In May 1992, Rodney King asked, “Can’t we all get along?” in response to the riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers who had beaten him.
Thirty years later, we can ask the same question. Consider George Floyd, the shootings in Atlanta and El Paso, the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the debates about masking and vaccines in responding to COVID-19. At a time when people should be coming together for the good of the nation and the world, we are arguing with and sniping at each other, and levels of mistrust are increasing.
Many of these concerns stem from beliefs that all of us hold about individuals and groups that are different from ours: differences on the basis of ethnicity/race, gender, religion, political affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, country of origin, first language, and the list goes on. As psychologists, we are not immune from the increasing tribalism. I get upset when I learn about yet another incident of discrimination or inequitable treatment, sometimes from the past and sometimes contemporary. I must keep reminding myself that, as a society, we are getting better, and that these incidents are getting rarer and with perpetrators being held to account more frequently than in the past.
It is clear that the values of liberty and justice are yet to be applied to all. How do we balance the genuine fear of returning to an unequal past that many experience when contemporary injustices occur with the notion of working toward a “more perfect union”? How do we acknowledge the atrocities of the past while including everyone from the present? How do we learn to place the welfare of our neighbors at the same level as the welfare of ourselves? These questions are not easy to answer, but psychology and psychologists are uniquely qualified to address them, in keeping with APA’s mission to improve the human condition.
In his poem, “Let America Be America Again,” Langston Hughes wrote:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,And yet I swear this oath—
America will be! . . .We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. . . .
And make America again!
