Re-imagining and Restoring Justice: Toward a Truth and Reconciliation Process to Address Violence Against African-Americans in the US

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The webinar, Re-imagining and Restoring Justice: Toward a Truth and Reconciliation Process to Address Violence Against African-Americans in the US, was hosted by Carl Stauffer and speaker guest, Fania Davis, and occurred March 16, 2016 on Zehr Institute‘s site. In the hour and a half long webinar, Stauffer and Davis discuss the restorative-justice based, Truth and Reconciliation Movement. Davis begins with sharing her personal story and how her path led to restorative justice and the Truth and Reconciliation Movement. In this process, Davis explains, one asks the questions, “how can we tell the truth, promote accountability and transform social structures that are totally different?”. Like the restorative justice frame, participants come together to share their truths, listen to other perspectives, offer support to those affected, and work through the experiences in a way that heals trauma. Throughout the webinar, Stauffer and Davis talk about restorative justice processes around the world and how they shaped the Movement, current Truth and Reconciliation processes going on in the US and finally, the webinar is wrapped up with a Q&A.

You can find the full webinar below or on Zehr Institute’s site here.

From the Zehr Institute…

The recent wave of internationally publicized police killings in the U.S. has sparked a national race conversation and passionate outcry for justice. But the current justice system cannot deliver the justice we seek – it is itself a perpetrator of massive structural harm. Also, killings of unarmed black people are contemporary expressions of centuries of unhealed racial traumas reaching all the way back to the birth of our nation, morphing from slavery to sharecropping and lynching, from Jim Crow to convict leasing, and to mass incarceration and deadly police practices today. Prevailing justice lacks the capacity to redress racialized historical harm. Yet, until we as a nation interrupt intergenerationally-transmitted racial traumas, we are doomed to perpetually re-enact them. If the justice system as we know it cannot adequately redress the long legacy of racial trauma in this country, can we imagine and engender a justice that can? A more capacious justice: one that promotes truth-telling, accountability, and reparations? Can we envision a justice that transforms relationships and social structures, grounding them in a mutual recognition of one another’s humanity? A justice that allows us as a nation, racially-fractured for centuries, to heal and build a new future together?

This webinar explores the possibility of a restorative justice-based Truth and Reconciliation Movement as our best hope.

We need to think about justice in a completely different way. How do we envision and imagine justice that can interrupt the historical cycles of racial trauma? How do we transform this historical harms, so that the killings can stop? How do we view accountability? How do we hold system accountable?

Below is the full webinar and it can also be found on Zehr Institute’s site here.

About Dr. Fania Davis
She is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY). Coming of age in Birmingham, Alabama during the social ferment of the civil rights era, the murder of two close childhood friends in the 1963 Sunday School bombing crystallized within Fania a passionate commitment to social transformation. For the next decades, she was active in the civil rights, Black liberation, women’s, prisoners’, peace, anti-racial violence and anti-apartheid movements.

About Zehr Institute
The leaders of EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) announced the founding of the Zehr Institute at the end of the fall 2012 semester. The Zehr Institute spreads knowledge about restorative justice and is a resource to practitioners, while facilitating conversations and cultivating connections through activities like conferences and webinars. The institute is co-directed by Howard Zehr, distinguished professor of restorative justice, and Carl Stauffer, assistant professor of justice and development studies at CJP.

Resource Link: http://zehr-institute.org/webinar/re-imagining-and-restoring-justice-toward-a-truth-and-reconciliation-process-to-address-violence-against-african-americans-in-the-united-states/

Our Differences Do Not Have To Become Our Divisions

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The article, Our Differences Do Not Have To Become Our Divisions, was written by Jessica DeBruin and posted June 20, 2016 on Everyday Democracy‘s site. DeBruin wrote this article in memory of the 49 victims from the Orlando massacre at Pulse nightclub, an LGBTQIA club. In the article, DeBruin shares her experience as a queer person in the aftermath of the massacre and calls for the urgent need to improve the civic process by demanding the need to ensure the voices of marginalized folks are at the table in an authentic way. She gives explicit ideas on how to do this by listening to affected communities, ensuring the mic is shared, and directly challenging and interrupting violence [in all forms].

Below is an excerpt from the article and read it in full on Everyday Democracy’s site here.

From the article…

It may be near impossible for all of us, even allies, even queer folk, to comprehend how we have internalized and acted out these violences on a daily basis – but it is essential that we begin to do so. When good people witness hate speech and say nothing, we have participated in that hate. By failing to challenge hateful narratives we become complicit to them. When we cling to compartmentalized notions of identity, we erase the experiences of people who live at the intersection of multiple group identities.

We will slip up. We will do all these things on occasion because these concepts have been with us most of our lives. Our progress will be imperfect, but we must continue to push ourselves to do better.

Where do we begin this process?

We begin with acknowledgement. We must acknowledge that on some level, great or small, we have all internalized homophobia. We acknowledge that the gender roles which some of us find comfort in, do not necessarily apply to or benefit us all. We acknowledge that institutional racism and colorism hold us all back, and rob us of the opportunity to better connect with one another.

Next we hand the mic to affected communities.

We uplift and magnify the voices of the marginalized, those who have been on the receiving end of violence.

We listen.

We listen to them, we listen to each other. We cannot feign deafness to avoid inconvenience or discomfort. If you consider yourself an ally to the queer, or any marginalized community, it is past time that you recognize that yielding the mic is one of the most powerful things you can do to support us.

Of course even within these communities, there are myriad factions, and perspectives and experiences. This touches upon a fundamental need for the creation of civic culture where people from all walks of life can come together in respect to share our experiences, to hear other people’s lived realities, and to find a way to work together.

We must find a place where we can acknowledge and uplift these differences. We must recognize that our differences do not have to become our divisions. A democracy that is alive and thriving should facilitate this kind of communal meeting of minds. This is what American core values should be.

In 1970 the grassroots implementation of this kind of dialogue between radically different queer communities produced the first Pride Marches. In cities across the nation, LGBTQIA folk came together to stand and be counted. They took tragedy and oppression and turned it into a celebration of being.

We are faced with a similar opportunity to continue this difficult work today. May we not shy away from it. May we instead use it to fuel action and positive change. May we instead practice the democracy of earnest and inclusive civic dialogue, so that on the other side of it we can emerge stronger than the sum of hatred and indifference.

Read the article in full here.

About Jessica DeBruin
Jessica is a writer and actress living in Los Angeles, dedicated to creating feminist, queer-inclusive art and media.

Follow on Twitter: @JessicaLaVerdad

About Everyday Democracy
Everyday Democracy (formerly called the Study Circles Resource Center) is a project of The Paul J. Aicher Foundation, a private operating foundation dedicated to strengthening deliberative democracy and improving the quality of public life in the United States. Since our founding in 1989, we’ve worked with hundreds of communities across the United States on issues such as: racial equity, poverty reduction and economic development, education reform, early childhood development and building strong neighborhoods. We work with national, regional and state organizations in order to leverage our resources and to expand the reach and impact of civic engagement processes and tools.

Follow on Twitter: @EvDem

Resource Link: www.everyday-democracy.org/news/our-differences-do-not-have-become-our-divisions

Repairing the Breach: The Power of Dialogue to Heal Relationships and Communities

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The 7-page article, Repairing the Breach: The Power of Dialogue to Heal Relationships and Communities (2014), by Robert Stains Jr was published in Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 10: Iss. 1. Dialogue has an incredible power to create a space for individuals to come together and work through difficult conversations that may have previously been felt by the participants as an insurmountable task. Public Conversations Project use of the Reflexive Structured Dialogue process creates an opportunity for a profound shift in conversations, as participants share their own personal stories, emotions and identities; to see and foster the humanity in each other and explore the common ground between both “sides”.

Find the PDF available for download from the Journal of Public Deliberation site here.

From the article…

Dialogue holds the promise of healing in all these contexts in which community is broken. The sense of community depends on the quality of relationships, and relationships grow from conversations. Therefore, the quality of conversation drives the quality of relationships and the possibility of community. At the Public Conversations Project (PCP), we have found that shifting the conversation through Reflective, Structured Dialogue invites and enables people to move from certainty to curiosity to caring; from mindless stereotyping to genuine interest by changing the nature and process of their conversations. Whether it’s a church divided over theology and human sexuality, a workplace split by gender issues or a region mired in religious and ethnic conflict, in dialogue mutual curiosity and exploration build on each other and relationships move closer to being restored. Much work has been done in our field to create and facilitate these kinds of healing conversations. Because they remain less visible than other kinds of dialogue, much more work needs to be done by practitioners, scholars and funders to evaluate, expand and sustain them.

Hope for relationship and community healing comes when dialogue focuses on personal stories, emotions and identities. It can counter the effects of the stories told of others that shred relational and communal bonds and the emotions that inflame or imprison. (Black, 2008; Freedman & Combs, 2009; Seikkula & Trimble, 2005). In face-to-face dialogue, participants have the opportunity to edit and add to the stories that are told about them, changing the ways that they are seen. As Black has observed, it is “…through telling and responding to personal stories, group members craft their identities and take on others’ perspectives” (Black, 2008, p. 93). This experience of being witnessed is powerful and connecting. It opens receptivity to others’ stories, dilutes stereotypes and invites the heart 1 Stains: The Power of Dialogue to Heal Relationships and Communities as much as the mind. And heart-focus can transform enemies to friends (Eilberg, 2014; Palmer, 2011).

…

In addition to expanding stories, healing dialogue focuses on “heart,” which invites feeling as well as thinking. The protected space of dialogue makes it possible for participants to express deep emotion in ways that can be received by their listeners, who reciprocate with their own expressions of feeling. In some cases that we’ve been involved with at Public Conversations, these feelings have been waiting five, eight or ten years to be expressed to “the other” whose words and actions –wittingly or unwittingly- may have ignited them. Speaking the seemingly unspeakable, and having it witnessed and engaged goes a long way toward healing individual and relational wounds. Dialogue provides the space for that to happen.

…

Finally, healing dialogue invites people to stand in a place of honor in the identities that matter most to them (race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.), and that they feel have been maligned. Participating in a dialogue may be the first time someone has had a conversation with people of different identities that does not begin with making someone wrong because of who they are. Rather they are invited to bring their identity into the room and experience the genuine interest of others who are different from them. People who experience being seen more fully in terms of how they experience themselves in their identity apart from the limiting and often demeaning stereotypes attributed by others report feelings of liberation and connection. This experience opens their own curiosity to more complex stories and deeper feelings expressed by “the other.” The healing ripples and reverberations can be far-reaching, and powerful.

Download the case study from the Journal of Public Deliberation here.

About the Journal of Public Deliberation
Spearheaded by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium in collaboration with the International Association of Public Participation, the principal objective of Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD) is to synthesize the research, opinion, projects, experiments and experiences of academics and practitioners in the emerging multi-disciplinary field and political movement called by some “deliberative democracy.” By doing this, we hope to help improve future research endeavors in this field and aid in the transformation of modern representative democracy into a more citizen friendly form.

Follow the Deliberative Democracy Consortium on Twitter: @delibdem

Follow the International Association of Public Participation [US] on Twitter: @IAP2USA

Resource Link: www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol10/iss1/art7/

Difference, Conflict & Love: How Family Can Lead Us Home

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The article, Difference, Conflict & Love: How Family Can Lead Us Home by Kathy Eckles was published April 2016 on Public Conversations Project blog. In the article, Eckles shares some of her family’s history regarding dialogue and the desire growing up to have had other alternatives communication with her family, especially when it came to harder issues. She gives 3 steps for improving communication skills with family, even when differences and conflict arise.

Below is an excerpt from the article and you can find the original in full on Public Conversations Project blog here.

From Public Conversations Project…

3 Steps to Improved Communication Skills

Step 1: Build Emotional Sturdiness
Stretch your comfort zone. Break old patterns. Say ‘yes’ to opportunities. Learn new things. Build trust in yourself as you strengthen your emotional capacity to listen, speak, create, succeed, fail, give, receive, lead. There will be moments of awkwardness, but you’ll survive them and, with humility and good-heartedness, they can even be endearing. You’ll likely wish for a few ‘do-overs,’ too, but you will grow.Step one: live your life beyond what you already know.

Step 2: Understand Self & Others
Ask why do I do what I do? What motivates each of us to be so different in how we communicate, lead and interact in relationships? What are my gifts and challenges? How can I be more accepting of myself and others? How might acceptance, appreciation and knowing more about how to meet people where they are impact our relationships at home and at work? Would we be happier and more productive? One of my favorite resources is the Enneagram. It’s helped me be more compassionate, appreciate differences, and relate more effectively. Step two: know thyself. Appreciate. Diversify. Respond, not react. Communicate in ways that make sense to the receiver.

Step 3: Develop Communication Skills
…Expand your conversation toolkit beyond news, sports, weather and the 140 character comment to include how to: listen and ask genuine questions to have a conversation that’s rich with curiosity and connection; unlock stuck conversations through mutual understanding; feel more grounded in your own voice; communicate across different cultures, personalities and contexts, and develop everyday tools to resolve or transform conflict. Step three: expand your quality communication skills. Practice every day.

This is an excerpt from the article, to find it in full, go to Public Conversations Project’s site.

About Public Conversations Project
Public Conversations Project fosters constructive conversation where there is conflict driven by differences in identity, beliefs, and values. We work locally, nationally, and globally to provide dialogue facilitation, training, consultation, and coaching. We help groups reduce stereotyping and polarization while deepening trust and collaboration and strengthening communities.

Follow on Twitter: @pconversations

Resource Link: www.publicconversations.org/blog/difference-conflict-love-how-family-can-lead-us-home

The Greatest History Lessons Are Those We Have Yet to Learn

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The article written by Jessica DeBruin, The Greatest History Lessons Are Those We Have Yet to Learn, was published August 2015 on Everyday Democracy‘s site. DeBruin shares some of her history, how it shaped her identity, and explores how our identities play out in our conversations and realities. She emphasizes the importance genuinely listening and participating in conversations where we explore the intersections of our own privilege and oppression. Below is an excerpt from the article and read it in full on Everyday Democracy’s site here.

From the article…

…There is a notion of being “all talk.” In truth, many actions must be taken to move us forward as a society. Humanity exists on the threads of a tapestry being woven, ever in motion. We may skip a stitch occasionally, or unravel bits of progress, but it is only through collaboration that we may continue. No one thread is more vital to the weaving. Likewise, there are many ways to take action. Some seek political recourse, some take to the streets, some create art, some tell stories, and we all talk.

In this arena I have found a useful application for the intersection of my privilege and my experience as a woman of color. At my core I am a storyteller, and that is just what I do. I can take all my experiences, all the confusion and micro-aggressions, and form them into something meaningful. Over the years I have seen subtle shifts in the attitudes of some of my white friends regarding race and, while I certainly do not take credit for the shift, I know that maintaining a relationship in which we talk about the hard stuff contributes to forming a habit of critical thinking.

I recall a conversation I had recently with a white, straight, cismale coworker of mine. In many ways he has what might be considered the trifecta of social privilege. And yet his nose crinkled in discomfort at the word. He quite earnestly expressed that he didn’t feel this had ever given him any undue advantage in life.

So we chatted about that.

I shared my perspective that privilege is not always about what is given to you, but often about what is not taken from you. Things like the ability to walk safely in public seem like something that should be a given in the United States in 2015, and yet a significant portion of the population does not take that privilege for granted.

When we finished our conversation he thanked me. He had never thought to see the world that way, frankly because he had never had to. As a queer, multi-ethnic woman I have no choice but to consider these things.

We both learned from each other: He left the conversation with insight into a different way of existing in the world. I left it with a better understanding of the ways in which our own privilege is truly a blind spot.

Conversations like these are vital to moving ideas forward.

In critically examining our place in the world and speaking truthfully about our experiences, we make small shifts to guide the direction of our broader cultural discourse. It starts with listening, really listening; the kind of listening that sends a prickle up your spine. Any democracy must be based first on our ability to listen, and then on the gumption to speak with honesty.

Yes, it will be uncomfortable. No individual is entirely privileged or oppressed, and learning your own privilege can be unnerving.

In school we learn that we earn what we have. The rags to riches mythology of extreme economic and social mobility has become a basic tenant of American society. Learning that hard work is not always enough for those who lack privilege can unsettle our sense of self. We want to believe that if and when we have good things it is because we have earned them. But this discomfort is productive if we can allow ourselves to sit with it. Indeed if we are not prepared to dismantle our assumptions about our place in the world, we have not truly learned our instrument.

Human beings possess one of the greatest privileges of all – the ability to intricately and meaningfully exchange ideas. This exchange of ideas has been essential to our advancement as a species. Through everyday conversations I have learned to appreciate the world from multiple perspectives, and I believe that has advanced me as an individual. It has helped me find the small actions I can take in my life to make this the kind of world I can be proud to be a part of.

The greatest history lessons I have ever learned are the testimony of so many remarkable individuals, each with their own set of experiences. The greatest history lessons are those I have yet to learn.

About Jessica DeBruin
Jessica is a writer and actress living in Los Angeles, dedicated to creating feminist, queer-inclusive art and media. Follow on Twitter: @JessicaLaVerdad

Resource Link: http://everyday-democracy.org/news/greatest-history-lessons-are-those-we-have-yet-learn

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Category Archives: listening

Repairing the Breach: The Power of Dialogue to Heal Relationships and Communities

Difference, Conflict & Love: How Family Can Lead Us Home