Peter Coleman has seen the enemy, and it’s not the people who violently disagree with us. It’s “toxic polarization” itself — and Coleman, Professor of Psychology & Education, who is the focus of a story and Q and A in the current edition of Newsweek, believes the Biden administration should focus on reducing it rather than on striving toward some idealized notion of nationalized unity.

Coleman, who directs Teachers College’s Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, has been a frequent commentator of late in many venues. But in Newsweek, he goes a step further in suggesting how the new President and his team should try to heal the nation. 

The principal thing I would recommend that Biden do is not talk about unity and healing yet. One of the things we've learned from peacebuilding is you don't go into a war zone and tell people to reconcile.

— Peter T. Coleman, Professor of Psychology & Education, in Newsweek

“The principal thing I would recommend that Biden do is not talk about unity and healing yet,” he tells writer Adam Piore.  “One of the things we've learned from peacebuilding is you don't go into a war zone and tell people to reconcile. Instead, you talk about toxic polarization as a pathology in our communities, our homes, and the impact it has on us personally, our children’s health and our community’s health.”

[Coleman’s new book The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization, is due out in June from Columbia University Press.]