Our democracies today are in search of true diversity, says Yascha Mounk—it’s both our greatest challenge and our greatest hope. In the pursuit of equality, a growing number of people have begun to define themselves in terms of their group identities (such as race or sexual orientation). But the Johns Hopkins professor says that’s actually counterproductive to our goal. He calls this “the identity trap,” and in his new book of the same name, he argues that our search for equality is not helped but harmed when we obsess over group identity, when we stifle discourse, and when we deny that members of different groups can truly understand each other. Yascha shows us how to escape the identity trap and keep fighting for a future in which “what each of us can accomplish—and how we all treat each other—no longer depends on the groups into which we were born.”

Zoom link: https://charlotte-edu.zoom.us/j/92044807218

Sponsored by the UNC Charlotte Free Expression and Constructive Dialogue Task Force.