Special Issue Editor’s Introduction: Practical Wisdom and Institutional Transformation in an Urban Disaster

As I complete the editor’s introduction to these articles on institutional disruption and transformation in New Orleans triggered by Hurricane Katrina, Corona splashes her colors over maps of the earth. The hurricane pales in comparison with the pandemic, but one contrast between the two occurs to this participant/observer in both. Prior to Katrina most institutions necessary to proper city functioning—including city administration, police department, and courts—were broken or stretched to the breaking point. As you will see in these articles, following the storm, business and civil society leaders, cooperating with government officials when possible, challenging them as necessary, led dramatic changes in city ethics institutions, community/police relations, property tax assessment, and so on. Such changes could only have been envisioned and executed locally. And so, they were. The base of power for post-Katrina change was local. By contrast, it is inconceivable that the primary impetus for responding successfully to the coronavirus could come from local communities. They are perfectly suited to lead charity, education, and support, but societal recovery from COVID-19 depends on effective, efficient, and functionally integrated macro-systems of food, housing, banking, education, health care, public safety, unemployment, transportation, and small business support. Macro-system functioning also requires aggressively targeting corruption. Terms like “price gouging,” “bid rigging,” “malfeasance,” “payroll fraud,” and “insider dealing” begin to surface as the trillions of public dollars required to pay for these very expensive programs are released. A stolen and a wasted public dollar have in common that neither achieves its intended public benefit. The base of power for responding to the corona pandemic is at the top

Seeing Race as We Are: Avoiding, Arguing, Aspiring

Racial conflict in the United States pushes people to positions of argument or avoidance, more or less intensely and for varying lengths of time, depending on external events like the murder of George Floyd. Neither stance produces the conversations required to seek common ground and compromise around racial issues. Argument alone deepens divisions and avoidance leaves them to metastasize in the social body. In an attempt to go beneath these two positions, this article first explains the role and form of interpretation in all conflict and dispute resolution and how it is shaped. Then it examines the concepts and strategies on race of seven identifiable groups. For example, whereas individualists reject identity politics and collective guilt for past wrongs and stress personal responsibility, pragmatists eschew ideologies on race, focusing instead on what they affirm. The article makes a deep critique of the antiracist assertion that those who fail to embrace its ideology are, by definition, racists. Finally the author discusses possible ways forward that reject dogmatic, either/or strategies in favor of a hermeneutical approach to matters of race including both sacred values and material interests

Inclusiveness, Foresight, and Decisiveness: The Practical Wisdom of Barrier-Crossing Leaders

This article previews a study under way to compare and contrast the attitudes, thinking, and action of leaders around the world who manage to bridge social divisions in their respective locales with those who work within their own groups. After briefly describing the planned assessment of their forms of social cohesion and empathy, the article examines the practical wisdom of effective actors in the social world and how it contrasts with academic knowledge for insight into how wise practitioners think about what they are doing. It also looks at the history of the conception of practical wisdom. Finally, examples of practical wisdom derived from one divided community in a time of crisis are offered

Social Traps and Social Trust in a Devastated Urban Community

The last national survey of adult literacy prior to Hurricane Katrina found 40 percent of New Orleans adults reading at or below the sixth-grade level and another 30 percent at or below the eighth-grade level. During the three years before the hurricane, New Orleanians watched as public meetings of its elected school board became models of incivility, where the politically connected struggled for control of contracts and patronage and self-appointed activists ridiculed school officials, board members, and fellow citizens who were attempting to raise the performance of the city’s public schools out of the ranks of the nation’s worst. During this same period, neither citizens nor public officials were able to address the deplorable condition of the city’s once nationally acclaimed youth recreation department, even as homicidal youth violence escalated, putting New Orleans consistently at or near the top of national per capita murder rates. In short, the adults of the city proved unable to provide adequate public education and recreation for children and young adults. Their failure resulted in violence, economic despair, and deepening racial division

Metaphors for One Another: Racism in the United States and Sectarianism in Northern Ireland

This article explores the possibility that an analysis of racism in the United States and sectarianism in Northern Ireland inspired by literary, psychotherapeutic, religious and philosophical conceptions of metaphor might yield new insight into the two situations by attending carefully to similarities and differences between them. Following brief summaries of the current state of racism in the U.S. and sectarianism in Northern Ireland, the article offers two perspectives from the field of psychotherapy that seem particularly germane to both situations. Then we turn to the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt for a reflection on the unpredictability and irreversibility of human action, and what can be done within the limits of those conditions. Finally, we find in contemporary broad-based community organizing in the tradition of Saul Alinsky our closing metaphor: interracial and interfaith citizens organizations as crucibles that enable citizens and people of faith to imagine a way forward in societies struggling with racist and sectarian histories

What Motivates Barrier-Crossing Leadership?

From large-scale wars, natural disasters, and pandemics to community-level religious and ethnic conflicts, many leaders wield power during crises by championing their group’s goals against those of rivals. But there is also a rarer breed of leader—barrier-crossers who pursue group interests by recognizing rivals’ interests and working with them to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Though such leaders have played vital roles in resolving conflicts, little is known about their extraordinary motivation. Here we report survey results contrasting barrier-crossing with barrier-bound leaders from seven communities. In line with new theories from group psychology and anthropology, we found that barrier-crossers uniquely reported intense, family-like bonds to both ingroups and outgroups. Further evidence suggests that these outgroup bonds result from past, personally transformative experiences shared with outgroup members