The dinner conversation with a group of change agent friends last weekend featured the story of one woman’s experience teaching high school government in her wealthy white suburban school system.
To facilitate learning on power, she divides the class into a majority and minority, identified by the wearing of different colored tags. Each group gets a different set of rules based on class inequality of power. For example, the minority can only use a designated bathroom, must take back seats in classes, and have other social restrictions and consequences. The group then switches majority and minority positions.
It is transformative for students, particularly those who grew up in families that defend inequalities to the death. Students realize that with power, their personalities morph into asocial and antisocial adolescent beasts.
At the end of the conversation I asked if the initial minority students act more or less empathetically with power over initial majority students. The data: they become worse.
This is a microcosmic cycle played out every time the minority in party power becomes majority after a turnover in elections. So as a designer, my interest is in the question of whether any amount of voting for individuals can end the cycle. Or would the cycle only end with profound structural change to systems, principles and policies? And if so, how would that come about?
