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Talking about Race
Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference
By KATHERINE CRAMER WALSH THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-86907-0
Chapter One Race, Dialogue, and the Practice of Community Life
It is a sunny spring day in a midsized Midwestern city, and the parking lot of the police station is beginning to fill. Inside, in a stately conference room, a Latina woman is busy placing handouts and pamphlets at fifteen or so places around the table. She has already put out bottles of water, sugar cookies on paper napkins, and individually wrapped wintergreen LifeSavers on the table in front of each chair.
Gradually people filter in. An African-American man and woman enter and greet the woman warmly. Several white men in suits walk in and do the same. A white woman in a cozy sweater arrives, just in front of an African-American man. Then two East Asian men enter. Some people greet each other with smiles, handshakes, or jokes; others introduce themselves across the table. After several more white men and women (some in suits) and an African-American mother and daughter enter, the table is full. We begin.
"Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to this Diversity Circle. I am Maria and I will be your facilitator." She says a bit more and then holds up a pamphlet.
This is the book that you will be bringing back with you [for the other three sessions.] We are here to do dialogue. This describes what that is, the role of the participant, listening carefully to others, etcetera. We need to make sure-this is extremely important, everyone-that we keep the discussion on track. The important part of my job is to keep things moving along, important that you speak freely, but don't monopolize. Address remarks to the group rather than to me. Important that all of us value your own experiences and opinion, ok? And that you engage in friendly disagreement. Remember it is dialogue, and not debate.
What is going on here? What I've just described is the actual start of a dialogue group that met in a central Wisconsin city. They were meeting to talk about race. This city, like many others, had chosen to use interracial face-to-face conversations about race as a way of improving race relations and the life of their community. The people wearing suits were public officials-elected officials and city government department heads.
This is striking behavior for a variety of reasons. First, these folks were about to voluntarily take part in an interracial discussion, not a typical behavior for most Americans. Second, they were not just engaging in interracial discussion; they were doing so about race. Bringing up the topic of race in interracial settings is generally treated as a potential for disaster by politicians and ordinary citizens alike. Third, it is a rare thing in public life to see a group of residents of a community sitting down around the same table with their public officials. Typically, when residents and officials engage in talk in a group, the format is a hearing or a meeting in which officials sit empowered at the front and residents sit passively in the audience.
Finally, this talk is also somewhat odd because these people were not about to engage in decision-making. Instead, as the facilitator said, what they were aiming for is dialogue-discussion intended to focus on personal experiences, emotions, and storytelling. As therapeutic and recreational as that may sound, the city manager, city council members, and other city employees were doing this on taxpayer time.
What these folks were doing is known generally as intergroup dialogue. Although it involves some behaviors that are rare in everyday American life, this type of program is not unique to this particular city. Since the early 1990s, more than 400 cities across the United States, and many cities throughout the world, have implemented programs like this in which diverse groups of volunteers are recruited to come together over repeated sessions to talk about race.
The actions of the people in this particular Midwestern city, as well as in cities around the country, are worth some attention because of all of the ways in which they are surprising, noted above. But they are particularly worthy of study by a political scientist because they constitute deliberative democracy in action. This is actual public talk, or interpersonal talk organized to address public issues. It is an attempt by real people in actual communities to confront the difficult public issue of race, and an attempt to enhance civic life in a context of cultural heterogeneity.
We have much to learn from what these people are doing. First, social psychologists have long suggested that interaction between people of different racial backgrounds is precisely what is needed to reduce prejudice. But much of what we know about intergroup contact is based on contact that has been manufactured by researchers. When, in contrast, do communities choose to foster interracial interaction-specifically about race? And what goes on when they do so?
Previous work on public talk suggests that it quickly becomes intractable when conducted across cultural divides or conflicting interests. Does that happen in these groups? Or given that people volunteer themselves for the programs, perhaps the participants are already in agreement that they ought to focus on racial identity when they first sit down together. Maybe the conversations merely "preach to the choir." Perhaps these programs are the domain of left-leaning "multiculturalists," focusing on racial group identities rather than things that unite the American people. If these intergroup programs intentionally draw attention to race, why do public officials volunteer for this seemingly divisive talk?
We also have much to learn about deliberative democracy from these groups. Democratic theory has taken a deliberative turn in the past several decades. Scholarship in political psychology, political communication, and public policy has followed suit. We now have not only multiple theories of what ideal deliberation ought to look like and what it can produce, but we also have a growing number of empirical studies that test, question, and expand these claims.
Thanks to recent studies, we now know more about who participates in various forms of deliberative participation, and even a bit about how this has changed over time. But we know very little about why community leaders choose to provide opportunities for public talk or why they turn to such a strategy to address pressing public problems such as race. Taking the time to notice how communities around the country are using dialogues on race can provide valuable insights into how deliberative democracy comes into being.
Why Study This Aspect of the Deliberative System?
I take deliberative democracy to mean the range of acts of structured interpersonal discussion intended to address community problems. As the facilitator quoted at the start of this chapter asserts, the talk in these programs is "dialogue, not debate." It is a form of public talk in which the emphasis is on listening to and understanding others, not on reaching a decision. Thus it is not deliberation. However, it is one form of talk in the overall deliberative system-the range of acts from informal conversation to formal debate that collectively comprise deliberative democracy.
Such civic dialogue provides an opportunity to understand why communities choose to confront public problems with organized, interpersonal, face-to-face talk. The insight we gain can not be generalized to all forms of public talk, but it can bring us closer to knowing the place that such communication plays in contemporary civic life.
This is all to say that these programs enable us to examine two pressing questions: How does public talk come into being? And what goes on within it? We expect deliberation to achieve many things-better informed opinions, tolerance, efficacy, well-rounded decisions-but before public talk can actually bring about these outcomes, people have to choose to pursue it. Because civic dialogue programs constitute a particularly difficult form of public talk within the deliberative system, understanding how this case comes into being can reveal more generally how deliberative democracy arises.
Why are communities choosing dialogue as a means to address the issue of race relations? A skeptic might say that people cannot seriously expect this endeavor to improve race relations or to achieve any kind of social justice, because deliberative democracy is slow and likely to favor the status quo. Even if the talk provides opportunities to question powerholders, doesn't it devolve into chaos? If it doesn't, isn't it too superficial or civil for anything productive to occur? And in interracial forums, aren't the voices of marginalized racial groups ignored or silenced? And doesn't the lack of interracial understanding simply cause the talk to collapse into disarray? A skeptic might also question why public officials are involved. Aren't they just paying lip service to a deep problem that requires a much more proactive approach? Finally, if this is really dialogue in which people actually listen to one another, rather than debate or make decisions, isn't it closer to a self-indulgent act of individual development rather than to political action?
There are many reasons to be skeptical of this form of public talk. And yet the fact remains that many people in many communities around the country are turning to it. Examining what they are actually doing with these dialogues on race brings us closer to understanding the nature of deliberative democracy. And it also sheds light on yet another pressing topic in contemporary civic life: how to create bonds across social divides. In recent years, this has been called the problem of creating bridging social capital. Social capital, the capacity of a social network to collectively address public problems, is particularly valued when it is created by relationships that bridge divisions across social groups. Although this "bridging" social capital is notoriously difficult to create, many claim that it is crucial for heterogeneous democracies. It is the kind of social capital that scholars expect will lead to generalized trust in other people. Without connections between members of different social groups, cities are vulnerable to intergroup violence, and the lack of reciprocity and cooperation across social groups threatens to undermine the stability of democracy.
These civic dialogue groups enable us to better understand how people go about building social capital across a particularly daunting social divide-race. We might expect that people would choose to build bridging social capital by focusing on what they have in common, or by working together on a common project, in a cooperative, not combative fashion. Why do they choose instead to engage in dialogue that could focus on racial differences and interracial conflict? And what do they do with the opportunity when they choose to do so?
Because these programs are about race, they also allow us to study how people are dealing with this fundamental issue confronting American civic life. Although race is not a new issue in American cities, Hispanic and Latino immigration in the 1990s and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have forced the issue of cultural diversity to the forefront in many smaller and medium-sized cities around the country. How are people of various racial backgrounds reconciling their identities as people of a particular race with their desire to bring the community as a whole together? How are people attempting to reconcile the desire to respect diversity with the desire to nevertheless come together as a community?
The Nature of Intergroup Dialogue Programs on Race
Intergroup dialogue programs on race relations are volunteer programs that organize interracial conversations about race over repeated sessions. The programs arise organically within particular communities, and then program administrators typically advertise through local media for volunteers. These volunteers are sorted into racially diverse groups of about ten to fifteen people who then meet once a week for about five weeks. At their meetings one or two facilitators lead them in two-hour-long discussions. They follow guidebooks that encourage people to talk openly about their personal experiences with race, their perceptions of race relations in their community, and their ideas about how they might individually and collectively improve race relations. When the program ends, participants are encouraged to pursue some of these actions, but they are not obligated to do so.
In some cities, the programs are sponsored by city or county governments. In others, they are sponsored by an existing nonprofit organization such as the YWCA or the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ, formerly the National Conference on Christians and Jews), or an organization that has been created specifically to administer the program. The programs have proliferated across the country since the 1990s, particularly around national events that highlighted existing racial tension such as the Rodney King and O. J. Simpson trials and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Several national organizations have promoted the use of race dialogues, including the Study Circles Resource Center, the Hope in the Cities program, the YWCA, the NCCJ, the National League of Cities, the National Civic League, and President William Jefferson Clinton's Initiative on Race.
Although the talk is not about policy decision-making per se, in most cases, public officials-elected and nonelected policymakers, and street-level bureaucrats-participate in the programs alongside local residents. They participate as "equals" in the conversation-sitting in the same circle, following the same ground rules and taking turns like the other participants.
Although much of the emergence of intergroup dialogue programs can be attributed to national umbrella organizations, it is not the case that these organizations seek out communities that are fertile ground for a dialogue program and then try to sell them the program. Instead, people within particular cities hear about intergroup dialogue programs through acquaintances, mass media, or professional organizations and contact the national dialogue organizations for help. Also, national offices of organizations such as the YWCA, the League of Women Voters, the NCCJ and the National League of Cities encourage their affiliates or member cities to use intergroup dialogue as one of many of their strategies to enhance civic life. In some cities, administrators have transformed the dialogue program into its own organization.
Thus the emergence of civic dialogue programs has an organic nature. People involved mention similar problems when explaining why they chose to pursue it-intractable race relations, a desire to know their neighbors better, a desire to invigorate participation in civic life-and yet they explain the need as specific to their community. At this point in the history of race relations in the United States, people around the country are finding it necessary to dialogue in order to improve their civic life.
What Do We Hear?
What do these dialogues on race reveal? Listening closely, we hear talk that is neither tuned to unity nor fixed on cultural differences. Despite the self-selection that brings people to these programs, we see participants we might not expect-police officers, firefighters, self-labeled conservatives. The participants are ordinary people, not leftist intellectuals. They are not uniformly wedded to the idea of placing racial identity before community or national identity. They approach the dialogues from a variety of perspectives and often convey that they prefer a politics of unity rather than a politics of difference. However, the format of the dialogues fosters listening and the telling of stories that insert attention to difference into the conversations. As people tell their stories and use these appeals to authenticity to exert power over the conversation, the groups struggle with a balance between unity and difference.
Rather than perpetuate a politics of unity or promote a politics of difference, these dialogues do something else: they engage in a practical politics. I call this a practical politics because it is conducted by people who are steeped in the idea that in order to deal with difference we have to focus on unity; and yet they are reminded in the course of the dialogues that race matters in their everyday lives, particularly in the lives of people of color in their communities. These reminders are not taken from the pages of multiculturalist theorists, however. They come from the real lives of neighbors, who are themselves wanting to see "people as people."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Talking about Race by KATHERINE CRAMER WALSH Copyright © 2007 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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