It's been a week since Barack Obama's landmark speech about race and racism in America. The question now is: Are we going to actually heed what Obama said and have the long-delayed discussions - not just online, but face-to-face, in our communities - about race and racism in America? Will talk about racism be nothing but a political sledgehammer or convenient distraction, or will it lead to real change in our communities?
I work for a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization called Everyday Democracy. (I also do partisan blogging here at Kos under the name Red State Rebel, but this is not a partisan post.) We have been helping communities organize large-scale, inclusive, action-oriented dialogues about race since the 1990s. Public figures from Bill Bradley to Jack Kemp to Spellman College president Beverly Daniel Tatum and author Frances Moore Lappé have endorsed the latest version of our discussion guide, Facing Racism in a Diverse Nation. You can get a free download of the guide here.
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Known until just recently as the Study Circles Resource Center (you can see why we changed our name!), Everyday Democracy got its start in New England in the late 1980s. After four white L.A. cops were acquitted in the Rodney King beatings in 1992, we created a guide to help community leaders answer King's big question: "Can't we all just get along?" SCRC also offered small grants to help communities launch discussions, and more than 100 cities applied.
Over the past 15 years, interest in race relations has ebbed and peaked, but we've continued to help communities engage citizens in "dialogue-to-change" projects that help people talk the talk, then walk the walk on creating racial equity. Just this winter, we announced our latest project: Communities Creating Racial Equity, in which nine cities across the country will be working together over three years to use a racial equity "lens" in examining every sort of public issue, from housing to education to juvenile justice to economic development and more. (This project will be the subject of our next live blog from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, April 17, at DemocracySpace.org. Anyone taking part in community organizing against racism is welcome to join us.)
Here are examples of some communities that are currently using our discussion guides:
In Lynchburg, Virginia, more than 500 people and 100 volunteer facilitators are taking part in the Community Dialogue on Race and Racism, which just launched this winter. Lynchburg also plans a weekend youth dialogue April 4-5 at the local skateboard park. The program was spurred on by the city partly due to the 2006 death of Clarence Beard Jr., a black man who died during a struggle with two white police officers. Following their dialogues and an action forum, Lynchburg residents will create teams to pursue reforms that might include such projects as working with the police department to diversify its workforce and establishing school-based study circles.
At Waterford Union High School in a small, 98-percent-white town southwest of Milwaukee, students are following up their diversity dialogues with a proposal to the school board to have a diversity class in the school currciulum. The students leading the effort - one white, one Arab-American - say it's perhaps even more important to talk about race in their homogenous town than it is for students who live diversity every day. Meanwhile in Milwaukee, Manpower - the international employment company - recently moved its headquarters from the suburbs to a racially mixed neighborhood and subsequently held a neighborhood summit to ask area residents what the community could do collectively to create more meaningful, long-term work for everyone.
Here are more examples, from Baltimore, Maryland; Macon, Georgia; Memphis, Tennessee; and Eugene, Oregon. Successful dialogues have been held under the auspices of city governments, YM/YWCAs, school districts, churches, United Ways, neighborhood associations, and a wide variety of independent, ad hoc organizations. The important thing is getting started.
In an essay yesterday at his blog, Rich Harwood of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation said that what we need isn't a "national conversation" on race because "such efforts can miss the larger point: our engagement must start where we live, in our communities, with people we can see and hear and feel, where we can hold each other accountable for what we say and do." Nor can it be a hasty, feel-good exercise, he wrote, adding, "In our desire to embrace a post-racial politics, we must not seek to move on too quickly, and risk undermining the very goals of engagement we purport to hold dear. Indeed, we must not seek to smooth over real differences, or even merely come to 'respect' them, but to understand and live with them, even embrace them." (Read more here.)
This is what Everyday Democracy specializes in helping communities create: Locally focused, action-oriented dialogues that can make a real, ongoing difference in how people in your community come to know, understand, and embrace differences. You can download a free copy of our Facing Racism in a Diverse Nation guide here (or en Espanol).
We look forward to helping your community talk the talk, then walk the walk.
DemocracySpace is a nom de blog of Julie Fanselow, writer and online organizer for the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization Everyday Democracy (formerly the Study Circles Resource Center.) Fanselow also blogs at Daily Kos under the screen name Red State Rebel.