The 49-minute video, What’s Race Got to Do with It?, published by California Newsreel in 2006, shows the journey of a diverse group of 16 UC Berkeley students who participated in a semester-long intergroup dialogue program sponsored by University of California, Berkeley Ethnic Studies Department and Stiles Hall. The students were part of the class, “FACING YOU, FACING ME: Race, Class & Gender Among UCB Student Leaders”, led by David Stark and co-facilitator, Jerlena Griffin-Destaco. An online facilitator’s guide is available on PDF here.
Below is a six minute clip from the video:
More about the film…
This excerpt comes from the film’s site, whatsrace.org.
More than 40 years after the Civil Rights Movement, America faces the paradox of being a nation “with racism, but without racists,” as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has put it. Racial inequality is harder to recognize in a world where it no longer announces itself with white-only signs. Meanwhile, the idea of “colorblindness” conveniently allows us to condemn prejudice and bigotry while ignoring how racism contributes to the vast disparities that persist right under our noses.
Not surprisingly, many of today’s students, born in the post-Civil Rights era, don’t seek out opportunities to engage in diversity programs and interracial dialogue. They feel they’ve heard it all before or wonder why we’re still talking about a problem that ended a long time ago. More often than not in these discussions, structural racism is ignored and multiculturalism gets confused with equality. Even many students of color don’t realize how underlying conditions impact opportunity.
Too few resources exist to help young people scrutinize their own assumptions, beliefs and attitudes about race – using language they understand, spoken by their peers. At a time when campuses are struggling to close achievement gaps, foster inclusion, and promote diversity – while equity initiatives across the country are under attack – we responded to the demand for a new tool that is up to date and speaks directly to students’ doubts and concerns in today’s post-Civil Rights world.
What’s Race Got to Do with It? chronicles the journey of a diverse group of students participating in a 15-week intergroup dialogue program at U.C. Berkeley. As the students share personal stories, debate hot topics, and confront one another about the role race plays in their lives, they make discoveries about their preconceived ideas and assumptions, and in so doing, help us begin to disentangle our own. The film goes beyond identity politics, celebratory history and guilt trips to help viewers “see through” achievement myths and create a safe space for open, honest exchange, particularly within educational environments.
In some ways, What’s Race Got to Do with It? is a “sequel” to our earlier release Skin Deep, because it highlights an interracial dialogue and provides a window into the different attitudes and assumptions that young people hold about race and equality.However, it goes further by highlighting the unique challenges and obstacles that students from disadvantaged backgrounds face compared to their peers (e.g., isolation, discomfort, underrepresentation, lack of encouragement and support, financial and emotional stress, societal disparities) and helping us understand the structural and institutional conditions underlying those difficulties.
In addition, the film focuses not just on what’s being said but also what’s not being discussed openly – the underlying fears, frustration, ignorance and confusion that render unproductive so many of our conversations about racism. The film spotlights the stories young people use to rationalize (to themselves and others) the persistence of racial disparities as well as the rhetorical strategies and often-loaded language they employ to evade, resist or deflect ideas that are unsettling. And it reveals just how different our experiences and perceptions can be of the world we ostensibly share – how something that is painfully obvious to one person can be invisible to another.
What’s Race Got to Do with It? does not attempt to replicate the experience of the class nor does it supply easy answers or address the concerns of every group. What it does provide is a starting point for a deeper, more productive level of conversation – one grounded in real-life issues and experiences. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the students on screen, their stories help get the “high stakes” topics out on the table, in a manner accessible to individuals who have never thought much about race as well as long-time activists. Perhaps most importantly, the film challenges each of us to reflect on existing disparities and the responsibility we all share – individually and institutionally – to create more equitable conditions for everyone.
For more information about the UC Berkeley class or to learn how to start your own intergroup dialogue program, contact David Stark at 510-841-6010 or info[at]stileshall[dot]org.
Resource Link: www.whatsrace.org/pages/film.htm
There seem to be incongruous concerns growing around many college campuses.
On the one hand, young people are accused of being fragile and coddled, too concerned with creating an artificial, shallow, ‘politically correct’ environment. At the same time, there are increasing calls for civility in response to student complaints.
The dance becoming familiar: something happens, students complain, the university administration calls for civility while the those watching from the outside throw up their hands at the coddled youth of today.
Why can’t they just calm down?
Let’s discuss this civilly.
I call these concerns incongruous because, while sounding like a call for moderation, calling for civility is essentially calling for a maintenance of the status quo. It’s a polite way of saying, you are wrong to be concerned.
Nobody calls for civility when outrage is considered to be well-founded.
As Audre Lourde says in her brilliant 1981 speech The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism: “Mainstream communication wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like evening time or the common cold.”
Student protests are a disruption to that fabric. Favoring an absence of controversy, most administrations respond with level-head calls for civility. They hold community dialogues where only those who agree with them show up. The others have already written off the process.
Well-meaning administers say and do all the polite things, baffled by students’ outrage and anger.
Meanwhile, students see inaction and platitudes; calls for civility when any reasonable person would be up in arms. Students are as confounded by administration placidity as administrators are of students’ anger.
As Lourde describes, “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger.” Our students cannot hide their anger.
Yet, civility and politeness are the prevailing norms in proper society. Perhaps it is only natural to expect proper students to conform to these norms.
There is a study I heard awhile ago – the most homogenous school districts give themselves the highest measures on discussing issues of diversity.
Diversity is easy to discuss when people are mostly the same.
It’s the places where there is true diversity, where people come from a wide variety of backgrounds – it is these places where topics of diversity are most difficult to tackle.
A risk-adverse administrator would be wise to prefer a homogenous community. With, perhaps, a splash of difference to benefit the mainstream and fulfill any principles of diversity.
This is the model that students object to. Students of color aren’t “diversity” intended to educate their white peers. And yet their anger is often dismissed as the sensitive ravings of over-privileged youth.
It is, I think, this aversion to risk, this aversion to discomfort, which is most problematic as we collectively strive towards social justice. Young people are told that they are wrong to demand safe spaces on campus, yet administrators, too, are guilty of seeking the outcome that most suits their needs.
And that just makes students even more angry.
We want to encourage NCDDers once again to plan to join the D&D Climate Action Network (D&D CAN) for their next teleconference on the intersection of D&D work and the issue of climate change on January 19th at 5pm Eastern.
Led by NCDD supporting member Linda Ellinor of the Dialogue Group, D&D CAN’s goal is to build a community of practice that fosters mutual learning, sharing, and inspires collaboration around the complexities of climate change. The monthly conference calls are one of the best ways to connect with this ambitious project, so we encourage you to learn more and register for the call at http://ddclimateactionnetwork.ning.com.
Here’s how Linda describes the upcoming call:
The D&D Climate Action Network will be holding its January Teleconference call this month on the topic of the Paris Climate Conference and Implications for our Work. It is scheduled for January 19th from 2pm, PST/5pm, EST.
Marti Roach will be facilitating using the Focused Conversation Method from the Institute of Cultural Affair’s Technology of Participation suite of facilitation tools. She has compiled a whole host of resources on what took place at the Paris talks that you can find on our D&D Climate Action Network Ning site: http://ddclimateactionnetwork.ning.com
Her questions for the discussion are also available there. We hope any of you who are focused on climate change work will join us on the call. All you need to do is to go onto our site, sign up with a password, etc., and then register on the top left hand side. We will then send you a link for the teleconference call using Zoom.
We look forward to your participation. Please contact any of our hosting team with your questions regarding our network.
Best,
Linda Ellinor
Co-Host: D&D Climate Action NetworkOur Hosting Team: Marti Roach, Nancy Glock-Grueneich, Sharon Joy Kleitsch, Rosa Zubizarreta, Tim Bonneman, Ben Roberts, Linda Ellinor
We hope that many of our NCDD members will join this important and engaging call, and we can’t wait to hear more about what the D&D CAN project accomplishes!
One of the more complicated, mostly unresolved issues facing most commons is how to assure the independence of commons when the dominant systems of finance, banking and money are so hostile to commoning. How can commoners meet their needs without replicating (perhaps in only modestly less harmful ways) the structural problems of the dominant money system?
Fortunately, there are a number of fascinating, creative initiatives around the world that can help illuminate answers to this question – from co-operative finance and crowdequity schemes to alternative currencies and the blockchain ledger used in Bitcoin, to reclaiming public control over money-creation to enable “quantitative easing for people” (and not just banks).
To help start a new conversation on these issues, the Commons Strategies Group, working in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, co-organized a Deep Dive strategy workshop in Berlin, Germany, last September. We brought together 24 activists and experts on such topics as public money, complementary currencies, community development finance institutions, public banks, social and ethical lending, commons-based virtual banking, and new organizational forms to enable “co-operative accumulation” (the ability of collectives to secure equity ownership and control over assets that matter to them).
I’m happy to report that a report synthesizing the key themes and cross-currents of dialogue at that workshop is now available. The report is called “Democratic Money and Capital for the Commons: Strategies for Transforming Neoliberal Finance Through Commons-Based Alternatives,” (pdf file) by David Bollier and Pat Conaty. 
You could consider the 54-page report an opening gambit for commoners to discuss how money, banking and finance could better serve their interests as commoners. There are no quick and easy answers if only because so much of the existing money system is oriented towards servicing the conventional capitalist economy. Even basic financial terms often have an embedded logic that skews toward promoting relentless economic growth, the extractivist economy and its pathologies, and the notion that money itself IS wealth.
That said, commoners have many important reasons for engaging with this topic. As we put it in the Introduction to the report, “The logic of neoliberal capitalism is responsible for at least three interrelated, systemic problems that urgently need to be addressed – the destruction of ecosystems, market enclosures of commons, and assaults on equality, social justice and the capacity of society to provide social care to its citizens. None of these problems is likely to be overcome unless we can find ways to develop innovative co-operative finance and money systems that can address all three problems in integrated ways.”
The advancement of the calendar year has brought a whole new energy to political campaign coverage. The Iowa Caucus is just over two weeks away, with the New Hampshire primary a week and a half after that.
Political journalism is aflutter with polling data and predictions – Cruz is expected to win the Iowa primary, and the second spot seems locked down as well. But other republicans vying for the nomination have the chance to make waves with a surprise third place finish.
“‘Exceeds expectations’ is the best headline a candidate can hope for coming out of Iowa,” a reporter shared in a recent NPR Political podcast while discussing what he referred to as the “Iowa Tango.”
The dance is not dissimilar on the democratic side – Clinton is expected to win Iowa, but Sanders has been slowly chipping away at her lead. An “exceeds expectations” in Iowa – and certainly a win – could lead to a big bump for the Sanders campaign.
This is all very exciting.
For those of us who are political junkies, presidential horse race coverage can be exhilarating. It’s like a (nerdy) action movie where you never know what’s going to happen next, where you’re on the edge of your seat because there’s no guarantee of a (subjectively) happy ending.
This sort of coverage is engaging for a certain segment of the electorate, but is it good journalism?
In We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, my former colleague Peter Levine illustrates an alternative model:
An important example was the decision of the Charlotte Observer to dispense with horse race campaign coverage, that is, stories about how the campaigns were trying to win the election. Instead, the Observer convened representative citizens to choose issues for reporters to investigate and to draw questions that the candidates were asked to answer on the pages of the newspaper.
Rather than asking “who will win the election?” this type of political coverage seeks to answer “who should win the election?”
One could argue that this isn’t an appropriate question for a news outlet to ask. If an ostensibly fair and balanced news outlet was actually biased in a particular candidate’s favor, for example, that would indeed go against the democratic process.
Yet we already know that horse race coverage can be prone to bias – resulting in early or inaccurate calls of elections while voting is still taking place.
Similarly, while certainly prone to bias, the question of who should win is not inherently biased. In the example above the Charlotte Observer answered the question not with their own editorial views, but through a combination of citizen voice and candidate response.
This is hardly the only model for political coverage addressing who should win. For example, outlets could put more emphasis on political investigative journalism – scrutinizing candidate policies for likely impact and outcome. There is certainly some of this already, but it is absent from some outlets while others treat such long-form critiques as secondary to the quick news of poll numbers.
Arguably here we have a market issue – perhaps journalists want to provide this sort of thoughtful analysis, but lack the reader interest to pursue it.
Walter Lippmann – a journalist and WWI propagandist – would certainly agree with that assessment. “The Public” as a faceless, unidentified herd, will always be too busy with other things to invest real time and thought into a deep understanding of political issues.
As Lippmann describes in his 1925, The Phantom Public:
For when private man has lived through the romantic age in politics and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is sober and unimpressed…You cannot move him then with good straight talk about service and civic duty, nor by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to make him vote.
To the extent that it is popular, horse race coverage succeeds because it is sexy and exciting. There are some people who have the interest and energy to read more provocative thought pieces on politics, but their numbers are not significant enough to affect so-called “public opinion.”
Lippmann does not fault the generic masses for putting their attention towards other things – it is only natural to have more interest and awareness in those topics which effect you more profoundly.
There is an important and subtle distinction here – just because the unnamed masses have no interest in politics does not mean that all people do not have an interest in politics. In one of my favorite Lippmann quotes, he writes that “The public must be put in its place…so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.”
Lippmann does not mean to argue for a technocratic society in which the voices of the common people are excluded. Rather, he highlights an aggregation problem – individual voices are important, while the collective voice of “the Public” – while easiest to hear – is nonsense.
This is, perhaps, what is most attractive about a model such as that used by the Charlotte Observer. Individual voices shaped the process, but on a scale that didn’t aggregate to meaninglessness.
A similar strategy can be seen in work such as that by the Oregon Citizen’s Initiative Review. A the review regularly gathers “a panel of randomly-selected and demographically-balanced voters…from across the state to fairly evaluate a ballot measure.” Each panel hears professional testimony about the measure and participates in several days of dialogue before produce a statement “highlighting the most important findings about the measure” which is then included in the official voter pamphlet.
This type of approach provides a balance between engaging diverse citizen voices and the infeasiblity of having every single person participate in such a process.
The Charlotte Observer provides one example of how this balance might be found in political journalism, but there have been so few attempts it’s impossible to know what’s best. It’s an area that’s desperate for greater innovation, for finding new ways to cover politics and new ways to think about journalist’s and citizen roles in politics.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the new evidence that partisan distrust and even hatred now trumps racial hatred. Consider the now-famous Iyengar/Westwood study, “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization.” Iyengar and Westwood showed that partisan identification has ceased to be a wholly ideological or instrumental self-description. It’s gone from identification to identity: it’s become an affective relationship that justifies exclusions, bias, and even outright prejudice.
Asked to award a scholarship to fictional high school seniors with equal qualifications, Democrats and Republicans awarded a seniors who had evidence of the opposing party affiliation among their qualifications only 21% of the time. Even when the scholarship candidate from the opposing party was more qualified, Democrats awarded the scholarship to Republican-affiliated high school seniors only 30% of the time, while Republicans awarded the scholarship to more qualified Democrats only 15% of the time! Alongside other evidence from economic games and implicit association tests, this enmity towards now appears like a very serious bias, one that most people almost certainly encounter as a part of their everyday lives.
I just can’t get my mind around the idea that people would feel comfortable privileging members of their party in scholarship competitions. It feels pretty dirty, and it suggests the kind of unwillingness to associate and collaborate that will be a real challenge to democratic public work in the years to come.
It used to be pretty common to remark that racial hatred was cultivated by elites who themselves didn’t feel bigotry deeply in order to prevent the alliance of working people whose interests were closely allied. By preventing workers from developing solidarity, racial mistrust allowed elites to create competition and legitimate violence. And yet everyone seems to have forgotten that lesson now that hatred based on partisan identity is at stake. Elites don’t care about partisan identity nearly as much as ordinary folks now do. Wonks and bureaucrats are partisan but usually get along with their opponents quite well. Technocrats agree on more than we disagree on. But citizens need to be able to work with their neighbors on matters of shared concern even when they don’t agree on federal immigration policy, firearms, or the culture war.
What’s more, partisan identification isn’t even a particularly good guide a person’s ideological positions on those matters. Precisely because most districts are safe districts for one party or another, voters’ experiences of the parties do not necessarily line up with their beliefs about specific policy issues. Ideological consistency of voters has never been particularly strong: it’s growing, but from a very low base.
Even in a world where partisans will deny each other jobs and scholarships, only 56% of Democrats hold mostly liberal views, and only 45% of Republicans hold mostly liberal views. If you expect true ideological consistency from partisans (the sort of thing that political philosophers try to achieve, maybe) then you’ll find partisan identification even less helpful: only 23% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans are consistently or rigorously liberal or conservative. So what justifies the enmity?
I don’t think it can be justified, and I think we need to aim a healthy skepticism at people like Jonathan Haidt who diagnose liberal and conservative brains. What’s left is culture, and our cultures are increasingly trying to justify and legitimate partisan differences in just the same way that they’d justify racial differences or gender differences or class differences. We can’t let that happen.
But what should we do, what should you and I do together, to prevent the growing partisan hatred? Here’s what President Obama–the Citizen-in-Chief–said during the State of the Union:
The future we want — all of us want — opportunity and security for our families, a rising standard of living, a sustainable, peaceful planet for our kids — all that is within our reach. But it will only happen if we work together. It will only happen if we can have rational, constructive debates. It will only happen if we fix our politics.
A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. This is a big country — different regions, different attitudes, different interests. That’s one of our strengths, too. Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, fiercely, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security.
But democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice. It doesn’t work if we think that our political opponents are unpatriotic or trying to weaken America. Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise, or when even basic facts are contested, or when we listen only to those who agree with us. Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get all the attention. And most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some special interest.
Too many Americans feel that way right now. It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.
]…]
So, my fellow Americans, whatever you may believe, whether you prefer one party or no party, whether you supported my agenda or fought as hard as you could against it — our collective futures depends on your willingness to uphold your duties as a citizen. To vote. To speak out. To stand up for others, especially the weak, especially the vulnerable, knowing that each of us is only here because somebody, somewhere, stood up for us. We need every American to stay active in our public life — and not just during election time — so that our public life reflects the goodness and the decency that I see in the American people every single day.
This three-page article, The Issue Guide and the Issue Forum: Political Inventions, by Brad Rourke was published in Kettering Foundation‘s annual newsletter, “Connections 2015 – Our History: Journeys in KF Research” in the fall of 2015. In the article, Rourke discusses the relationship between Kettering’s research and the National Issues Forums; how the Foundation’s research lead to the creation of NIFI’s issue guides, which were put into practice within the forums. What emerged was a better understanding of how individuals wrestled with their most wicked problems on the community level, and the realization that public deliberation is necessary for true democracy. Below is an excerpt from the article and you can download the full Connections newsletter for free on Kettering’s site here.
From the article…
The way issues typically get presented on a policy level are manifestly different from how citizens see those same issues. Citizens name issues differently, and these re-namings give rise to different options for action—re-framings. For example, citizens may not think about an “achievement gap” that professional educators must address, but may instead worry about why different kids seem to get different results for reasons that don’t seem fair. The latter formulation of the problem is one in which citizens may see themselves having a role. The options for addressing the problem will be different and are likely to contain much more that can be done on the level of community as opposed to institutionally. And so a barber may think to provide haircuts free of charge to children, if they will read aloud while he cuts. A community-level institution thus can be seen as one of the many actors that can productively be involved in the shared enterprise of educating local young people.
Kettering research increasingly shows that citizens see issues in terms of things that are deeply valuable to them and that wicked problems involve tensions The Issue Guide and the Issue Forum: Political Inventions between these things. Evolution has wired humans to seek security, for instance, and has also wired them to seek freedom to act. The more of one that we pursue, the less we have of the other. An effective issue framework will make these tensions clear.
This way of framing issues is sometimes (often) at odds with the way these same issues are framed in policy discourse. It is disruptive. This can pose difficulties when it comes time to demonstrate the value of public deliberation to policymakers. Kettering is experimenting with various ways of doing this as a part of its A Public Voice initiatives, an experiment to see how we might productively involve policymakers in developing issue frameworks that are rooted in public research and conducive to public deliberation.
Another, newer experiment with issue guides is just beginning. NIF issue guides are national in scope and, even though they are intended for use in communities, there can be problems getting community-based traction to hold forums. The facts on the ground or the potential actors may be slightly different. Or there may be other differences between how an issue looks locally and how it might look on a more national basis. We are beginning to experiment with changes in how we present issue guides to make them more easily “customizable” to local communities while at the same time maintaining the aspects that make them useful as self-starters
About Kettering Foundation and Connections
The Kettering Foundation is a nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering’s primary research question is, what does it take to make democracy work as it should? Kettering’s research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation.
Each issue of this annual newsletter focuses on a particular area of Kettering’s research. The 2015 issue, edited by Kettering program officer Melinda Gilmore and director of communications David Holwerk, focuses on our yearlong review of Kettering’s research over time.
Follow on Twitter: @KetteringFdn.
Resource Link: www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/periodical-article/Rourke_2015.pdf