Fighting racism with dialogue
People confront hate by sharing stories.
SAN DIEGO — On a recent Thursday night, a dozen strangers gathered at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center arranged their folding chairs in a circle, a little apprehensive about how personal things were about to get.
They passed “talking pieces” from person to person, sharing times when they felt supported by certain identities — and times they felt harmed.
“We are promoting healing from hate in the sharing of our stories,” guided the circle’s co-facilitator, dialogue specialist Ashley McGuire.
The same conversations were happening in neighboring rooms throughout the community center that evening. By the time the circle broke, it was hugs and handshakes all around.
People parted ways in the afterglow of a collective experience, and with the feeling that they’d done something, even if it was small. Could these gatherings — rooted in ancient, tribal practices — be the answer to combating intolerance in San Diego and beyond?
The National Conflict Resolution Center and a host of community partners hope so. The effort is part of a resurging movement in San Diego and across the country to confront racism and bigotry through frank yet respectful dialogues — a movement that has taken on added urgency in the face of escalating, ideological-fueled violence. But this is no quick fix. The changing of hearts is not as concrete as legislation or added security measures. And it’s not necessarily meant to reach people on the fringes — at least not at first. Rather, it’s slow, intentional community building, one person at a time.
“It can change San Diego,” said Mikiel Toure, who leads circles as a restorative practitioner at the National Conflict Resolution Center. “We don’t need everybody on board. But the world is impacted by only a small percentage of the world that comes together. Then it’s a ripple effect to the masses.”
The raw display of hate during the 2017 Unite the Right marches in Charlottesville, Va., got the Rev. Wendy Craig-Purcell of the Unity Center thinking about how her own faith-diverse congregation in San Diego could be more intentional about addressing racism.
As a white person, she asked her black parishioners for advice. Their instruction: Don’t just bring black people and white people together to talk about race. White people need to sit in a circle by themselves and become more educated about racism and privilege.
She developed a curriculum around race issues for a white audience, with special focus on “The White Ally Toolkit,” a program developed by David Campt.
A national expert in bringing people together to talk about difficult subjects, Campt, who is black, sat on the advisory board for President Clinton’s Initiative on Race and has guided conversations for Congress, the military and Fortune 500 companies.
“It’s meant to reach the ordinary white person who truly thinks, ‘I’m a loving person. I don’t see color. I don’t see what the issue is,’ ” Craig-Purcell said of the white ally program. “That, in itself, is the issue.”
The tool kit has been gaining more traction lately, Campt said, partly because white people are experiencing the pain of the nation’s divisiveness in their own circles.
“They support it because it’s helping them feel like this is something they can do about the race problem,” Campt said, “but it’s also a case of people wanting to be better agents of peacefulness in their own families.”
Congregant Kevin Byrnes, a retired human resources executive, started his white ally journey in January.
“For me, it’s been hugely transformative, and also humbling and embarrassing,” he said. “I realized how little I really knew.”
The training is part history lesson, part inner reflection and part conversation skill-building. When it comes time to put the tools into practice — actually broach the subject of racism with a fellow white person — how the issue is framed can be make or break.
Campt suggests moving away from the word “hate” and focusing instead on our unconscious biases.
“There’s a whole bunch of people who don’t hate people of color. They just have a little less empathy for them,” Campt said. “If we only think about it as hate, the truth is what that does is feeds a certain level of denial.”
And the term “racist” is a surefire way to put someone on the defensive. “People don’t think of themselves as racist,” he said.
Rather, Campt advises approaching the dialogue around how our brains can be affected by influences of which we are not aware. He instructs white allies to be prepared to share a personal story of unconscious bias.
“You’re not going to persuade people very much on the basis of facts,” Campt advised. “The way to move people is to talk about personal experience.”
Jan Atkinson, a life and spiritual coach who attends the Unity Center, just started her white ally training alongside her husband, and she’s already dipped her toe into such a conversation.
A few weeks ago while out with some longtime married friends, who are also white, she mentioned her participation in the white ally program and shared what she was learning.
“I noticed that the wife was very uncomfortable,” Atkinson said.
The friend dismissed the subject by suggesting they focus on the progress that minorities have made, pointing to the nation’s election of a black president.
The friend later became defensive, stating, “I’m so tired of being called a racist”; Atkinson said no one in the conversation had implied or suggested that she was.
So Atkinson was excited when Campt visited the Unity Center this month to deliver a presentation one night and teach a daylong skill-building workshop a few days later. Byrnes also attended the workshop.
While this small group of San Diegans was learning how to steer uncomfortable conversations on race that Saturday, a gunman killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso in an apparent antiLatino attack.
“It reinforces why this work is so important,” Byrnes said. “It just has to be.”
The dialogue circles being offered by the National Conflict Resolution Center set out to tackle many of the same biases, but in a more controlled space among a diverse cross-section of people.
The first restorative circle held July 25 at the Jewish center in La Jolla was more of a warmup, a facilitated conversation that flitted around the edges of identity.
“I felt it was meaningful,” said first-timer Jay Williams, a healthcare industry professional. “At the same time, I felt like we were a bunch of babies in the room, taking the very, very first steps toward what I hope will be some progress.”
The National Conflict Resolution Center’s fourpart dialogue series, called “A Path Forward,” is sponsored in part by the San Diego Union-Tribune and community and interfaith groups, and funded by the county’s Live Well San Diego campaign.
The county contract allocates $30,000 for eight community restorative health circles to address “community concerns” and foster “collaborative dialogue that will lead to solutions” but does not specify the topic area to be discussed.
The idea for this series originated months ago as a way to heal from the nation’s deepening polarization. The deadly anti-Semitic attack on the Chabad of Poway on April 27 brought the effort into sharp relief.
“I thought about how infrequently people from different walks of life sit down to share with one another and listen to one another,” said Pastor Brian Daly from Pacific Beach Christian Church, who participated in the first circle. “It was kind of refreshingly different. It wasn’t an agenda someone was trying to cram down our throats. It was literally opening up space for people to get to know each other.”
But the challenge remains: How do you get people to actually show up? That’s where the ripple effect comes in, organizers say.
“The key is creating a safe, empowering, supportive space and meeting that person where they’re at,” said Toure, the circle facilitator. “It helps them make the choice to jump without you pushing them. It may take a minute, it may take 10 years, depending on how thick their walls are.”
The next dialogue circle will be held Sept. 4 at Bayview Baptist Church in San Diego. The event is free, but registration is required at NCRConline.com/communitycircles.
Davis writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.