In fourth grade, my teacher wrote on my progress report that she found my questions — critical of what I was being taught — disruptive. My mother didn’t like this. She valued my education and wanted me to explore my curiosity so she had me apply to attend Grosse Pointe Academy, an elite private school in an affluent suburb of Detroit.
When I arrived at GPA, I was one of fewer than a handful of black students in my grade. Unlike my white peers, many of whom lived in palatial mansions with full-length basketball and tennis courts, I came from a disadvantaged community where financial hardship was commonplace and pockets of poverty and violent crime were well within walking distance.
I wanted to fit in and feel like I belonged, to excel and make the most of this incredible education. My desire to thrive at my new school meant that I would have to transgress our differences and seek to find some common ground.
To make matters more difficult, a number of my white peers and their parents assumed upon meeting me that I loved rap music, grape Kool-Aid, fried chicken and playing basketball. These kinds of comments didn’t make it easier for me to connect and develop friendships. Hearing these things often made me uncomfortable.
I could have shut down, focused on my schoolwork and given up on the prospect of making friends and building rapport with my teachers. But I was determined to make my experience in school one that was stimulating and rewarding.
So I resolved to try and learn more about how my peers saw the world. Instead of taking offense to biased comments that felt insensitive, I asked my peers questions that would allow me to gain a deeper understanding of their experience and how it informed their beliefs. In some cases, I would even propose hypothetical scenarios often involving issues I sensed we may disagree on, and then I would ask them for their thoughts.
This required patience and attentiveness, and generally yielded mixed success. But what I learned from these conversations was that one way of connecting with people of different backgrounds and perspectives was by making a sustained, concentrated effort to get a sense of what matters to them and why.
These experiences taught me the value of listening — of making the same effort to listen that we often make to persuade others and win arguments.
Throughout my life, this kind of deliberative engagement with unfamiliar perspectives has proven invaluable. And nowhere has been more useful than at the college I recently graduated from.
When I arrived at Williams College in 2014, I was eager to embrace the intellectual challenge of energetically debating controversial topics with my peers, professors and outside speakers. I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of perspectives that I knew I disagreed with so as to strengthen my ability to defend my own beliefs. I saw vigorous debate as an opportunity to prepare myself to engage with people of various ideological stripes and make a positive difference in the world.
Unfortunately, many in the Williams community felt that opposing views should be shut out. To combat this illiberal tendency, which made robust and open discussion a detested intellectual aim in the minds of many, I joined Uncomfortable Learning, a student group that brought controversial speakers to campus in hope of broadening the range of political discourse.
As the president of Uncomfortable Learning, I faced enormous backlash and often a torrent of ad hominem attacks. In dealing with my critics face to face, I often relied on some of the lessons I’d learned when I began attending private schools.
My critics were often impassioned and sometimes furious. They were not interested in being persuaded or challenged. So whenever I could, I tried to open the conversation with a question that invited them to explain their qualms about my work.
With one student in particular we were able to reach a deeper understanding of each other despite the fact that neither of our opinions changed. Although I was unable to change my campus community in the ways that I’d hoped, I was encouraged by the progress I was able to achieve in certain individual interactions.
Listening to offensive ideas and engaging with people we vehemently disagree with can be trying. I’ve been going at it for fours years now and I still find it difficult. But when I consider the many conversations that have made me a more empathetic and compassionate person, I’m reassured that the effort is worthwhile.
Zachary R. Wood is the author of “Uncensored: My Life and Uncomfortable Conversations at the Intersection of Black and White America” (Dutton, out now.)
