Unified effort focuses on discussing race relations
Editor’s Note: This is the first of an occasional series of stories aimed at fostering healthy conversations about race and community relations.
Troubled by a spate of police shootings of blacks in 2016, the resulting racial tensions and onslaught of racist vitriol on social media, two Oklahoma City sisters decided to bring their friends of different races and ethnicities together to have “the conversation.”
You know, the one that hardly anyone wants to talk about in an interracial group — a discussion about race and race relations.
The sisters, Leah and Lauren Palmer, who are black, held the talk at their parents’ home and, to their delight, people seemed to welcome the
opportunity to dialogue with each other, even if it meant feeling awkward at times. The discussions continued for months and the siblings eventually realized they had latched onto a good idea.
This month, the pair, along with two other women, Hillary Coenen and Kate Strum, who are white, are launching The Conversation Workshops, which are designed to bring individuals together for dialogue about race relations and other issues that impact communities.
Stories of grassroots efforts like the Palmers’ are what a new initiative entitled United Voice Oklahoma hopes to highlight through an ongoing series of stories. United Voice Oklahoma has brought local media outlets together, including The Oklahoman, to present a unified voice in promoting healthy dialogue about race.
The Rev. Clarence Hill, a Norman preacher, said it’s fitting and intentional that the initiative is being launched on the anniversary of the assassination of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He said even though American society is integrated, “we have a way of living segregated.”
“With Martin Luther King, the thing I think about is his dream, especially when you think about him being a person who was assassinated and his life being cut short. His dream is what lives beyond,” Hill said.
“When I think about this conversation (on race), I can think of several scenarios where my own 4-year-old children have been playing with children of a different ethnicity and what King said that he dreamed that little black children and little white children would one day be able to play together in harmony. He used the phrase the ‘brotherhood of all mankind.’”
Coming together
Hill, founder of Stronger Together OKC, said he enlisted the cooperation of media entities to create United Voice Oklahoma after talking with John Rossi, former general manager of the Fox 25 news outlet in Oklahoma.
He said Rossi helped open doors to other local media outlets whose representatives liked the idea of coming together for a common cause.
“We said if the media, who are fierce competitors, if they can come together to solve a problem and work for our greater good, then why can’t anyone else — me and my neighbor, me and someone across the aisle, or myself and someone of another skin color. Why can’t we at least come together,” Hill said.
Rossi said he attended several of Stronger Together OKC’s justice conferences which, among other topics, tackle race relations head-on. He said he was impressed with the discussions at those gatherings and told Hill it would be good to get media partners willing to collectively disseminate the idea and goal behind such gatherings to the general public.
“I kept thinking, what if we took what they’re doing in these conferences and put them on a much bigger platform through the media? It will get in front of a lot more people,” Rossi said.
Now running a media consulting firm called JR Media, Rossi said he remembers when King died in the midst of leading a civil rights movement 50 years ago.
“I remember when he was changing the face of the country and then he was assassinated. Things have gotten better, but we still have a ways to go,” Rossi said.
Hill and Leah Palmer with The Conversation Workshops, said she and her sister were disturbed after the 2016 police shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. She said they had some sleepless nights and wondered what they could do amid the racial tension that seemed to grip their local community and others like it across the country.
“We noticed that people were wanting to talk but they were doing it on social media, but it didn’t seem very productive,” Leah Palmer said.
When the siblings, members of Frontline Church, invited people to their home to discuss racial issues, they were surprised when 65 people showed up, packing the house for what became a “cool four-hour conversation,” she said.
Leah Palmer described The Conversation Workshops as an anti-racism workshop curriculum that aims to teach people how to talk about the difficult topic of race.
She said the workshop curriculum may help people who are experiencing what she felt when the sisters began the discussions — that she wasn’t telling her white friends about her internal sadness in the face of racism and microaggressions in order to protect them in some way.
That felt like a lie in the friendship, she said, and she believes it is happening in a lot of relationships and institutions.
“People are being politically correct rather than talk about these things, but I think that actually cripples communities more than it does any good because then you are not able to experience a full relationship or full friendship,” Leah Palmer said.
The Conversation Workshops may help individuals take muchneeded steps toward more honest discussions and relationships between people of different races, she said.
“I don’t know that the conversation can change the world, but I do think it can make a difference,” she said.
Meanwhile, Hill said so much of the premise of United Voice Oklahoma stems from the hope of moving forward to fulfill King’s dream — one conversation at a time, one dinner discussion at a time.
“I’m excited because bringing people to the table is a step even further to the reality of his dream,” Hill said.
“His generation and the generation before it took so much heat around this conversation, the least I can do is take the heat and keep opening up more spaces (for dialogue) and fulfilling the dream.”