This was fascinating to read! I know that you’re writing from an American context, and while a lot of what you say has echoes in countries like Britain, would you know of similar references that are applicable to the British context? One of the major factors here is the nasty undercurrent of racism that flows in this country - that’s what delivered the Brexit vote, for example. I don’t know enough about America to know how large a factor it is for you, but I suspect that it’s considerable. - Therefore, it’s possible that many of the social factors relevant in the analyses you mention might also be partially relevant here. Anyway, I look forward to reading more from you!
Whoops, looks like I spoke too soon. Here's an interesting study from 2021 I just came across that speaks to my other comment about more direct connections to people from other backgrounds.
Here's the abstract - "Can exposure to celebrities from stigmatized groups reduce prejudice? To address this question, we study the case of Mohamed Salah, a visibly Muslim, elite soccer player. Using data on hate crime reports throughout England and 15 million tweets from British soccer fans, we find that after Salah joined Liverpool F.C., hate crimes in the Liverpool area dropped by 16% compared with a synthetic control, and Liverpool F.C. fans halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets relative to fans of other top-flight clubs. An original survey experiment suggests that the salience of Salah’s Muslim identity enabled positive feelings toward Salah to generalize to Muslims more broadly. Our findings provide support for the parasocial contact hypothesis—indicating that positive exposure to out-group celebrities can spark real-world behavioral changes in prejudice." https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/can-exposure-to-celebrities-reduce-prejudice-the-effect-of-mohamed-salah-on-islamophobic-behaviors-and-attitudes/A1DA34F9F5BCE905850AC8FBAC78BE58
This is lovely. Mo Salah is a massively popular member of the Liverpool team. I remember, at the worst times of Islamophobia here, that Liverpool fans would chant “I want to be Muslim too” because of Mo Salah. He’s a lovely example of how sporting success, especially in a popular working-class game like football (what you call soccer) can be a real force for positive change.
Thank you for the kind words! Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with the British context. You'd do well to verify this, but I believe I read a little while ago that London accounts for a huge amount of the non-white population in the whole country, so potentially the context could be quite different.
There is a lot of racism in the U.S., but my experience growing up in a mostly white state and then living and teaching in a very diverse state has been that the more and earlier that people interact with folks from different backgrounds, the less racism is able to take hold. I believe this is because they have real experiences with people to compare to racist tropes/narratives they might hear.
There are certainly rural areas in the U.S. with very few immigrants, but I think overall the U.S. is much more heterogeneous than Britain, and being much larger can vary a lot state to state. That's a long-winded way to say I don't really know, but I'd love to hear if you come across anything.
London has a massively cosmopolitan population and there are hundreds of London natives who don’t have English as a first language. It also used to be, in the 60s and early 70s, a place where dustmen and high court judges might be living next door to each other. Sadly, the city is much more segregated by class, but by no means completely. There is a much more cooperative and tolerant spirit here, and it’s very different from the rest of Britain. The worst places are suburban small towns that are self-satisfied and don’t have much contact with outsiders. These people, moving into London from the suburbs are dreadful. Proper Londoners are lovely - not that I’m biased, being a Londoner myself, but still!
Strange you talk about "out-of-towners" and "inner-city dwellers". When my brother lived in Paris, which used to have the vehicle registration mark "75" (as the 75th département) he advised always to watch out for the cars bearing the registration marks 92, 93, 95, whatever. These are the "banlieues" - the out-of-towners. They tended always to be more assertive, more raffish, more self-confident. When I lived in Düsseldorf (registration "D"), the same tendencies could be noted with vehicles driven by those from "NE" - Neuss, across the river Rhine. Düsseldorf = money, Neuss = boy racers. I say this in relation to vehicles, because in those two cases, you can identify the owner by their registration mark (that's not always so in London), but I think that this is a tendency in all major cities, as between the real city-dwellers and the peripheral out-of-towners. And why? Your guess is a good as mine, but it could be that one set has something to try and prove, and the other doesn't.
Thank you. It's a lot, and I need to come back and read it again but wanted to respond to your opening, because it's a thing that I've recently written about myself and I'm not sure if I'm right.
Here's my own essay: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/old-schoolmasters-old-truths. Its precept is "Everyone knows everything" because our own knowledge when contrasted with the knowledge of others is at best a clash of opinion. Definitive knowledge is - I want to contend - very rare.
What you say about gravity is predicated on the theory of gravity being right. In that sense, I don't know if it's right or not. I assume it's right because people who I respect - scientists and encyclopaedias and schoolteachers - tell me that's the way it is. But I only know the theory of gravity because OTHER PEOPLE know the theory of gravity. That puts an interesting slant on pretty much everything I know: I know it because someone else knows it. That means most of my knowledge is in fact based on hearsay, and hearsay is one source of evidence that is treated with scant respect by courts of law, and I find that interesting. We demand that courts base their judgment on primary evidence, and we ourselves base the vast majority of our judgments on secondary evidence - hearsay.
What you say about feelings is also interesting. When I feel in love, or afraid, it is my body that tells me those emotions, but my body does not put those labels on them. By contrast, an actor in drama class will be told by his teacher to act "afraid" or "in love" and he must then reproduce the feeling and outward appearance of those sentiments, but he can only do that if he knows the visceral reaction that his body has to such stimuli and also that "in love" and "afraid" are the correct words to apply to those reactions. So, the actor must know how the emotion feels and what words are used to describe it before he can start to display it to his audience. But I don't need to know any of that to be in love or to feel afraid, do I?
This was fascinating to read! I know that you’re writing from an American context, and while a lot of what you say has echoes in countries like Britain, would you know of similar references that are applicable to the British context? One of the major factors here is the nasty undercurrent of racism that flows in this country - that’s what delivered the Brexit vote, for example. I don’t know enough about America to know how large a factor it is for you, but I suspect that it’s considerable. - Therefore, it’s possible that many of the social factors relevant in the analyses you mention might also be partially relevant here. Anyway, I look forward to reading more from you!
Whoops, looks like I spoke too soon. Here's an interesting study from 2021 I just came across that speaks to my other comment about more direct connections to people from other backgrounds.
Here's the abstract - "Can exposure to celebrities from stigmatized groups reduce prejudice? To address this question, we study the case of Mohamed Salah, a visibly Muslim, elite soccer player. Using data on hate crime reports throughout England and 15 million tweets from British soccer fans, we find that after Salah joined Liverpool F.C., hate crimes in the Liverpool area dropped by 16% compared with a synthetic control, and Liverpool F.C. fans halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets relative to fans of other top-flight clubs. An original survey experiment suggests that the salience of Salah’s Muslim identity enabled positive feelings toward Salah to generalize to Muslims more broadly. Our findings provide support for the parasocial contact hypothesis—indicating that positive exposure to out-group celebrities can spark real-world behavioral changes in prejudice." https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/can-exposure-to-celebrities-reduce-prejudice-the-effect-of-mohamed-salah-on-islamophobic-behaviors-and-attitudes/A1DA34F9F5BCE905850AC8FBAC78BE58
This is lovely. Mo Salah is a massively popular member of the Liverpool team. I remember, at the worst times of Islamophobia here, that Liverpool fans would chant “I want to be Muslim too” because of Mo Salah. He’s a lovely example of how sporting success, especially in a popular working-class game like football (what you call soccer) can be a real force for positive change.
Thank you for the kind words! Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with the British context. You'd do well to verify this, but I believe I read a little while ago that London accounts for a huge amount of the non-white population in the whole country, so potentially the context could be quite different.
There is a lot of racism in the U.S., but my experience growing up in a mostly white state and then living and teaching in a very diverse state has been that the more and earlier that people interact with folks from different backgrounds, the less racism is able to take hold. I believe this is because they have real experiences with people to compare to racist tropes/narratives they might hear.
There are certainly rural areas in the U.S. with very few immigrants, but I think overall the U.S. is much more heterogeneous than Britain, and being much larger can vary a lot state to state. That's a long-winded way to say I don't really know, but I'd love to hear if you come across anything.
London has a massively cosmopolitan population and there are hundreds of London natives who don’t have English as a first language. It also used to be, in the 60s and early 70s, a place where dustmen and high court judges might be living next door to each other. Sadly, the city is much more segregated by class, but by no means completely. There is a much more cooperative and tolerant spirit here, and it’s very different from the rest of Britain. The worst places are suburban small towns that are self-satisfied and don’t have much contact with outsiders. These people, moving into London from the suburbs are dreadful. Proper Londoners are lovely - not that I’m biased, being a Londoner myself, but still!
Strange you talk about "out-of-towners" and "inner-city dwellers". When my brother lived in Paris, which used to have the vehicle registration mark "75" (as the 75th département) he advised always to watch out for the cars bearing the registration marks 92, 93, 95, whatever. These are the "banlieues" - the out-of-towners. They tended always to be more assertive, more raffish, more self-confident. When I lived in Düsseldorf (registration "D"), the same tendencies could be noted with vehicles driven by those from "NE" - Neuss, across the river Rhine. Düsseldorf = money, Neuss = boy racers. I say this in relation to vehicles, because in those two cases, you can identify the owner by their registration mark (that's not always so in London), but I think that this is a tendency in all major cities, as between the real city-dwellers and the peripheral out-of-towners. And why? Your guess is a good as mine, but it could be that one set has something to try and prove, and the other doesn't.
Thank you. It's a lot, and I need to come back and read it again but wanted to respond to your opening, because it's a thing that I've recently written about myself and I'm not sure if I'm right.
Here's my own essay: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/old-schoolmasters-old-truths. Its precept is "Everyone knows everything" because our own knowledge when contrasted with the knowledge of others is at best a clash of opinion. Definitive knowledge is - I want to contend - very rare.
What you say about gravity is predicated on the theory of gravity being right. In that sense, I don't know if it's right or not. I assume it's right because people who I respect - scientists and encyclopaedias and schoolteachers - tell me that's the way it is. But I only know the theory of gravity because OTHER PEOPLE know the theory of gravity. That puts an interesting slant on pretty much everything I know: I know it because someone else knows it. That means most of my knowledge is in fact based on hearsay, and hearsay is one source of evidence that is treated with scant respect by courts of law, and I find that interesting. We demand that courts base their judgment on primary evidence, and we ourselves base the vast majority of our judgments on secondary evidence - hearsay.
What you say about feelings is also interesting. When I feel in love, or afraid, it is my body that tells me those emotions, but my body does not put those labels on them. By contrast, an actor in drama class will be told by his teacher to act "afraid" or "in love" and he must then reproduce the feeling and outward appearance of those sentiments, but he can only do that if he knows the visceral reaction that his body has to such stimuli and also that "in love" and "afraid" are the correct words to apply to those reactions. So, the actor must know how the emotion feels and what words are used to describe it before he can start to display it to his audience. But I don't need to know any of that to be in love or to feel afraid, do I?