White Working Class, With a New Foreword by Mark Cuban and a New Preface by the Author: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

by Joan C. Williams

His message is an important one: what his family needs is not a lecture about racism but a conversation about fear. “Telling people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere,” said Alana Conner of Stanford. “It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”150 What causes people to change their minds are conversations designed to make a connection with them, through honesty and empathy. That worked when activists canvassed to assess—and create—support for transgender rights.151 Two-thirds of the recent sea change in acceptance of marriage equality stemmed from a gradual process of people changing their thinking.152