are viewing how the headlines on the news
and in your newspapers and on your social media feed
are constantly filled with hate and extremism.
And the last point about this to the video that we just saw,
we've actually seen a 500% increase in white supremacist
propaganda on the ground.
Not just college campuses where we saw a spike
and we continue to see that increase.
But what that means is this post-Charlottesville
environment that we're in, white supremacists
may not be as comfortable showing their faces at a rally.
But what they're doing are finding other clandestine ways
to amplify and spread their messages through propaganda
spread out not only in small towns,
but literally in every major city that we see.
And last point, we also track extremist-related murders
at ADL, and we've been doing so since about 1970.
2018 was the fourth deadliest year related
to extremist-related murders.
We saw over 50 people killed by extremists,
and 98% of those were by right-wing extremists--
white supremacists, antigovernment types.
And when you look at the past 10 years,
of all the extremist-related murders-- about 427--
73% have been carried out by white supremacists
and other homegrown antigovernment type extremists.
That may not necessarily connect with some of the narratives
we hear in the news every day.
But these are the statistics we need to account for
as we have this discussion about whether hate is rising or not.
PHILLIP MARTIN: I'd like to see how those statistics also
connect with David Harris's research.
David, your work is evidence-based,
as you've described it.
You've studied how discrimination,
including racist language and attitudes
on prejudice, the effects of health of those
who are in the crosshairs.
You've talked about that impact.
Tell us more about what you and what
your colleagues have found.
DAVID WILLIAMS: Well, there's a large body of research--
and it's a global body of research--
that indicates that exposure to discrimination,
both kind of virulent forms but even little
indignities on a day to day basis,
has pervasive adverse negative effects on health.
There's studies showing an increase
in the risk of premature death linked
to exposure to discrimination.
What the research is also showing us
that is very relevant for our conversation,
that it's not just the incidents that are
targeted at you individually.
But if you live in a community with higher levels
of prejudice, studies show African Americans who
live in such communities across the United States,
such counties across the United States
have higher rates of death.
It's not just African Americans.
There's a study looking at anti-gay prejudice
in the United States.
And for LGBT populations who live in communities
of higher anti-gay prejudice, their death rates
are three times higher than those
who live in communities of low levels of anti-gay prejudice.
And this is pervasive throughout society.
One of the studies I was involved with
documented that among high school and middle school
students who are exposed to racial discrimination
in online contexts, their levels of anxiety,
their levels of depression are higher,
even after you take into account other adolescent stresses
and discrimination offline.
So documenting the discrimination online
is a unique contributor to their poor health.
There's research documenting the negative effects
of anti-immigrant rhetoric, but also anti-immigrant policies.
So for example, a study I was involved
with in the state of Arizona after SB1070
was passed, a law that authorized
local officials to stop anyone who looked
as if they might be illegal.
And we documented among Mexican American mothers,
there was a decrease in the use of preventive health
services for their children and the access of social services.
And most strikingly in that study,
that effect was strongest among US-born Mexican American women.
So those women who were citizens of the United States,
we suspect, were so--
it was such an assault to their dignity
that they could be stopped simply because of how
they looked that there was these negative effects.
And there's research documenting that--
a study out of Los Angeles that shows 11th graders who,
in the year before the election, were
concerned about the hate and the discrimination in the society.
A year later, they have higher levels of depression,
higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of substance abuse.
So the bottom line is we are finding
pervasive negative effects on the health
of multiple stigmatized populations linked
to the exposure, not only the personal targeting
but this broader context of hostility in our environment.
PHILLIP MARTIN: One thing is this conversation
is such that, no, we don't have to struggle
to connect the dots between your different expertise.
Dipayan, something David just talked about--
the role of online media, the role
of social media in promulgating hate is fairly clear right now.
But you've done research on this topic.
What have been your findings?
DIPAYAN GHOSH: Well, I think both Oren's
and David's comments and yours really resonate for me.
When we think about some of the memes that
have risen over the past few years
or even particular instances of hate-- so,
for example, the frog meme or instances
of hate against particular classes of the US population
really pushed by others groups.
The thing that we really have to think about
is, why is this happening?
What is the infrastructure that is enabling
the spread and the pervasiveness, as David
has suggested, of all of this content being consumed?
Why is it having such an impact on the internet?
And what I'd suggest is that it is about the infrastructure.
It is about the commercial regime
that sits behind these internet platforms,
from YouTube to Facebook to Twitter to even
some of the newer platforms.
And when we think about that infrastructure,
it's sometimes difficult to get our heads around how it works
and what connects them all and how they're all similar.
But deep down, I think that infrastructure,
that commercial regime that defines
these platforms is actually fairly simple at a high level.
First of all, these platforms, they
develop very compelling services--
like Messenger or like the News Feed or like the Twitter feed
or like the YouTube system--
to such an extent that they're, as some psychologists
have suggested, addictive.
And this has prevented other services
from actually challenging these services to the extent
that they're limiting competition on the internet.
Second, through these services that
are dominating the internet, these companies
are drawing up--
hoovering up large amounts of data
of our personal information through our engagement
on the News Feed, as well as through purchases
of data from third parties, as well as from third party
websites to develop behavioral profiles on us.
And those first two pillars move us
to the third, which is that these companies develop
very precise and sophisticated algorithms that do two things--
curate content in our social feeds and target ads at us
based on our behavioral profile and based on our extensive use
of these platforms.
And so what I'd suggest is that this infrastructure has grown
up in this way for 20 years, as we've
seen Facebook and Google come to the fore in the global economy,
and really taken over the internet commercially,
to the extent that these impacts against hate are not really--
these companies are not really challenged
from a business perspective to do anything about it
until and unless the public sentiment rises up
so much that they have to actually start to address it.
What I'd suggest is that we draw on the tremendous public
sentiment against hate, against the spread of disinformation,
against the spread of algorithmic discrimination
and take this opportunity in the next couple of years
to push a regime, a regulatory regime that addresses
the harms of that business model so that we have better
competition on the internet, so that we have better privacy, so
that we can have better transparency
and to the ways that these algorithms work.
And what I'd suggest is that that
can start to address in the long run
this spread of hate issue, which is really, really challenging
us in really difficult ways.
PHILLIP MARTIN: OK.
The online content that you, Oren--
David Williams have talked about--
this stuff, of course, is being consumed by everyone.
It's across the board.
But it's mainly being consumed by young people
when you talk about online platforms.
And we talk about Teaching Tolerance,
both the name of the organization
and an objective of the organization.
What are you finding in terms, Maureen,
in terms of young people, the reception?
And what are you finding in the schools?
How are the schools being shaped by all of this?
MAUREEN COSTELLO: What we're finding
is that schools are not immune to the climate that
is pervasive in the United States Teaching Tolerance
has always operated to reduce prejudice in schools
and to improve intergroup relations among students.
And we've always heard about hate incidents.
Starting in 2016, we became aware
that there were more incidents happening
as a result of the rhetoric of the presidential campaign,
and we surveyed teachers.
And as a result, we came out with two reports in 2016
that showed three alarming phenomena.
The first, of course, was that teachers
were reporting that marginalized students, whether they
be immigrants, LGBT students, students of color generally,
religious minorities, were feeling high levels of anxiety.
And that has been supported by subsequent studies,
one out of UCLA last year, that have just
said this has continued.
The second finding was that bullying,
which has been a long standing concern of educators,
had taken on a kind of political tint,
and that we might consider that politics had weaponized
bullying in a way, and that the kind of rhetoric that
was being mentioned in political campaigns
was now being used against vulnerable students.
And the third thing we found was that teachers
were really, really uncertain about how to handle this--
not only about how to support marginalized children,
how to contain the hate that they were seeing emerging,
and, finally, even how to talk about politics and the election
in a way that would itself not seem partisan.
We've been tracking hate incidents at schools.
And by hate incidents at schools,
we're not talking about hate crimes necessarily.
We're talking about harassment, disparaging remarks,
negative behaviors that target a group of people
based on their identity.
It's very hard to say whether they have increased
because no one really was tracking this very closely
prior to the last couple of years.
But what we've seen is a regular number of incidents.
And as the FBI hate crime data showed, 25% of the hate crimes
happened in schools from K through college.
We're about to release a report next month in which we've
looked at both news reports of hate incidents
and also data gathered from educators.
And what we can tell you is that anti-Semitism is on the rise.
Racial harassment is on the rise.
Anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim harassment are all
happening at schools with a terribly detrimental effect
on students, most of whom--
over 51%-- are children of color,
and they come from these marginalized groups.
So obviously, this is not only a public health crisis of sorts,
but also a problem about making schools
effective in doing what they're supposed to do,
which is educate.
You cannot educate when children don't feel safe.
I would just leave by saying that what we've also
discovered-- and this will be in our report--
is that the vast majority of incidents at schools never get
reported in the news media, that probably fewer than 5%
are reported.
And that for many, many children,
they're being exposed to hateful language
and to disparaging remarks in a hostile environment
in the very place where they should feel safest.
PHILLIP MARTIN: In the last two years, as probably especially,
you've seen a lot of kids being emboldened, of chants,
of all types of things that perhaps you hadn't seen before.
I don't think we could divorce a lot of this
from the political atmosphere.
And to that end, I'd like to turn to Jim,
who we're talking to remotely.
He's out in Wisconsin.
Jim, as former attorney general, as a former governor,
what role are you seeing in terms
of the law, but, more importantly, politics,
in promulgating and then propagating hate?
JIM DOYLE: Well, first on the law,
let me say I argued before the United States Supreme Court
in the 1990s the first case that went
to them on hate crimes in which they
upheld the right of a state--
the ability of a state to impose harsher sanctions on people
that commit crimes motivated by racial,
gender, other kinds of biases.
And it was a big win at the time.
But I think we all have to recognize that the law--
and it's critical, I should say, that those laws be enforced
and people understand that the law
is on one side of this issue.
It's not on the other side-- that the law is on the side
that people ought to be able to live freely in this country,
and they ought to live freely in a way
that they are not harassed, harmed because of their race,
their religion, their sexual orientation, whatever.
But we ought to recognize that the law is--
for the issues that have been talked about,
the demeaning statements in schools, the low-level,
street-level interaction between a police officer and somebody
on the street that can be so demeaning,
that have the kind of harms that Professor Williams has
documented--
that the law is a pretty ham-fisted way
to deal with those.
It doesn't really get to those kinds
of very significant issues.
That's where politics becomes so important
and where leadership becomes so important.
Much of this-- and I'd be interested to see while
it's accelerated--
if I recall the statistics from the Anti-Defamation
and Southern Poverty Law Institute and others--
it really started with the election
of Barack Obama and this virulent reaction
by segments of our society, the idea
that an African-American person could
be president of the United States,
birthers, and all of that racist stuff that came out of it.
And now it's obviously been accelerated,
why political leadership that talks in stereotypes,
and that's what's so harmful.
These horrible stereotypes that that brown people coming across
the borders are criminals, that African-American people--
the stereotypes they've dealt with in my world
of law enforcement.
It's been so harmful as there's somehow
some kind of inherent criminality
that we all have to be very scared about
that is existing there.
Those kinds of large stereotypes that
come from political leadership from our president.
Let's just say it.
I'm mean, when you have a president that
talks in terms of people and these kinds of groups instead
of Americans as American, citizens
as immigrants as individual people with hopes and dreams,
most good, some bad.
When we have some who lump-- who sees the world in these--
and talks about it in that way.
And then you have the obvious, when politicians
start drawing equivalencies that what happened in Virginia
was equal on both sides.
That has a horrible effect on our political atmosphere,
but what concerns me is what Professor Williams was talking
about is the effect on people that
hear that coming at them, an African-American student
working hard in school, trying to get ahead,
who hears leadership talking about the people
of African-American backgrounds with that kind
of dismissive attitude.
It has terrible, harmful effects,
and it does in the law, as well, because these attitudes do then
pervade the policing on our streets and lead
to some of the terrible incidents we've seen.
But even more the lower level--
I shouldn't say more but equally important
that lower level, that kind of routine stop on the street
in which a young black person is treated in a particularly
aggressive way that a young white person might not
has very serious effects on how people see the government,
how they relate to the government,
how they see the political process,
whether they see it as something that's
out there to try to help them.
So, obviously, my one question I often ask is when I hear--
I've heard the president and others say,
I'm tired of all this political correctness.
why can't we just say what we want to say?
And my question is, what is it you really want to say?
why don't you just tell us what you really want to say?
Let's get this out there.
But that's really what we're dealing with, with a lot of--
and, politically, I think, with the issues
that we're talking here today.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Well, one of the things I'd like to do
is even explore this--
we might not have the time to do it here-- but even explore
the term political correctness.
What does that mean usually and often?
And the other point that you just made--
and I want to address this to our panel in a few minutes--
is that about the role of the president.
It's the elephant in the room, but it's one
that I think we have to explore.
Before we do that, I want to turn to another clip, this one
by Teaching Tolerance.
This is a clip of a part of a film they put together
called Mix It Up at Lunch.
GIRL: Mix it up day was a very fun day.
I got to see more people mingling and getting along
with people that they usually don't necessarily talk to
or even look at.
And it was a very fun thing to see
that people were being proactive and getting
in there with other kids.
WOMAN: I loved the whole day even though it seemed chaotic.
I loved everything they did because it's
our kids speaking to our kids, which is what we need.
We need interaction between our students
so that they understand.
And, hopefully, even though they took it
as acting or just singing, they'll
go home tonight, or this afternoon,
or even think about it tomorrow, you know, what they said
really will make a difference if I just stand up
or if I learn that I'm different from somebody else,
and it's OK.
And that's my message that I hope
they perceive from today, whether it
be today or tomorrow.
But I think the whole thing was a shining moment for me,
just to have them involved and work with each other.
GIRL: My advice to give to other students
is to keep their eyes open, don't shut off
and jump to conclusions, to just participate because I promise
it's very rewarding in the end.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PHILLIP MARTIN: Well, that's a good idea.
[LAUGHTER]
PHILLIP MARTIN: Now we're going to mix it
up and right before my second favorite meal lunch.
And, Maureen, let's start off with you.
And this, obviously, is part of an effort
to counter the hate and the type of intolerance we're seeing out
there.
Can you talk about other aspects of Teaching Tolerance's
programs and how you're reaching or attempting
to reach young people much like the local program Facing
History and Ourselves?
MAUREEN COSTELLO: We work through teachers
across the United States and millions of them
turn to Teaching Tolerance for advice,
and guidance, and curriculum.
And while we do sponsor Mix It Up at Lunch Day,
we're very cognizant of the fact that this can't just
be a moment in the school year, that, in fact, schools are
incredibly important places.
They're crucibles for building the society
that we're all going to live in in 10 years or 20 years,
and they are also one of the last common institutions
standing.
And so I think that it's a time that
calls for more investment in making sure that schools are
doing their jobs to counter hate and to build that good society.
What does that mean?
All of our work is guided by something
we call the social justice standards,
and they're based on four pillars, identity, diversity,
justice, and action.
The idea of identity in our vision
is that schools should have this at the center of their vision
so that, as they look at students who come in,
they want every student to find in school a place where their
own identities-- whatever those identities are,
be they religious, racial, sexual orientation,
whatever-- can be affirmed and basically that they can have
positive identity development.
Secondly, that they develop a curiosity--
and obviously have exposure-- to people
with different identities, but that it's
a healthy open-minded curiosity of, I know who I am.
Tell me who you are.
The third is we want children to have a commitment to justice,
and that shouldn't be very controversial.
I mean, it is part of the Pledge of Allegiance,
that we want justice for all.
And we want children to be able to think
critically and recognize injustice when they see it.
And, finally, we feel that the end of all education
has to be a capacity to take action,
to work with others to address injustices
and to do the work that we're all called upon to do,
which is to make this world a better place than we found it.
And so for us, it's about encouraging peer relationships.
It's about encouraging schools to have
daily interactions between--
among students and adults that bring them together.
It's curriculum based, explicit curriculum
about prejudice and about stereotypes
but also that builds community, implicit curriculum that
exposes students to the lived experiences of others.
This is incredibly important, and there's
lots of good research that has shown that when
students learn about the history of discrimination, they,
in fact--
their attitudes, their discriminatory attitudes
decline and decrease.
So we should be honest in our curriculum about the warp
and the flaws in our history.
And, finally, I think the most important thing-- and school
leadership is incredibly important here-- not
every school in this country is a cauldron of hatred.
We hear from a lot of teachers who talk about,
how this doesn't happen in my school,
and they always point to school leadership
who really walk the walk as well as talking the talk.
Kids learn from adults, and they learn from each other.
And so what matters is not only what
we say but also what we do.
And that means that we have to greet every person who
comes into that school and treat them
as a deserving human being who deserves our respect.
PHILLIP MARTIN: It's funny but when
I'm thinking about the whole notion of trying
to engender empathy--
which is what your program does, which
is what the world of difference program does--
you're also dealing, however, with a larger message that's
coming across, for example, and oftentimes,
on Twitter of a huge megaphone that certain individuals have
in order to promulgate a particular message.
And one question I would have for Oren,
in the context of that, is how do you basically get to a point
where you think you're reaching where you actually are making
a world of difference, when you have that bigger
megaphone out there that might be drowning out your message.
OREN SEGAL: Yeah, I mean this is a battle for hearts and minds
at the end of the day.
So in the Center on Extremism, we
believe sunlight is the best disinfectant.
You need to expose the extremists.
You need to expose the hate so that people can frankly
understand what they're up against.
But our work would not be enough without
our educational resources.
So a World of Difference, for example,
it trains not only students but teachers and their parents,
not only how to identify bias--
we're good at-- we're pretty good at identifying
what is racism, anti-Semitism, what
is Islamophobia, et cetera.
But you know what's more important?
And this is a lesson from the Holocaust
is to have people to say, I'm not just
going to sit around and do nothing about it.
You're training kids, and, often,
this is peer-to-peer model, as well, that we have at ADL.
And that gives it a little bit more legitimacy
for younger people.
But to say, you have a stake here.
You have a role.
We will teach you how to identify bias
within institutions, within others, and within yourself.
And then we are going to arm you and help
you to speak out and challenge that bias and that racism.
That makes my job as somebody who's
tracking extremism easier because I
know there's an army behind me who
are going to be able to call it out and do something about it.
Deborah Lipstadt said anti-Semitism
starts with the Jews, but it doesn't end with the Jews.
The same is true for all forms of hate,
and look no further than Pittsburgh,
where here's an individual who attacked 11 people largest
massacre against Jews in this country's history.
And it was motivated by an anti-immigrant sentiment,
talking about the caravan, talking about the social media
hate of that day, and he targeted Jews
because in his conspiratorial white supremacist worldview,
the Jews are controlling our immigration policy.
So by teaching kids of all different backgrounds,
religious, races, et cetera, that
helps to the fight against anti-Semitism.
And the fight against anti-Semitism
helps fight all forms of racism and bigotry.
That's what we're trying to teach our kids in our schools.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Oren, and just as a good segue way to David.
You know how to talk about this stuff.
You know how to talk about this stuff.
All of you, you're conversationalists.
David, a lot of your research is based on the conversations that
take place between individuals and the amelioration
of discrimination as a result of those discussions.
Talk about that work and what conclusions
are you coming to in this age of heightened anxiety
and hate, if you will?
DAVID WILLIAMS: I think we need, as a society,
to find safe places where people can talk.
When if someone, because of their background
and understanding, said something
that was inappropriate, they're not castigated and excluded.
So I think creating those safe places generically
is one thing that all of us need to be because there's
a sense in which--
Kellogg Foundation had a program called the Truth, Racial
Healing & Transformation.
People need-- don't assume that everyone has the same level
of knowledge that you have.
And there's a term in their socialization
that was used that didn't think it was a problem,
and they're now learning it's a problem.
So I think we need to be patient with each other
but be committed to firmly but lovingly raise its use
and provide truth.
There is a study I want to talk about it.
It was published recently, very elegant study
published in Science, where a group of researchers
took political canvases and sent them out
to Democratic and Republican voters
and had these canvassers allow the voter they were talking
to to do most of the talking.
And their job was to find ways to link an experience
in the life of the canvasser to think of some experience they
had had when they had been treated negatively
and then to link that to how transgender individuals would
feel when they are treated negatively.
And this showed that this kind of conversation
was effective in reducing prejudice against transgender
individuals, it was effective in increasing levels of support
for policies to ensure anti-discrimination legislation
towards transgender individuals.
And what they would say is the key
is the specific language and conversation that
was used to engender this.
And this organization out in Southern California
who does this work, they tested 13,000 conversations first
to find the right kind of conversation
that nonetheless can open the door to help to build empathy.
And I think the building of empathy of putting ourselves
in the shoes of another is one of the keys
to build in the kind of tolerance
that we need in our society.
PHILLIP MARTIN: One of the cauldrons that we're
seeing where empathy is basically being challenged
would contravene and it seems to be taking place online.
I think about Reddit, for example,
which has become a platform for abuse and for a lot of haters.
And, Dipayan, how are you basically finding
Reddit and other social media platforms?
Are the conversations that David talked about
and the efforts toward empathy--
or can they possibly take place on online platforms
that seem to have been basically subsumed by the haters?
DIPAYAN GHOSH: Wow, it's very difficult, I think.
I think it's very difficult. To cite
another study, a different study,
MIT researchers showed about just a few months ago
in a paper--
I believe in Science or Nature-- that falsehoods travel
20 times faster than the truth.
And they travel faster, they travel farther,
and they reach deeper into social networks,
meaning to individual people using Twitter,
which was the social network that these researchers
analyzed.
And I think what that suggests is that, well, falsehood,
and hate, and disinformation are all linked together.
And in the practice of spreading hate online,
on social networks, or the practice
of spreading disinformation, we've
seen over, and over, and over, again,
that propagators of this kind of content
are really linking the two and trying
to hit those thin cracks in American society
and pound them over, and over, and over, again, and fracture
society by targeting ads, or targeting content, or pulling
people into filter bubbles and showering them
with content about a particular political issue that
triggers hatred or triggers discriminatory action going
forward.
And I think to really resolve that kind of issue,
we have to revisit the business model.
We have to think, again, about how
do Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, how do they work?
It's about these services.
It's about the collection of data
to drive behavioral profiling, and it's
about these algorithms that target ads and curate content.
And to really address hate speech in the long run,
we're seeing two issues.
We're seeing this problem of filter bubbles which is--
I believe-- is caused by this business model of people trying
to force people--
hate speech propagators and disinformation operators
trying to force people into these filter bubbles
and increase engagement over these platforms,
as the internet platforms themselves
want to increase their ad revenues.
And we're seeing this problem of pushing content
against those thin cracks to try to break people or break
their will to be tolerant.
I think the only place to start, then, is
to address that infrastructure.
And that's going to require a lot of political will,
and right now if we-- we talked earlier about politics,
these issues even as they pertain to social media
are divided along partisan lines.
When I worked in the White House during the Obama
administration, we saw this, and it
was very difficult to do anything about it.
When I worked at Facebook in Washington, we saw this again.
And I think it's going to be extraordinarily
difficult to address it, but we need political will.
We need to build sentiment and build up
the public education on these kinds of issues
and start to address them looking deep down at the way
that the internet is structured today.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Let's take it from online
to the streets of the role, for example, of law enforcement,
in much of what many people see as antithetical relationship
with communities of color, with many communities
in the country.
And then many seem to be emboldened
by the current administration, the Justice Department,
and by the White House.
Jim, can you talk about--
and then I'm going to ask the panel pretty
much the same-- the panel here, pretty much the same question--
can you talk about the role that police officers are playing
in terms of, if you will, the receptivity to a lot
of these negative messages that are being, if you will,
being seen as messages of hate.
JIM DOYLE: Many more people are going
to have contact with a police officer
than they are with the President of the United States.
And many-- or a governor, or an attorney general--
and many are going to draw their conclusions about how
the government reacts to them over their lifetimes based
on that contact.
We have been at this for a long time of the training,
and that's why I really encourage
all of people who have spoken here
about the training they do to modernize
police training on this issue.
After Rodney King, we set out on a large scale training
in Wisconsin, as many states did,
on police understanding racial divisions.
Much of the training when I look back at it--
and I've seen the results-- was just plain wrong.
I mean, a lot of it was police officers going up
to people to African-American people and calling them,
man, because they thought that was
how they were going to relate more closely
and be part of the community.
Much of the training and community policing
was to teach white police officers how
to talk kind of jive, street jive,
thinking that somehow that was making them culturally aware
and with the people that they were talking about.
You saw it at Harvard with the Professor Gates incident
where a distinguished professor is treated in that way.
We probably all know, and I know dear relatives and friends
who have been treated--
I've often asked-- I think the training for police officers
ought to start by having rich African-American people come in
so they know this isn't about poverty
and tell them about their worst experience with the police.
And white people are shocked to hear these stories.
I've done this a few times.
To hear to hear their friends talk about what
happened to them when they went in the hardware store and got
followed around and then stopped because maybe they
were shoplifters.
So it gets back to this empathy issue.
And much of the training was good and, obviously,
the major part of law enforcement
after training has to be, this is the law,
and you have to enforce the law, and it
doesn't matter who the person is in front of you or their color.
But when you get into these deeper assumptions that people
have-- and many police officers are not immune to them--
that for some genetic reason black people
have more criminal disposition than white people,
that's at the heart of much of what we're talking about here.
And that gets reinforced politically.
So I really encourage the kind of training we've talked about
and we've heard about in the schools and others,
particularly about empathy, to really
have that be the training that moves into the law enforcement
realm as well.
I want to make one other point if I
can about politics quickly.
We've come, unfortunately, in this country now,
to two parties that are-- one is almost an all-white party
and one is a party that is made up
of most racial minority, some white males, and about half
of the white females in the country.
If you just look at this demographically,
that's not a good place for us to be politically
because the white party has to maximize its white vote
in every election.
And the way you do that is to get white people,
the majority people voting as a block,
and we saw this in the South after the Civil Rights Act.
Nobody thought in the South that Republicans someday could
get 75% of the white vote.
They said, that'll never happen.
Well, it's happened.
And now you are seeing that same thing happening politically.
And the result is on this-- on the messaging issue that
we've talked about--
there are political incentives now
that are exploited, as was just described, on the internet.
What do we know about what the Russians did?
Some of that's come out is they exploited racial divisions
by putting all kinds of stuff out on the internet that both--
after police shootings-- that inflamed both sides.
That's how they know they can get to us.
And our politics is now driving us
into that same position where one side benefits
from inflaming it, and the other side
benefits by trying to make sure that all
of the people of minority background in the country
are voting for their party.
And we now are in a very, very difficult political place.
We've been here for a long time, but it has now
gotten that you just look at the numbers, and the vote,
and how it breaks down by race, it is just stark.
We have parties that are divided on this issue.
PHILLIP MARTIN: I can tell you, we
could talk about this, folks, for days
because it's so much to talk about.
We have time at this point for just a few questions
from our listeners and our viewers.
This question is from Michael and he says, "Clearly, there
are a host of levels that impact racism,
institutional, cultural, et cetera,
what is our best chance of changing
racism on an individual level?"
I'm going to direct this one right now to David and then
to the rest of our panel.
DAVID WILLIAMS: It's a big challenge.
I think I would say we need to raise awareness levels.
So what's happening with teaching tolerance
so that people are knowledgeable.
And I would say that the media has a powerful role to play.
We have seen-- now, I'm not suggesting in any way, shape,
or form that we've solved the problem--
but we have seen striking declines
in the levels of prejudice against LGBT populations
in the United States.
That has not happened by chance.
Much of that has been linked in scientific research
to explicit strategies that were implemented
in the media that has led to reductions of prejudice.
And I think we need to change the culture.
We need to change what people think.
And the media and other larger cultural institutions,
like religious institutions, can also play an important role
in changing the very culture around these issues.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Oren.
OREN SEGAL: Yeah, I mean-- this was the $64,000 or the million
dollar question.
I do think this, in tracking extremism of all types
and narratives, especially, online,
I am always disappointed by the lack of content that tells
the other side of the story.
So if you go onto YouTube, and you put 9/11.
You want to learn about what happened,
and younger people are not quite sure what happened
because they weren't alive.
It's only a couple of suggestions
away from conspiracy theories, and these our more mainstream
platforms that are being exploited by those who are
giving these false narratives.
These hate hateful narratives.
So I do think creating an opportunity for people
to create content--
not just that counters it, that's difficult--
but to have a place to develop your own narratives
is part of that effort of creating critical thinking.
Not only think about what you're seeing
and what you're bringing in, and think
about who's trying to fool you, and try to trick you,
and brainwash you into having these hateful beliefs,
but you need to have an opportunity to then leverage
other types of content.
I learn about new technologies from two places,
from extremists and from my seven-year-old son.
And so we need to be able to arm our youth with the ability
to tell their stories in compelling ways that
are as sexy, and cool, and interesting as those
who have those hateful ideas.
PHILLIP MARTIN: One of the questions I do want to ask--
in the little time that we have-- is, Maureen and Dipayan,
are you saying--
what is the impact of what we're seeing
outside of the United States?
What impact is that having on, if you will,
thoughts about tolerance intolerance
here in the United States?
Out of Hungary, for example, where you see Roma
under assault, where you see immigrants
immigration has become an issue that
has been defined as us versus them like here
in the United States.
What's your view about that, the impact?
MAUREEN COSTELLO: I don't think that we're seeing it explicitly
on school children, for instance, or even on educators,
but I think that a lot of the language and the ideas that
are coming out of Europe are being amplified in social media
here in the United States.
And nobody is paying attention to where
they're coming from, basically.
So I think that the notion that just because they're
across the ocean, they don't affect those is just untrue.
DIPAYAN GHOSH: Just to add to that,
I completely agree with Maureen, and we're definitely
seeing some really nasty themes come particularly
from all over Europe, Eastern Europe, Western
Europe, and Northern Europe, that are,
as Oren and I have researched a little bit and spoken about,
driven from this idea of identitarianism.
And that is definitely shaping a lot
of cultural creation of this--
or this ethos that we are better and they're worse.
And I think that people like Richard Spencer and people
like that in the United States have certainly
subsumed that message and projected it here.
And that's obviously dangerous.
PHILLIP MARTIN: I'm looking at our clock
and so-- but I also need all of you
to just take a moment to, if you will,
summarize this discussion and your thoughts
on hatred and intolerance that's sweeping across our nation,
unfortunately.
Oren.
OREN SEGAL: Sure, to the degree this is a final word for me,
I would say, we have a heat map at ADL where we track incidents
of anti-Semitism, hate crimes, extremist activity
of all types.
And I'm always reminded, as we're trying to explain
to the public, the trends that we're seeing,
that each one of those points on a map over 5,000-- now,
over the last two years--
is a story of community resilience.
Is a story of people coming together
and rejecting that hate.
And to your point about the media,
I think we need to start telling more inspiring stories.
And because when we hear that, that also has an impact
and that also maybe creates courage amongst people
to hold all those who are purveyors of hate accountable,
whether they're in your local community
or whether they're in the highest office.
We all have a voice.
And we need to constantly support all those
in our communities to show that hate really
does have no place here.
So you don't do this work for 20 years
without having some sort of hope that things will get better.
But I think the data, and I think
the training, whether it's for law enforcement, students, et
cetera, will help make those dots a little bit
more actionable.
And you're turning basically lemons into lemonade.
DAVID WILLIAMS: Two quick things.
Governor Doyle talked about interactions
of African-Americans with the police.
I and other colleagues published a paper last year
in Lancet that shows that when police killed
an unarmed African-American male,
the mental health of the entire African-American population
in that state is adversely affected for the next three
months.
So, again, it's another example of this
is affecting the quality of life of individuals here.
And, finally, my other quick point
is that this environment of hate.
It's not only about individual interaction.
It is driving social policy, and we
are leaning towards policies, the policy proposals
right now in Washington DC, that will destroy the social safety
net as we know it today.
And we don't have to guess about what would happen.
In 1981, the omnibus reconciliation bill,
early in the Reagan administration,
let a million people lost food stamps and 600,000 people
would dropped from Medicare--
Medicaid.
And 250 community health centers closed in the United States
as a result to cuts to social services,
and there were pervasive negative effects on children,
on pregnant women, on the elderly in the United States.
So we have to look not only at all interactions,
we have to look at the policies that we decide
driven by false narratives.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Dipayan.
DIPAYAN GHOSH: I'll also share just two quick thoughts.
First, addressing the online space.
Again, I think these internet platforms are designed
the way they are because they're designed to increase engagement
and there's no regulatory regime that
sits above them right now that that tells them, no, you
can't do that. you can't spread hate. you
can't spread discrimination.
One example, Latanya Sweeney, a professor
of computer science here at Harvard, searched for her name
on Google, and I believe the story
that she reported is that she saw an ad for jails
because Google inferred that her name is associated
with African-American heritage and thought that, hey, we
should show her this ad.
In another example, Google--
when kids were searching for gorillas on Google Images--
people saw images of minorities in the United States.
These systems are designed to drive engagement
because they want professor Sweeney to click on that ad
because they think that that's going to drive engagement.
They want people to--
they design these algorithms in ways
that encourages clicks and encourages bigger ad spend.
So my first point is that we need to address that system.
We need our leadership to understand
how these systems work and start to address them at their core.
Second point is just a broader one
which is that I think our leaders, in society,
from politicians to actors and actresses,
thought leaders need to be more honest and need to speak up.
I think, just one example--
this didn't come up yet-- but with Liam Neeson,
we've seen over the past few days.
I want to highlight not just what
he said, which was honest to the public, which I appreciate
at some level, but also what a soccer player,
John Barnes of African origin but who played in England,
his reaction to Liam Neeson.
And his reaction was one of great appreciation
for the honesty, instead of just the traditional media
reaction which was that, wow, Liam Neeson is
a horrible person, and we need to vilify him.
So I would appreciate more honesty.
We've seen that in the US Congress,
as well, over the past week.
So just two quick points, thank you.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Maureen.
MAUREEN COSTELLO: I think we're going
to win or lose this battle in the schools, basically.
If we do not orient our schools towards the vision
that they are, in fact, building the society that we're
going to live in in the future, we have lost.
We've been focusing a lot in schools on college and career
readiness, and we really have to focus on social and emotional
readiness, as well.
My ideal-- the ideal policy change
is to really make integration a focus of our school policy.
But if we can't go there, then we
really need to make sure that young people have
digital intelligence so that they know not only
how to interpret material that comes to them as consumers,
but that they also learn how to be productive consumers--
producers for social media.
I think at the end of the day, I'm reminded of the phrase
that Dr. King used in his last book, which
is that we have a choice between chaos and community.
And what we've been talking about so much is isolation.
Hate grows in isolation.
And schools are places of community.
And so everything that we need to do is deliberate talking--
teaching about the kind of discrimination that exists,
not pretending it doesn't exist, admitting that we've all
been socialized to be racists.
And I think it's particularly an issue in schools
because 80% of teachers are white women.
And I'm very fond of white women.
[LAUGHTER]
But they carry with them-- we all
carry with us implicit biases.
It's one of the issues that a lot of good police training
has tried to address, and it's something
we have to address with teachers as well.
But we really, really need to decide
that this next generation has to be
better than we are generally.
PHILLIP MARTIN: And, Jim, in Wisconsin, please,
your last words.
Well, not your last words.
[LAUGHTER]
Your words today.
[LAUGHTER]
JIM DOYLE: Well, I agree with everything
that's just been said.
I had a friend, a European, say to me recently,
whatever happened to your country?
And he went off about how bad everything was.
I said, well, remember, this is a country
that, just a few years ago, you were
cheering because of the election of Barack Obama as president.
And it's not like everybody just suddenly
moved out of this country and a whole new group,
new people moved in.
But what happened is we are a complicated country.
And while we've talked about the problems here,
we are a country of great tolerance
and of acceptance, and in our schools, and churches, and much
of the work that's being done here.
The police officers all across the country
are doing really, really important things on this.
So I'm going to end this if I could just politically,
which is in Wisconsin-- and we weren't unique--
in this last election, in November,
we had more people vote in an off-year election
than at any time since the Second World War
and a massive turnout at presidential levels.
And it was a very, very close vote,
and, I will say the person I wanted to win won
but that's beside the point.
The point is we do have a very, very engaged political world
right now.
And all of the education we've talked
about, the issues of implicit bias,
of tolerance, the more we talk about that in all the ways
we've talked about here today really affect
how current voters and younger people who are going
to be coming voters will vote.
And that's how in a democracy--
back to Professor Williams' comments
about the policies that make the difference-- that's
how we try to make sure the policies
we want are effectuated.
And so it is really critical that we have a very, very
engaged political body and I'll give President Trump
credit for this-- he has truly engaged the American people.
And we are seeing voting turnout like we have never seen before,
and that's a good thing.
And that, politically, is the way you address these issues.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Jim, thank you, and on that note.
And on that note, I want to thank
our panel, Jim, Maureen, Dipayan, you know David,
and Oren.
And I'd like to thank you, our audience,
for taking part in this forum.
Let me mention also something that's coming up
on March 4, another event.
And I'm going to read this.
This is the Dr. Lawrence and Roberta Cohn
forum, it's deaths from pregnancy and childbirth,
why are more US mothers dying and what can be done?
This was also presented jointly by PRI's The World and WGBH.
I'd like to thank you, and I'd like to thank our panel.
Engaging discussion.
There's a lot of work to be done, obviously,
but you've begun that work and you are carrying out
that work every day.
Thank you very much.
And I thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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