On a road trip this summer I heard a TED Radio Hour episode which talked about the potential for breaking through to people with diametrically opposed views. I was struck by the story of Megan Phelps-Roper, who was a hateful, outspoken member of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church (she is the granddaughter of the church's founder, the late Fred Phelps.) She actually came to change her views entirely, and leave the church, and her turnabout was largely the result of a few folks who patiently debated her on Twitter of all places. Here is her 15-minute TED talk — truly worth watching! — where she talks about her experience and offers 4 rules of thumb for productive dialogue, based on the methods used by the people who turned her around.
The radio program also mentioned the fascinating case of African American civil rights leader Xernona Clayton, who regularly and civilly spoke her truth to Calvin Craig, a KKK Grand Dragon. He eventually left the Klan and credited Clayton with having changed his views. Here is an article on this.
When I remarked about the TED show to a Daily Kos friend, she mentioned the case of documentary filmmaker Deeyah Khan, a Muslim woman and self-described “lefty liberal” who interviewed white supremacists and jihadists in her films White Right: Meeting the Enemy and Jihad: A Story of the Others. Here’s part of a remarkable interview with her on Vox:
I want to be clear: I don’t think it’s the responsibility of persecuted people, or abused people, or oppressed people, to have to “reform” extremists. I don’t think it’s their burden. I don’t think it’s people of color’s job to have to do that. What I’m saying is this is something that I wanted to try. I was personally curious, and I am really surprised and heartened by how it went.
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I was actually very pessimistic when I began these projects. I just wanted to try something I had never tried before. It was never a consideration or a possibility that what happened would actually happen — that any of them would like me and that I would like them, that we would actually get along, that somebody would use the word “friend” for me.
I never believed I would remain friends with any of these white supremacists, that some of them would walk away from their movement after we interacted. But that’s what happened, and I still can’t quite believe it. If you would’ve told me that when I started, I would’ve laughed at you, but here we are.
Khan is not wearing blinders. She is quite frank that some of the men she met are extremely dangerous, irredeemable thugs who threatened to murder her. While not all extremist can fundamentally change their views and abandon their hateful bigotries — some can.
All of these extremists want us to give up, to fear each other and them, to become more divided. And they don’t want us to be kind, or to show empathy, or to organize, or to vote, or to do any of that.
So we have to become active citizens and active human beings, and no matter what happens, we cannot afford to give up on each other. That means even people that we disagree with and people that we dislike. In fact, it matters more. It’s easy for me to like you. It’s easy for me to be nice to you because we probably see the world fairly similarly. That’s easy. That’s not when our principles really matter.
So here’s what I think is the takeaway from these intriguing cases:
The next time you encounter someone online (or, say, someone at your Thanksgiving table) who is expressing a view that you know is wrong — keep in mind that if even Klansmen and Westboro Baptist Church radicals can sometimes be made to see the light — then the odds must be even better that you could change hearts and minds of some folks who are not radicals by engaging with them civilly.
If you diss a person — for example, in an online forum like this one, if you just dismiss someone by posting a meme, rather than straightforwardly arguing your point with them — what have you accomplished? You may feel momentarily superior, that you’ve “owned” the person — but really it’s just the opposite: you haven’t scored a victory, you’ve lost an opportunity to change that person’s mind. And not only that person, but potentially others: if you convert someone to your position, they may then help to bring others along.
Even in this forum where we’re all on the same side of the aisle, we’re often rude instead of civil, we talk past each other instead of to each other, and therefore miss opportunities to persuade even our natural allies to rethink their positions. We can do better! Here’s a gratifying personal example of successful dialogue not long ago with a Daily Kos member who completely disagreed with me — at first.
I think you’ll find the satisfaction you’ll gain from actually changing someone’s mind — like in that example I just linked to — will be much, much greater than what you’ll gain from dissing them with a clever, cutting remark or a sarcastic meme.