In an ideal world learning about individual group members…
Page 131. In an ideal world learning about individual group members will humanize the group, but often getting to know a person better just establishes her as different from the rest of the group.
— from Friends, Community & Society (Relationships/Community/Society)
In the book
There is a wider turbulence, too, the one that scales up from friendship to society: the tribal impulse. We do not live as lone individuals in a desert; we live in tribes, and that belonging is a deep human good — but the very same impulse curls, all too easily, into us-against-them. Worse, simply getting to know one member of an out-group can backfire, marking them in our minds as the exception rather than softening the whole. It is rarer than we like to think for a member of a majority group to form a real friendship across the line into a minority one. — Friends, Community & Society (Relationships/Community/Society)