Presentation by Rob Corcoran at national forum on Building Constructive Frameworks for Improving Ethnic Relations: Best Practices Here and Abroad 50 Years After Brown, hosted by the University of Denver, August 19-21, 2004

Beyond the Comfort Zone:
Honest Conversations on Race, Reconciliation and Responsibility
by Rob Corcoran, National Director Hope in the Cities

This paper was presented at a national forum on Building Constructive Frameworks for Improving Ethnic Relations: Best Practices Here and Abroad 50 Years After Brown, hosted by the University of Denver, August 19-21, 2004

When my wife and I arrived in Richmond, Virginia 25 years ago the city was in state of some excitement and turmoil. After more than 200 years of exclusionary white rule, black Richmonders had finally been able to gain control of City Council. Henry March became our first African American mayor. Overnight political power shifted and the white establishment suddenly discovered they could no longer run the city with private meetings on the golf course or over drinks at Commonwealth Club. Of course, they still held the economic power. One of Henry Marsh’s first acts was to fire the white city manager, which infuriated Main Street. The city had also recently experienced court ordered busing after its failure to voluntarily desegregate schools.

The reaction to busing was the exodus of about two thirds of the white population to county schools, private schools and academies. In addition, the business community was rapidly pulling investments outside the city boundaries. Finally the Virginia General Assembly prohibited Richmond from ever annexing further land. The door was locked and bolted.

This was the scene when we arrive with our 11-month-old son to live in an integrated neighborhood. Over the years we’ve raised three sons, all of whom were students in the Richmond public schools, which at present are more than 95% black, so they have had the experience of learning what it is to be a minority. This year, the graduation of our youngest son marked the completion of our twenty years with the school system.

The very day we arrived the doorbell rang and on the step was an African American woman who said, “My name is Audrey Burton and I have come to welcome you to the neighborhood.” It turned out that she lived directly across the street. So began a friendship and partnership with Audrey and her husband Collie that has lasted 25 years. They are community activists. They are risk takers who have had the courage to move out of their comfort zone and begin a change process by examining their own attitudes, biases and behaviors. They reached out to build a friendship with senior white city administrator whom they had suspected of racial prejudice. The effect on this man was so striking that someone said to me, “What has happened? Whenever I went into a meeting with this man I felt the decisions were already made. Now he actually listens to what I have to say.” At about the same time, a retired secretary called on one of the newly elected black council members and invited him and his wife to tea, the first such invitation they had received to any white home. That city council member, Walter Kenney, later became mayor of Richmond and played a key role in the public launching of the work of racial reconciliation.

I tell these stories because they illustrate the way in which a new approach to race relations in Richmond has grown over the years. It has been organic rather than organizational. It has involved individuals moving out of their comfort zones to establish contact. Very often these first encounters have taken place as people have opened their homes and welcomed strangers into their private spaces.

Simple but courageous steps have had a ripple effect across the region, involving inner city residents and suburbanites, business leaders and grassroots organizers, elected officials and religious leaders of all faiths. We are black and white, Muslim, Jew, and Christian, staunch Republican and liberal Democrat. In 1993, with the full support and involvement of government, business and grassroots leaders, we launched a call for “honest conversation on race, reconciliation and responsibility.” It was a landmark moment for Richmond.

Michael Paul Williams is a native Richmonder, who writes for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He is an African American who does not pull his punches in his weekly column. This was his evaluation of the past decade when he spoke at a public event in November 2003: “I have seen Richmond evolve from a place that discretely oppressed its black citizens and where race was not discussed in polite company…The conversations have not always been calm or coherent, but they have seldom been trivial. We have struggled to move the discussion from power, spoils and misguided nostalgia toward empathy, healing and …transformative change…

“We have witnessed our politicians move from stark division and open rancor toward honest attempts to reach consensus. We’ve grappled to tweak our symbols to more completely reflect our city…(Taken) an enlightening trip through the dark side of Richmond history. Erected a monument to a native son on a boulevard previously off-limits in the harshest sense. And most recently, we paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in the former capital of the Confederacy. Indeed, anything is possible.”

Yes, it could be said that if change can occur in Richmond it could occur anywhere. So what has been going on? I am going to describe a process of community change, give some examples of how it has worked, and then conclude with some reflections on my experiences over the past decade in Richmond and in communities across the USA.

All of our work with Hope in the Cities is based on three guiding principles: honest conversation, acts of acknowledgment and reconciliation, and acceptance of personal responsibility.

Honest conversation
Someone said the four scariest words in the English language are, “We’ve got to talk.” Our first organizing principle was an absolute determination to welcome everyone to the table. There is no future in simply meeting with like-minded groups and congratulating ourselves on our sense of enlightenment. Honest conversation means going towards those we fear, those we mistrust, and those whose views we may find challenging or threatening. It means engaging those who are alienated or in denial.

We also recognized that if information alone could have resolved our racial dilemmas it would have been done ago. Some of the worst divisions in our Richmond community take place between the most highly educated people. We can discuss racial issues at the intellectual level quite rationally, but when faced with a challenging situation, or when our own interests seem threatened, it is our gut feelings that take over. The emotional process is often more important than the cognitive process. Therefore at some point dialogue must move to a different level: from an exchange of information to an experience of transformation. In order for this to occur, those facilitating the dialogue need to model a level of honesty and vulnerability that creates a safe space for others to share their deepest and most painful experiences.

Our starting point for any community dialogue process is to ask three questions: What is the underlying conversation that is not taking place? Who needs to be at the table in order for the conversation to have meaning? How might we engage with them?

Over the years we have developed two structured dialogue formats. The first typically involves 12-14 people meeting together at least six times. The conversation focuses on personal experience and story telling; it enables participants to dig deeply into their own individual and group history, and to explore questions of privilege, unhealed history and
forgiveness. Here is a typical six-part structure for these community dialogues:
1) Beginning the conversation: why are we here?
2) Our experience of race & community: who are we?
3) Our experiences & history: can we come together?
4) Forgiveness & atonement: can we forgive? Repent?
5) Building hope for the future: what should our city look like?
6) Looking within: who are we now?

We have found this dialogue structure enormously helpful in building personal insight and trust.

We call the second curriculum a “metropolitan dialogue on race, economics and jurisdiction.” We created it three years ago in order to build a connection between individual relationship building and structural change. It involves up to 25 people in a weekend residential retreat setting. This dialogue begins with a comprehensive statistical overview of the region in order to establish a common knowledge base. Individual core values are then explored, which provide a basis for developing tension between those core values and the existing reality as represented in the statistical presentation.

We have often found that the use of an “environmental scan” allows surfacing of hopes and fears, and for all to claim both accomplishments and complaints. If only criticism is aired, “boosters” may try to hijack the process by filibustering about legitimate success. Likewise “complainers” can bog down any process by airing legitimate complaints if they feel they are not being heard. In fact, most people regard aspects of the current reality with both a critical and appreciative eye. Deeper awareness comes in processing the future section. Boosters are afraid of losing what they love if too much is changed. Complainers are afraid nothing will change for the better if the future change is addressed too timidly.

A particularly useful methodology has been to ask the participants to divide into self-selected affinity groups. We then ask each group to consider two questions: “What might we need to hear from the other group in order to build trust? What is it that we ourselves are doing that is in some way perpetuating the problem?” Invariably this leads to a greatly increased level of honesty.

The annual Metropolitan Richmond Day, now in its 9th year, convenes more than 600 people from across the region to examine critical issues and affirm our commitment to dialogue and to partnership. This is a vital way of exposing large numbers of people to insights gained in the small group dialogues.

I’m going to share one example of how we have engaged in dialogue with one of our major local institutions. The Richmond Times-Dispatch was notorious for its editorial support of massive resistance and its attacks on the first black city council. Realizing that simply “naming the enemy” does nothing to solve the problem, we set out on a process of constructive engagement to identify and support those people within the organization who were working for change. Instead of criticizing, we laid out a vision of how Richmond might give a national lead in the work of racial healing and offered the newspaper an opportunity to play a part in this change. Five senior editors came to our home to meet with a group of thirty citizens in a discussion about the role of the newspaper in the community. At first there was some resistance to the notion that the newspaper might have any proactive role. However, several editors subsequently took part in structured small group dialogues. Later the managing editor asked us to take some twenty journalists on a history tour of Richmond to sensitize them to the neighborhoods they were writing about.

Over the years news coverage has become noticeably more responsive to community concerns. The newspaper regularly welcomes readers’ input in discussing its choice of stories. The newspaper’s prominent feature on Virginia’s role in the eugenic movement helped give impetus to an apology by the General Assembly. In depth coverage on the financial plight of Virginia’s cities helped to raise visibility on issues of city-county-state relationships and inequities of funding. This year the newspaper ran a three-part series marking the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation, including reference to the newspaper’s leading role in resisting integration. An editorial, signed by the senior editor and speaking for the publisher, ended with these words, “No man or institution can apologize for the actions of others. But what better moment than the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education for this newspaper to restate its opposition to Massive Resistance, to lament the massive wrong inhering in it, and to laud the Court for removing the last major barrier separating American truths from American ideals? We do all three - here, now, today.” It was not an apology, but a good step in the right direction.

Here is a summary of the principles of honest conversation:
• Include everyone and exclude no one.
• Focus on solutions rather than on naming enemies
• Affirm the best rather than confirm the worst
• Move beyond pain and blame to constructive action

History
Individuals and communities nursing deep wounds, or experiences of humiliation or shame, are often unprepared psychologically to take part in dialogue. There is a need for symbolic acts of acknowledgment of that pain and loss before real conversation can take place. Exposing and acknowledging wounds can unlock energy for inclusion efforts and common action.

Some 300,000 women, men and children were sold in slave markets in downtown Richmond. Then came the Civil War. Half the major battles took place within a 50-mile radius of Richmond. The weight of this history and its economic and social legacies has had a paralyzing effect on our public life.

“It is often the thing from which we hide that ultimately wounds us from the inside out,” says our former mayor Walter Kenney.” In 1993, on a hot June afternoon, he led hundreds of Richmonders, of all races and backgrounds, in the first “walk through history.” We marked the dock on the river where ships arrived bringing Africans, and the downtown slave markets: painful places and events previously unknown or ignored. Today, people throughout the region and beyond are able to take advantage of these sites as educational resources. Schools use them for field trips; black and white churches walk the trails together. Participants in conferences and conventions are requesting special tours, and there have been family reunions from as far away as Mississippi. The city received a national grant for a competition to design a slave memorial. Our vision is that the place where racism began in its worst form could be the place where healing begins.

During that first walk, a colleague of mine, who is a African American community worker, stood at the foot of the monument to Confederate Soldiers and Sailors and said these words: ”When I first saw this monument I felt pain, the pain of what I had experienced as a black man. Then I looked at it from the perspective of grief. The descendents of the Confederates put that monument there out of grief and they need to be healed too.”

Alex Wise describes such insights as “the gift of historical imagination,” which he defines as the ability to imagine walking in the other person’s shoes. Alex is the direct descent of Henry Wise, the governor of Virginia who authorized the hanging of John Brown. He led Virginia out of the Union and became a Confederate general. Honest conversation about race and responsibility strips away isolating pretensions and allows us to feel and value the humanity of all.” It is Alex’s vision to create the first museum center in the nation to tell the whole story of the war from the perspective of Union, Confederate and African American. This is being implemented with the full support of all sectors of the community.

Hannibal Johnson, from Tulsa OK, author of the Black Wall Street, says “This approach demonstrates a model of true community reconciliation in an inclusive, validating way, without sacrificing moral clarity.” Tulsa, of course is where the worst race riot in America took place when a white mob destroyed the black business district in 1921. Hannibal is part of a growing movement to seek ways to make amends for this event. Cities and communities around the country are finding ways to acknowledge and heal their history, and not just in the south. A few years ago the state of Oregon marked a Day of Acknowledgement, the first example of state government publicly acknowledging its history of racism.
There are many ways of doing this work of acknowledgement but the underlying principle is this: an accurate, respectful and inclusive public telling of the story, not in guilt or anger but by taking ownership together of our shared history.
Personal responsibility
I’ve talked about dialogue and healing history and I would like to say a word about personal responsibility. It means unflinching honesty about ourselves and about our own communities. Hope in the Cities moves beyond a mentality of blame and victimization and insists on individual responsibility as the starting point for change.

But, as Sharif Abdullah writes in A World That’s Works for All, “No one wants to be pressured, shamed or manipulated into change. What catalyses deep change is an appeal to the heart.” I have often found that the best road to the heart is to share my own mistakes, failures or fears. How might we use our personal narratives as invitations to others to join us on the journey?

As a British born, white American male, there is nothing I can do about the deeds of my ancestors. However I can make choices about how I live now and the priorities I choose. Do I engage in “privilege hoarding?”

There are some aspects of my personality that I can’t change, but I can at least be aware of them. A few years ago I was shocked when a close colleague, an African American with whom I had worked for many years, said “I sometimes feel you withhold your true feelings as a means of maintaining control.” It has never occurred to me that what I regarded as normal Scottish reserve might be interpreted by others as a control mechanism.

Conclusions
These then are three key principles of our dialogue approach: honest conversation, acknowledging history and personal responsibility. We’ve trained over 200 facilitators and helped to organize community dialogues or events around local history in Portland OR, Selma AL, Hartford CT, Natchez MS, Camden NJ, and Dayton OH, Baltimore, MD. Here are a few observations from our successes and failures:

The challenges of overcoming deep-seated racial hurts and mistrust can appear overwhelming. Ultimately, structured dialogues may have limited long-term value if they are not a part of a comprehensive approach to community building. Our goal must be to build self-sustaining teams capable of engaging all sectors of the community, deeply rooted in acts of reconciliation that addresses wounds of history, and in relationships that will continue to flourish and bear fruit long after the formal dialogue is over.

I have concluded that the most important thing that we can do is to equip and support those who are on the front line of community change efforts. Change agents need to develop strengths in three areas if they are going to be effective over the longer term.
1) Values integration. A quality of inner life, which sustains the work for change and reflects the values and characteristics needed to create trust and unselfish teamwork.
2) Specific skills/methodologies. Dialogue design/facilitation, group dynamics, acknowledging and healing historical wounds, and building and sustaining teams.
3) Strategic capacity. Ability to connect diverse networks, discern underlying issues, identify potential allies and access resources of knowledge, funding or additional skills.
To address these needs we now offer a five-part intensive residential training program.

Finally, since this talk is entitled Beyond the Comfort Zone, I am going to take the risk of raising two questions. They are really a self-critique of the racial justice movement.

Are those of us in the racial justice movement sometimes so sure of our own analysis that we make it hard for other potential allies to join the conversation? As a dialogue facilitator, I need to park at the door my most cherished viewpoints. If I believe that I already know the root of the problem and the way to the solution I will not create an open, inquiring atmosphere.

When I first came to Richmond, as the son of a lifelong warrior in the labor movement, I found myself in the most conservative environment that I had ever encountered, surrounded by people whose world view, whose politics, whose set of priorities bore no relation to anything I could relate to. Little by little I came to realize that it was not my job to judge anyone, or even to try to convert them to my way of thinking, and that I had might even have something to learn from conservative, Republican business people. Today some of these very people who I was so quick to judge are giving significant leadership in efforts for racial healing and justice in Richmond.

The reason Hope in the Cities is such a powerful voice in the community today is that everyone feels that in it they can find a home where they can make their best contribution. “Be open to complexity and unafraid of ambiguity.” This is a wonderful ground rule I came across the other day. People are complex and life is complex. There are no neat packages and we must firmly resist temptations to try to fit people into boxes. Is it not true that the issue of racial justice is too important and too big to be seen as the sole possession of the political left? If so what might need to shift in our approach?

My second question is this: Are we perhaps too hesitant about acknowledging the importance of spiritual factors in efforts for community change? I am not talking about religiosity. How do we take care of ourselves? How do we nurture the vision? Life is a whole. Are there things in our lives that drain our energy? I believe that the art of true dialogue is to enable people to ask themselves tough questions. This requires not so much technique on the part of the facilitator, but a basic intuition, which is the result of our own deliberate, disciplined introspection. Recently, a colleague of mine, who is highly skilled facilitator, said that she realized that childhood experiences with her father caused her to react negatively to certain types of white males in a dialogue. It was easier for her to relate to black participants than people of her own race. This was an enormously important and liberating insight for her.

In their book The World at the Turning, Charles Piguet and Michel Sentis write: “We have learned in thirty years of working with Buddhists, Hindus, North American Indians, Africans of all beliefs, militant communists, young revolutionaries, powerful capitalists, peasants, politicians, trade union leaders, that hope is not confined to any one temple…. The intimate experiences of the heart and spirit are a reality which can be communicated and which every other human being can respond to…This reality has to be stripped of the intellectual and religious verbalizing we normally clothe it in: words, like grand garments on a wasted body, can hide internal poverty. We need to rediscover the one universal language – a life lived out.”

This is an essential truth that I believe we need to keep in front of us as we consider new approaches to interethnic relations, fifty years after Brown.

Copyright © 2004 Robert Corcoran