#'she was tangible evidence that dean was his own person with his own thoughts feelings and desires'

[laurelwinchester]

The way fandom (and then the show itself) treats Lisa and Ben is so cruel and unsettling to me - fandom which reveres Sam/Jess, even though he was never honest with her, and she's (unfortunately) much more of a symbolic placeholder. we spend time with the Braedens. Dean calls their house "home." They truly try to build something. Nothing will ever convince me there wasn't real, deep love there. the story was utterly agonizing for all of them, and Dean never even gets to acknowledge it again?

yes! 

the way the fandom treats lisa and ben (especially lisa) is so disturbing. it's so disturbing. and the lack of self awareness is honestly startling to me. i know it shouldn’t be at this point, but it is. the fandom likes to talk about the misogyny in the show, but they refuse to acknowledge that they were and are just as bad. they helped create that misogyny. they drove it. i know that their treatment of lisa is just the tip of the iceberg but it's so heinous and cruel and blatant that it's what i always get stuck on. they hate her so much. they froth at the mouth over her very existence. the things they say about her are just appalling. and for what? because she loved dean and she wasn't sam or cas? because she tried to give him something neither sam nor cas could? it's ridiculous.

lisa was not a bad character. she didn't do anything wrong. she did nothing to earn the shocking vitriol the fandom slings at her. she supported him when she could, she drew boundaries when she knew she needed to, and she loved him through all of it.

and he did love her back. it seriously irks and baffles me me that people still have the audacity to say that he didn't love her. they tried so hard to build. they wanted a life together. like you said, he called her home. they had something refreshingly honest and real if not tragically fragile.

people can deny that as much as they want but obviously it was real. obviously it was love. if it wasn't, dean would have been able to walk away, but he wasn't. that's the thing. he tried and he tried to leave them, but he couldn't. not without being forced to.

in order to remove lisa and ben from the story, the writers literally had to erase dean from their minds. we can talk about character motives all we want when it comes to that particular piece of the storyline, but it was clearly done because the writers didn't know another way to take lisa and ben out of the narrative. they were important to dean. they were in his bones. they were his family. the only way to get them out was to literally remove him from them like an amputation. 

the fact that they added in dean’s tearful ‘’if you ever mention them again, i’ll break your nose’’ line in order to justify never dealing with or even, at the very least, naming his grief is enraging and puzzling, but the absence of them was felt all throughout dean’s behavior in season seven. (which people like to say was just because of cas, even though it really very much was not.)

if lisa and ben were as meaningless as the fandom (and the writers) wanted them to be, all these ridiculous parts of the plot (the memory erasing, pointedly never talking about them again) wouldn’t have been necessary. if they were placeholders, they would have faded away slowly over time the way all the others did, but they didn’t. they were removed abruptly and traumatically because it was the only way to separate dean from them.

the reason the fandom hates lisa always comes back to those two popular ships and the fact that dean is so often seen as an object for sam or cas. almost like a pet. he can be coveted, his acts of service are welcomed, but when he tries to have something for himself, when he tries to love anything or anyone else outside of that ~team free will~ bubble, everyone flips out because in their minds he is not permitted to exist outside of the way he loves sam or cas. he gets nothing of his own.

and that was exactly what lisa represented. she was tangible evidence that dean was his own person with his own thoughts, feelings, and desires, and he was perfectly capable of building a rich, fulfilling life full of love without the other two. no wonder she scared both the fandom and the writers.

[amwritingmeta]

hey! i was just wondering if you think spn will actually make destiel canon by the finale? it seems like in interviews they're trying to let us down gently w/a cas death (which possibly makes it seem like cas's ending might be related to his empty deal?) + all the parallels between saileen and deancas, and it looks like dabb and co (while not rly bringing arcs into conclusion and generally making a mess of spn) are fighting to make it canon, i was wondering what ur take on it was, esp after ep09

Oh, my dear, my heart is swelling with love for those two right now. I just watched the show through from 12x19-15x13 and I swear, that moment they share in 15x12, clinking those glasses and sharing all those smiles was like balm. It’s not even five minutes of screen time, and still it was like, okay, yes, good, thank you for the room to breathe. :D

It seems to be that Cas hearing Dean’s prayer has ushered in some much earned peace between them. They’re shown to be on the same page and taking each other’s side unquestionably. Dean trusting Cas’ judgment regarding Jack without pause. And that’s a good word for it: there’s trust between them, mutual respect, understanding. It’s so lovely, isn’t it?

So, there’s this line that’s sort of stuck with me. Actually, there are two things that have stuck with me (apart from all the gorgeous symbology baked into every episode) and it’s that the word “complete” has been mentioned twice.

Once in reference to Mary in Heaven, and once by Amara in reference to God.

Then we have a line that’s recurred twice: I had to die to get what I want.

The fact that its spoken verbatim twice made my antennas perk up a bit. It may mean nothing, as some things in this narrative sometimes do mean nothing, but it’s still interesting to take these things into account: that we’re searching for completion and that sometimes, in order to get what you want, you have to die.

So. Will Cas die?

I don’t think so. I don’t think so for many reasons that I’ve laid out here (I just posted this) (it was like you read my mind that this was coming today), but foremost because I cannot see how him dying does anything for his character arc, or for his joint journey with Dean.

You know, dark!Kaia (Kaia’s Shadow) going back to the Bad Place (Kaia’s unconscious) and accepting the ending waiting there, releasing our!Kaia back to the world where she belongs, makes me think, more than ever, that the integration of the main character’s Shadows are a necessity. 

The Empty, way I see it, is representative of Cas’ Shadow, his unconscious, all the repressed and suppressed emotions of guilt, shame and doubt that has kept his self-worth down until Jack came on the scene. 

And this is just my reading of this situation, but I’m not sure I can see Cas defeating the Empty in the Empty, if you know what I mean? The last time Cas intruded, the Empty made him suffer greatly. I don’t think Cas holds any sway there, nor should he. 

To me, the weapon our conscious has against our unconscious ruling our decisions, is our ability to grow aware of our own impulses, our own thought patterns, and making choices to break away from them.

I think Cas can only beat the Empty through making a choice and, well, for a long time I’ve felt that choice should be to become human, because by making a final choice of who he is and who he wants to be, he brings himself into awareness, integrating his Shadow in the process, and narratively nullifying the Empty’s hold on him, since humans don’t go to the Empty when they die: they go to Heaven. 

But that’s wishing and hoping and speculation, of course.

Here’s where the Destiel question comes in though.

Do I believe they’ll make it canon?

Personally, I can’t think of anything more a part of our story than the love story between those two, but I know what you mean. You mean a representative, tangible, clear, statement type of making it canon. Textualising it, so that there’s no room for doubt whatsoever. No more arguments, no more queer baiting complaints, just Destiel in plain sight. Undeniable. 

I do and I don’t.

Watching these last few seasons through again made me realise what a different feel to them this last season has, because the emotional stakes for Dean and Cas have everything to do with what they mean to each other. Yeah?

Dean taking his anger out on Cas and it pushing Cas into a turning point where he chose to leave, to move on, which was a moment of clear independence a statement of his sense of self-worth, and it in turn pushing Dean into a turning point where he faced a side to himself that he’s needed to name since forever, admitting to not having any control of himself, which is something he has to acknowledge if he’s to move into trusting himself fully, all of this has been gosh darn breathtaking to get to witness.

And having them land back in this ease, where they work together seamlessly as a team, being kept together more than not, the framing of them, all of this makes me feel like they could give us canon Destiel. I’m not going to say they absolutely won’t. 

I believe the writers want it. I believe the actors want it. But, again, that’s just what I take from the narrative itself, because the subtext is stronger than ever this final season. 

Especially with Sam and Eileen being reunited.

Because it’s been that clear parallel you mentioned, but it’s been that clear parallel to those of us who see it. The echoes of the Saileen romance that trace through the Destiel progression won’t be as resounding to those that don’t.

And because of that, at this point, I also feel quite reserved with my belief that Destiel could become canon. Because there’s so much, but there’s also nothing. There’s so much for us to enjoy, there’s so much evidence they keep throwing at us that the writers support this reading of their story, but still, there’s nothing, really, to let on that they’re building towards these two men, at some point, declaring their love for each other.

There has been zero textual foreshadowing of that.

There have been throw away moments, like the cop flirting with Dean, for example, but he frowned at that, and then got sincerely flirted with by a woman, so that deescalated that very quickly. 

There was Dean at first rejecting Garth’s compliment of “You smell SO good”, becoming uncomfortable, to then, by the end of the ep, tell Garth he didn’t smell half-bad either.

And there was that amazing moment with Cas calling out Sam being “sexually intimate” with Ruby and Dean repeating the words as if he can’t believe Cas even knows how to pronounce them.

So, there’s... you know, stuff?

But it’s not foreshadowing if it can be overlooked by the wider audience.

That said.

This show isn’t about this love story of ours. The fact that it’s so downplayed could mean that what we’ll get is something textual, but extremely subtle. I mean, for me, lingering eye-contact and a shared smile in a context that makes us understand they’re choosing each other would be enough.

If, by canon, you mean do I think we’ll get them kissing, then the answer is I want to believe that we might get that, because they could build towards that on the foundation of ease and trust that they’ve put down over the last few episodes and they could build it effectively, but I just don’t know if the studio (who own the characters) is onboard. 

My hope is that they are, because the topic of healthy representation is so hot right now, and the question of the longevity of Supernatural to the younger generations (you know, you young ones who are proving exceedingly more open-minded and looking for something beyond the superficial brothers-hunting-monsters aspect of the show) would bank on the show opening itself up to the possibilities of solid representation already seeded throughout its run.

But Dean has flirted with more women than men this season. You know? I mean, he hasn’t flirted with any men. So. 

Look, I’m not going to say I don’t think we’ll get it, because I don’t know. 

I watched S15 yesterday and finished it today and suddenly I feel this wave of hope that it actually might happen, because they’ve already changed how Dean and Cas interact, they’ve given them so many scenes with just the two of them, and we have Sam clearly meant to end up with Eileen, and doesn’t Dean and Cas deserve that same happiness? That same sense of completion? That internal peace of loving unconditionally and being loved in return?

Sam and Eileen could be foreshadowing. These writers are subtle and they could be gleefully rubbing their hands together at the thought of springing textual Destiel on the GA, you know? The green light from the studio might make them diabolical. *sadism* And I love that thought.

Because that’s been the point of the love story for me, this slow, slow build to the moment when Dean and Cas have reached a point in their progression when what they’ll have together is a healthy, balanced, loving relationship because they’ve both let go of the past and are looking to the future.

But I won’t expect textual Destiel. If we do get it, I’m going to treasure it as a big cherry on top of an already perfectly inviting and exquisite pie.

What I do believe, more than ever, that we’re getting, though, is closure. Even if it’s only at the subtextual level, I believe that those of us who read the subtext will have Destiel verified beyond a shadow of a doubt. And yes, I will be quite surprised and disappointed if we don’t get that. Because of how these first 13 episodes have been shaped and how strong the subtext is in them.

I believe we’ll end on a hopeful note.

And wouldn’t that just be gratifyingly phenomenal?

(it really would) (honestly I just need to know that they are happy and alive and together and well and finding peace and carrying on) (you know?) (thank you and amen) :)

xx

[sinrau]

Many American public-health specialists are at risk of burning out as the coronavirus surges back.

Ed Yong July 7, 2020

Shutterstock / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic

Saskia Popescu’s phone buzzes throughout the night, waking her up. It had already buzzed 99 times before I interviewed her at 9:15 a.m. ET last Monday. It buzzed three times during the first 15 minutes of our call. Whenever a COVID-19 case is confirmed at her hospital system, Popescu gets an email, and her phone buzzes. She cannot silence it. An epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, Popescu works to prepare hospitals for outbreaks of emerging diseases. Her phone is now a miserable metronome, ticking out the rhythm of the pandemic ever more rapidly as Arizona’s cases climb. “It has almost become white noise,” she told me.

For many Americans, the coronavirus pandemic has become white noise—old news that has faded into the background of their lives. But the crisis is far from over. Arizona is one of the pandemic’s new hot spots, with 24,000 confirmed cases over the past week and rising hospitalizations and deaths. Popescu saw the surge coming, “but to actually see it play out is heartbreaking,” she said. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Popescu is one of many public-health experts who have been preparing for and battling the pandemic since the start of the year. They’re not treating sick people, as doctors or nurses might be, but are instead advising policy makers, monitoring the pandemic’s movements, modeling its likely trajectory, and ensuring that hospitals are ready.

By now they are used to sharing their knowledge with journalists, but they’re less accustomed to talking about themselves. Many of them told me that they feel duty-bound and grateful to be helping their country at a time when so many others are ill or unemployed. But they’re also very tired, and dispirited by America’s continued inability to control a virus that many other nations have brought to heel. As the pandemic once again intensifies, so too does their frustration and fatigue.

America isn’t just facing a shortfall of testing kits, masks, or health-care workers. It is also looking at a drought of expertise, as the very people whose skills are sorely needed to handle the pandemic are on the verge of burning out.

To work in preparedness, Nicolette Louissaint told me, is to constantly stare at society’s vulnerabilities and imagine the worst possible future. The nonprofit she runs, Healthcare Ready, works to steel communities for outbreaks and disasters by ensuring that they have access to medical supplies. She started revving up her operations in January. By March, when businesses and schools started closing and governors began issuing stay-at-home orders, “we were already running on fumes,” she said. Throughout March and April, she got two hours of sleep a night. Now she’s getting four. And yet “I always feel like I’m never doing enough,” she said. “Like one of my colleagues said, I could sleep for two weeks and still feel this tired. It’s embedded in us at this point.”

But the physical exhaustion is dwarfed by the emotional toll of seeing the imagined worst-case scenarios become reality. “One of the big misconceptions is that we enjoy being right,” Louissaint said. “We’d be very happy to be wrong, because it would mean lives are being saved.”

The field of public health demands a particular way of thinking. Unlike medicine, which is about saving individual patients, public health is about protecting the well-being of entire communities. Its problems, from malnutrition to addiction to epidemics, are broader in scope. Its successes come incrementally, slowly, and through the sustained efforts of large groups of people. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, told me, “The pandemic is a huge problem, but I’m not afraid of huge problems.”

The more successful public health is, however, the more people take it for granted. Funding has dwindled since the 2008 recession. Many jobs have disappeared. Now that the entire country needs public-health advice, there aren’t enough people qualified to offer it. The number of epidemiologists who specialize in pandemic-level infectious threats is small enough that “I think I know them all,” says Caitlin Rivers, who studies outbreaks at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

The people doing this work have had to recalibrate their lives. From March to May, Colin Carlson, a research professor at Georgetown University who specializes in infectious diseases, spent most of his time traversing the short gap between his bed and his desk. He worked relentlessly and knocked back coffee, even though it exacerbates his severe anxiety: The cost was worth it, he felt, when the United States still seemed to have a chance of controlling COVID-19.

The U.S. frittered away that chance. Through social distancing, the American public bought the country valuable time at substantial personal cost. The Trump administration should have used that time to roll out a coordinated plan to ramp up America’s ability to test and trace infected people. It didn’t. Instead, to the immense frustration of public-health advisers, leaders rushed to reopen while most states were still woefully unprepared.

When Arizona Governor Doug Ducey began reviving businesses in early May, the intensive-care unit of Popescu’s hospital was still full of COVID-19 patients. “Within our public-health bubble, we were getting nervous, but then you walked outside and it was like Pleasantville,” she said. “People thought we had conquered it, and now it feels like we’re drowning.”

The COVID-19 unit has had to expand across an entire hospital wing and onto another floor. Beds have filled with younger patients. Long lines are snaking around the urgent-care building, and people are passing out in the 110-degree heat. At some hospitals, labs are so inundated that it takes several days to get test results back. “We thought we could have scaled down instead of scaling up,” Popescu said. “But because of poor political decisions that every public-health person I know disagreed with, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

“I feel like I’ve been making the same recommendations since January,” says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-disease physician who works in public health. The last time she felt this tired was in 2014, after spending three months in West Africa helping with the region’s historic Ebola outbreak. Everyone who experienced that crisis, she told me, was deeply shaken; she herself suffered from post-traumatic stress upon returning home.

The same experts who warned of the coronavirus’s resurgence are now staring, with the same prophetic worry, at a health-care system that is straining just as hurricane season begins. And they’re demoralized about repeatedly shouting evidence-based advice into a political void. “It feels like writing ‘Bad things are about to happen’ on a napkin and then setting the napkin on fire,” Carlson says.

A pandemic would have always been a draining ordeal. But it is especially so because the U.S., instead of mounting a unified front, is disjointed, cavalier, and fatalistic. Every week brings fresh farce, from Donald Trump suggesting that the country should do less testing to massive indoor gatherings of unmasked people.

“One by one, people are seeing something so absurd that it takes them out of commission,” Carlson says.

Public health is not a calling for people who crave the limelight, and researchers like Rivers, the Johns Hopkins professor, have found their sudden prominence jarring. Almost all of the 2,000 Twitter followers she had in January were other scientists. Most of the 130,000 followers she now has are not. The slow, verbose world of academic communication has given way to the blistering, constrained world of tweets and news segments.

The pandemic is also bringing out academia’s darker sides—competition, hostility, sexism, and a lust for renown. Armchair experts from unrelated fields have successfully positioned themselves as trusted sources. Male scientists are publishing more than their female colleagues, who are disproportionately shouldering the burden of child care during lockdowns. Many researchers have suddenly pivoted to COVID-19, producing sloppy work with harmful results. That further dispirits more cautious researchers, who, on top of dealing with the virus and reticent politicians, are also forced to confront their own colleagues. “If I cannot reasonably convince people I’ve been friends with for years that their work is causing tangible harm, what possible future do I see on this career path?” Carlson asks.

Other scientists and health officials are facing the wrath of a nation on edge. Unsettled by months of stay-at-home orders, confused by rampant misinformation, distraught over the country’s blunders, and embroiled in yet more culture wars over masks and lockdowns, Americans are lashing out. Public-health experts—and women in particular—have become targets. Several have resigned because of threats and harassment. Others face streams of invective in their inboxes and on their Twitter feeds. “I can say something and get horrendously attacked, but a man who doesn’t even work in this field can go on national TV and be revered for saying the exact same thing,” Popescu said.

Some critics have caricatured public-health experts as finger-wagging alarmists ensconced in an ivory tower, far away from the everyday people who are suffering the restrictive consequences of their advice. But this dichotomy is false. The experts I spoke with are also scared. They’re also feeling trapped at home. They also miss their loved ones. Louissaint, who lives in Baltimore, hasn’t seen her New York–based parents this year.

“I feel like I’m living in at least three realities at the same time,” Louissaint told me. She’s responding directly to the pandemic, trying to ensure that patients and hospitals get the supplies they need. She’s running an organization, trying to make sure that her employees keep their jobs. She’s a Black woman, living through a pandemic that has disproportionately killed Black people and the historic protests that have followed the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. During the ensuing reckonings about race, “I’ve been pulled into so many conversations about equity that people weren’t having months ago,” Louissant said.

“Someone said to me, ‘I hope you’re getting tons of support,’” she added. “But there’s no feasible thing that anyone could do to make this better, no matter how much they love you. The mental toll isn’t something you can easily share.”

These laments feel familiar to people who lived through the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, says Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist who has been working on HIV for 30 years and who has the virus himself. “I have friends who survived the virus but didn’t survive the toll it took on their lives,” Gonsalves told me. “I’m incredulous that I’m seeing this twice in my lifetime. The idea that I’m going to have to fend off another virus … like, really, can I have just one?”

But Gonsalves added that HIV veterans have a deep well of emotional reserves to draw from, and a sense of shared purpose to mobilize. His advice to the younger generation is twofold. First, don’t ignore your feelings: “Your anxiety, fear, and anger are all real,” he said. Then, find your people. “They may not be your colleagues,” he said, and they might not be scientists. But they’ll share the same values, and be united in recognizing that “public health is not a career, but a mission and a calling.”

Despite the toll of the work and the pressure from all sides, the public-health experts I talked with are determined to continue. “I’m glad I have a way in which I can be useful,” Rivers said. “I feel like it’s my duty to do what I can.”

The Pandemic Experts Are Not Okay

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

After the nation’s first black president, we now have a white president with the whitest and malest cabinet since Ronald Reagan’s. His administration immediately made it a priority to deport undocumented immigrants and to deny people from certain Muslim-majority nations entry into the United States, decisions that caused tremendous blowback. What President Trump doesn’t seem to have considered is that diversity doesn’t just sound nice, it has tangible value. Social scientists find that homogeneous groups like his cabinet can be less creative and insightful than diverse ones. They are more prone to groupthink and less likely to question faulty assumptions. What’s true of groups is also true for individuals. A small but growing body of research suggests that multiracial people are more open-minded and creative. Here, it’s worth remembering that Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, wasn’t only the nation’s first black president, he was also its first biracial president. His multitudinous self was, I like to think, part of what made him great — part of what inspired him when he proclaimed that there wasn’t a red or blue America, but a United States of America. As a multiethnic person myself — the son of a Jewish dad of Eastern European descent and a Puerto Rican mom — I can attest that being mixed makes it harder to fall back on the tribal identities that have guided so much of human history, and that are now resurgent. Your background pushes you to construct a worldview that transcends the tribal. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story You’re also accustomed to the idea of having several selves, and of trying to forge them into something whole. That task of self-creation isn’t unique to biracial people; it’s a defining experience of modernity. Once the old stories about God and tribe — the framing that historically gave our lives context — become inadequate, on what do we base our identities? How do we give our lives meaning and purpose? President Trump has answered this challenge by reaching backward — vowing to wall off America and invoking a whiter, more homogeneous country. This approach is likely to fail for the simple reason that much of the strength and creativity of America, and modernity generally, stems from diversity. And the answers to a host of problems we face may lie in more mixing, not less. Consider this: By 3 months of age, biracial infants recognize faces more quickly than their monoracial peers, suggesting that their facial perception abilities are more developed. Kristin Pauker, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and one of the researchers who performed this study, likens this flexibility to bilingualism. Early on, infants who hear only Japanese, say, will lose the ability to distinguish L’s from R’s. But if they also hear English, they’ll continue to hear the sounds as separate. So it is with recognizing faces, Dr. Pauker says. Kids naturally learn to recognize kin from non-kin, in-group from out-group. But because they’re exposed to more human variation, the in-group for multiracial children seems to be larger. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story This may pay off in important ways later. In a 2015 study, Sarah Gaither, an assistant professor at Duke, found that when she reminded multiracial participants of their mixed heritage, they scored higher in a series of word association games and other tests that measure creative problem solving. When she reminded monoracial people about their heritage, however, their performance didn’t improve. Somehow, having multiple selves enhanced mental flexibility. But here’s where it gets interesting: When Dr. Gaither reminded participants of a single racial background that they, too, had multiple selves, by asking about their various identities in life, their scores also improved. “For biracial people, these racial identities are very salient,” she told me. “That said, we all have multiple social identities.” And focusing on these identities seems to impart mental flexibility irrespective of race. It may be possible to deliberately cultivate this kind of limber mind-set by, for example, living abroad. Various studies find that business people who live in other countries are more successful than those who stay put; that artists who’ve lived abroad create more valuable art; that scientists working abroad produce studies that are more highly cited. Living in another culture exercises the mind, researchers reason, forcing one to think more deeply about the world. Another path to intellectual rigor is to gather a diverse group of people together and have them attack problems, which is arguably exactly what the American experiment is. In mock trials, the Tufts University researcher Samuel Sommers has found, racially diverse juries appraise evidence more accurately than all-white juries, which translates to more lenient treatment of minority defendants. That’s not because minority jurors are biased in favor of minority defendants, but because whites on mixed juries more carefully consider the evidence. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The point is that diversity — of one’s own makeup, one’s experience, of groups of people solving problems, of cities and nations — is linked to economic prosperity, greater scientific prowess and a fairer judicial process. If human groups represent a series of brains networked together, the more dissimilar these brains are in terms of life experience, the better the “hivemind” may be at thinking around any given problem. Photo Credit Lynnie Z. The opposite is true of those who employ essentialist thinking — in particular, it seems, people who espouse stereotypes about racial groups. Harvard and Tel Aviv University scientists ran experiments on white Americans, Israelis and Asian-Americans in which they had some subjects read essays that made an essentialist argument about race, and then asked them to solve word-association games and other puzzles. Those who were primed with racial stereotypes performed worse than those who weren’t. “An essentialist mind-set is indeed hazardous for creativity,” the authors note. None of which bodes well for Mr. Trump’s mostly white, mostly male, extremely wealthy cabinet. Indeed, it’s tempting to speculate that the administration’s problems so far, including its clumsy rollout of a travel ban that was mostly blocked by the courts, stem in part from its homogeneity and insularity. Better decisions might emerge from a more diverse set of minds. And yet, if multiculturalism is so grand, why was Mr. Trump so successful in running on a platform that rejected it? What explains the current “whitelash,” as the commentator Van Jones called it? Sure, many Trump supporters have legitimate economic concerns separate from worries about race or immigration. But what of the white nationalism that his campaign seems to have unleashed? Eight years of a black president didn’t assuage those minds, but instead inflamed them. Diversity didn’t make its own case very well. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story One answer to this conundrum comes from Dr. Sommers and his Tufts colleague Michael Norton. In a 2011 survey, they found that as whites reported decreases in perceived anti-black bias, they also reported increasing anti-white bias, which they described as a bigger problem. Dr. Sommers and Dr. Norton concluded that whites saw race relations as a zero-sum game. Minorities’ gain was their loss. In reality, cities and countries that are more diverse are more prosperous than homogeneous ones, and that often means higher wages for native-born citizens. Yet the perception that out-groups gain at in-groups’ expense persists. And that view seems to be reflexive. Merely reminding whites that the Census Bureau has said the United States will be a “majority minority” country by 2042, as one Northwestern University experiment showed, increased their anti-minority bias and their preference for being around other whites. In another experiment, the reminder made whites more politically conservative as well. It’s hard to know what to do about this except to acknowledge that diversity isn’t easy. It’s uncomfortable. It can make people feel threatened. “We promote diversity. We believe in diversity. But diversity is hard,” Sophie Trawalter, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told me. That very difficulty, though, may be why diversity is so good for us. “The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise,” Katherine Phillips, a senior vice dean at Columbia Business School, writes. “You have to push yourself to grow your muscles.” ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Closer, more meaningful contact with those of other races may help assuage the underlying anxiety. Some years back, Dr. Gaither of Duke ran an intriguing study in which incoming white college students were paired with either same-race or different-race roommates. After four months, roommates who lived with different races had a more diverse group of friends and considered diversity more important, compared with those with same-race roommates. After six months, they were less anxious and more pleasant in interracial interactions. (It was the Republican-Democrat pairings that proved problematic, Dr. Gaither told me. Apparently they couldn’t stand each other.) Some corners of the world seem to naturally foster this mellower view of race — particularly Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s home state. Dr. Pauker has found that by age 7, children in Massachusetts begin to stereotype about racial out-groups, whereas children in Hawaii do not. She’s not sure why, but she suspects that the state’s unique racial makeup is important. Whites are a minority in Hawaii, and the state has the largest share of multiracial people in the country, at almost a quarter of its population. Constant exposure to people who see race as a fluid concept — who define themselves as Asian, Hawaiian, black or white interchangeably — makes rigid thinking about race harder to maintain, she speculates. And that flexibility rubs off. In a forthcoming study, Dr. Pauker finds that white college students who move from the mainland to Hawaii begin to think differently about race. Faced daily with evidence of a complex reality, their ideas about who’s in and who’s out, and what belonging to any group really means, relax. Clearly, people can cling to racist views even when exposed to mountains of evidence contradicting those views. But an optimistic interpretation of Dr. Pauker’s research is that when a society’s racial makeup moves beyond a certain threshold — when whites stop being the majority, for example, and a large percentage of the population is mixed — racial stereotyping becomes harder to do. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Whitelash notwithstanding, we’re moving in that direction. More nonwhite babies are already born than white. And if multiracial people work like a vaccine against the tribalist tendencies roused by Mr. Trump, the country may be gaining immunity. Multiracials make up an estimated 7 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, and they’re predicted to grow to 20 percent by 2050. President Trump campaigned on a narrow vision of America as a nation-state, not as a state of people from many nations. His response to the modern question — How do we form our identities? — is to grasp for a semi-mythical past that excludes large segments of modern America. If we believe the science on diversity, his approach to problem solving is likely suboptimal. Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. Sign Up Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. SEE SAMPLE MANAGE EMAIL PREFERENCES PRIVACY POLICY Many see his election as apocalyptic. And sure, President Trump could break our democracy, wreck the country and ruin the planet. But his presidency also has the feel of a last stand — grim, fearful and obsessed with imminent decline. In retrospect, we may view Mr. Trump as part of the agony of metamorphosis. And we’ll see Mr. Obama as the first president of the thriving multiracial nation that’s emerging. Moises Velasquez-Manoff, the author of “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Disease,” is a contributing opinion writer. A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 5, 2017, on Page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: What Biracial People Know. Today's Paper|Subscribe Continue reading the main story

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What Biracial People Know

After the nation’s first black president, we now have a white president with the whitest and malest cabinet since Ronald Reagan’s. His administration immediately made it a priority to deport undocumented immigrants and to deny people from certain Muslim-majority nations entry into the United States, decisions that caused tremendous blowback.

What President Trump doesn’t seem to have considered is that diversity doesn’t just sound nice, it has tangible value. Social scientists find that homogeneous groups like his cabinet can be less creative and insightful than diverse ones. They are more prone to groupthink and less likely to question faulty assumptions.

What’s true of groups is also true for individuals. A small but growing body of research suggests that multiracial people are more open-minded and creative. Here, it’s worth remembering that Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, wasn’t only the nation’s first black president, he was also its first biracial president. His multitudinous self was, I like to think, part of what made him great — part of what inspired him when he proclaimed that there wasn’t a red or blue America, but a United States of America.

As a multiethnic person myself — the son of a Jewish dad of Eastern European descent and a Puerto Rican mom — I can attest that being mixed makes it harder to fall back on the tribal identities that have guided so much of human history, and that are now resurgent. Your background pushes you to construct a worldview that transcends the tribal.

You’re also accustomed to the idea of having several selves, and of trying to forge them into something whole. That task of self-creation isn’t unique to biracial people; it’s a defining experience of modernity. Once the old stories about God and tribe — the framing that historically gave our lives context — become inadequate, on what do we base our identities? How do we give our lives meaning and purpose?

President Trump has answered this challenge by reaching backward — vowing to wall off America and invoking a whiter, more homogeneous country. This approach is likely to fail for the simple reason that much of the strength and creativity of America, and modernity generally, stems from diversity. And the answers to a host of problems we face may lie in more mixing, not less.

Consider this: By 3 months of age, biracial infants recognize faces more quickly than their monoracial peers, suggesting that their facial perception abilities are more developed. Kristin Pauker, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and one of the researchers who performed this study, likens this flexibility to bilingualism.

Early on, infants who hear only Japanese, say, will lose the ability to distinguish L’s from R’s. But if they also hear English, they’ll continue to hear the sounds as separate. So it is with recognizing faces, Dr. Pauker says. Kids naturally learn to recognize kin from non-kin, in-group from out-group. But because they’re exposed to more human variation, the in-group for multiracial children seems to be larger.

This may pay off in important ways later. In a 2015 study, Sarah Gaither, an assistant professor at Duke, found that when she reminded multiracial participants of their mixed heritage, they scored higher in a series of word association games and other tests that measure creative problem solving. When she reminded monoracial people about their heritage, however, their performance didn’t improve. Somehow, having multiple selves enhanced mental flexibility.

But here’s where it gets interesting: When Dr. Gaither reminded participants of a single racial background that they, too, had multiple selves, by asking about their various identities in life, their scores also improved. “For biracial people, these racial identities are very salient,” she told me. “That said, we all have multiple social identities.” And focusing on these identities seems to impart mental flexibility irrespective of race.

It may be possible to deliberately cultivate this kind of limber mind-set by, for example, living abroad. Various studies find that business people who live in other countries are more successful than those who stay put; that artists who’ve lived abroad create more valuable art; that scientists working abroad produce studies that are more highly cited. Living in another culture exercises the mind, researchers reason, forcing one to think more deeply about the world.

Another path to intellectual rigor is to gather a diverse group of people together and have them attack problems, which is arguably exactly what the American experiment is. In mock trials, the Tufts University researcher Samuel Sommers has found, racially diverse juries appraise evidence more accurately than all-white juries, which translates to more lenient treatment of minority defendants. That’s not because minority jurors are biased in favor of minority defendants, but because whites on mixed juries more carefully consider the evidence.

The point is that diversity — of one’s own makeup, one’s experience, of groups of people solving problems, of cities and nations — is linked to economic prosperity, greater scientific prowess and a fairer judicial process. If human groups represent a series of brains networked together, the more dissimilar these brains are in terms of life experience, the better the “hivemind” may be at thinking around any given problem.

The opposite is true of those who employ essentialist thinking — in particular, it seems, people who espouse stereotypes about racial groups. Harvard and Tel Aviv University scientists ran experiments on white Americans, Israelis and Asian-Americans in which they had some subjects read essays that made an essentialist argument about race, and then asked them to solve word-association games and other puzzles. Those who were primed with racial stereotypes performed worse than those who weren’t. “An essentialist mind-set is indeed hazardous for creativity,” the authors note.

None of which bodes well for Mr. Trump’s mostly white, mostly male, extremely wealthy cabinet. Indeed, it’s tempting to speculate that the administration’s problems so far, including its clumsy rollout of a travel ban that was mostly blocked by the courts, stem in part from its homogeneity and insularity. Better decisions might emerge from a more diverse set of minds.

And yet, if multiculturalism is so grand, why was Mr. Trump so successful in running on a platform that rejected it? What explains the current “whitelash,” as the commentator Van Jones called it? Sure, many Trump supporters have legitimate economic concerns separate from worries about race or immigration. But what of the white nationalism that his campaign seems to have unleashed? Eight years of a black president didn’t assuage those minds, but instead inflamed them. Diversity didn’t make its own case very well.

One answer to this conundrum comes from Dr. Sommers and his Tufts colleague Michael Norton. In a 2011 survey, they found that as whites reported decreases in perceived anti-black bias, they also reported increasing anti-white bias, which they described as a bigger problem. Dr. Sommers and Dr. Norton concluded that whites saw race relations as a zero-sum game. Minorities’ gain was their loss.

In reality, cities and countries that are more diverse are more prosperous than homogeneous ones, and that often means higher wages for native-born citizens. Yet the perception that out-groups gain at in-groups’ expense persists. And that view seems to be reflexive. Merely reminding whites that the Census Bureau has said the United States will be a “majority minority” country by 2042, as one Northwestern University experiment showed, increased their anti-minority bias and their preference for being around other whites. In another experiment, the reminder made whites more politically conservative as well.

It’s hard to know what to do about this except to acknowledge that diversity isn’t easy. It’s uncomfortable. It can make people feel threatened. “We promote diversity. We believe in diversity. But diversity is hard,” Sophie Trawalter, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told me.

That very difficulty, though, may be why diversity is so good for us. “The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise,” Katherine Phillips, a senior vice dean at Columbia Business School, writes. “You have to push yourself to grow your muscles.”

Closer, more meaningful contact with those of other races may help assuage the underlying anxiety. Some years back, Dr. Gaither of Duke ran an intriguing study in which incoming white college students were paired with either same-race or different-race roommates. After four months, roommates who lived with different races had a more diverse group of friends and considered diversity more important, compared with those with same-race roommates. After six months, they were less anxious and more pleasant in interracial interactions. (It was the Republican-Democrat pairings that proved problematic, Dr. Gaither told me. Apparently they couldn’t stand each other.)

Some corners of the world seem to naturally foster this mellower view of race — particularly Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s home state. Dr. Pauker has found that by age 7, children in Massachusetts begin to stereotype about racial out-groups, whereas children in Hawaii do not. She’s not sure why, but she suspects that the state’s unique racial makeup is important. Whites are a minority in Hawaii, and the state has the largest share of multiracial people in the country, at almost a quarter of its population.

Constant exposure to people who see race as a fluid concept — who define themselves as Asian, Hawaiian, black or white interchangeably — makes rigid thinking about race harder to maintain, she speculates. And that flexibility rubs off. In a forthcoming study, Dr. Pauker finds that white college students who move from the mainland to Hawaii begin to think differently about race. Faced daily with evidence of a complex reality, their ideas about who’s in and who’s out, and what belonging to any group really means, relax.

Clearly, people can cling to racist views even when exposed to mountains of evidence contradicting those views. But an optimistic interpretation of Dr. Pauker’s research is that when a society’s racial makeup moves beyond a certain threshold — when whites stop being the majority, for example, and a large percentage of the population is mixed — racial stereotyping becomes harder to do.

Whitelash notwithstanding, we’re moving in that direction. More nonwhite babies are already born than white. And if multiracial people work like a vaccine against the tribalist tendencies roused by Mr. Trump, the country may be gaining immunity. Multiracials make up an estimated 7 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, and they’re predicted to grow to 20 percent by 2050.

President Trump campaigned on a narrow vision of America as a nation-state, not as a state of people from many nations. His response to the modern question — How do we form our identities? — is to grasp for a semi-mythical past that excludes large segments of modern America. If we believe the science on diversity, his approach to problem solving is likely suboptimal.

Many see his election as apocalyptic. And sure, President Trump could break our democracy, wreck the country and ruin the planet. But his presidency also has the feel of a last stand — grim, fearful and obsessed with imminent decline. In retrospect, we may view Mr. Trump as part of the agony of metamorphosis.

And we’ll see Mr. Obama as the first president of the thriving multiracial nation that’s emerging.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/opinion/sunday/what-biracial-people-know.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0