Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the 10th in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."
National elections in the United States tend to spark talk of “red” and “blue” America — two parallel nations divided by geography and politics, with rural and central states trending Republican and coastal and urban areas voting for Democrats.
This shorthand obscures as much as it reveals, of course. There are many blue voters in red states, and vice versa. Indeed, there is some research to suggest that the very creation of red- and blue-colored voting maps leads people to overestimate the extent of American political polarization.
Monica Harris, the author of “The Illusion of Division,” agrees that “Americans are profoundly divided by partisan politics, race, gender identity, vaccination status, and an assortment of labels that keep us fixated on our differences.” But Harris believes these divisions are illusory: “The media and political establishment amplify this division by focusing on fringe voices on the right and the left, ignoring the vast majority of sensible Americans in the center who agree on ‘big picture’ problems and solutions.”
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Harris has been seeking to bridge the divides in American life through her writing and by leading the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. FAIR was founded as a critique of the anti-racism curricula introduced into many American schools in the aftermath of the slaying of George Floyd. Instead of focusing on racial differences, FAIR seeks to advance “pro-human” values by promoting open discourse and advocating on behalf of free speech.
I spoke with Harris about how she came to lead FAIR, what’s really dividing us, and why race relations in the United States have gotten off track. This transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Greg Berman: You wrote a book about the illusion of division in this country. What's the argument?
Monica Harris: Let me start by backing up. I’m someone who's Black and female and gay. I grew up in Southern California. Someone who looks like me, that kind of person is typically, I think, branded as progressive, especially in California. I graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law in the ’80s and early ’90s. So that further solidified my identity. And after I graduated, I went into entertainment law. For the lion's share of my adult career, I worked in Hollywood for various networks, from Walt Disney to Viacom. I was the quintessential progressive for many years.
But to make a long story short, about 14 years ago I had an epiphany that prompted me to make a radical lifestyle change. I took a trip with my family to Montana and we stayed in a little town, just outside of Yellowstone.
We were there for about a week — no Wi-Fi reception, just my partner and our extended family. I didn't think about anything except being present and absorbing the natural beauty and interacting with my family and friends. And it was just such a nourishing experience. On the way home, I told my partner, "God, we've never really seen Montana. Let's explore the rest of it."
And so here we are, an interracial family with our biracial child, and we're driving through Montana and we stop in all of these little towns. I was expecting, given my identity, to be treated a certain way as a Black person, as a gay woman, when I went into these towns that were 99 percent white. And what blew me away is that I connected with these people. They were treating me like I wasn't different at all.
I left that trip thinking not only did I feel comfortable there, but I could actually imagine myself living there. About a year and a half later, my partner and I decided to move to Montana. We sold everything and we bought a 20-acre ranch at the foot of the Continental Divide.
GB: What kind of reaction did you get from your friends back in California?
MH: A lot of people were kind of stunned: "Montana, what are you thinking? That’s not your tribe. I mean, you know they vote mostly Republican. You know they have guns there. Montana's not friendly to gay people.”
That reaction — that’s what I call the illusion of division. There's this idea that people who don't vote the way we do, who don't look the way we do, who don't share our lifestyle … that they're people we can't communicate with. They're people we can't exchange ideas with. They're people who don't share our values in any respect. That's the illusion.
After my time living here as a classically blue person transported to a red state, I've come to realize that even though we are different in so many ways, what we're ignoring are the ways in which we are so similar, our common values and interests. What we have in common is far more important than what separates us. We just don't realize it because our media constantly reminds us of how we’re different and because the people we elect constantly remind us how we're different.
GB: You have said that we are living in a culture of outrage. What's driving this culture?
MH: This is not a news flash, but I think our media are driving the culture of outrage. In my book, I write about a “Hidden Brain” podcast episode that I was listening to. A woman was talking about how she had seen a video of a Native American gentleman who was being taunted by these young white kids on the mall in Washington, D.C. And she tweeted out a comment that was something like, "White supremacy on display again, this is horrible what they're doing to this poor indigenous man." And she got a lot of likes and that made her feel good.
But then her son brought to her attention, “Hey, Mom, I don't think you've seen the full video.” And as it turns out, when she saw the unedited version, there was much more backstory. These kids had been taunted by another group, I think it was the Black Israelites, and they had been harassed, and the Native American man was trying to break it up, and they lashed out at him for getting involved. Anyway, the point was that the initial video was totally taken out of context. And the woman in the interview instantly felt ashamed. But when she tried to post this on social media to explain what really happened, people weren't welcoming. Actually, the response was more along the lines of, "How dare you give comfort to the enemy? Why are you backing down? Why are you giving racists an excuse to be racist by giving some insight on the context of this encounter?"
All of that is an example of the culture of outrage. Not only are we compelled tribally to support outrage, but when we even attempt to bring ourselves back from outrage, we're discouraged from doing it. Others won't let us retreat. Nowadays, we can express ourselves any way we want on social media. And if we're wrong, like this woman in “Hidden Brain” was wrong in her assessment, there's no cost. There's no penalty. I think that's a big reason why the culture of outrage has flourished.
GB: Let’s talk a little bit about race, which has always been a fault line in American society. I recently saw some polling data from Gallup that showed, for many years, fairly stable and positive views among both Black and white survey respondents about the quality of race relations in the United States. And then it just goes off a cliff around 2015. Today, the majority of both Black and white Americans have a negative view of race relations.
MH: I don't think the timing is coincidental. That was literally the year before Donald Trump was elected. And I think anyone paying attention to that presidential campaign could see that Trump, rightly or wrongly, was being labeled a white supremacist and a racist. Which is somewhat ironic since, as far as I've seen, most of Trump’s racist comments were directed towards immigrants. His comments really weren't directed towards Black people, but it was Black people who expressed the greatest outrage.
Trump tapped into a sense of historical outrage stemming back to the legacy of slavery. That's a wound that we as Black people have had for centuries that has never truly healed, for obvious reasons. During those years when it seemed like race relations were progressing, the wound was healing, but like with any wound, it doesn't take much to make it bleed again. I think that's what happened in 2015 — there were very opportunistic parties that started scratching at that wound. And it didn't take long for blood to flow.
As a member of Gen X, I was part of the first generation that reaped the benefits of integration. I didn't go to school accompanied by the National Guard like people in my mother's generation. I was able to mingle with my white peers, other students. I studied beside them, and it felt organic to us. There was still racism that I experienced, but it was nothing like what my parents experienced.
I think we do ourselves a disservice when we continue to remind Black people that we're still struggling with systemic racism and that America is inherently racist. Black Americans in 2024 have really made profound strides since 1964 when the civil rights movement was in full swing. We are not where we need to be, but we are getting closer. I think the pitfall that people often succumb to these days is that we're not appreciating our progress. We're focusing on our failures.
GB: Speaking of generational divides, you wrote in Quillette that there is a generational schism in terms of how people think about diversity. What are the millennials and the Gen Zers getting wrong and what are they getting right when it comes to diversity?
MH: The millennials, and Gen Z as well, have not only come to take integration for granted, but I think they also have also embraced a very distorted form of diversity. As a Gen Xer, I was raised in a climate in which diversity wasn't just race and sex and gender. It also contemplated class. It also contemplated political perspective and geographic diversity. All of these were forms of diversity that contributed to, particularly on campuses, a very textured way of looking at people as individuals and interacting with them and learning from each other.
I think what's different today is that Gen Y and Gen Z seem to view diversity through a very narrow lens of race, gender, sex and maybe ableism. But they seem to be completely disregarding some equally important aspects of diversity. And I personally believe that class is probably the most important issue today in America. I think it even supersedes race. A lot of Black people are struggling not because of their race, but because of the class they were born into. But I'm Black. I'm living in a state that's mostly white, and my standard of living is higher than the average white person in Montana. And that's solely based on my education and class.
Even if we got rid of racism overnight, even if tomorrow every one of us woke up and we were the same color and we couldn't distinguish between each other physically, we would still have an enormous problem in this country relating to class. There are generations of people who have been cut out of the American dream because they lack access to education and decent-paying jobs. Their families are being torn apart by drug addiction. That's something that we don't talk about nearly as much as we should. The fentanyl crisis is affecting white families more than Black families. And again, not wealthy white families. It's mostly middle-class and working-class families.
Gen Ys and Gen Zs are focused on the power and oppression model. The error, in my opinion, is that people are projecting this power and oppression model onto other groups of people who are also being oppressed. I think that's one of the big blind spots that the younger generation has now. They have a lot of legitimate anger towards the condition of society, but I think it's misdirected. Class is the elephant in the room. That's the kind of diversity that I think needs far more attention right now.
GB: Have you seen the book “White Rural Rage”? It basically argues that rural white people are a unique threat to American democracy. I’m wondering how much evidence of that rage you see as you go about your life in Montana?
MH: I do see white rural rage. But to be clear, that rage is against the machine, not against Black people. I almost fall prey to that rage myself sometimes. It's rage against the inequities in the system.
The source of white rural rage is class. It is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone who's paying attention that elite and corporate interests have dominated our government and are dominating our economy.
I actually think that rural white people were some of the first to pick up on what's happening because they were affected sooner than anyone else. For example, upper middle class white-collar workers didn't see the effects that NAFTA had on working- and middle-class Americans. They weren't working in factories, they weren't doing work with their hands. They weren't farmers. But white people in rural America — they felt those effects immediately. Their lifestyles changed. They took a huge drop down in socioeconomic status.
But I don’t think rage is confined to white rural America. My perception is that rage is spilling over into white suburban rage, white urban rage, Black urban rage. It's a general rage. Every day I meet more Black people who are just as outraged by inflation, who are just as outraged by the endless wars, who are just as outraged by our pharmaceutical industry. These people are waking up and they're angry. So yeah, I would say that I've seen white rural rage, but there's no way I would confine it to that environment. It is much broader.
GB: I want to talk a little bit about the Gaza protests on campus. What kind of long-term impact do you think they will have? On the one hand, I think that they have been incredibly divisive. On the other, I think that they have actually upset the apple cart in some interesting ways — for example, encouraging some people on the left who had previously been supportive of the idea of aggressively policing speech to see the value of free speech protections.
MH: Among people who are free speech purists like myself, I think there's some concern that this new tolerance of free speech may be opportunistic and driven more by convenience than out of a sincere belief in the principles of freedom of expression. I question how people on college campuses can on Oct. 6 insist that speech must be restricted — or compelled, in many ways, in terms of people being compelled to use pronouns in class — and then on Oct. 7, you do a 180 and you completely embrace free speech.
I think that a true commitment to free speech must encompass the people you don't agree with. And I think the jury is still out as to whether the kids on campus now who are supporting free speech are doing it only because it benefits them. I think we have yet to see whether that commitment will last once the Gaza protests are over. I have my doubts.
GB: In a similar vein, I wanted to ask about Donald Trump, who I think is a uniquely divisive figure. The current polling data suggests that Trump is going to outperform any Republican candidate in a long time with Black voters, and perhaps with other minority groups as well. So I think it is possible to make the case that Trump, in a weird way, is actually driving depolarization, at least in certain respects.
MH: Wow, I had never thought of it that way. But I think you're right. I think what Trump may be doing, unwittingly even, is that he's taking the white rural rage that fueled his election in 2016, and he's expanding it. Weirdly enough, he’s making a lot of Americans, across the socioeconomic and political spectrum, aware of their common frustrations. I think that's very threatening to powerful interests.
I didn't vote for Donald Trump. I'm an independent, but there's a part of me that wonders if the greatest opposition to Donald Trump is not because he's sexist or racist or whatever else, but because he is one of the few candidates in modern history to actually focus on the most important issue in this country today, which is class. Now, Donald Trump doesn't specifically call out class. I don't think he's articulate enough to even express that. But I think he's paying attention to something that, unfortunately, I don't think Joe Biden and the Democrats are really looking at. They just aren't.
GB: Lots of people are now saying that we need to scrap DEI. Just to put my cards on the table, it's hard for me to imagine that we're going to step away from the concept of diversity. That seems like a fundamental thing that we should want to hold on to. Is there a way to do DEI programming that makes sense and that doesn’t engender enormous backlash?
MH: At FAIR, we believe the country was driving along with the car doing pretty well with a certain set of wheels. We took these wheels off and we put DEI wheels on. All we need to do is take these DEI wheels off and put on the wheels we had before.
For the past 20 to 30 years, corporate America had diversity trainings. They weren't DEI trainings — they were simply called diversity trainings. We were brought into rooms, and we were instructed, "All right, this is how you deal with someone who may come from a different ethnic background, from a religious background, someone who's handicapped, someone who's Republican. Someone who may have grown up in a super, super small town and doesn't have the same values you do having grown up in New York. We all have to work together, and we can do it."
The old-school diversity training was more about bridge-building, whereas DEI seems more about wall-building. So I think we just need to get back to the kind of diversity initiatives that we once had.
The greatest danger I see is that the DEI branding threatens to undermine all diversity. And diversity is the lifeblood of this country. I mean, we are a nation founded on immigration. We benefit from that immigration. It makes us, I think, the most special country in the world. I think it's enabled so much innovation, culturally and technologically. It is our blessing and our curse. Because when you're a heterogeneous country, it's also hard to remember what you have in common.
But to your point, we can't get rid of diversity. We at FAIR believe we simply need to return to a more authentic and holistic form of diversity and inclusion. The biggest problem that we at FAIR have with DEI is the equity component. I think “equity,” in a vacuum, means justice and fairness. But the way it's being construed now is a very distorted interpretation of equity that essentially means that in order for some people to have more, or in order for some people to succeed, others must be brought down. It's a sort of leveling, of bringing people down to the lowest common denominator. And it doesn't allow for excellence. And it doesn't reward the ambitious. And I think that those are part and parcel of the American experience.
So equity to me is antithetical to everything America stands for. There's a reason that DEI isn't called diversity, equality and inclusion. Equality is what we at FAIR support — equality of opportunity. We are not guaranteed success. Life is not guaranteed to be fair. And our government can't guarantee that it will be fair in all respects. The only thing that we can and should be assured of is equal treatment and equal opportunity. So we support diversity, we support equality, we support inclusion, but not DEI in its current form.
GB: FAIR is a fairly new organization that has already been through some ups and downs. How is FAIR doing, and what role do you see it playing going forward?
MH: I became executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism last October. The reason I was attracted to this organization is that it's nonpartisan, and it's dedicated to protecting and defending civil liberties on multiple fronts through legal channels.
We're similar to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, but where FIRE protects the First Amendment, we protect the First and the 14th mmendments, that's free speech and equal protection. So that's the niche that FAIR fills. I like to say we're what the ACLU was intended to be, and once was, but no longer is. Our mission at FAIR is helping people understand and appreciate our common culture, interests, and values as Americans.
I think that FAIR's future is bright because there’s a real need for the work we're doing around depolarization and advancing and defending civil liberties when they're under fire. I think realizing that we are all human, and that our biggest challenges are ones that affect all of us, is the key to moving forward and to reversing a lot of the damage that's been done in this country.
This article originally appeared on HFG.org and has been republished with permission.
