Two of the most powerful organizing efforts following recent
shootings are #neveragain following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
massacre and #BlackLivesMatter following the shooting of Michael Brown by a
police officer. They have something in common that you may not have noticed:
they were triggered in homogeneous communities. Parkland, Florida, where the
massacre took place, is overwhelmingly white and well-off. Michael Brown was
shot in a majority-black neighborhood in Ferguson, Missouri. Each community came together to mourn the
death of their own and to prevent repeats of the same tragedy. Each effort has
been very effective, at least in getting media coverage.
I mention these examples because communities don’t always organize
effectively, and we have seen in past research that more-homogeneous
communities can more easily organize both for self-support and for supporting
others. In a recent article in Administrative Science Quarterly, Wesley Longhofer, Giacomo Negro, and Peter W. Roberts test this effect again, and they
also look at whether local organizations can unite or divide communities that
would not be naturally united. They find that schools unite and churches
divide, and the reason is interesting.
We have to start with why diverse communities have difficulty organizing
to help. The problem is that when communities have a mix of people with
different color, wealth, religion, and other characteristics, people start
believing that those who seem different may have different values and ideas of
what is good and bad. More and more, people associate with those who are most
like themselves, including in community organizations. And as they interact
with those who are most like themselves, they continue to strengthen the
beliefs that they are different from the rest. The result is a community that
is separated in its people, and also in the community organizations that people
belong to, like churches, clubs, and associations of many kinds.
Suppose there is a common cause that just about everyone agrees to
support. In this research, the common cause was collection of money for UNICEF
(the Trick-or-Treat campaign done every year). Many people are in favor of
UNICEF, especially if they have children. But it is still the case that
homogenous communities organize better and help more because they are more
united to begin with. The exception is that campaigns organized by public
schools overcome the negative effect of diversity, and even reverse it to make
diverse communities more helpful. Public schools are special because they are
mandated and (in the USA) are organized to maintain diversity of students, so
they span diverse groups of people and help them understand each other. That
way, public schools unite diverse communities.
For the same reason, campaigns organized by churches and clubs had less effect in diverse communities. Both are voluntary organizations, so they are exactly the type of place where people interact with those most similar to themselves. Community organizations that reflect the divisions of the community, like churches and clubs, divide efforts to organize help; those that span the divisions of the community, like public schools, unite efforts to organize help. In times with many and deep divisions in communities, it is worth asking what organizations exist that can span different groups and help the community help itself and others.
