A More Just Future

Psychological Tools for Reckoning With Our Past and Driving Social Change

By: Dolly Chugh

Narrated by: Dolly Chugh

Winner of the 2024 Getting To We Words Create Worlds Award

In the vein of Think Again and Do Better, a revolutionary, “welcome, and urgent invitation” (Angela Duckworth, #1 New York Times bestselling author) to explore the emotional relationship we have with our country’s complicated and whitewashed history so that we can build a better future.

As we grapple with news stories about our country’s racial fault lines, our challenge is not just to learn about the past, but also to cope with the “belief grief” that unlearning requires. If you are on the emotional journey of reckoning with the past, such as the massacre of Black Americans in Tulsa, the killing of Native American children in compulsory “residential schools” designed to destroy their culture, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans, you are not alone. The seeds of today’s inequalities were sown in past events like these. The time to unlearn the whitewashed history we believed was true is now.

As historians share these truths, we will need psychologists to help us navigate the shame, guilt, disbelief, and despair many of us feel. In A More Just Future, Dolly Chugh, award-winning professor, social psychologist, and author of the acclaimed The Person You Mean to Be, invites us to dismantle the systems built by our forebearers and work toward a more just future.

Through heartrending personal histories and practical advice, Chugh gives us the psychological tools we need to grapple with the truth of our country with “one of the most moving and important behavioral science books of the last decade” (Katy Milkman, author of How to Change).

Critic reviews

“Dolly Chugh is the wisest and warmest of behavioral scientists. Let her show you how to unpack your own mistaken assumptions about our past so that our unconditional love for our nation can coexist with unflinching honesty. Patriotism need not be simplistic to be idealistic. This book is a welcome and urgent invitation to open our eyes to the past and become better ancestors today.” (Angela Duckworth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Grit)

“If you too are feeling the call to be more brave, more active, and more just…then this is the book you've been looking for.” (Michael Bungay Stanier, bestselling author of The Coaching Habit and How to Begin)

“This is the thoughtful and brilliant work we’ve all been waiting for that will help readers grapple with our legacy of systemic racism—both past and present. A More Just Future expertly provides readers with indispensable practical and evidence-based tools to overcome the psychological barriers that impede us from truly reckoning with injustice.” (Uché Blackstock, MD, founder of Advancing Health Equity and Author of Legacy)

“In the Japanese art of kintsugi, artisans take broken pottery and restore it by sealing the cracks with precious metals. In this instant classic, Chugh teaches us her version of that art to address our own fractured national history. Instead of ignoring cracks or discarding shards, she shows us how to restore the past in a way that makes the future feel all the more startling and precious. This book is required reading for all patriots who love their country enough to see its wounds—and heal them.” (Kenji Yoshino, author of Covering and Say the Right Thing)

“Even as a student of this field, I found myself underlining and highlighting passages on every page. Dolly Chugh gets to the very heart of what is preventing progress and loosens those bonds gently and with deep humanity. This book is grounded in solid research and lived experience, but also in empathy. Absolutely everyone who reads it will find useful advice on how to be a better person.” (Celeste Headlee, PBS host, award-winning journalist, and author of We Need to Talk and Speaking of Race)

“A vulnerable, compassionate, and pragmatic psychological guide to facing the darkest corners of America’s past.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“Marked by its authenticity and sense of encouragement, this is a welcome look at how the average person can help fulfill America’s promise.” (Publishers Weekly)

So good!!

Not what I expected and so much more than I expected. highly recommended that will not only encourage you with reckoning with our country‘s past but inspire you to continue to learn and understand and take action.

Transformative

I loved "A More Just Future." Chugh is a gifted writer in whose hands the charged political topics of race, culture, and identity are rendered sane and reasonable and human. Every chapter made me grateful for Chugh's humanity and forgiveness, allowing me to hold both my love of my country and my knowledge of its imperfections at the same time, accepting that tension as the reality of being an American.

She resists the temptation to oversimplify the culture-war conflicts that have riven America's political landscape, and avoids demonizing those who might disagree with her. She considers America's virtues and its failings with open eyes and a warm heart.

Chugh's reading of her own book is inflected with genius, emotion, and self-deprecating humor that made me love both her and the book. This book is well worth reading or listening to. Highly recommended!

I SO needed this audiobook!!!!

This audiobook is helping me figure out how to think about my own place, as an American who wants to do right by other Americans. It's a complex and diverse world for me, as a human being and as an Asian American, living in New York City and among people of many colors and backgrounds. The author is guiding me through this territory, fraught with landmines in a way I can understand. Through shared experiences of watching "Little House on the Prairie" and football, I am able to understand how I arrived at attitudes that I am questioning now.

The author provides psychological reasons about how people think, perceive, and reason so I don't have to feel so guilty for being human. Yet, I have to make an effort to UNLEARN the messages that I have been told and LEARN, perhaps, a new way to think about the experiences of others and my own. The author has shown me a compassionate way to do that.

This is an ESSENTIAL listen for anyone interested in understanding how to come to terms with our country's difficult racial history, learn & unlearn how we can respect and show compassion to each other and ourselves, and have the language to make positive change in the world.

BRAVO DOLLY!

was hoping this book would be written

thank you for writing this book. such an important topic with useful counsel for one of the most important challenges facing America today.