Editor’s Note: The students of Graham Bodie’s IMC 559-01 are graduate students in the Integrated Marketing Communication program at the University of Mississippi. This piece was written collectively by the class as part of a year-long course on toxic polarization and submitted by Bodie.
Before the first day of class, our professor asked us to complete a short survey. One question asked us to place ourselves somewhere on the political spectrum. It seemed simple enough, but it made many of us uncomfortable.
Talking about politics with strangers feels risky. Several of us wondered what kind of class we had just signed up for.
That discomfort turned out to be the point.
Over the last academic year in IMC 559 at the University of Mississippi, we studied two ideas that have quietly reshaped how we navigate our daily lives: toxic polarization and bridging. We came into class thinking polarization mostly meant strong political disagreements. We are leaving with a much harder truth.
More Than Disagreement
Toxic polarization is not simply people arguing about politics. It is a mindset where the other side is not just wrong but a threat. It is the reason a policy debate can feel like a personal attack.
Once we had language for this, we could not stop seeing it. We noticed it in news headlines written to provoke rather than inform. We noticed it in our own assumptions, the quiet, unflattering things we believed about people whose views differed from ours before we ever gave them a chance to speak.
“I thought I was already a pretty understanding person, but this class helped me realize there were biases I had never noticed before,” one student wrote in an end-of-year reflection.
That reckoning was uncomfortable. It was also necessary.
What Bridging Actually Means
Bridging is not about erasing differences or pretending everyone secretly agrees. It does not mean you have to change your values or soften your convictions. In the simplest terms, it means being willing to listen to another person’s story before deciding who they are.
Real bridging is not a debate. Bridging is designed to build understanding. The goal is not to win. The goal is to understand the experiences and values that led someone to think the way they do and to let them understand yours.
Our class took part in meetings outside of the classroom, in neutral settings, where we worked through prompts and topics with our classmates. We learned things about the people sitting next to us in class that we never would have discovered otherwise, and we began to understand why they hold the beliefs they do.
We also learned from organizations doing this nationally, including Listen First Project and the 500+ organizations that participate in collaborative campaigns like National Week of Conversation. These are not feel-good experiments. They are evidence that bridging works.
The Shift We Felt
Not everyone in our class came in with the same background. Some of us are from Mississippi. Some had deliberately avoided politics because, as one classmate put it, “I noticed how polarized it was early on, and I just didn’t know what it was called.”
But a shift happened—different for each of us, but real.
Some of us started slowing down when scrolling through social media, asking what was missing before sharing. Some of us began having conversations with family members we had always avoided political topics with. One student wrote that they had friends with completely different political views and had never talked about it until now. “Bridging only works if you aren’t scared to talk about things with people who may have different opinions than you,” they said.
“Bridging doesn’t start with changing someone else’s mind. It starts with being willing to listen.”
Others found the change in how they listened, how they questioned their own assumptions, and how they stopped seeing a person’s political identity as the whole of who they are. As one classmate reflected, “The media is shaping people to believe that everyone on opposite sides hate each other and can’t be friends. But I’ve found that’s not true.”
Communication Is Not Neutral
We learned that communication professionals, journalists, and campaign strategists are not bystanders to polarization. They shape the environments where conversations either happen constructively or collapse into contempt.
When communication focuses on conflict and outrage, it deepens division. When it encourages storytelling, curiosity and listening, it can help people engage with differences instead of running from them.
The choices we make, what stories we tell, how we frame them, whose voices we amplify, carry real weight. We are not just delivering messages. We are building, or eroding, conditions for civil life.
Putting Bridging Into Practice
We did not stop at theory. In April, we hosted a public Braver Angels debate on housing in Oxford and Lafayette County at Oxford-University United Methodist Church. The event brought
together University of Mississippi students, faculty and staff alongside city and county leaders, developers, affordable housing advocates and residents for a structured, civil debate. The goal was to model respectful discourse across political, generational and town/gown divides, give stakeholders a real space to be heard, and generate practical policy ideas for decision-makers, including the Affordable Housing Commission, Oxford Board of Aldermen, and Lafayette County Board of Supervisors.
The debate format itself was a form of bridging in action. Participants were not there to win. They were there to be heard, and to hear others. The structured format held space for disagreement without letting it collapse into contempt. Policy ideas surfaced that none of the participants could have reached alone.
We also took the conversation outside the auditorium. During the week of tabling at the student union, we spoke with 40 students about their political views, invited them to engage with perspectives different from their own and shared data on the issues dividing our community. Many of those students had never been asked those questions before. Some stopped for just a minute. Others stayed to talk for much longer.
What we found, in both settings, was the same thing: People want to be in conversation. They are waiting for a structure that makes it feel safe enough to try.
None of us believes one class can fix toxic polarization. The forces driving division are large, structural, and stubborn. But the problem does not begin in Washington or on cable news. It begins in the moments when curiosity disappears, and contempt takes its place.
And it can be interrupted, in those same moments, by anyone willing to ask a real question and wait for the answer.
That is what bridging looks like. It starts with us.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
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