More Than A Stupid Joke

"Positive polarization" has pit Americans against one another. Moral fusion offers a way to reclaim character for the common good.

Yesterday Politico published a report on thousands of private text messages exchanged between leaders of Young Republican groups across the country, including jokes about slavery, gas chambers, and rape. The details aren’t worth repeating, except to pause and consider the callousness with which some who aspire to high office dismiss the humanity of their neighbors.

The vulgar details of the report were shocking enough that Vice President J.D. Vance could not ignore the story. He chose to address it directly on a new episode of The Charlie Kirk Show. “The reality is that kids do stupid things,” he said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.”

Per Politico’s reporting, the “kids” Vance is referring to are young professionals in their 20s and 30s - some barely younger than him - many of whom hold elected office, work for politicians, or, in at least one case, are employed by the Trump administration.

Even Vance seems to realize that this kind of rhetoric is no laughing matter, at least when it’s in the mouths of his political opponents. On the same episode, he brought up offensive texts sent by Virginia Attorney General candidate Jay Jones to a Republican colleague - violent rhetoric for which Jones has apologized.

No one wants to be on the receiving end of this kind of dehumanizing language. Yet it proliferates in our public life not because “kids will be kids,” but because a political movement dedicated to the interests of an elite minority has invested in division. “Positive polarization” is what Pat Buchanan called this divide-and-conquer tactic when it was first imagined in the new political landscape that emerged following the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of the 1960s.

For decades, sociologists have described these intentionally cultivated divisions as “culture wars.” But they are not inherent to culture. They have been cultivated, and Americans have been increasingly told that their religious, familial, and personal identity hang on choosing a “side.”

Young professionals who disregard the humanity of their political opponents in private text messages aren’t just “being kids.” They are performing the identity that has been celebrated and modeled for them in a political culture of us vs them.

These are not the texts of ignorant, uneducated, or underdeveloped men and women. They are, rather, a sign of miseducation and malformation.

When he was an undergraduate at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on the miseducation of Jim Crow’s authoritarians in his first published essay for the campus newspaper, The Maroon Tiger.

The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of men we call educated?

It is a question King would continue to work out for the rest of his too short life: what forces had miseducated and malformed some Americans to believe that some neighbors were not equal to them in human dignity? And what work could a society do together to change that?

At 17 years old - when he was, in truth, still a kid - King saw clearly that character must be the true goal of education in a multi-ethnic democracy.

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.

King did not come to this conclusion on his own. He, too, was growing into a culture that celebrated and encouraged a particular identity. In his case, it was the culture of an HBCU that honored the dignity of every person, understood that democracy required both freedom and equality, and held up examples of character for the common good.

Such institutions were founded to educate Black people who had been enslaved and denied education in the United States. But they never existed just for Black people. HBCU’s, like the Black church in America, have been spaces where moral fusion coalitions have formed people for leadership over and against authoritarian forces of division. In the 20th century, they formed leaders like King, Ella Baker, John Lewis, and Diane Nash. But they were also the spaces where white folks like Candy Carrawan, Howard Zinn, and Ed King grew into their roles as leaders of a movement for multi-ethnic democracy.

As we work to train a new generation of moral leaders at the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, we are launching today a new partnership with four HBCUs: Howard University, Lincoln University, North Carolina Central University, and Tougaloo College. We’re grateful to be at Bishop Barber’s alma mater, NCCU, for a public event this afternoon. We invite you to join us there.

We’re also looking forward next week to hosting historian Jelani Favors at Yale Divinity School. Favors’ celebrated book, Shelter In A Time of Storm, has highlighted the role of a “second curriculum” at HBCUs that has formed generations of students for civic engagement and democracy-building work. If you are in the New Haven area, you can join us for his public lecture next Wednesday.