Nilanjana Dasgupta is provost professor of psychology and founding director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Scientific American Mind, National Public Radio, and other major outlets. She is the author of a new book, Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities, published by Yale University Press in January 2025. Dasgupta lives in Northampton, MA and joined the RFC Board in January 2023.

I've been thinking a lot recently about January 2017, right after the U.S. presidential elections, when anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric was on the rise nationwide. Trump had just imposed a travel ban against foreign nationals from several majority-Muslim nations.

The mood in my town was tense. Some neighbors, friends, and I organized a group to talk to our local elected leaders on the town council. We used personal stories to urge our councilors to designate the town as a sanctuary city. We were worried that our Muslim neighbors and immigrant residents may be targeted by the rising hostility. One person who spoke was a young Muslim woman. She told her story of growing up in our town and loving it. But now the climate had changed. The anti-immigrant hostility swirling around made her afraid for her safety and the safety of her family. She worried that her hijab and her husband’s kufi might make them targets. She worried that her children and friends at the local mosque might be targets. Her story laid bare her daily experiences of vulnerability.

Eight years later, we are back in the same moment again. The second Trump presidency burst forth with a series of bans, purges, and retributions targeting civil rights. A high priority of Trump’s agenda for his second presidential term is sweeping immigration restrictions including “the largest deportation program in American history,” reinstating a travel ban that restricts entry into the United States of people from several Muslim-majority countries, and ending birthright citizenship for US-born children whose parents are undocumented immigrants. This, together with other executive orders that eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in federal government, make it clear that diversity and civil rights is a target for the second Trump administration.

Many of us who care deeply about equality and social justice are asking ourselves, what now? How do we move forward in this dramatically changed political and legislative climate? How do we convert despair into hope, demobilization into action? What’s the most effective sphere of influence for ordinary people?

My new book, Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities, offers some answers to these questions using a science-driven approach to culture change by synthesizing research from multiple scholarly disciplines and converting their lessons into actionable solutions. Here are three takeaways from the book about what we can do as ordinary people.

1. Act in local places where you live and work. That’s the Goldilocks sphere of influence. In contrast, actions on a large stage—statewide, national, global—get diluted by other competing interests that are not in individuals’ power.
2. Act collectively with others to amplify your power and make change more possible. Collective action gets more traction while individuals acting alone are easily overpowered, sidelined, or delegitimized by situational forces.
3. Culture change is slow and incremental and compounds over time with repeated action. Expect a marathon not a sprint.

Returning to that day in January 2017, in town hall, in front of our elected officials, I think that personal story touched a nerve. A couple of months later, the town council unanimously passed a resolution affirming that our town welcomed people of all religions and national origins. And they resolved that town officials and institutions would not assist or enforce federal initiatives that target, surveil, or hinder the freedom of residents based on religion, immigration, or citizenship. That collective action was our first. Its success sparked social gatherings that brought together Muslim members from the local mosque with others of us, non-Muslims, to learn about each other and discuss other steps we could take together. Prior to this, our two communities had been segregated from each other. Now we were together. We morphed into a refugee resettlement action group to prepare ourselves to host refugee families in our town once the travel ban was lifted.

My story of local town residents coming together on the heels of the first Trump administration, coalescing, building relationships, strategizing, and acting together in various ways across time fits the three principles in Change the Wallpaper. Although the crisis was brought on by the national election, our actions were entirely local. They were also always collective. Several of us had not known each other prior to the 2016 election. That election and the ensuing crisis sparked new friendships and various types of collective actions that continued throughout the four years. One person in our group, the young Muslim woman who had spoken up at the town council that first day, was mobilized to run for school board, and then later, for a seat in the state legislature. The rest of us campaigned for her and cheered her on. She became the first Muslim woman elected to the state legislature. Our collective actions at a local level had ripple effects that, over time, started to change the wallpaper of legislators in the state capital.

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If you're in western Massachusetts and interested in learning more about Nilanjana's book, she'll be at the Forbes Library on Tuesday, February 18th at 6:30 pm talking about her book in conversation with local scholar and activist Carrie Baker. See the Forbes Library website for additional information; we hope to see you there. If you're not able to attend that event, her website includes links to several recent Op Eds and podcasts with additional information about the book and her findings.