The RaceDoctor Speaks!

Last week, I was in quaint and friendly Whitefish, Montana, a small town that was full of advertisements all over town for a local January 20th Inauguration event. The celebration was to combine singing, poetry, reflections of some town leaders. The advertisement featured an image that melded Martin Luther King and Barack Obama. Above MLK was “I have a dream, and below, Obama was “Someday a Change is Gonna Come.” My first reaction was, “I can’t believe they confused Barack Obama with Sam Cooke!" But after my amusement wore off, I was moved by the genuine excitement for turning a racial corner in a town where I only saw 5 black people in an entire week.

As I look at the formats of events from Whitefish (which I think should be renamed “White People”, but I digress) to my home in Washington, I cannot help by notice that we are America is commemorating this unique milestone in largely the same way we celebrate other events: we will have public events focused on performances of many types where we can all sit back and observe polished performances. It is great that people even in overwhelmingly white parts of the country are consciously linking the quadrennial celebration to national pride on turning an important milestone in the 400 year project toward racial equality. But I think we are missing a great opportunity to advance the often vaunted “national conversation on race”. Here we finally have a collective racial incident that is not something to be lamented. Can’t we do better than just watch performances?

If we really want to fully leverage this moment, we need to create mobilize ourselves to actually engage in other in real conversation, not just watch artists and intellectuals perform. We need to mobilize ourselves to authentically engage each other, not merely to attend celebrations where the vast majority watch other folks talk, instead of engaging each other across the lines that have divided Americans since the nation was founded.
Of course, there are a lot more people who think a “national conversation” is needed than who want to roll up their sleeves and get involved in it. All across the country, there are dialogue facilitators like me who are skilled in helping people have important but difficult conversations across lines of difficulty. Why are churches, civic groups, media outlets, businesses, and governments not mobilizing these folks and creating thousands or tens of thousands of settings for real conversation between regular folks. I love poetry and singing too, but we are unlikely to really advance to racial ball very far if our only engagement with each other is smiling in the lobby at each other before we head back to our separate neighborhoods.

If we were to really make an effort to engage each other, we would need to have a discussion that was designed truly build upon on shared pride and produce new connectedness and mutual insight. How might we do that?
First, we have to talk about how race and racism have affected us personally, to openly discuss the story we have told ourselves about it, and examine how this story needs to be adjusted. Racially liberal people – by this I mean primarily blacks, other folks of color, and who tend to think about racism a lot - are going to have to wrestle honestly with the a obvious and hard to acknowledge fact: White folks are not only a lot less racist than used to be, they are less racist than we thought they were on November 3. I have not talked to one black person who truly thought that regardless of the polling data that something - The Bradley Effect, an assassination, or something else from The Man’s Infinitely large Trick Bag - would emerge to prevent Obama’s election.

Given that Barack got more white votes than any recent democrat (still less than 50 percent, we must all note), and that he will take that oath of office, black folks and other racial liberals need to update our notion of what racism is and how it functions. For a long time, the fact that the nation would never elect one of us to lead it served the as important reminder about the many contradictions of this nation. It was a sign of some of the hypocrisy embedded in this nation, for all its admirable ideals. We just knew that no matter how lofty the national ideals were, there was so much prejudice in the nation’s people that there was still much racial work to be done. We now must wrestle with how Obama’s election changes are narrative about what the nation is, and how white folks think about us.

A second major part of this discussion would be more challenging for racial conservatives. Put simply, we need to talk about what the election doesn’t mean. The Obama’s election does not and will not on its own alter the numerous racial disparities that show America is far from a place where racism has no impact on how well groups do. (Examples abound: average black wealth one 10th that of average white wealth; numerous experiments consistently show that minority housing applicants are more likely than not to face discrimination when looking for housing; black, Latino, and native American are all poverty rates approximately 3 times that of whites.) To really wrestle with realities like these would likely be more challenging for racial conservatives, who tend to see group disparities as being the fault of the groups, not the our collective systems.

While the election may prove that anybody can make it, we need to have a conversation about how to move toward a society where everybody can make it. Seems an appropriate topic at a time of national “economic reset,” but still a difficult one.

The third and final major theme of our discussion concerns the way that issues of race and racism have affected relationships between people and groups. Apart from the disparities, we still live remarkably divided society in every sphere except the workplace – in our neighborhoods, churches, clubs, even our freely chosen friendship circles. When are we going to start dealing with that?

Maybe this can’t ever be really addressed. Certainly, one thing the current moment could allow us to look at is the way that issues of race and racism have affected relationships between people from different groups. Can engaging each other authentically around this historic moment lead to diminishing the gaps in trust – or even just contact – between groups? Potentially yes, if we really do have a national conversation about how issues of race have affected. The Obama campaign produced what one might call a truly multi-racial coalition around change. But that was a short term coalition focused on the election. Of course, a real coalition is more than millions of people from different groups voting for the same person; a real coalition involves people and groups committing a shared goal and to improving their relationships with each other. My fear is that we will all be so busy celebrating – perhaps in racially separate events save for the actual swearing in – that we won’t turn our attention to the impediments within ourselves, our institutions, and our social structures that keep our relationships distant and strained.

Obama has promised to more deeply engage the American public, unless we find room to grapple with the impediments to contact and trust that have kept us apart for a long time, such efforts are likely to have limited effectiveness.

Having a national conversation about any of this means not leaving this to exchanges by experts on television. We can have 10 times the number of expert panels probing these issues as we can muster and create a new C-SPAN network just to cover these events, but until our local institutions create settings where each of us are actually engaged in real conversations with other people who look different than we do, the fullness of this opportunity to advance the cause of racial reconciliation will not be leveraged.

But I guess having a decent party around racial progress isn’t the worse thing in the world. Can we do better? I would like to say “yes, we can,” but we will see.