THE CONVERSATION

A thoughtful plan to combat racism.

Making his book debut, social psychologist Livingston distills his professional expertise as diversity consultant to Fortune 500 companies, police departments, hospitals, universities, federal agencies, and nonprofit organizations—and his own experience as an African American—to offer a pragmatic, generous, and optimistic guide for confronting racism. “My hope,” he writes, “is that The Conversation will bring people together to talk honestly about race, with the goal of creating profound and sustainable social change.” Lucidly interpreting theory, data, and research from a wide range of scientific disciplines, the author examines how individuals form their ideas about race, identity, and morality; what forces shape their behavior; and how changes might be effected. Tribalism—the need to differentiate between “us” and “them”—is wired into humans, Livingston asserts, contributing to the development of stereotypes and the perception of structural threats (which disrupt the status quo) and psychological threats (which undermine an individual’s sense of self-worth). He explains and illustrates terms such as White privilege, anchoring bias, and implicit bias, and he distinguishes between prejudice (what someone feels about a particular group) and discrimination (how someone behaves toward a particular group). Some people, he acknowledges, deny that racism exists, behaving like fish that “may not notice that they are immersed in water, let alone the dynamics of the stream they live in, because they have become habituated to swimming in a current that has always been there.” Perceptions of fairness, he concedes, “can be based entirely on habit or history.” Livingston proposes what he calls the PRESS system to inspire positive change: Problem awareness, Root cause analysis, Empathy, Strategy, and Sacrifice. This rubric informs the discussion questions that end each of the sections, making the book useful for business, social, or educational groups as well as for individual readers. Racism, Livingston believes, is a “solvable problem.”

A cogent, hopeful contribution to an urgent issue.