Real encounters would bridge the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’

Reprinted from At Buffalo

We live in a world of modest changes. Politicians make tweaks to the tax code and refinements to policy. Infrastructure gets patched, successful movies get prequels — and sequels and threequels — and “new and improved” products are usually just more of the same.

For this series, we set aside the idea of incremental improvements and asked eight mem­bers of the UB faculty to think big: If they had unlimited time, money and persuasion techniques, what audacious idea from their fields would they want to implement today?

You might find their bold visions — offering free college classes for prisoners, developing a national call system to fight hackers, requiring everyone to have real conversations with people whose beliefs make their blood boil — amazing or absurd.

But either way, we hope their ideas make you think.

The problem: The refugee crisis

The big idea: Require everyone — particularly political leaders — to have real encounters with people very different from them.

Hilary Weaver is associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Social Work

If I had a magic wand, I would make sure that all of us have meaningful contact with 10 people who have realities that are much different from ours.

We tend to live in very segmented societies, where we have minimal contact with anyone who is significantly different from us. This allows suspicion and fear to breed because we lose sight of our common humanity. Difference becomes value-laden — not the difference between blue and green, but differences that lead us to say that some people are less than others. And that can lead to so many forms of injustice. The crippling effects of racism, for example, affect both the targets of racism and racists.

So I would like to set up encounters with people of different classes, races, sexualities, immigration statuses, abili­ties and spiritualities. What if all of our policymakers had meaningful encoun­ters with refugees and really understood, on a face-to-face basis, what their reality looks like when they have watched family members get killed? Would they think differently?

If we — people of comfortable means — spent time with the poorest of the poor, would we be able to turn a blind eye when we walk down the street and someone asks us for money? Would these kinds of experiences make us more able to make decisions based on compassion rather than fear?

I think this big idea would help bridge the gap between “us” and “them,” and bring about really powerful changes in the world.