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Week Three, “The Art of Play,” will kick off with a lecture by Jill Vialet, who has been dedicated to expanding and promoting play in children for the past 22 years through her nonprofit organization, Playworks.

At 10:45 a.m. on Monday, July 9, in the Amphitheater, she will share her experiences at Playworks, as well as her findings about the importance of play.

Vialet founded Playworks in 1996 after an elementary school principal in the San Francisco Bay Area asked her to help make recess more constructive. The program began with two schools, and today is used in more than 1,800 schools in more than 20 cities across the country.

According to its website, Playworks will reach almost one million students this year by helping schools establish inclusive environments for play.

“The idea is that play has the possibility and potential of bringing out the best in kids,” Vialet said. “What is great about the program is when it is intentionally worked into a school, it allows kids to feel seen, feel included and develop teamwork skills. Then, these morals can become really established and habitual.”

Vialet directly oversaw the programming in the original two schools as executive director, but said her role has since evolved over the years to include “fundraising, public speaking, creating partnerships, identifying opportunities for expansion.”

Vialet said her findings are not limited to children. Play has the ability to also impact adults’ lives.

“Play infused into a workplace or a society more intentionally creates an opportunity to build trust and rapport across the messiness of human interaction,” she said. “And it’s not necessarily through dialogue. The experiential opportunity and the ability to experience common ground and common interests is necessary to create an environment that enables dialogues to enhance democracy.”

Vialet said play and systems of play are “inherently ammature,” meaning that one must have a love for it and recognize the way that it presents itself naturally. She will expand on this concept at her lecture.

“Another thing I have been thinking about a lot recently is the idea that play is kind of a design element that can change the experience,” she said, “and how we might make opportunities to participate in democracy in a more constructive and engaging way.”

Vialet is also the author of Recess Rules, which tells the story of a group of middle- schoolers who are unhappy with the way their recess is going and begin to create a Playworks-like framework by themselves.

“It’s really about kids leading and finding their own power of play,” Vialet said. “That’s a common theme in both the book and the Playworks framework.”

When Theodore Roosevelt visited Chautauqua in 1905, he described this place as “a gathering that is typically American, in that it is typical of America at its best.” Each summer, Chautauquans showcase their American spirit with a day filled with celebrations of country and community. The Children’s School parade, Chautauqua Community Band concert, Independence Day Pops Celebration, and fireworks over a flare-lined Chautauqua Lake make for a day that is, indeed, typical of America at its best.

Photos by: Haldan Kirsh, Riley Robinson and Abigail Dollins

A month after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, Amy Chua read a passage from her first book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability to an international business transaction class at Yale Law School.

“In developing countries, under certain conditions, demagogic politicians with no political experience can sweep to power in elections, to the horror of the elites, riding a wave of racially tinged populism,” she read.

She looked up to her class of now-stunned law students.

“Professor Chua, that sounds a lot like you are describing the United States,” one student said over the dead stares of her classmates.

It wasn’t about the U.S. — it was about former Venezuelan President and dictator Hugo Chávez.

That interaction inspired Chua’s fifth book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, which argues that tribalism is widening the political divide in the U.S. She articulated her point at the 10:45 a.m. morning, Friday, July 6, lecture to close Week Two and the theme “American Identity.”

Chua is an author and professor of law. She was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2011, one of Atlantic Monthly’s Brave Thinkers and one of Foreign Policy’s 2011 Global Thinkers. This was Chua’s second visit to Chautauqua Institution; her first visit she documented thoroughly in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, when her daughter auditioned on (and later quit) the violin.

While humans are tribal animals like their primate relatives, they are not just “a little” tribal — they are extremely tribal, according to Chua. This is not only evident in politics, and isn’t necessarily always negative; humans exhibit positive, tribalistic behaviors in families, friend groups and sports.

“We all know that America is in the grips of political tribalism,” Chua said. “We lament and we condemn this tribalism, even as we can’t help voraciously engage in it.”

Tribalism turns problematic when people begin seeing other tribes as inherently “bad,” which Chua said is apparent in the “bitterly divided” state of the nation.

“At this moment, we can’t get anything done, and we can’t even talk to each other,” she said. “We are at a point where many Americans see people (who) voted for the other side not just as the people that they disagree with and want to debate with, but rather as immoral, evil and ‘un-American,’ which is a dangerous state of affairs.”

Chau contributes this behavior to two factors; the first, the massive demographic shift from the waves of immigration since the 1970s.

“For the first time in history, whites are on the verge of losing their majority,” she said.

And it’s not just white people who feel threatened — every group feels threatened. Women feel threatened by Trump’s presidency, men feel threatened by the #MeToo movement and Christians feel threatened by the changing culture, she said.

This is not a generational issue either, according to Chua. Across college campuses, including her own predominantly liberal Yale, “group blindness,” or failing to acknowledge a group’s oppression, is “the ultimate sin.” Chua said it was “transcendent” for white women to wear a headscarf or a kimono when she was a student, but now it would be seen as a micro- aggression.

“If you champion group blindness, you will be seen as erasing the very specific experiences of oppression of minority groups,” she said. “So I see a lot more self-segregation (among) the different student groups.”

This leads to a hardening of party lines, which prevents conversation across said lines.

The second factor Chua addressed — market-dominant minorities — works simultaneously with racial and cultural changes.

Market-dominant minorities is a term Chua coined in her first book, World on Fire. It describes a minority that controls the majority of wealth in a country. For example, Indonesia’s Chinese ethnic minority makes up 3 percent of the population but controls 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. For these countries, the introduction of a democracy can be destabilizing.

“Americans tend to romanticize democracy,” she said. “We think that elections are the answer to everything. And I think we are now getting the taste of our own medicine. … Under certain conditions, especially when inequality traps certain deep, pre-existing ethnic or religious divisions, … democracy does not improve, but actually catalyzes, group conflict.”

Chua predicted this would happen in Iraq. Prior to the U.S. invasion, Iraq had a market- dominant minority — the Sunni. The Sunni comprised 15 percent of Iraq’s population, controlled its markets and victimized the majority Shia and Kurds population.

“What do you think the majority is going to do when you give them the vote?” she said. “I predicted that Iraq’s long-oppressed 60 percent Shia majority would likely use their new-found power as revenge against their former overlords.”

That’s exactly what happened, she said.

“Once in power, the Shia immediately began excluding and persecuting and executing Sunnis,” Chua said. “The Sunni minority instantly realized this democracy thing isn’t working, so they began joining the insurgency: al-Qaida and ISIS.”

This theory is not limited to developing countries. A new market-dominant minority is rising in the U.S., dubbed “coastal elites,” according to Chua.

“Something has changed,” she said. “Class or education has split America’s white majority. Indeed, today there is so little interaction and intermarriage between these two groups of whites in America — between coastal, urban, more educated whites and whites in the heartland, the South, more working- class whites. Today, the division between these two groups of whites is so deep that it practically constitutes what social sciences would call an ethnic divide.”

The “coastal elite” class includes Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley moguls, according to Chua, who share the same “cosmopolitan” lifestyle and progressive ideals.

This new economic superpower, and the changing demographics of the U.S., is causing the riff between tribes, but Chua said she has hope.

“(America’s) strong overarching American identity, coupled with its ability to accommodate individual subgroup cultures, make it a ‘super- group,’ ” she said.

The United States’ unique birthright citizenship policy makes “(it) the model for overcoming tribalism,” but Chua offered some additional suggestions.

Her first suggestion was that Americans need to be more protective of their country’s “uniqueness.” Democrats should be more aware of the harm of the “scorched-earth” approach to American identity.

“There’s a world of difference in saying ‘America has repeatedly and shamefully failed to live up to its open ideals and must do better,’ ” she said. “There’s a huge difference between saying that and saying that ‘the principles that we are supposedly founded on are all fraud, all lies.’ ”

Republicans need to remember that “real patriotism is more than just waving a flag or singing the anthem very loudly,” Chua said.

“The kind of overarching national identity that a super-group requires, capable of binding Americans together, all that balance cannot exist unless every person in the society has reason to love the country, has reason to be proud of the country,” she said.

Americans also have to start viewing one another as human again, “(looking) beyond those echo chambers” and bridging the gap between the coast and the heartland “to start reaching across divides.”

“America is an aspirational nation; our ideals have always far exceeded reality,” Chua said. “The American dream is a promise of freedom and hope. That is also a call on all of us to make true the myths we tell ourselves about what we tell ourselves America has always been.”

After she concluded her lecture with Langston Hughes’ poem “Let America be America Again,” Geof Follansbee, chief executive officer of the Chautauqua Foundation and Chautauqua Institution’s vice president of development, opened the Q-and-A. He asked what is “threatening” majorities.

“I think that there is a real fear that the country is changing and that it won’t be the country that it was,” Chua said. “I am an optimist because we have encountered this before. We’ve seen nativists, anti-immigrant and xenophobia waves happen before. Every other time we have overcome it.”

When asked what her ideal 2020 presidential candidate would be like, she said a candidate with strong leadership skills, who speaks authentically — without being “canned”— and who can reach the other side of the political divide.

To close that divide, Chua said the nation should focus on restoring one of its core values.

“I think that restoring upward mobility in this country should be viewed as a national emergency,” she said.

Chautauquans can finally answer the question: “Whose line is it anyway?”

It’s Colin Mochrie’s and Brad Sherwood’s, who at 8:15 p.m. on Friday, July 6 in the Amphitheater will perform their off-the-cuff show “Scared Scriptless.” It’s the first visit to Chautauqua for the improv stars, both series regulars of the Emmy-nominated series, “Whose Line is it Anyway?”

“We give the power to the audience,” Sherwood said in an interview about the show with The Hype Magazine. “They are the puppet masters. And we are at the mercy of their demented brains.”

Using prompts and suggestions from audience members, Mochrie and Sherwood will execute a series of improv sketches.

And they won’t be alone on stage.

“Every scene starts with a suggestion from the audience, and we have audience members onstage with us for about 80 percent of the show,” Mochrie told the Star Gazette. “It’s that added danger quality.”

These suggestions come in the form of games, many of which Mochrie said will be familiar to “Whose Line” fans, but he and Sherwood try to keep it exciting.

“Much of the work that Brad and I do in our show is coming up with a way to ask for suggestions so that we don’t get the same things over and over again. … We’ll come up with ways like, ‘What was your great-grandfather’s occupation?’ or ‘What’s an occupation where you need special equipment?’ ” Mochrie said in his Star Gazette interview. “It gets the audience to think outside of the box a little.”

The duo has lots of experience making people laugh. After a stint with improv group Second City’s Toronto troupe, Mochrie starred in the British and American versions of “Whose Line.” He is the recipient of three Canadian Comedy Awards, winning for Best Male Improviser in 2000, Best Male TV Performance in 2001 and Best Writing in 2003.

Sherwood got his start on the 1994 sketch-comedy series “The Newz,” and after joining “Whose Line” in 1992 continued to appear in various comedic productions. He is also a Second City alum, but appeared in the group’s L.A. troupe. Sherwood has tried his hand at everything from game shows to late-night talk shows, with credits ranging from “The Drew Carey Show” to “The Dating Game.”

Mochrie and Sherwood teamed up in 2003 for “Scared Scriptless,” and they’ve been touring ever since.

“I like the energy and the adrenaline that you get from being on stage, and I think once you become good at making people laugh, getting those laughs becomes a bit addictive,” Sherwood told Parade magazine.

And yes, the show really is unscripted.

“It’s always different. You never fall into a rut. Every audience is different, every theater is different, and depending on our moods, every show is different,” Mochrie said in Parade. “It’s not like we’re a band going out doing our greatest hits night after night. We’re making up something completely new — every night — with the help of the audience.”

For the past week, Chautauqua Theater Company’s An Octoroon has been asking audience members to step into the skin of someone who may not look like them.

“I think that is something every single person can do regardless of if they see the play,” said CTC Managing Director Sarah Clare Corporandy.

Now, CTC is asking the same from all Chautauquans, both on the grounds and in Chautauqua County. To facilitate further conversation, there will be a film screening of “Mother’s Milk: A Film Quilt” at noon today at Chautauqua Cinema.

Originally written as a play by CTC guest artist Larry Powell, the film consists of several shorts that tell the story of a young black boy named Sparrow on a journey to find his mother and his home. Scenes were shot across the country and were each filmed by a different director with a different actor in the lead role.

“I call it a quilt because it’s a collection of short films stitched together,” Powell said. “It’s not just a film, it’s an immersive theater experience.”

“Mother’s Milk” is free with a gate pass on a firstcome, first-served basis and will be followed by a talkback with Powell.

Powell said the film is a response to oppression and injustice that aims to educate why violence doesn’t work and why worthiness and self-love does. He said he asked it to be screened at Chautauqua after a traumatic event last weekend.

“It is really for us to step up, for us to come together, take the actions of love against fear,” Powell said.

Around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 1, Powell and three other actors of color were signaled to pull over by a Chautauqua County police officer while they were on the way home from a party to celebrate the opening of An Octoroon.

After both cars were let inside Chautauqua’s main gate, Powell stopped the car and said he told the actors in the backseat to remain calm. The white officer approached Powell’s window and asked to see his driver’s license before saying that the car’s taillight was out. Powell said he was unfamiliar with the company car, but demonstrated that the lights were in working condition.

Powell, the designated driver, said the office repeatedly asked him if he had been drinking. Each time, he replied that he was sober.

Powell was asked to step out of the car. At this point, another car full of white company members arrived at the scene, including CTC Artistic Director Andrew Borba. Borba said he stepped out of his car and tried to intervene, but was told by the officer to move along. From a distance, Borba said he took a picture on his phone that showed Powell’s taillight was working.

Powell said he explained to the officer that he was the lead of An Octoroon, an award-winning artist only in town for the summer and that he was not a problem.

“It is really, really messed up that I have to shuffle through a learned survival mechanism as an ‘exceptional negro,’ ” he said. “He wasn’t even mean, either, but the actual actions were awful.”

Powell and the company members were let go without a ticket. The car continued to Jewett House, where the actors were met and comforted by other conservatory members.

Borba said the incident was not related to An Octoroon.

“We could have been producing any play that happened to be employing actors. They were pulled over because they were black,” he said. “We happen to be doing a play that addresses racial issues in America.”

At noon on Sunday, July 1, CTC company members gathered for a private meeting to discuss the encounter. They were joined by Chautauqua President Michael E. Hill, Vice President of Visual and Performing Arts Deborah Sunya Moore, Vice President of Religion and Senior Pastor the Rt. Rev. V Gene Robinson, and Robert Franklin Jr., Robinson’s predecessor, who happened to be on the grounds at the time.

For over two hours, company members shared their feelings and asked what CTC and Chautauqua would do to address what happened. Powell later suggested to Hill and Moore via email that Chautauqua hold a screening of “Mother’s Milk” as another step toward healing.

“(Powell) was such a pillar of graciousness,” Moore said. “I’m really full of gratitude for how he’s leading.”

Corporandy said that last weekend’s events do not exist in a vacuum.

“It has been brought to our attention not only by these larger incidents, which we have at least one of every year, but smaller moments that when you come into a place where you are the minority in a significant way that people look at you differently and approach you differently and talk to you differently,” Corporandy said. “Those things on a daily basis can really add up to feel very hurtful and isolating.”

Corporandy said that CTC has made a more conscious effort to inform conservatory members about the lack of diversity at Chautauqua before they arrive on the grounds. She said that in response, conservatory members have asked to be connected to a local NAACP chapter or another network of allies.

“We are making it clear that we are (allies), but if we are not the right people for them, we will find them the right people,” Corporandy said.

Corporandy said CTC appreciates the cards and support from Chautauquans, but would like to see kind words translate into activism.

“Really, what we need to see is that this community is acting in a place of advocacy,” Corporandy said. “We don’t necessarily need hugs and cookies.”

Corporandy said that advocacy can take many forms, including awkward one-on-one conversations.

“Those conversations do not have to be with the actors that were in the show,” she said. “They need to be with each other. Even though Chautauqua is a gated community, that doesn’t mean that we’re perfect.”

Hill and Chautauqua County Sheriff Joseph Gerace said they will meet this afternoon to discuss what happened and how the officer’s actions were received. Hill said he is also in talks with County Executive George Borrello about broader inclusion in the county.

Gerace declined to comment on Sunday’s incident until after meeting with Hill, but said that “all police deputies and officers go through diversity training, which is a state mandate.”

In the spring, Chautauqua Institution hired the diversity consulting firm Cook Ross to help adjust internal policies and develop a comprehensive inclusion plan with short-term and long-term benchmarks for the next decade. The team from Cook Ross includes Johnnetta Cole, president of the nation’s two historically black women’s colleges, who will address Chautauqua at 12:30 p.m. on July 14 in the Hall of Philosophy as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative.

“We’re investing significant resources into trying to make this a model community. We’re willing to really tackle moments of injustice and to look underneath, whether there are systematic things we can do to erase those,” Hill said. “The rest will be, sadly, a gradual long change,

For David Brooks, rekindling love and community is at the heart of American identity.

“We are driven by this heart and soul to bond with each other,” Brooks said. “It’s our natural inclination. So you have to believe that our nation will prevail and that even in a moment of isolation and loneliness and division, we will find a way to bond through love and affection.”

The New York Times op-ed columnist spoke at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture on Thursday, July 5 to an overflowing Amphitheater, tackling Week Two’s theme, “American Identity.”

Brooks described his life as “bookish.” His initial infatuation with writing began after he read Paddington the Bear. In high school, when a girl dumped him for someone else, he thought, “but I’m a much better writer than that guy.”

“And so we have different values,” he said over a roar of laughter (and a lone crying baby).

When he was 18, the admissions offices of Brown University, Wellesley College and Columbia University decided he should go to the University of Chicago, he said. There he found a “bookish place” for his “bookish life.”

From there, Brooks served as a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a contributing editor at Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly. Brooks is a senior fellow at Yale University and a regular commentator on PBS’s “NewsHour.” In 2003, he became a “conservative columnist” at The New York Times, which he describes as “being the chief rabbi in Mecca.”

He is the author of Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There; On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense; The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement; and The Road to Character.

This was Brooks’ third appearance at Chautauqua Institution; he last visited five years ago — when he was 10 years younger, Brooks said.

Aside from his bookishness, Brooks values consciousness, which he said is comprised of two parts; the first is the heart.

Brooks talked about a friend who desperately tried to remove a bamboo stand. The man tried to cut down the plant, taking an axe to its roots; he dug a three-foot hole, poured chemicals and cement into the hole, but eventually the bamboo began to peak through the concoction. Brooks said that just like the bamboo, the heart will prevail.

“We all have something like that. We have some piece like that that is our desire and which pushes through anything. … We are always desiring,” Brooks said.

The second part of consciousness, according to Brooks, is the “yearning soul.”

Brooks asked, not that the audience believe in a god or higher power, but if they “believe that (they) have a piece of (them) that has no shape, color, size or weight; that is of infinite value and dignity; that (believes) slavery is wrong because it assaults another human being’s soul; that rape is wrong, not because it assaults a bunch of physical molecules; that it’s an assault on another human being’s soul; and that obscenity is anything that covers up another person’s soul. And what this soul does is it yearns for righteousness.”

But, Brooks said, society is attacking the joy of the heart and soul with its individualistic culture.

In our current climate, there is an emphasis on self, he said. Levels of narcissism are rising, the U.S. is “No. 1 in the world in thinking that we’re good at math,” he said; college men would choose fame over sex, according to Brooks.

There is also an institutional issue of alienation sweeping the nation, he said, with higher levels of social distrust, and a “crisis of meaning” with rising depression and suicide rates and the opioid epidemic — the “slow suicide,” he said.

Much of this Brooks contributed to the nation’s “tribal mentality.”

“It’s us versus them; it’s friend and enemy,” he said. “And the politics in tribal mentality is what we call in political science ‘the negative polarization.’ Do you like your own party? ‘Not really.’ Do you hate the other side? ‘Totally.’ So our politics are more driven on hatred.”

Brooks sees “tribal mentality” as a greater issue than just a riff between political ideologies — he sees it as a “silent Pearl Harbor,” if not as “dramatic.”

“When the foundations of democracy are being shredded, isn’t that a silent Pearl Harbor?” Brooks said. “When the foundations of capitalism, of free movement of goods and people are being shredded, seems to me like a silent Pearl Harbor. … When 55,000 people die of opioid addiction and 45,000 commit suicide, that seems a silent Pearl Harbor.

“So, we are not going to be asked as older generations have been asked, ‘What did you do in the war?’ I think we will be asked ‘What did we do in the peace?’ ”

Although the U.S. is not experiencing a spiritual revival or a political revival, it is experiencing a civic revival, Brooks said. Grassroots movements across the country are motivated by “the love of the good” and “the love of their (cities),” and are focused on building relationships with youth. He called those community groups “the answer to our nation’s problems.”

However, these groups are working at a micro level while the country is losing its narrative on a macro scale, he said.

Brooks grew up with the “immigrant mentality and the Exodus narrative” — the belief that waves of people came to the “promised land” like the story of Moses.

“The Puritans came with that narrative, the Founding Fathers came with that narrative. … Every subsequent immigrant came with that narrative, … and yet, we have to face the reality for a lot of young people that that narrative makes no sense to them,” Brooks said. “They just don’t buy that this is a promised land. … It’s a new narrative of commitment to each other based on redemption and forgiveness.”

After receiving a prolonged standing ovation, Brooks kicked off the Q-and-A.

“Now we can talk about Paul Manafort for 20 minutes,” he said.

President Michael E. Hill asked the first question: What are communities doing to foster these bonds?

For Brooks, politics are not the sole influence in life. When he goes to polarized areas like “blue” Vermont or “red” Louisiana, he said, there is a healthy foundation that doesn’t rely on politics. Brooks stressed listening to people of different opinions and ideologies to cultivate community growth.

Hill turned to the audience for questions — what politicians are building strong communities, one attendee asked. Brooks answered with John McCain, Ben Sasse, a Republican junior senator from Nebraska, and Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota.

“I would say politicians are not that callous; they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t love their country,” he said. “It’s just they’re just stuck in a rotten system that makes them behave the way they behave.”

David Brooks has a special, unofficial label for his work at The New York Times. He’s not just an op-ed columnist — he’s a conservative columnist.

Brooks has defined this label further:

“Well, I’m an American conservative,” Brooks recently told the podcast “Conversations with Tyler.”

During his third lecture at Chautauqua Institution, Brooks will have the opportunity to expand on the meaning of that label, continuing Week Two’s exploration of “American Identity.” Brooks will take the podium at 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, July 5 in the Amphitheater.

“I hope it gives voice to those who would identify as conservative. I hope it challenges those who consider themselves solidly liberal,” said Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill. “I think one of the interesting things with David, and it’s one of the reasons that he both appeals and occasionally frustrates both sides of that aisle, is that he refuses to be put in a camp of left or right.”

Brooks has written columns for the Times since 2003, following stints as a foreign correspondent and op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal. Brooks appears every Friday as a commentator on PBS’s “News- Hour,” as well as on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

In addition, Brooks is the author of four books, the most recent of which is The Road to Character, which is a New York Times best-seller.

Brooks last visited Chautauqua in July 2013 when he gave a lecture titled, “Moral Geniuses: Public Figures to Admire and Imitate.” This was before Brooks became a frequent and strident critic of President Donald Trump.

In partisan political discourse, Brooks is a uniquely nuanced voice, Hill said. Brooks does not equate conservative with Republican, a point he argued in his June 25 column, “Republican or Conservative, You Have to Choose.”

“Trump is an assault on the sacred order that conservatives hold dear,” Brooks wrote.

But while critiquing both sides of the aisle, Brooks also analyzes cultural trends such as “wokeness,” questioning the common space in what can feel like a national Venn diagram of opposing views.

He acknowledged conflicting ideas of American identity in his May 2017 Times piece, “The Four American Narratives.”

“America has always been a divided, sprawling country, but for most of its history it was held together by a unifying national story,” Brooks wrote. “But that civic mythology no longer unifies.”

Hill expects Brooks to discuss both America’s historical narrative and current events in the dizzying national news cycle.

“I can’t predict which thing he might bring up,” Hill said. “It could be anywhere from the Supreme Court vacancy, to what’s happening with the border, to how he sees the social fabric of America.”

Chautauquans may notice there is no title listed for Brooks’ lecture. Hill said he expects this presentation to be an entirely different experience from the last one Brooks gave in the Amp.

“Part of the reason why there’s not a title, and I really applaud this about David, is that he’s probably writing it right now,” Hill said. “I think David is just extremely educated, nuanced and thoughtful at how he looks at issues, and I suspect that this will be one of the best lectures we have all season because of those qualities.”

Who are the “we” in “we the people?”

Jelani Cobb, staff writer for The New Yorker, took a hard look at what “we the people” has meant throughout history at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Tuesday, July 3 in the Amphitheater, continuing Week Two’s discussion of “American Identity.”

During Cobb’s tenure at The New Yorker, he has written extensively about race in America. His articles, including “The Anger in Ferguson,” “Murders in Charleston,” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Reparations,” tackle injustice, the police and race.

He is the 2015 recipient of the Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism, the 2017 recipient of the Walter Bernstein Award from the Writers Guild of America East for his PBS Frontline series “Policing the Police,” and a Fulbright fellow.

This was his first visit to Chautauqua Institution.

“This is an immense country — sprawling — and if we were to ask ‘what America is,’ we could give any variety of answers,” Cobb said. “We could say that it is a nation-state, in North America — the North American continent — that covers 3.8 million square miles. That it has a population of 325 million people…”

Cobb rattled off facts about the U.S., from religious makeup to racial breakdown. He told the audience “a lot about the United States,” but not “who we are.”

“ ‘Who we are’ is a much broader, philosophical question,” he said. “It is best understood by our responses in times of difficulty. It is what we do in our most mundane moments. It is what we hold onto in our most cherished values.”

The question of who are “we the people,” Cobb said, is central to decades of unresolved conflict — he called it “the fundamental divide” — because for most of the nation’s history, “we” has been exclusive to white people.

“The first-person plural ‘we,’ we’ve never sufficiently understood and defined who was included in that word,” he said. “And as a consequence, we had a dynamic in American history of an expanding concept of ‘we’ and a contracting and fearful idea of who ‘we’ should be.”

This dynamic constantly replays itself, like a “Freudian nightmare, (recurring and recurring) until the underlying conflict is resolved,” he said.

Cobb referenced the Declaration of Independence — and its inherent hypocrisy.

In the original declaration, Thomas Jefferson drafted arguments for separating from England. One of the grievances stressed that the British were guilty of thrusting slaves on the American colonies, and if the slaves revolted, it would be at the expense of Americans, not the British, according to Cobb.

“This is as stinging a rebuke of the institution of slavery that we see from Jefferson’s pen,” he said.

That clause did not make it into the final draft, weaving oppression into the nation’s founding document.

“It is essentially copy-editing black freedom out of the original document. We begin with this disparity and distinction in the capacity in the word ‘we’ to not include all human beings of this country,” Cobb said.

Moving through history, this “disparity” pitted the young republic against itself, erupting in the Civil War — a war fundamentally rooted in the question of “who we are,” Cobb said.

Cobb, who lived in Georgia for a number of years, said “people will tell you ‘the Civil War was fought for a number of exotic reasons.’ ”

“It’s widely accepted that slavery was the active ingredient, which is to say it was not the only cause, but it was the cause which without it, we would not have war,” he said. “It was the intractable element in this, and this issue of slavery would prove more fundamentally as a question of identity.

“Could the people who imagined a republic where there had been none imagine an interracial republic where there was not one?”

States used slavery as a bargaining chip: California could join the Union if southern states could enact tighter fugitive slave laws. From these “compromises” arose a government bureau dedicated to capturing and returning fugitive slaves and attempts to impose a constitutional amendment to prohibit the abolition of slavery, according to Cobb.

None of this resolved the question of “who we are.”

“It’s like a tire that has been patched and patched and patched, and sooner or later the tire is going to fall apart,” he said.

Cobb recalled seeing a statue of Abraham Lincoln on the drive to the Institution. Most people remember Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator,” but Cobb said people admire him for the wrong reasons.

According to Cobb, Lincoln spoke openly about “(consigning) the Negro race to a position of inferiority.” It wasn’t until his party pushed for the abolition of slavery and the Union was victorious at the Battle of Antietam that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Cobb noted that the proclamation only freed slaves in states that had seceded from the Union, and a constitutional amendment was needed to truly end slavery (only for those who had not been convicted of a crime).

“This is back to this expansion and contraction of ‘who is we?’ ” he said.

The rise of the Klu Klux Klan in the late 19th and early 20th century and the sharp increase of immigration laws were also bound in this question of “Who are we?”

Cobb jumped forward to contemporary history.

“In 2007, there were exactly four people in the United States who thought the country was ready to elect a black president, and they all lived in the same address on the south side of Chicago,” Cobb said over a roar of laughter. “But this happened, and it was an amazing thing to witness.”

He said regardless of political views or opinions, Barack Obama’s election to the highest office was a “novel development in American politics.”

However, the election of the first African-American president did not deter the “fundamental divide” from tearing at the social fabric of this new era.

A 2010 and 2011 opinion poll showed a small sliver of white people thought the most disadvantaged group in the country was themselves — despite making up 61 percent of the country and holding 91 percent of political offices, according to Cobb.

“We have yet to triumph over the most narrow sense — the most zero-sum understanding of who we are. We have yet to permanently inscribe a concept of democracy that sees itself as enriched with the presence and success of others. … This can be a difficult thing to grapple with,” he said.

But Cobb has hope. He shared an anecdote about a flight from Atlanta to New York City he took shortly after 9/11. A tall man with olive skin and a long beard boarded the plane wearing a tunic and baggy pants; he sat a row behind Cobb.

Cobb looked over his shoulder and asked the man where he was from; the plane fell silent.

The man turned and, in a rebuttal, asked Cobb where he was from. Cobb responded: “I’m from Queens, and I’m asking because I think you’re also from Queens, and if you are who I think you are, we were in the same breakdance crew in high school.”

“Everybody around us exhaled — he’s a breakdancer, he’s not going to kill us,” Cobb said over the audience’s laughter. “I’m now the large black man that made the white people around me feel more comfortable.”

This experience taught Cobb that it is possible for the country to see beyond its narrow view of itself and widely adopt openness and acceptance.

“In short, it is possible for democracy to exist in this land — it does not quite at this moment,” he said. “This struggle we have inherited from generations past, but I have no doubt that as people of conscience and diligence, it will. It will one day.”

After a thunderous standing ovation, Chief of Staff Matt Ewalt opened the Q-and-A by asking if Cobb finds confidence in the younger generation’s ability to further advance inclusivity.

“We do in instances find that young people are more open-minded about questions and being less mired by the decrepit thinking of older generations, and I think that’s hopeful,” Cobb said. “But I also think that we can’t kind of think that we are on auto-pilot, that these issues will resolve themselves.”

One attendee asked Cobb’s thoughts on whether Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel for the national anthem is a response to social injustices, or a lack of patriotism.

Cobb, who is close friends with Kaepernick, said that people mistake his decision as “unpatriotic” to gloss over the actual issues at hand, like police brutality.

“Patriotism is supposed to include dissent,” Cobb said.

Discussing the intersection of religion and politics is hardly a lighthearted conversation, historian Spencer McBride admits. But analyzing this connection is vital to understanding American identity.

At 2 p.m. on Wednesday, July 4 in the Hall of Philosophy, McBride will confront this topic head-on in his lecture “Religious Awakenings and America’s National Identity Crisis” as part of Week Two’s interfaith theme, “Religion and American Identity.”

“People want very clear answers, they want the role of religion in America’s past to be very neat and clean and to sit in a box,” McBride said. “The reality is that it was just as complicated back then as it is now. It’s really enlightening in some ways just because it shows that this has been a messy, contentious issue from our country’s beginning.”

McBride, a documentary editor at The Joseph Smith Papers, believes America’s “identity crisis” is a constant within the culture that cannot be understood without considering the role of religion. During his lecture, he will take Chautauquans through the sweeping history of the Second Great Awakening, a revival that led to a rapid rise in religious participation by Americans.

“I’m going to show how these religious awakenings affected the American identity. … I’m going to show that sometimes we think of religion in a very general sense,” he said. “We think of religion’s role in America’s national identity in today’s terms of the secular versus the religious. But even within American religious communities, there’s different approaches.”

As a historian specializing in the American Revolution and the early American republic, McBride attests to religion’s prominent role in shaping the country’s identity. Religious beliefs, he said, have often vindicated social change.

“These religious revivals really drummed up a lot of support for the abolition of slavery. … Yet there’s people using the same Bible, the same religious views to argue that slavery is justified and approved by God,” he said. “So when I talk about a national identity crisis, it’s in a sense that there’s never been a steam-rolled, uncontested national identity. It’s always evolving, it’s always up for debate.”

Amid studying 19th-century movements like the Second Great Awakening and the abolition of slavery, McBride has experienced his own “awakening” as his research has uncovered patterns of religion colliding with politics.

“The first two decades in the 2000s have been very divided, polarized times in our political culture,” he said. “You hear religion invoked again and again by politicians on either side of the aisle, … and people debated the proper role of religion and religious leaders then just as they do now.”

On his very first visit to Chautauqua, the historian and author of Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America,” said he is enthused about sharing his research with the community.

“I’ve known about Chautauqua for a long time, but it’s great to be a part of it,” he said.