The Quality of Interactions When Race Isn't A Factor

As anti-racism enters the lingua franca, and we now have events such as this Scholar Strike for Racial Justice, it occurred to me that we should take inventory about our interactions when race isn't a factor,  but then possibly also consider interactions where race is a factor but the interactions go reasonably well.  I will focus on the former in this post, but briefly consider the latter near the end of the post.

There is a sucker born every minute.
P.T. Barnum?

The question mark following the attribution comes from the story here about the Cardiff Giant. I chose it to lead off because it seems so apropos of now. In a simplified view of reality based on this quote, society is divided between the takers and the suckers.  Interactions between the two are based on flim-flam and have a predatory aspect.  When I teach this in class I refer to the taker as a snake oil salesman.  For now, I just want to treat it as a category.  When we have a sufficient number of categories, then we can ask how our interactions distribute over them.  The inventory I have in mind would do this over a wide variety of people but still be restricted to where race differences are not present.

A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.
Bernard Meltzer found here

An opposite extreme to the taker-sucker interactions is found in interactions between true friends.  These are what you live for.  They are enjoyable and give meaning to your life.   If as a student you have good friends at school, it is so much easier for you.  Ditto for when you have good friends at work.

Before I wave my hands about all the interactions that fall in between these two extremes, I want to do a tiny bit of theory.  We should separate out one-off transactions from repeat interactions.  At the time of the initial transaction the participants might not know whether there will be repetitions in the future or not.   Consequently, the quality of that first transaction matters a great deal for determining this outcome. I've written many times about valuing a collegial work environment.  In such an environment colleagues are treated as friends and interactions include both real work and playful non-work stuff. Further, collegiality requires that when there is a potential new colleague to treat the person as a true colleague right off the bat.

Most of the time that's how it plays out, in my experience.  However, there are some people I'd classify as jerks, rather than colleagues.  It may take a while for that to reveal, but once it does the interactions are to be avoided, if possible, or to be tolerated but not embraced, if avoidance is not possible.  Now, combining the two extremes, it is possible that a taker masquerades as a colleague until the moment is ripe.  It is also possible that someone who has been a good colleague turns into a taker, if circumstances force that.

For economic transactions, I think these categories and possible hybrids are sufficient. So, for example, whenever I poll my students about their prior experience with group work, invariably they will report some dissatisfaction with such work because one or more of the group members were free riders on the efforts of the other members of the group. The stories of this sort are commonplace for me. But I don't have a good sense about the relative numbers of those who do their share of the group work versus those who free ride.  I also am ignorant about whether the free riding is just an indicator of immaturity and that as the student matures the student accepts the need to do their share of the work, or if the free rider is a personality type that persists.   But it is more complex than this.  I've learned over the past few years that students with emotional problems will sometimes look like free riders in group work, yet they are totally unlike those who are simply being lazy. As students are often not forthcoming with their peers about their emotional issues, it may be hard to tell one situation from another.

Let us consider a different sort of interaction, within groups where the focus is to come to some group decision, but that decision is not necessarily about economics.   Group dynamics may feature factions with the group.  Those factions might engage in rather intense politics about group decisions.  The Economics department at Illinois was intensely political that way when I first joined it back in fall 1980.  Though I did get caught up in  the politics for quite a while, I found much of it ugly, mean, and dispiriting.

It is also possible for friction within smaller groups to occur because of what Argyris and Schon call Model 1.  A member of the group has a strongly felt need to win at all costs, thereby proving to himself that he was right all along, yet possibly creating harsh conflict with other members of the group as a consequence.  The other members get discouraged and either want to leave the group themselves or purge the group of the so-called leader.  I've had experiences of this sort both with campus committees and with volunteer groups outside the university that I've been part of.  But I've also experienced quite wonderful groups that have a strong sense of collegiality among all members.  As before, we'd like to know the relative frequency of the different type of interactions.   In my own experience, after I moved from economics to ed tech, the politics lessened in intensity a good deal, though was never entirely absent.

One last type of interaction to consider is negligence fueled by being oblivious to the situation.  As I'm writing this post, a friend in Facebook posted about teens blaring music from their car while she was trying to get some sleep, then not being able to do that so going outside, knocking on their car window, and complaining to them.  Mixing metaphors in a way I probably shouldn't, at issue is whether obliviousness of this sort remains in some people well after they've reached adulthood and/or for the particular type of interaction caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) should be the message that the recipient heeds.  Driving on the highway features this type of interaction with some frequency.  More recently, one might consider wearing a mask or not in public during the pandemic as an example in this category.

I'm not making a category for ordinary interactions that happen with no incident.  For me, going to the supermarket typifies this sort of transaction.  The person running the cash register and the other person bagging the groceries do their job.  After I make payment they invariably say, "Have a nice day."  There is something comforting in the sameness of these sort of transactions, but they will get no further attention here.

The task then, is for each of us to go through the categories and do a rough tabulation of the frequency of the good transactions and the bad.  This should be done twice, first as recipient, then as perpetrator.  As Argyris and Schon point out, we have espoused theories (in which we are never the perpetrator) and theories in action (where we sometimes are the perpetrator).  Or, if you prefer, there is the delightful song Kids from the musical Bye Bye Birdie.  (Why can't they be like we were, perfect in every way?)  This suggests there will be substantial under reporting of ourselves as perpetrator. But that's a start.  And it means that a more thorough form of data gathering would require going beyond self-reporting and require people to report about others in their group interactions as well as in their bilateral interactions.

Now I want to briefly try to line these categories up with racism.  This is purely guesswork, but I hope it is not entirely unreasonable. Takers are racists.  Suckers can be made into racists by propaganda.  I dare say much of our politics are about this.  People who are fundamentally collegial are prone to be anti-racist, as are Model 2 leaders.  Model 1 leaders, in contrast, are more apt to be racist.  Racism by negligence, as distinct from racism by intent, is possible for people in all the categories.  But if anti-racism training is targeted at the negligence form of racism, it will fail with those who are not collegial and who hold Model 1 as their theory in action

I want to close with a little bit of experience of mixed-race interaction which I observed by listening.  My wife, who worked in campus HR until she retired last week, had many many meetings conducted online after the stay-at-home-orders were put in place.  Her habit was to use the speaker from her computer rather than use headphones.  I could hear much of the conversation this way.  Often the subject matter was quite serious and difficult to navigate. Yet collegiality was preserved throughout these meetings, even though the days got long, with some calls ending well after 6 PM.  And a point I'd like to raise here is that there was a lot of laughter and humor.  Much of that was situational, though a bit was also deliberate.  Dealing with one stressful situation after another, humor seems to be the glue that keeps things together.  And the people evidently had high regard for each other.  Even when they disagreed, the fact that they knew each other so well and trusted each other was how they navigated these matters.  Further, there were also some errors made by one person making a false assumption, because the volume of information was huge and it was hard to process it all.  In this sense collegiality also provided error checking that individuals simply couldn't do.  Misunderstandings were cleared up before they had a chance to multiply and create real difficulties.  Though I'm very glad my wife is retired now, it was inspiring to hear these interactions on a regular basis.  It's how all of us should interact.

My own direct interaction in a mixed-race setting these days is mainly with my primary care doctor.  I don't see him that frequently, for which I'm grateful. When I do see him, race is completely a non-issue.  That's the way I'd prefer it to be.  I wonder if we'll ever get there for the society as a whole.