(Logan airport, trying to get to Chicago) Because I study civic engagement and civil society, people often expect me to favor civility. My actual view is more complicated; not only civil dialogue but also contentious speech is important in a democracy. Citizens should be able to express righteous anger; parties and candidates should face zero-sum competitions that necessitate sharp debate. Yet there is a reason to care about civility: it helps us to learn from other people. That is why I like the norm that the Civic Commons expects of its online participants: “We’re as interested in each other’s opinions as we are in our own. And we act like it.” That works for me as a definition of civility. For more on the context, see Dan Moulthrop’s remarks at Frontiers of Democracy.

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(Albuquerque, NM) After Newtown, President Obama “direct[ed] the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Education to launch a National Dialogue on Mental Health.” This presidential directive led, in turn, to “community conversations,” including a big meeting here in Albuquerque on Saturday. I am here because I serve on the board of Everyday Democracy, which helped to organize the Albuquerque deliberation.

Note that the whole effort began in response to the Newtown shooting, but the focus shifted—for understandable, if debatable reasons—from guns to mental illness. Now, several months later, it is very hard to talk about gun violence without thinking about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. And the president has called for a national dialogue on race.

These shifts of topic raise a general and urgent question about framing, or, in blunter terms, What should we talk about?

For instance, if you are concerned about the Trayvon Martin killing, it may be because you despise anti-black racism and oppose “stand your ground” laws. If you are still thinking about the Newtown murders today, you probably want to regulate or ban assault weapons. On the other hand, if you oppose gun control and think (as most white Americans say they do) that anti-black racism is overemphasized, then you may want to change the focus away from Trayvon Martin and away from Newtown. You may find urban crime a more congenial topic, because the accused are disproportionately Black, and gun control has been used locally without seeming to work. See, for example, Pat Buchanan.

Incidentally, people like Buchanan have helped to make the Martin case a major news story by talking about how “the media” is overplaying it. Within their own circles, they want to talk about the Zimmerman trial, which reinforces their views about race and guns. (It allows them to remind everyone that men who look like them can act as the law.) The debate about whether we should be talking about the Trayvon Martin case actually increases attention to the case and serves the interest of the hard right as well as civil rights groups.

As a participant in political debates, you are entitled to try to shift the focus. Each framing pushes the conversation in certain directions instead of others. So it is not intrinsically wrong to say, in response to the Trayvon Martin case, “Let’s talk about the 500 murders committed in Chicago last year.”

In fact, I also want to talk about urban crime, including the crimes committed by young Black men, which produce many victims and also partially explain why nearly 1 million African American men are incarcerated today. Not only Pat Buchanan but also the NAACP want people to know that African Americans are disproportionately convicted of crimes.

So what is the right conversation for us to be having in this situation? I would say we need to be able to talk both about urban violent crime–in which Black people are disproportionately perpetrators and victims–and racially motivated violence against African Americans. One of those topics must not be eclipsed or trivialized by invoking the other one. If the phrase “comparisons are odious” means anything, its wisdom emerges in cases like this. It would be true but odious to say that almost as many German gentiles died in WWII as Jews died in the Holocaust. It’s not that the German lives were valueless and we shouldn’t care, but the comparison trivializes. Likewise, a person who cared about all these victims would not casually juxtapose 500 homicides in Chicago against 27 in Newtown and one in Sanford, FL.

Although no one should try to eclipse one topic with the other, they may be related in various important ways. For instance, maybe we teach most Americans (Black as well as White) to think that Black people’s lives are cheap. Then Zimmerman’s decision to shoot had something in common with decisions that are taken nearly every day in cities like Chicago. It is also true that many people are sincerely afraid of crime, and their fear is legitimately part of the conversation.

One place where both police (or vigilante) violence against Black people and crime committed by Black people are extensively and continually discussed is within the African American community itself. At “Frontiers of Democracy,” Peter Pihos gave a great historical talk about Chicago around 1970, when crime was rising rapidly and mass incarceration was just around the corner. He focused on several African American leaders who very explicitly opposed both “genocide” (by the white government) and “suicide” (by the Black community) and connected them to each other. That was an important moment, but similar discourse has been constant and vibrant. After all, compared to the national population, African Americans are disproportionately represented in urban police forces, corrections departments, and among the citizens who call the police and sometimes complain about slow and inadequate responses. So this is a subgroup of Americans on both sides of the prison industry and well aware of that.

A right-wing trope holds that we don’t pay enough attention to crimes committed by Black people because that discussion would violate political correctness. We may indeed not talk very well about race and racism, but our actions speak loudly. We spend about $27 billion a year simply incarcerating African Americans,* to say nothing of the costs of policing and the judicial process. Michigan, whose great city is bankrupt, spends one fifth of its general fund on prisons. California spends more on prisons than on its once-vaunted system of public higher education. The relative silence on this topic in venues like the US Congress is indeed problematic, but we can’t let that silence be filled by the kind of words one sees on open comment forums about the Zimmerman trial. It must be a conversation about how to treasure and protect all human lives.

*I extrapolate from the total cost of prisons ($68 billion) and the proportion of all prisoners who are Black (roughly 40%).

The post what we should talk about? (notes on Trayvon Martin and the state of national dialogue) appeared first on Peter Levine.

(This is the sixth in a series of blog posts by CIRCLE, which evaluated several initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from specific evaluations. It is also on the Democracy Fund’s website.)

CIRCLE evaluated seven initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund during the 2012 election. These interventions were not comparable; they had diverse purposes and operated in various contexts and scales. We certainly do not have a favorite among them. But we do recommend that policymakers pay attention to one of the projects because it can be adopted by law—with positive effects.

In 2011, the Oregon legislature instituted a process called the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR). This reform unifies two apparently contrasting forms of democracy, the popular initiative and the deliberative forum.

With a referendum, the public can circumvent entrenched interests and hold politicians accountable. A referendum honors the democratic principle of one person/one vote.

Oregon was one of the first states to institute referenda, initiatives, and recall elections. Perhaps the most famous advocate of these populist reforms was William Simon U’Ren, known nationally as “Referendum U’Ren,” who formed the Oregon Direct Legislation League in 1897. As a result of early initiatives, Oregon was the first state to elect its US Senators directly (1908), the first to hold a presidential primary election (1910), and one of the first to allow women to vote (1912).

These were achievements. But a referendum does not require people to learn, think, or discuss. As the number of referenda rises, the odds fall that voters will be thoughtful and well-informed about each ballot measure. Deliberation is a form of democracy that encourages people to be well-informed and thoughtful. Juries and New England town meetings are deliberative bodies that have deep roots in the United States, but governments can also create innovative deliberative forums today. For instance, several cities have asked AmericaSPEAKS to convene large numbers of representative citizens to discuss an issue—such as the city plan of New Orleans or the budget of Washington, DC—and give official input on the final decisions.

Referenda can easily reach large scale and offer every citizen an equal vote, but they may not reflect thoughtful opinion and may in fact present information in a format that is too complex or filled with jargon to be easily understood even by well-informed voters. They can even be manipulated by the authors of ballot measures or by groups that spend money on campaigns. Deliberation addresses those two problems, but deliberations tend to be small and would cost a great deal (in both money and participants’ time) to make widespread.

The Citizens Initiative Review process combines the best of both ideas. The text of an initiative is given to a randomly selected, representative body of 24 citizens who study it, hear testimony on both sides of the issue, and collaboratively write an explanatory statement. They spend five days on this work. Their explanation does not endorse or reject the initiative but gives deliberated and informed arguments for and against it. A copy is mailed to all households in Oregon as part of the state’s Voters Pamphlet.

Penn State Professor John Gastil found that nearly half of Oregon voters were aware of the CIR’s explanations in fall 2012. He also conducted a randomized experiment, surveying a sample of Oregonians who were given the explanations and a control group who were not. His experiment showed that the text produced by the CIR influenced people’s views of the ballot measure and increased their understanding of it. If many people knew about the explanation, and the explanation changed people’s opinions in an experiment, then the CIR probably changed many people’s opinions across the state.

CIRCLE conducted an analysis of media coverage of the CIR process in December of 2012.  With the bulk of coverage appearing in Oregon-based media outlets, it generally focused on the CIR process—describing it and communicating its validity and trustworthiness. Healthy Democracy, the organization that managed the CIR, created strong and consistent messages that guided this public conversation, which at times expanded into advocacy for the CIR or appeals to strengthen democracy through such processes. The media also used the CIR as a way to talk about deliberative dialogue in a concrete form. For the non-Oregon media especially, it offered a way to think about the possibilities for such processes in other locales. Advocating  deliberative processes and igniting the public imagination about new forms of engagement were clearly strong narrative threads in the public discourse caused by CIR media coverage.

CIRCLE is also in the final stages of interviewing political leaders from other states who have observed the CIR in Oregon or are engaged in other educational activities about the CIR. We are asking them what would influence their decision to adopt the reform. We will report our results here.

The previous entries in the series can be accessed below:

1 – Educating Voters in a Time of Political Polarization

2 – Supporting a Beleaguered New Industry

3 – How to Reach a Large Scale with High-Quality Messages

4 – Tell it Straight?  The Advantages and Dangers of Parody

5 – Educating the Public When People Don’t Trust Each Other

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