RACE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Nonfiction

Civil rights in a petri dish

RACE AND SOCIAL CHANGE:
A Quest, a Study, a Call to Action
By Max Klau

384 pp. Jossey-Bass

Reviewed by Sala Wyman

Developmental psychologist Max Klau begins by asking: What might we learn by carefully observing multiple civil rights movements in a petri dish?  

Deeply embedded in our personal lives are beliefs about race, the order of things and decisions about whether we conform to those beliefs—or not. Klau creates a social petri dish through examining the complex systems of power that continue to feed historically created social divides and are exacerbated by current political rhetoric and actions.  In a sense, he confirms what many of us already know. It’s going to take a lot more than conversations to dismantle systems that create social inequality. 

A former Vice President of Leadership Development at City Year (an Americorp program) and currently the Chief Program Officer at the New Politics Leadership Academy, Klau’s commitment is to help young people change the systems by becoming rigorous and empathetic leaders within those systems. 

Klau grew up in a white middle-class Connecticut suburb. There, like many in a homogeneous world, the information he received about limitations placed on people because of race, gender, or sexual orientation was unavailable. The news, dinner table discussions, and high school studies did not offer him or his peers what they needed to understand the world in a broader social context. 

It was during his doctoral studies in human development and psychology at Harvard that he was drawn to, and became involved with, an organization fostering youth leadership. Camp Anytown was a program that included a learning segment called the Separation Exercise, a simulated civil rights movement. 

After participating in an emotional month-long tour with Black and Jewish adolescents, through historic civil rights sites—Philadelphia, Mississippi; churches of Birmingham, Alabama; Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas; and a trip across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama—and listening to the heart rending stories of students, Klau remarked, “I had no idea.” 

So began his personal quest that led to three years of “developing a rigorous research methodology.” His study included systems racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia from U.S. slavery to Nazi Germany to our current police shootings of unarmed African American men and children. Klau wants us to ask ourselves why we think these systems exist and what can we do to change them. One answer, to which Klau is committed, is in the recruitment and development of youth leadership.

With a thoughtful, personal journey through social justice issues that resulted in a commitment to ensure permanent change through the creation of a methodology for change, empathy, and action, I found someone who is a powerful motivator and change agent. Social change does not happen by reading about it; social change that brings about permanent equality on a multicultural landscape is brought about through action, through civic engagement. A permanent habit of civic engagement can begin with the development of  young leaders.

His research is thorough. He investigates the dynamics of obedience and conformity and the roles they play in the “status quo of unjust systems.” He explores the psychological disconnect between how people in privileged business positions view their relationships to their world and the reality of those complex systems in fostering inequality. Individuals within systems of privilege can easily escape the reality of how those very systems oppress vulnerable populations. 

Racism goes beyond our daily concepts of black and white. Colorism, for example, a phenomenon descended from a legacy of white privilege, is a system in which people with lighter skin are favored—both within and outside of their racial group—to receive more privilege than their darker peers. Klau learned about colorism during a heart-breaking discussion in the  Camp Anytown separation exercises.

Klau does not understate the complexity of social systems and what it takes to change them. It is both a political and spiritual [my term] quest. He writes, “achieving higher consciousness about what is true about race and social change can only occur through the experience that can best be described as a journey of awakening.”

He moves through studies that include Stanley Milgram’s and Solomon Ausch’s experiments in conformity, The Stanford Prison Project (in which college students were divided into  “guards” and “prisoners” with devastating results), and the Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes exercise where elementary children learned the consequences of prejudice through separation into privileged (blue eyes) and non-privileged (brown eyes) groups.

And I like that Klau is unfazed by criticism of his investigations as too formally academic. The book is academic, but with heart. Klau uses his own experiences, social science research, charts and graphs, and quotes from well-known philosophers, writers and politicians. I came away feeling that he wants the reader to understand that social inequality begins with daily decisions of whether or not one will conform to a social system that inherently harms another human being. 

Klau changes systems by opening young hearts and expanding young minds. Klau quotes Nelson Mandela who after 27 years in prison for his war against apartheid, said: 

I was asked as well about the fears of whites. I knew the people expected me to harbor anger towards whites. But I had none. In prison, my anger towards whites decreased, but my hatred for the system grew. I wanted South Africa to see that I loved even my enemies while I hated the system that turned us against one another.

And there’s a personal reason I enjoyed this book. City Year is an AmeriCorps program in which young adults have the opportunity to serve in communities to help reduce the large number of students—particularly those of color—who do not graduate from high school. City Year changes the participants. As a former VISTA Volunteer (Volunteers In Service To America — the domestic antipoverty program founded in 1965), my worldview, like Klau’s in Camp Anytown and the views of City Year participants, was changed forever through civic engagement.

About City Year Klau writes, 

City Year AmeriCorps members serve on highly inclusive teams. Privileged young adults from the suburbs work daily as equals alongside young adults from the community being served, and together they spend the year engaged in intense collaboration focused on effectively serving their students.” It’s a “rigorous, strategic, collaborative, research focused, and data-driven effort to confront a pressing public problem: reducing high school dropout rates.

Social inequality is complex. Healing the racial and social divides is hard work. Klau’s commitment to young leadership in business and politics is a method to effect permanent societal change. I loved the book and think anyone who wants to remold unjust systems should read it.