This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

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New Year well-wishers don’t have to speculate whether you’re Christian, or Hindu, or Jewish, or atheist to decide whether to hide behind some muddled insignificance like “Happy Holidays!” New Year’s is non-discriminatory—a one-size-fits-all celebration. Never mind Thanksgiving, January 1 is really the universal holiday that everyone embraces equally.

Though the most secular of days, New Year’s nonetheless involves the most magical of thinking. To believe that somehow your life’s slate is suddenly wiped clean or that you get to start anew the moment the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve is pure illusion at its best. And we all eat it up! Unlike Santa Claus, the power and promise of the new year isn’t a myth that you wise up to at a certain age. If anything, your need to believe in starting fresh every 365 days gets stronger with age. And the best thing of all is that no one is liable to give you grief for believing such nonsense. Have you ever heard a strict rationalist scold someone for believing that you can start over in the new year? I’m guessing that even Richard Dawkins closed out 2015 sharing best wishes for a happy and prosperous 2016 with his friends and colleagues.

At the same time, there is something intrinsically anti-modern about the idea that time is circular. After all, our post-Enlightenment science-centered worldview generally has us believe that time—like progress—is linear. Time marches forward, not round and around. With each discovery or invention, moderns like to believe that over time things get cumulatively better. The very idea of progress is the belief that human life continues to improve as human knowledge grows.

But this quaint faith in progressive human improvement notwithstanding, there is something relentless and unforgiving in the very idea that time moves forward in a straight line. Linear time can, and will, pass us by—evidence of our own mortality. To believe that time is circular, on the other hand, allows for the possibility to, well, circle back, regroup, reassess, and embrace second chances and new beginnings. It’s comforting to think that the train will come around again to pick us up. At the very least, circularity allows for the possibility of redemption. It is why we are fond of recurring seasons.

So eager was I to assess and learn the lessons of 2015 that a few Sundays ago I texted seven of my closest friends and colleagues to help me rate my year. (I had decided I wasn’t a reliable source.) The answers were unanimous. It was good, very good even. But those who know me best knew that I didn’t just want a grade; I wanted to know what I could do better. What I really wanted was to hear how I could avoid making the same mistakes I made in 2015 all over again in the new year.

And that is perhaps the greatest thing about New Year’s. It is the only time when we are encouraged to resolve to do better without anybody having to make us feel guilty first. We are also encouraged to dream and make wishes for ourselves.

Whether or not our New Year’s goals are achieved is almost irrelevant. The point is that life is hard, and sometimes the smallest illusion like starting over again can help boost us along. Experience tells us that the luster of the new year will soon fade. But I think if you believe that the arbitrary clicking of the clock will automatically change your fortunes, then, why not, the world is your oyster.

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The songs I hear in my local drugstore and on the radio tell me over and over again that Christmas is about joy. And, of course, it is. But that’s only half the story. The Christmas tale, which appears in only two of the four Gospels—in two very different versions—is a lot richer and more challenging than we generally choose to remember.

Every year around this time, I try to get my head and heart prepared for the holiday season. I ask myself what I should think about as Christmas approaches. What do I want to learn? How do I want to grow? I guess you could say it’s my personal version of Advent.

A year ago, I was so ill prepared for the season that I went to visit my good friend Frank McRae, who has studied the Old and New Testaments, to request guidance. He considered my question, went silent for a moment or two, and suddenly slammed his palm violently on the table. “He was born in a manger!” he yelled. “And yet they found him! Those three wise men didn’t let the humble surroundings distract them. They knew greatness when they saw it. It helped that they came from the East, from far away. They didn’t share whatever local prejudices there may have been against a child of humble parents in such humble surroundings.”

In one fell swoop, my friend turned my Christmas into a meditation on discernment, the need to see clearly, and to recognize goodness around us, in whatever shape or form.

In their wonderfully insightful book, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach Us About Jesus’ Birth, New Testament scholars Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan encourage us to understand the Christmas story for what it is: a parable, a metaphorical narrative whose truths lie not in its factual details, but in the multiple meanings we can find in it.

Of course, Jesus himself was famous for his parables, the best of which subverted conventional ways of seeing the world. These parables, Borg and Crossan write, “invited his hearers into a different way of seeing how things are and how we might live.” In other words, as invitations from Jesus to see differently, they were also opportunities for people to change their lives and circumstances.

Today’s popular Christmas stories are often sentimental and viewed through the gauzy lens of warm and fuzzy childhood memories. Unlike Easter, which more clearly invites believers to meditate on notions of sacrifice, repentance, and transcendence, Christmas is more likely to be focused on gift-giving family togetherness than on individual faith and transformation.

But the story of the birth of Jesus is clearly more than sentimental. It’s about the weak and the wise outsmarting the powerful. It’s about the humble and faithful turning the world upside down. As Borg and Crossan argue, these are not tales designed to safeguard the status quo.

So this year, as I celebrate the birth of Jesus with the ones I love, I will also be thinking about where exactly I stand in a world that clearly needs fixing, and whether I’m doing my part to help turn it upside down.

Because whether or not there has ever been a war on Christmas, the Christmas story is itself about conflict. And each December 25, we are given an opportunity not only to welcome joy into the world, but to declare which side we are on.

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The horrible events in Paris inspired a round of global rubbernecking and then a sloppy debate over whether the Western World cares more about the victims in Paris than those in Beirut or Kenya and now Mali. Predictably that debate quickly evolved into one over race and ethnicity.

But there’s a deeper question to be asked here: How exactly does empathy work?

When the news of the Paris attacks hit, I was in a meeting in Washington, D.C. with a French-born publisher who quickly became anguished over the news. She grew up in Paris. Her daughter lives there now. In fact, her daughter frequents one of the targeted restaurants. While the events disturbed me, this French woman was clearly more pained. She was safe. Her family was safe. But the news invaded her consciousness in a way that seemed to affect her physically. At one point she sat down on the floor, hunched over, and stared gloomily at her smart phone.

It wasn’t until I learned that Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old Mexican-American from Southern California, had been killed in the attack that news of the massacre struck me on a more personal level. Nohemi was an American. Like me. She was a Mexican-American. Like me. She was from Southern California. Like me. Suddenly the horrible events that occurred 5,600 miles away seemed closer to home. What I had seen as tragic now felt sad.

A few days after the attacks in Paris, I drove down to Cal State Long Beach, the university Gonzalez had attended, to ask some students how her death had influenced their emotional response to this act of terrorism.

At first what I heard were reactions not dissimilar to mine. People ticked off certain aspects of their multi-layered identities that connected directly to Nohemi’s story, which, in turn, made them feel more deeply about the tragedy in Paris.

“All life is meaningful,” 23-year old senior Ernie Smith told me. “But I related to the events more when I found out she was a student, at Cal State Long Beach. Then it really hit home.”

The distinction between generally caring and having that feeling really “hit home” is suggested in the difference between the origins of the words sympathy and empathy. Sympathy derives from the Latin and Greek words meaning “fellow feeling.” The word empathy came to English from the German word Einfühlung, which means something like “inner feeling” or “feeling into.” While often used interchangeably, empathy carries a more intimate meaning than sympathy and suggests that the subject understands and is capable of sharing an emotion with the object. Sympathy, on the other hand, implies a greater distance. In a nutshell, you feel empathy when you can imagine being afflicted by the tragedy in question, and sympathy when you cannot.

What 26-year-old senior Catherine Gillespie then told me explains further how identifying—then empathizing—with a victim of a tragedy can help place you, at least on some psychic level, closer to the incident.

“The band that was playing at the concert hall where so many people were killed was from Palm Desert, California,” Gillespie told me. “I’m from nearby Indio. If I had been in Paris that night, I would have gone to see them play.” In other words, her identification with the band enabled her to imagine suffering the fate of the concertgoers, which therefore made her feel for the victims more deeply. Her response also suggests that there is a strong connection between empathy and fear.

Before last week, I would have told you that selflessness is at the core of caring. But after the events in Paris and listening to people’s reactions, I realize that whatever else empathy does for our psyches, it is also a form of self-preservation. I empathize with you, because what happened to you could happen to me. And that would be really horrible.

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The coffee was perfectly roasted. The steamed milk almost fluffy. The young woman reading next to me had that perfect combination of elegance and boho grunge, style and studied insouciance that only a French woman can pull off.

You see what I did? I just said the word insouciance! Shoot me now!

This gorgeous city can do that to you—make you say words you wouldn’t be caught dead uttering at home and think thoughts you know you shouldn’t be thinking, well, anywhere!

But that’s why we Americans love it here, right? It’s the place we can visit to imagine the life our loved ones, our circumstances, or our better judgment would never let us get away with back in Peoria. It’s where you don’t feel indulgent ordering that bottle of 2005 Château Mont-Redon or taking the time to enjoy the profiteroles and then maybe a digestif after your main course. It’s where you’ll appreciate more art in one week than you did in the previous three years back home.

I suppose I should be grateful that there’s a place in the world that inspires us to slow down and actually enjoy—and not just consume—life. And to some extent I am. To the middle-class American imagination (mine included), Paris symbolizes the sophisticated, urbane, gracefully choreographed life we should all be living.

But there’s also something deeply unsettling about the effect this hyper-idealized city has on foreign minds.

There are two types of earthly paradises: the kind that draws you in, embraces you, and gives you space to reinvent yourself (say, California), and the kind that is so elusive that you can only dream about receiving that sort of embrace, even after you’ve entered its gates.

The archetypal American in Paris, Gertrude Stein, insisted that Americans love France precisely because it leaves them alone, because there is no embrace. Here, she said, expats “are free not to be connected with anything happening.” The brilliance of Paris, she mused, is its ability to imbue foreigners with “the emotion of unreality.”

Sure, there is an element of that in any place to which scores of tourists and expats flock. No one goes on holiday—for however long—to immerse himself or herself in “the real world.” What would be the point? But Paris—and France’s infamous culture of seduction—take unreality to a whole new level.

In La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life, a book that’s slightly annoying because it tells us things like Henry IV was an “indefatigable lover,” New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino explains that French seduction is all about persuasion, charm, lingering, process, strategy, and subtle negotiation. Because there’s not necessarily an end to it, the means—the game, the dance—is the point. In France, seduction applies not only to personal encounters, but to commerce, diplomacy, politics, and even bureaucracy.

But whatever allure the idea of endless seduction might have for you, it might be instructive to recall that the French séduire derives from the Latin seducere, which means to “lead astray.”

Annie Cohen-Solal, the writer and Sartre biographer, told me over a drink the other night that she also thinks Americans find France so fascinating in part because it eludes them. She finds it ironic that the city that symbolizes for so many the release from narrow, practical, middle-class constraints is itself the most bourgeois of places.

“France is still a very traditional country,” she told me. “People want to keep it that way. There is a strong elitist tradition, particularly in education. Old, heavy institutions play a big role here, and civil servants run the show. That’s why tastes are very, very slow to change.”

In other words, for all its human diversity, Paris’ great beauty derives in no small part from an aesthetic and cultural consensus that only a deeply hierarchical society can maintain. Contrast the relatively uniform architectural styles of any major boulevard in central Paris to the wild variety on any major street in New York or Shanghai. This also helps explain why the uber French Louis Vuitton Foundation had to choose Frank Gehry, an American architect from Los Angeles, when it wanted to design the single most revolutionary new building in town.

I realize it’s a little unfair to blame Paris for the illusions we have of her. And ultimately my interest is not in the city itself, but on the psychic effects built—and, in this case, imagined—environments have on the people who live and visit.

My biggest problem with Paris is that it’s a cop-out for so many foreigners who come to conjure the myth of their more sophisticated selves. There is nothing wrong with inspiration or aspiration—two things this city provides in spades. But illusions are no substitute for real life and flirtation can never trump the value and meaning of a warm, genuine embrace. If tourists and expats cared so much about cultivating their finer selves, they’d go back home and do it—for real—rather than rely on a visit, however long or short, to give them a temporary fix. While we’ll always have Paris, you don’t have to walk her streets to live the life she inspires.

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The ensuing year, my sophomore year of high school, pretty much determined how I’d live my adult life—at least so far. Madrileños taught this cul-de-sac’d suburban boy how to take nightly strolls, to find refuge in cafes and bars, and otherwise live much of my life in public. Madrid turned me into what my mother calls a callejero—someone who’s always in the calle, or street.

But only recently have I realized how moving away at such a young age changed my very understanding of what home means.

If you ask me whether I love L.A., the city I was born in, raised around, and have lived in for more than 20 years, I’d say absolutely, yes. But my stated love for the place may not be based on any objective merits or anything this rapidly gentrifying city actually has to offer me.

In thinking about why people attach themselves to certain locations, I discovered that my own attachment to L.A. comes from two sources, both of them rather romantic.

First, I was baptized at La Placita Church, the same place my father was baptized in 1930. La Placita is across the street—and derives its name—from La Plaza, the center of the original pueblo of Los Angeles, which was founded in 1781. In other words, the very site of my baptism connects me to the origin story of my city on several levels—gathering together my familial, religious, ethnic, and civic identities. For me, La Placita is the epicenter of all that is genuinely L.A.

A city, in the final analysis, is the collection of stories its citizens tell about it. A truly great civic culture is the blending of millions of narratives into a powerful sense of belonging for as many of its residents as possible.

Popular culture, particularly in a city like L.A., plays a powerful role in this collective narrative. How many Angelenos have not heard classics like “I Love L.A.”, “Ventura Highway,” “It Was a Good Day,” or “Free Fallin’”? While in Spain, I gained a special love for Joni Mitchell’s “California,” and would sing it aloud whenever I got homesick.

The old adage tells us that home is where the heart is. But Tony Bennett convinced us long ago that you can leave your heart just about anywhere. Having moved away so young, I learned—through songs and movies—to mythologize home from a distance. And this is the second romanticized source of my Angeleno attachment: absentee nostalgia.

My personal understanding of home, then, wasn’t that of a city where I necessarily lived or even found comfort in, but rather a place where I often didn’t find myself and would occasionally long for. My love for Los Angeles, in other words, is driven largely by nostalgia, longing, and memory that goes well beyond my lived experience. Does this make my affection for the city any less real? I don’t think so.

But still, there’s nothing more replenishing of my attachment to home than the occasional—OK, frequent, if we’re honest—escape from it. I feel the need to leave Los Angeles every so often, as surely as I feel the exhilaration every time my plane touches back down at LAX upon my return.

The great geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has written elegantly about the eternal tension between place and space. “Place is security, space is freedom,” he writes. “We are attached to the one and long for the other.”

While my personal experience encourages me to love home from afar, I think L.A.’s often-maligned sense of placelessness—read freedom—simultaneously seduces me from a distance. Even the iconic view from my living room window—the palm trees, the Griffith Observatory, the Hollywood sign—sometimes makes me feel as if I were looking out at a distant Oz that remains perennially beyond my reach.

I’ve been traveling a great deal lately and the other day I realized that the only place I’ve felt jet -lagged was in Los Angeles, which seemed sort of perfect. I had that wonderfully fuzzy far-from-home feeling right here—at home.

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I asked my new friend what she felt about all this. She said she was grateful to have the “circle closed” and that she, too, had always loved him. Indeed, he was the only man she ever truly loved.

I’ve told the story to multiple people since then—I, too, needed to get it off my chest!—and everyone has a different reaction. Some see it as wholly tragic. Others see it as beautiful. Still, some consider the college boyfriend a huge jerk for reaching out three decades later with no intentions of starting a relationship. I, on the other hand, take it as a poignant parable on the unexpected ways our lives can be affirmed and uplifted from even the most unexpected of sources.

Think about all the people who manage to “get to us” in life, and not just in the romantic sense. Don’t you wonder why certain words and gestures can resonate more than others and continue to move us years later?

Last week, while taking a morning walk through the University of California, Berkeley, my stomping grounds three decades ago, I found myself missing a burly Italian-born gentleman who ran the café I frequented just about every night of my undergraduate career. Elio De Pisa wasn’t my friend in any conventional sense. He didn’t know my mother’s name or the story of my grandfather. If asked, he couldn’t have rattled off my favorite movies. But the little he did know about me, he acknowledged and vocally embraced.

I’ve never been the most socially adept person, and I was even less so in college. The everyday rituals of dating were never really an option for a kid as quirky and shy as I was. Nor, given my (literally) medieval intellectual interests, did I know exactly to which group I belonged. To wit, I was a born and bred agnostic who was drawn to early Christian philosophy.

Whenever I came in for my daily coffee and conversation at Berkeley’s Caffe Mediterraneum, Elio would mock me lovingly for studying religion. “Gregorio Agustín de Salamanca!” he would call out whenever he saw me. (He knew and seemed to be amused by the fact that Augustine was my favorite saint.) The one time I was stupid enough to meet a young woman in that geriatric café, he told her not to trust me because I was a Jesuit. “With Jesuits you always have to read between the lines!” he bellowed.

Looking back, I realize that more often than not it has been relative strangers like Elio who could make me feel, despite all my self-doubts, that I belonged just by being myself.

In his Philadelphia homily, Pope Francis insisted that, “like happiness, holiness is always tied to little gestures.” He talked about the “the little miracles” that are quietly shared within loving families, those gestures “of tenderness, affection, and compassion” that “make us feel at home.”

But what he didn’t touch on was the way non-family members—colleagues, bosses, acquaintances, shopkeepers, café managers, and even strangers—can also bestow upon us little miraculous gestures that can lighten our load, give us confidence, and ultimately make us feel a little more at home in the world.

Last November, I gave a brief, frenzied, slightly nutty talk at the Getty Museum at a symposium that had been organized around the work of Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, an artist whose stark depictions of exile and alienation I’ve admired since college.

After my talk, Koudelka, whom I had never met, came up to me, repeatedly stuck his finger in my chest and asserted rather aggressively in his broken English, “You are who you are supposed to be. Some people will hate you. Some people will love you. I love you.”

I have no other way to describe that odd little moment other than as a tremendous gift, the memory of which somehow helps me understand my small place in the world.

It makes me think that the email my Hawaiian friend received from her long lost love was less a romantic gesture than it was a profound acknowledgement that a man whose affections she had once craved thought she was special, a feeling he deprived her of when he broke her heart so long ago. It was a particularly welcome acknowledgment, I assume, after her recent divorce.

We cannot live on gestures alone. But in a world that allows us to move faster and farther from home than ever before, it’s important to realize that it may very well be the kindness of strangers that helps keep us going.

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Last week, my wife and I walked 102 tough miles in eight days in the lush, rain-soaked Scottish Highlands. There’s nothing quite like an eight-hour hike in the pouring rain to get you thinking about why you travel and where you do it. Maybe it was the blisters, the knee brace, and the roll of tape wrapped around my left knee, but some bleak mornings I just wanted to say to hell with Scotland. It rained six out of the eight days. And even when it was “dry,” the perennial gray skies seeped into my body, mind, and spirit. While I was supposed to be communing with the open wilderness, I felt hemmed in and constrained by the heavens. By the end of day five, I felt downright miserable. But then I received a late night text from a good friend back home in Los Angeles that helped me realize not only why I was there, but what it is I love most about traveling.

Although I’m scheduled to fly upwards of 100,000 miles this year, I don’t call myself a traveler. I get tongue-tied whenever I’m asked the inevitable “business or pleasure?” question. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Both? Neither? Must I choose? Is life itself “business” or “pleasure”?

In his odd little essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau explains the origins of the term sauntering. The word is derived “from idle people who roved around the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under the pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land. Sensing their duplicity, children would then exclaim, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

That is how I view the term “traveler” and the many people these days who blithely say they “love to travel”—mere saunterers. And particularly after last week’s rain-soaked musings, I’ve come to think that travel should be more purposeful than that.

I’m partial to places that may seem godforsaken, places where residents have to grapple with human deprivation, isolation, and darkness. I’m deeply curious as to how people manage to survive the slings and arrows of life. Sure, I can enjoy Paris as much as the next guy. There is no denying its beauty. But the City of Lights also sometimes seems like an Impressionist still life that calls me to ponder life’s perfections and delicacies rather than its struggles.

One of my most rewarding trips ever was the three weeks in 1997 I spent traveling around Romania. I wanted to know how Romanians were managing to move beyond the material and spiritual deprivations of the Communist era.

A man I met on a train took me into the sewers of Bucharest to introduce me to a group of children who lived there, and a saintly nun from Arizona took me on her regular visit to an orphanage for children with congenital deformities. In a landscape of so much hopelessness, the legacy of an oppressive dictator, and a morally corrupt ideology, these were the things that struck me most: the power of love and a people’s sheer ferocity in the face of complete tragedy.

And that is what the best travel is to me, the opportunity to strip life to its essentials, not in order to go beyond the culture in which I live, but to remind myself of what culture is for in the first place: to help us survive life’s travails and keep us going. And it certainly helps to put my own bourgeois “travails” in perspective.

A dozen years ago, during the Second Intifada, the Israeli Foreign Ministry invited me to their country and asked me what I wanted to learn. I told them that I wouldn’t speak to politicians or soldiers and that my only interest was how the average Israeli citizen survived the daily stress of terror. I interviewed artists, playwrights, social workers, and psychologists. On that trip, I learned the power of denial and adrenaline.

My favorite cities in Europe are Berlin and Dresden, where, like in Bucharest, one is obliged to grapple with the evils of the not so distant past. A decade or so ago, I spent Christmas Eve alone in a hotel room in a snow-bound and empty Dresden as a way to redefine the holiday away from the trappings of family and tradition and towards more fundamental concepts. Like peace and goodwill.

Alain de Botton recently wrote, in a Financial Times column, about the medieval Catholic tradition of pilgrims taking long journeys to touch the body part of a long-dead saint to help cure whatever ailed them. The Church had a guide to pilgrimages that matched destinations with ailments. At one point, de Botton points out, there were 46 sanctuaries in France alone that welcomed women who were having trouble breast-feeding. Similarly, those who suffered from a painful molar could travel to the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Rome, where they could touch the arm bones of Saint Apollonia, the patron saint of dentistry. Though moderns don’t generally believe in the power of relics to cure them, de Botton encourages today’s travelers to “hang on to the idea that certain parts of the world possess a power to address complaints of our psyches and bring about some sort of change in a way that wouldn’t be possible if we just remained in our bedrooms.”

De Botton’s exhortation explains why I’m drawn to godforsaken places. The ongoing complaints of my psyche only make sense, and can be put into proper perspective, far, far away from my bedroom.

Indeed, sometimes it helps to go to the most remote inhabited island on earth, as I did several years ago when I took a six-week trip to Tristan da Cunha. I hopped on a plane to Cape Town and then hitched a ride on a research vessel for six days before I reached the British-ruled volcanic speck of an island in the South Atlantic. Though my ostensible goal there was to learn about the effects of inbreeding on asthma, what I was forced to study firsthand, in an isolated village of fewer than 300 blood-related souls, were the ways humans try to control each other to protect themselves from one another and from the outside world. There I learned the power of kinship and of harboring a collective disdain for “the others.” Well, before the six weeks were up, the disdain was mutual and I was ready to go home.

Which brings me back to my bleakest days in Scotland. Although the culmination of a life-renewing weight loss effort, the 100-mile walk was no small undertaking for me, a chronic asthmatic whose lungs generally don’t respond well to humidity, or to nature, for that matter. But then came that text message from my friend on the night of day five. “What an achievement,” she wrote. “It’s like you’re walking into a new life. Going through a Scottish birth canal. Only through misery do you find purpose and clarity.” And there it was, I was suffering both physically and mentally because I was being reborn into a healthier and physically more disciplined life. The idea of death is implicit in that of rebirth.

With each step and heavy breath through the Scottish Highlands, I was actively discarding the years of disappointment, anger, and sadness that led to my putting on so much weight. Walking through Scotland, it turns out, was a way for me to actively grapple with my own darkness. I assure you that the trek was neither business nor pleasure. I can say, however, that it was exactly what I love about traveling.

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I am not usually a fan of flooding the zone on the bad behavior of the rich and famous, but this story might have warranted it. Because while it lacks the cartoon-like buffoonery of Donald Sterling’s antics, the Levenson affair tells us a whole lot more about the serious racial challenges facing America today.

If nothing else, Levenson’s e-mail should remind us how old-fashioned racism—the belief in the innate inferiority of members of an entire race—isn’t the only source of racial conflict in America. Levenson didn’t use racist epithets in his e-mail to the team’s general manager. Nor did he articulate a disdain for African-Americans in general. What he did do, however, was express his belief that white fans were uncomfortable being outnumbered by black fans and that, given this assessment, he’d prefer a broader white fan base than a black one.

Did Levenson belittle the importance of African-American basketball fans? Absolutely. But ultimately his comments were about demographics, and the relative status and comfort implicit in being a member of a majority group.

When Americans refer to majority and minority populations, they are generally speaking of the demographics of the nation at large, which has always had a white Protestant majority. But since the founding of the republic, cities, towns, and states across the country have experienced dynamic population shifts that have turned local minorities into majorities and vice versa.

Germans became the majority in Milwaukee in the 1860s. Irish-Americans replaced white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as the majority population in Boston around 1900. By 1980, blacks were the new majority in Baltimore. In 2001, whites became a minority in California. All of these demographic changes created intergroup tensions.

Now, I’m not arguing that ethnicity represents as deep a divide as race in America. The history of black-white relations reveals levels of cruelty and enmity that even the bitterest tensions between Massachusetts WASPs and the Irish never did. But the principle is the same. The relative size of ethnic and racial groups can influence how members of these groups get along with one another. That’s because in intergroup relations—as in basketball—size matters. The majority status of racial or ethnic groups in any given location carries with it enough benefits to induce competition and tension.

A 2007 study of Illinois residents found that living in a “higher percentage same-race neighborhood” can improve “the emotional well-being” of residents. This research strongly implies that residents of such neighborhoods are seeking emotional as well as economic benefits in togetherness. Presumably, the racial and ethnic kinship of majority group membership shores up identity, protects against discrimination by non-group members, and provides networks and support.

Similarly, a 2004 study out of Germany found that, particularly in the Western world, minority and majority memberships have “distinct effects on a variety of important social psychological phenomena.” Most importantly, newfound minority status can create “a state of uneasy mindfulness” in individuals because they are suddenly more aware of their group identity. Majority members “can take their existence for granted,” the German study concluded—and as a result, “they tend to forget their identity (without losing it).” Minority members, however, can feel obliged to expend greater amounts of emotional energy asserting their identities and making space for themselves in the world.

Perhaps because Levenson himself is Jewish, he seems to implicitly understand the burdens of being in the minority. His e-mail states explicitly that he thinks Southern whites “simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority.” But rather than find ways to make both groups—and ideally others—feel welcome and included in the culture of Hawks fandom, he sided with whites, in part because he had already concluded, as he wrote in the damning e-mail, that “there are simply not enough affluent blacks to build a significant season ticket base.”

The facts of the Levenson affair are very much specific to the universe of basketball fans in Atlanta, Georgia. But because demographers keep telling us that Anglos are projected to become a minority in the United States sometime around 2043, there is a broader, more far-reaching cautionary tale here.

Over the next several decades, how will whites react to losing their majority status in cities and counties across the country? How will prominent business owners and politicians seek to ease possible tensions? Will their long tenure as the historic majority make whites’ transition to minority status all the more difficult?

No, Levenson’s e-mail won’t get the same attention as Donald Sterling’s pathetic rants. But its content and twisted logic speak to a far more endemic problem facing a rapidly changing America.

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