Intent on bridging a long-standing achievement gap between black and white students, the Oak Park and River Forest High School board found itself in a bog of racial sensitivity. Back and forth board members went, debating whether the language of a resolution should use the words “black” and “white” or “minority” and “non-minority.”
Feeling their good intentions slipping away, the four white and three black members decided they couldn’t address the school’s racial issues without first exploring their own. Last Saturday, just days before Sen. Barack Obama would give a landmark speech encouraging Americans to confront racial divides, the High School District 200 board held an awkward but frank public discussion on race.
“I suppose if Obama’s speech had come a couple weeks earlier, it might have appeared we were reacting to it,” said board member Ralph Lee. “But the truth is, we were already talking about race. We didn’t have any choice.”
Such efforts, rarely comfortable and often contentious, have gone on for decades — in neighborhoods where racial chasms can exist in the narrow spaces between two-flats, on campuses where racial acceptance is easily boasted but not so easily backed up.
Obama’s speech was widely hailed as inspiring oratory that encouraged Americans to break the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.” But those in the trenches of racial dialogue know that whatever progress might result won’t come fast, or easy.
Fruitful conversations require listening without being defensive, identifying common goals that transcend race and having a willingness to be uncomfortable, participants said. As school board member Lee says, there’s no “magic bullet.”
“I believe the speech will have a slight impact on everybody, as opposed to a heavy impact on only a few,” he said. “But that’s the way progress is made, in tiny little increments over a number of years.”
In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton convened a commission charged with launching a national discussion on race. Judith Winston, executive director of the initiative, reflected back on her work and concluded the most effective conversations happened when people focused not directly on race but on issues that concerned all people.
Bringing people together
“Race wasn’t the way to start the conversation,” Winston said. “But what worked was bringing people of different races together to talk about shared concerns and shared values, with the idea of getting people to understand that the racial divide was not nearly as deep as it seemed.”
That approach has been applied in Chicago Lawn on the Southwest Side, a once fiercely blue-collar white community where a hurled rock hit Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the head during a 1966 march. The neighborhood is now primarily a mixture of blacks and Latinos.
Among the brick bungalows and neighborhood-watch signs warning against drugs, black residents are resentful of jobs lost to illegal immigration, and Latinos blame an increase in crime on new families from torn-down public housing high-rises. But gang violence on or near school campuses inspired parents from both communities to talk about one thing they all seek: safety.
Florence Johnson, an organizer with the Southwest Youth Collaborative, said community tension doesn’t come only from racial differences but also from institutional dysfunction in schools and government.
“Something else is fueling that fire,” Johnson said. “Something else is fueling you to be at odds with your neighbor of a different race, and it doesn’t necessarily come from within; it comes from without.”
DePaul University’s John J. Egan Urban Center targeted the neighborhood for a citywide Black/Latino Working Groups Initiative meant to bridge racial divides.
‘It’s about community’
“The city has to get involved in this. The aldermen has to get involved. The schools have to get involved,” said John Zeigler, who directs the university effort. “It’s about community. It’s not about us and them.”
Out on the streets, however, racial sentiments can be raw. After black teens attacked a group of Latinos, some adults began organizing, even threatening to use machetes as protection.
“We were like: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s find another way to deal with this situation,'” said Johnson, who noted that Latino teens have also attacked black residents. “I’m so grateful that we’ve already started this black and brown dialogue.”
Such dialogues often begin tentatively, as people attempt to find connections. For white students from Edgewood Middle School in Highland Park and black students at Jesse Sherwood Elementary School in Chicago, the ice broke over something as simple as differences in their names.
“That starts the conversation in terms of the cultural differences and what the students do know or don’t know,” said Brittany Coffin, a social worker at Edgewood, which for years has promoted interaction between the schools. “The connection with the kids is great because they realize regardless of where they are, they are all kids.”
Last fall, members of the Black Student Union at McHenry County College — where the student body is less than 1 percent black — decided to open up their insular discussions on race by inviting others to participate.
Brianna Borman, 19, a student whose mother is white and father is black, was surprised to find that one debate among union members — whether the term “African-American” is acceptable — also registered with people of other races.
“A lot of people, not only African-Americans, feel like they’re labeled wrong,” she said. “One lady that came in said, ‘If you’re African-Americans, why aren’t we Irish-Americans?’ We didn’t really expect other people outside our group to feel like that.”
Loyola University Chicago has been grappling this semester with allegations that campus security had racially profiled black students. The day after Obama’s speech, about 15 students gathered on the Far North Side campus for a diversity workshop.
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Writing down feelings
As the group watched a film about racism on college campuses, students wrote their feelings on a board at the front of the classroom.
Black student Brittany Kennedy wrote about how hard it is to discuss race: “When you approach people with their mistakes and judgments in terms of race, they get defensive instead of putting themselves in the other person’s shoes.”
“To create change, you have to feel uncomfortable,” said graduate student Laila Alchaar of Loyola’s Office for Student Diversity Resources, who led the discussion.
Other students agreed their generation seems to find it easier to say something politically correct than to confront tough racial questions. “I don’t think people talk about it enough, and that is part of the problem,” said freshman Moriah Nelson, who is white.
Bola Oloukanni, a freshman from Nigeria, thinks the reluctance to talk stems from students learning in school that they should live in a “colorblind” society.
“Even with [Obama’s] speech and how powerful it was, people’s solution to racism is to say, ‘We are all the same’ and brush it aside,” Oloukanni said.
Not words, but deeds
Obama asserted in his speech that brushing aside the issue will accomplish nothing. The senator insisted the country’s legacy of discrimination is real and must be confronted “not just with words, but with deeds.”
In the civil rights era, King never laid out a precise blueprint for how Americans should sort out the problems of race. But he spoke about coming together. Slowly, often reluctantly, some did, and that led to substantive changes in both policy and opinion.
“Dr. King’s speeches turned into legislation, not just conversation,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson, noting that King’s “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963 was followed the next year by a civil rights act that outlawed segregation in schools and public places.
In that same vein, the Oak Park-River Forest school board talked about race and boardmembers’ own experiences not to feel good about themselves, but because they felt compelled to improve the lives and standing of black and white kids.
“I’ll never be black,” said board member Dietra Millard. “I will do everything that I can to listen, to try to hear, to try to adjust my behavior in ways that help me understand the situations black people face. But our goal is to get from race to achievement, to look at how it affects our kids in our high school, and to answer the question: ‘What, really, can we do?'”
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