They Have Worked on Conflicts Overseas. Now These Americans See ‘Red Flags’ at Home.

They address dehumanization on both sides of the political divide. To deny that this happens on one's own side, and that the other side must be motivated by evil reasons, is exactly an example of dehumanizing others.

Please read the whole article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/us/conflicting-experts-peacebuilders.html

By Sabrina Tavernise
Feb. 4, 2019

Paula Green has spent much of her life working on conflicts abroad. In places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Myanmar, Dr. Green, an American psychologist, brings together survivors of war, helping them see past their differences so they can live with one another again.

But recently, she began seeing some warning signs in the United States, flashes of social distress that she recognized from her work abroad, and after 29 years of peacemaking in other places, she decided to turn her lens on her own society.

“People are making up stories about ‘the other’ — Muslims, Trump voters, whoever ‘the other’ is,” she said. “‘They don’t have the values that we have. They don’t behave like we do. They are not nice. They are evil.’”

She added: “That’s dehumanization. And when it spreads, it can be very hard to correct.”

Dr. Green is now among a growing group of conflict resolution experts who are turning their focus on the United States, a country that some have never worked on. They are gathering groups in schools and community centers to apply their skills to help a country — this time their own — where they see troubling trends.

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“There are a lot of people who have been working internationally who are calling me up and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, what do we do? We have to do something,’” said Elizabeth Hume, a former conflict expert for the government, who is vice president of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, a professional association for conflict prevention experts.

“We are seeing some serious red flags,” she said, “things that make conflict experts like me really nervous.”

Conflict experts said while the United States is not nearly in the dire state of some of the other countries they work in, the resilience of American institutions was being tested. And the deterioration of political stability is always gradual.

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Ms. Fields said the group was able to talk about hard things because of what came before: the feeling that the other side had heard them and that they had become, in a fundamental way, equals.

“I think we all expected it to be a lot harder than it was,” Ms. Fields said. “I really learned that no matter how differently we think or vote, if we take a moment to see the other person for who they are, as somebody with a family and a story, that made the hard stuff easier.”

She added: “It was about having a hard conversation in a soft place.”