When you think about it, all our problems can be explained by George Washington’s teeth.
As we’ll see, those famous chompers provide a surprising entrypoint to the cognitive impasse we seem to be facing around race, wealth, history, and power. People’s varied interpretations of the Capitol insurrection on January 6 are only the most recent example, and you don’t need to be a social scientist to see that facts alone rarely help resolve those tensions.
Here’s another case from recent history. In a new essay adapted from her book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” Heather McGhee, a former policy wonk at the progressive think tank Demos, recalled a time when the forgotten history of race and privilege made policy discussions particularly disheartening.
When faced with a deeply damaged economy in 2010, her policy peers — pushed toward a “grand bargain” by the Tea Party and Obama administration alike — rejected investments in favor of massive cuts to the kinds of government programs and services with a track record of lifting up the vulnerable middle class. To her, the dissonance was deafening:
On a call with a group of all-white economist colleagues, we discussed how to advise leaders in Washington against this disastrous retrenchment. I cleared my throat and asked: “So where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class, and they paid for themselves in economic growth? Now these guys are trying to fundamentally renege on the deal for a future middle class that would be majority people of color?”
Nobody answered. I checked to see if I was muted.
Finally, one of the economists breached the awkward silence. “Well, sure, Heather. We know that — and you know that — but let’s not lead with our chin here,” he said. “We are trying to be persuasive.”
Trouble is, we can’t just stop believing what we believe, whether it’s about trickle-down economics, or whether Black patients feel less pain, or the effect of immigration on the U.S. economy. Persuasion is just as hard: when we try to defend our own beliefs to others, people typically dig in their heels.
And here’s the part about the teeth, via a delightful explainer comic about beliefs drawn by Matthew Inman, the best-selling author, illustrator, and philosopher-artist behind The Oatmeal. (He may be best known for his New York Times bestselling collection, How To Tell If Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You.) In this strip, Inman explores what’s known as the backfire effect, documented via an experiment that involved using an MRI machine. Bottom line: when we encounter facts counter to our deeply held beliefs, our brains feel it as a physical attack.
This is where Washington’s dentures come in handy.
If you’re an American with vaguely warm feelings toward the myth of George Washington — the “father of our country” who may or may not have written the Constitution — then you probably snickered when you first heard that his dentures were made of wood. Times were tough back then! He powered through.
But what if you learned a new fact: that a 2005 scan revealed that they were really made of a bunch of materials, like gold, lead, ivory, and horse teeth. Inman asks you to consider: “How did it feel to learn this new fact about George Washington’s teeth?” Because it fundamentally changes little about your idea of him, “presumably your belief in the composition of George Washington’s teeth has changed with little or no friction.”
So, what happens when you learn that Washington also had a set of teeth that had been taken from the mouths of enslaved people? (He did.) That’s a little bit more work, isn’t it?
To become better able to have difficult conversations, we need to have a better handle on ourselves. “The point,” Inman says, “is to give you an emotional barometer of how you feel when presented with new ideas.” This barometer will help you understand the late-night compulsion to fight on the internet, the strong reaction to “cancel culture,” and tense holiday dinners, among many other things.
But it also gives you a tool to survive tough conversations with competing ideas. How to persuade other people? Harder to say. Maybe a comic will help.
Inman credits a three-part series on the backfire effect from the excellent You Are Not So Smart Podcast as his source, and I recommend checking out the whole thing to learn more. But his comic explainer is an emotionally accessible reminder that while it’s okay to be human, it’s better to evolve.
“I’m not here to take control of the wheel, or to tell you what to believe,” he writes. “I’m just here to tell you that it’s okay to stop. To listen. To change.”
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On point
Will the real estate industry ever address its role in the racial wealth gap? This is the question asked by two analysts from Brookings, who note that while lenders and donors are abandoning Trump’s businesses and by extension, his political apparatus, they have yet to do the same with industry practices. “Lenders’ separation from Trump is a recognition that financial support enabled his anti-democratic behaviors,” writes “Brookings Fellows Tracy Hadden Loh and Andre M. Perry. However, the real estate industry has been complicit in white supremacy and racial discrimination long before Trump took office. Will the repudiation of Trump lead to a wider reckoning?”
Brookings
English football is at a breaking point The online abuse — hate speech, slurs, threats— has gotten so bad that leaders in the sport have banded together to make it stop. In an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, officials from the English Football Association, the Premier League, Women’s Super League and the organizations representing players, managers and referees made it plain. “Your inaction has created the belief in the minds of the anonymous perpetrators that they are beyond reach,” and that their platforms are “havens for abuse.” Is a digital media boycott next?
AP News
What we’ve learned from the year of the ‘Karen’ Looking back, 2020 was the year that a persistent meme — that of an interfering white woman calling the police, or otherwise harassing people of color — became a window into America’s racist feminine Id. “We as a culture have adopted this stance that white women are more virtuous and not complicit in upholding racism in particular,” Apryl Williams, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan tells writer Julia Carrie Wong. “They just sort of go along with it, but they’re not conscious actors. The Karen meme says, no, they are conscious actors. These are deliberate actions. They are complicit. And I think that’s why it strikes a nerve with people.”
The Guardian
On Background
The U.S. has a more complex history than most people seem to realize Historians, researchers, and writers have been working overtime to help provide the much-needed context to explain the moment we’re in and why it shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s worth reading and sharing widely, for at least one simple reason: they are the best answers to the “can we just move on?” argument. In this piece, Paul Musgrave makes it plain: We are doomed to relive racist resentment and violence because we never connect the dots. “As debates over how to understand Jan. 6, 2021 demonstrate, until recently most practicing American social scientists reflexively dismissed such events as incidental, regrettable exceptions to a democratic, rule-based system.”
Foreign Policy
A stolen slave auction plaque and an unexpected confession People don’t read the plaques, until they do. This is the tale of how a small plaque embedded in the ground of Charlottesville’s central Court Square came to represent a bigger story about what gets remembered and who gets admired. The plaque commemorated the “slave auction block,” barely noticeable in the shadow of Confederate monuments. When it was stolen last year, people assumed it was white supremacist shenanigans. It was not. And then the hole in the brick pavement was filled with another, much better plaque. Enjoy.
Washington Post
Women of color are tired y’all. Can you guess why? Sayu Bhojwani, a writer and advocate, is unflinching in her answer. “Women of color leaders are guarding a dirty little secret — our work is eroding our mental, physical and emotional health,” she begins. “We are slowly wrecking ourselves as we try to transform political organizations, foundations, media rooms, nonprofits, the publishing industry.” And it’s just getting worse. She explores our own complicity, which I admit, was painful. But it ends in a good place. “But we can’t keep playing a game in which the rules are rigged against us,” she says. “Instead, we must commit to valuing ourselves and our time in ways that feel uncomfortable at first but can lead to a shift in culture more generally…”
Medium
The marshmallow test gets roasted The marshmallow test was an important piece of social science research in the 1960s, believed to measure the ability to delay gratification and predict future success. It was simple: Place a marshmallow in front of a child and instruct her that she is free to eat that one now, but if she waits fifteen minutes, she can have two. The kids who can manage to hold out were once believed to have brighter futures. Turns out the original study was based on only 90 kids, enrolled in a preschool on the Stanford campus – and a follow-up showed that the marshmallow gobblers did no worse long term. A more recent study expanded the cohort to 900 more economically diverse kids, and a new interpretation emerged: For kids from poorer homes, eating the marshmallow in front of them may have been the smart choice.
The Atlantic
raceAhead is edited by David Z. Morris
Today's mood board
Narrator: It was not, in fact, New York's A$AP Rocky watching the Houston Rockets from courtside. Some investigators considered the Astro World cap a clue to this completely unknown mystery man's true identity, but perhaps we'll never know.