So much can always be said and people will dither until the cows come home - to use a rural turn-of-phrase that I grew up with and still like. However, without doing justice to a much broader and deeper conversation, it is disconcerting to me that as a country we do not (choose not to?) comprehend that there remains significant need for at least the following things in relation to the topic at hand: -- further compassion/empathy [a profoundly important step]; -- further interpersonal connection; -- further understanding [which is produced through a number of means - not the least of these being interpersonal connection (which assists in fostering needed compassion/empathy)]; -- further local, state and national system-level justice (Which is much too broad a category too offer specific suggestions here); In my own general assessment of 15 years of teaching using various texts, facilitating various classroom discussions and taking my students on journeys of relational encounter navigating issues of privilege and marginalization...the key to healthy, meaningful, sustainable change in understanding comes from both encounter with history/narrative/data/etc. through classroom material/discussion and from interpersonal connection. These aspects brought together produce worldview change. Without the combination, the classroom aspects produce information (even knowledge), but often without deep, sustainable compassion. And without the combination, the outside-the-traditional-classroom encounters produce compassion with an often too narrow sense of the broader context and history in which the encounter is taking place lessening the ability to extrapolate meaningfully from a particular context. Both aspects are needed and when these aspects overlap often amazing personal life-change and civic change happens. Its not magic; but it is a substantive pedagogical methodology that offers an authentic pathway into comprehending another way of being-in-the-world that allows people a just possibility to non-coercively shift their opinion. In whatever variations are needed to helpfully enact such learning methods across our nation (and there are all kinds of exciting possible permutations for businesses, government, community groups), I believe offering more of this kind of engagement would bring us to a much healthier national moment offering renewed possibilities for finding justice-honoring, life-flourishing, dignified, civic-society encouraging ways forward. Through engagement like that proposed above, I believe we can overcome the difficult political disconnect the article notes at its ending summarizing statement: The American belief that discrimination and its effects ended with the dismantling of Jim Crow are an important part of this story, and a real component of why this discrimination is allowed to persist. But the widespread insistence on this point — with more than 60 percent of Americans and 80 percent of conservatives saying that black families have primarily themselves to blame for unequal advancement — makes the politics of addressing the issue all the more difficult. Thanks to Lisa Sharon Harper and Kathy Khang for originally forwarding this article onward.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 05:29:52 +0000