Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (14 page)

About two years into our friendship, I had an argument with Andrea. She and I have talked about it together publicly, so I will not be breaking her confidence when I describe that conflict here. What I learned from that argument was the importance of being able to put the issues on the table.

In 1991 we were jointly leading a workshop in St. Louis with a group of clergy. The workshop was focused on unlearning racism and the role of clergy in leading their congregations to greater racial awareness. The participants represented a group of clergy that was both multiracial and multidenominational. The primary focus was on race and racism, but in the course of the workshop, we began to talk about the connections among “isms”—various forms of institutionalized prejudice and discrimination—as we often did: classism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and so forth. In the course of that conversation, controversy emerged among the clergy as to whether heterosexism should be included on the list. There was a wide range of points of view among the clergy in that room about homophobia and homosexuality, as there is among clergy nationwide, and there was open disagreement among them.

Afterward, Andrea and I had a long discussion about the conversation and the varying points of view expressed. I was particularly interested in the opinion of an African American Presbyterian minister in the group, as I had just joined a Presbyterian church—the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Massachusetts.

My husband and I were living in Northampton, Massachusetts, a predominantly White community, and we had decided that we wanted to have our children be part of a Black environment, at least some of the time. And so we had sought out a predominantly Black congregation to join, and we found one that we liked in Springfield, a city about thirty minutes away from our home. I was very excited about having just joined. The spirit of the pastor and the congregation had been the primary factors in our choice, not the specifics of the denomination. Although I eventually became aware that there was controversy within the Presbyterian denomination about whether openly gay men and lesbian women could be ordained, this denominational policy was not an issue on which I had focused in choosing that church.

Andrea, however, had been very active in the struggle for civil rights for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people for some time. It was a part of her daily life in many ways. A heterosexual woman living in partnership with a man, she had chosen not to be married to stand in solidarity with her sister, who is a lesbian and who at the time could not legally marry her partner. Andrea had been quite public about this decision, and had even written an article about why she had chosen not to be married.

She was making a clear, active, and involved witness, and I was aware of that. But it was not something that she and I had talked much about until this workshop. In the course of our conversation about the workshop on the plane back from St. Louis, Andrea confronted me about my own heterosexism in a particular way. She said she couldn’t believe that I was a member of my new church. How could I, with my politics, be a member of a denomination that was exclusionary? she asked rhetorically. Andrea, who is now the ordained pastor of a United Church of Christ congregation, was at the time a practicing Quaker, and she belonged to a Quaker congregation, which was explicitly open and affirming of everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. Clearly she wanted me to hold my new denomination to the same standard.

I was taken aback by her comment. She knew I had just joined this church, and that I was very excited about it. In response to her question, I said
Hmm
to myself and retreated into the book I was reading on the plane. I didn’t engage with her at the time. But Andrea’s comment continued to stick in my head, and I was irritated by it, even after we had returned home. It took me a while to put my finger on what was bothering me about it. In the end, what I concluded was that there was a lot of White privilege in her statement and her tone. It was easy for her to say, “You should just join another church.” Well, there aren’t that many Black churches in western Massachusetts. Trying to find one as open and affirming as the Quakers on this issue probably would have been impossible. And while it had been my message to my children that we should be inclusive and embracing of all people, at the same time I wanted my children to have the uniquely Black religious and community experience that we had found at my new church.

It irked me that she was being so judgmental when she, as a White person of faith, was in a very different circumstance. As a White person willing to change her denomination, she had many predominantly White churches to choose from, with a wider range of political stances on gay rights and ordination. I didn’t disagree with her on the substance of the politics; but the Quaker alternative was not going to provide my children with the particular religious and cultural experience that I wanted them to have.

We hadn’t been friends that long, a couple of years. And so, at the time, it was a difficult question: Do I want to tell Andrea how irritated I am about this comment, or do I just let it go? I believe that if I had not said anything about it at the time, the outcome would have been similar to Emily Bernard’s example—we would not be friends today. We probably would have continued to be collegial, certainly; we worked together. But as friends we probably would have drifted apart, because I would have said to myself,
She doesn’t get it
.

Instead of being silent, I called her up and said, “I have to talk to you about something.” She asked, “What?” And I said, “I have to tell you, you said something to me on the plane that’s been bothering me ever since.” She said, “Okay,” and I could hear her breathing deeply on the other end of the phone, open but bracing herself in a way. And I proceeded to tell what I thought about her comment.

She listened quietly, and then she said, “You’re right.” And that made all the difference to me. She acknowledged my point of view and I felt my experience had been validated. We went on to talk about what it meant for her to be at her church; I talked about my ambivalence about being at mine, and why it still felt important to stay. Although we were not in complete agreement, our frank conversation allowed us to continue to deepen our relationship in ways that were very life affirming. The key here is that I challenged her racial privilege, and she was willing to listen. Our friendship moved forward. Had my concern been allowed to fester, perhaps it would have died a premature death, or remained at a more superficial level.

This story would not be complete if I did not also add that she continued to challenge my heterosexual privilege, albeit in a less judgmental way, and I also listened. And when a change in pastoral leadership at the Springfield church resulted in a series of explicitly homophobic sermons, we made the difficult decision to take our children elsewhere and joined a multiracial United Church of Christ congregation that was welcoming to all.

The argument that Andrea and I had in 1991 was our first but not the only conflict in our long friendship. The key to the longevity of our friendship has been the willingness to put our issues on the table. And that is hard to do across racial lines.

Cross-racial communication can be difficult. Why bother? What is the benefit—can’t I get the five good things of friendship from someone who looks like me? Anyone who has experienced the phenomenon known as the Spelman sisterhood—the community of women at Spelman College—knows the answer to that question is yes. The opportunity for mutual relationships with someone who shares your life experience is irreplaceable. But relationships across lines of difference are essential for the possibility of social transformation. Change is needed. None of us can make that change alone. Genuine friendship leads to caring concern. Caring concern leads to action. And we need to take our action from the position of strength that comes from self-knowledge and social awareness. Cross-racial friendships can be a source of both.

Andrea Ayvazian shared these words at the end of an essay we wrote together on the topic of our friendship:

While the dynamics of friendship are unique in many ways, and uniquely intimate, I believe we can learn some lessons as a society—and as educators—from the examples I have offered here. One lesson is that
human connection requires familiarity and contact
. Gloria Ladson-Billings’s
The Dream Keepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children
is a study of educators who were teaching mostly Black children in urban schools with predominantly Black populations.
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Some of the teachers who were successful were Black teachers. Some of the teachers who were successful were White teachers. But one of the characteristics of all of these effective teachers was that they made an effort to know the community. They spent time in it. They were not necessarily from the community in which they were teaching or familiar with it when they first got there, but they went out of their way to make home visits, attend church events when children were in the church play, and so on. They did things to connect with the child’s out-of-classroom experience.

A second lesson is that
White people and people of color often come to the challenges of cross-racial connection with very different perspectives
. For example, in college, White students and students of color often have a desire to connect with one another across racial lines. But they do so with different expectations. In a study of University of California students, the sociologist Troy Duster observed that White students were interested in interacting with Black students, but they preferred social opportunities such as getting together on a Saturday afternoon and sharing pizza—an informal, unstructured social setting. Black students too shared the desire to connect across racial lines, but they wanted structure around that desire. They preferred to engage with White students in formal settings like classrooms or workshops where issues related to race could be discussed. Typically, White students did not want to participate in those workshops; they didn’t necessarily want to talk about power and privilege. They just wanted to be friends—not realizing the ways that unexamined power and privilege could impede the development of such friendships.
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Duster’s finding resonates with my own experience working on predominantly White campuses. Students of color I have known in my years of teaching often expressed disappointment when few White students chose to come to the educational forums they organized or the diversity workshops that took place. As in Duster’s study, they observed that many White students did not want to talk about racial issues in such contexts. They did seem to prefer the social comfort of the familiar—whether the pizza parlor or the campus center. But students of color, particularly African American students, have told me that it is often in such relaxed social environments (with or without alcohol) that unexamined stereotypes emerge in casual language, causing discomfort and the kind of invisibility that Trey Ellis described—discomfort that hangs awkwardly in the air but goes unnamed and undiscussed.

And yet an important lesson of my own experience of cross-racial friendship is that
connection depends on frankness, and a willingness to talk openly about issues of race
. And that may take structures that institutions can help foster. In a society where residential segregation persists and school segregation is increasing, familiarity and contact across racial lines requires intentionality. We need to think about how we can structure meaningful dialogue opportunities.

In
Chapter 4
I focus on examples of such opportunities in the context of higher education. Here I will offer community-based examples. For instance, in Atlanta, where I now live, the civic organization Leadership Atlanta each year brings together an intentionally diverse group of seventy community leaders to spend a year meeting in seminars and small discussion groups learning about important social issues in the city (e.g., education, health care, homelessness). The yearlong experience begins, however, with a two-day workshop on race, designed to provide a lens through which all the other seminars will be considered. The focus is on stimulating cross-racial dialogue that has the potential of evolving into cross-racial connections deep enough to support community transformation.

Another helpful example can be found in the work of the Study Circles Resource Center, a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that helps communities bring people together across divides of race, income, age, and political viewpoints to solve community problems, with particular attention to the racial and ethnic dimensions of the problems they address. Although Study Circles staff members are available to offer advice and training, their most powerful resources take the form of their written guides (available in English and Spanish) that motivated citizens can use on their own to guide constructive cross-racial dialogue. The first such text was published in 1992—a guide on racism and race relations designed to provide tools for structured conversations about race that would allow people to deepen their understanding of one another’s perspectives across racial lines, and ultimately help them move from dialogue to action and change. Since then it has been used by thousands of study circles across the United States in communities as different from one another as Los Angeles, California, and Lima, Ohio. In 2006 the Study Circles Resource Center published its latest guide,
Facing Racism in a Diverse Nation
, and it is a powerful tool to help communities build the kind of diverse, meaningful dialogue our country needs. The model it offers explicitly guides participants past their fear and anger to take the risks that cross-racial dialogue requires, with the clear goal of moving beyond mere talk to effective action and social change.
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