Cultivate friends you disagree with, as well as those with whom you agree, because together you’ll locate the soft spot in your own thinking and find common ground to build on.
Although both my grandfathers encountered ethnic prejudice, they viewed this as an aberration – a failure of some Americans to live up to the nation’s ideals. America in their eyes was a land of unsurpassed blessing. It was a nation of which they were proud and happy to become citizens.
People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree — even about matters of profound human and moral significance.