President Obama thanked Pope Francis for his role in bringing the US and Cuba together. He said his "moral example shows us the importance of pursuing the world as it should be, rather than simply settling for the world as it is."
A mark of moral leadership is holding up a vision and encouraging others to overcome their differences to embrace that vision. This kind of leadership is not content with analyzing problems but imagines solutions. It has the courage to take difficulties and turn them into assets. It moves beyond the accepted boundaries to engage the opposites and build unexpected alliances.
In all of our communities and countries there are challenges that seem insurmountable. And because we often lack the courage and imagination for radical action we settle for crisis management or remedial responses instead of addressing the roots of problems.
But if the Berlin Wall can fall and if South Africa can move from apartheid to democracy, then we should take courage that what once seemed impossible is not beyond our reach.
In the US we can finally commit to integrate our schools and create quality education for every child; we can reform the prison industrial complex that is devastating generations of men of color; we can pay a living wage and lift millions out poverty; we can achieve sensible gun laws and end the mindless slaughter in our schools and communities; we can live well and still conserve the environment.
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These things are possible. But it will take the kind of moral example that Obama highlighted, not just by a pope or by politicians but by leaders at all levels – and that includes each one of us taking responsibility right where we are.
It will also take persistence. Social media has proved successful in sparking popular movements from Tahir Square to Occupy Wall Street, but it has not yet been able to sustain them. Change will take more than a click of a mouse or tap on an iPhone. We will need to find ways to use technology for genuinely honest dialogue, careful listening, coalition building and organizational training.
Vision, courage, imagination and persistence: these are essential qualities for leadership. What better way to celebrate this season of new life than by each of us making a choice to no longer accept the unacceptable. Let's pursue a vision of a world as it should be.
Monday, December 22, 2014
Monday, December 8, 2014
A moment of truth for conservatives
True conservatives should be at the forefront of demands for changes in law enforcement recruiting and training methods and in procedures by prosecutors in the wake of controversial police actions and decisions by grand juries.
Rand Paul is one of the few leading Republicans who are speaking out unequivocally against flagrant examples of abuse of government power. Instead, some Republicans have focused on condemning the violent protests or, as in the case of Matt Willis, the executive director of Missouri Republican Party, denouncing efforts to channel community anger into voter registration. This is short-sighted. Conservatives should use this moment to affirm their core belief in individual liberty and equal protection under the constitution.
I am reminded of an event at the National Press Club in 1996. Initiatives of Change/Hope in the Cities and several national other national organizations including the Faith & Politics Institute and Study Circles Resource Center (now Everyday Democracy) hosted a forum to encourage honest dialogue on race relations. Believing that all voices needed to be at the table, we assembled an unusual combination of national leaders from diverse political views to speak to the theme.
We took a calculated risk in inviting such polar opposites as Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Paul Weyrich, to take part in a panel discussion. No remarks had been vetted. As the founder of the Heritage Foundation, Free Congress Foundation and National Empowerment Television, Weyrich was known to provoke strong responses as one of the most influential figures in the conservative movement. As I describe in my book, Trustbuilding, when he rose to speak many in the audience held their breath.
Surprisingly, Weyrich began with a personal confession that for a long time he had simply ignored protest in the black community about prejudice and racism, particularly among police. “My attitude was, ‘Well, this is just a bunch of criminals probably trying to evade their just dues.’ I simply didn’t hear those cries. But I must tell you that one of the most profound events in my political life was the revelation of the comments made by the detective Mark Fuhrman during O. J. Simpson’s trial. I was astounded and outraged... And so I began to look more closely, and I’ve taken a particular interest in Philadelphia where certain bad white cops have targeted a lot of innocent black people to advance themselves by enhancing their record of arrest.”
As Weyrich continued, there was complete silence in the room. “I now find that in many cases these cries have a great basis of legitimacy, and they are cries that the conservative community….needs to take seriously… And because of our own view on the subject of government power, and the need to keep government in check, we conservatives should have a natural sympathy for these cries and be able to start a dialogue…My own experience is that once you begin a dialogue and you earn the trust of people… although you may come into the conversation on a very narrow basis, you will end up expanding that conversation and will continue, hopefully, to build trust on both sides.”
The national crisis of trust in our core institutions exposed in recent weeks is a moment of opportunity. Conservatives should call on their own best traditions to stand alongside those who are experiencing bias and sometimes brutality by the very people who should be protecting them. And they should press for reform of grand jury procedures that are unfairly weighted in favor of the police even in the case of apparently unjustified killing of unarmed people.
They could also support an increase in funding for community policing programs which has fallen significantly as the federal government focused more resources on fighting terrorism. From 2000 to 2007, the number of full-time community policing officers nationwide fell by more than half, to 47,000 from 103,000.
There are some positive models of police-community trustbuilding. As city manager of Cincinnati, Valerie Lemmie (who now serves on our Initiatives of Change board) was responsible for overseeing landmark agreements in 2002 with the Department of Justice and Community representatives regarding police-community relationships, and police policies, procedures and practices after the shooting of an unarmed 19-year-old black man by a white officer.
Such measures will not resolve the larger issues of poverty and segregation in our cities, but they will be an important first step.
Rand Paul is one of the few leading Republicans who are speaking out unequivocally against flagrant examples of abuse of government power. Instead, some Republicans have focused on condemning the violent protests or, as in the case of Matt Willis, the executive director of Missouri Republican Party, denouncing efforts to channel community anger into voter registration. This is short-sighted. Conservatives should use this moment to affirm their core belief in individual liberty and equal protection under the constitution.
I am reminded of an event at the National Press Club in 1996. Initiatives of Change/Hope in the Cities and several national other national organizations including the Faith & Politics Institute and Study Circles Resource Center (now Everyday Democracy) hosted a forum to encourage honest dialogue on race relations. Believing that all voices needed to be at the table, we assembled an unusual combination of national leaders from diverse political views to speak to the theme.
We took a calculated risk in inviting such polar opposites as Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Paul Weyrich, to take part in a panel discussion. No remarks had been vetted. As the founder of the Heritage Foundation, Free Congress Foundation and National Empowerment Television, Weyrich was known to provoke strong responses as one of the most influential figures in the conservative movement. As I describe in my book, Trustbuilding, when he rose to speak many in the audience held their breath.
Surprisingly, Weyrich began with a personal confession that for a long time he had simply ignored protest in the black community about prejudice and racism, particularly among police. “My attitude was, ‘Well, this is just a bunch of criminals probably trying to evade their just dues.’ I simply didn’t hear those cries. But I must tell you that one of the most profound events in my political life was the revelation of the comments made by the detective Mark Fuhrman during O. J. Simpson’s trial. I was astounded and outraged... And so I began to look more closely, and I’ve taken a particular interest in Philadelphia where certain bad white cops have targeted a lot of innocent black people to advance themselves by enhancing their record of arrest.”
As Weyrich continued, there was complete silence in the room. “I now find that in many cases these cries have a great basis of legitimacy, and they are cries that the conservative community….needs to take seriously… And because of our own view on the subject of government power, and the need to keep government in check, we conservatives should have a natural sympathy for these cries and be able to start a dialogue…My own experience is that once you begin a dialogue and you earn the trust of people… although you may come into the conversation on a very narrow basis, you will end up expanding that conversation and will continue, hopefully, to build trust on both sides.”
The national crisis of trust in our core institutions exposed in recent weeks is a moment of opportunity. Conservatives should call on their own best traditions to stand alongside those who are experiencing bias and sometimes brutality by the very people who should be protecting them. And they should press for reform of grand jury procedures that are unfairly weighted in favor of the police even in the case of apparently unjustified killing of unarmed people.
They could also support an increase in funding for community policing programs which has fallen significantly as the federal government focused more resources on fighting terrorism. From 2000 to 2007, the number of full-time community policing officers nationwide fell by more than half, to 47,000 from 103,000.
There are some positive models of police-community trustbuilding. As city manager of Cincinnati, Valerie Lemmie (who now serves on our Initiatives of Change board) was responsible for overseeing landmark agreements in 2002 with the Department of Justice and Community representatives regarding police-community relationships, and police policies, procedures and practices after the shooting of an unarmed 19-year-old black man by a white officer.
Such measures will not resolve the larger issues of poverty and segregation in our cities, but they will be an important first step.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Could Virginia help bridge the national divide?
In contact sports if you play scared you will get hurt. And in the mid-term elections the Democrats played scared.
Yes, Republicans worked shamelessly to suppress the vote in Texas, North Carolina and other states. Yes, the Koch brothers and others flooded key campaigns with money. And yes, some irresponsible voices played on fears of the electorate with wild statements conflating threats of Ebola, terrorists crossing the border and executive over-reach in Washington.
But the Democrats have only themselves to blame for an inept campaign that completely failed to build on a solid record of accomplishment. How could they do so badly despite a healthy growth rate, unemployment under six percent (although this figure masks a much grimmer reality), consumer confidence at a seven-year high and low inflation?
Their worst mistake was failing to champion the landmark reform that has delivered health care to 10 million people. They embarrassed themselves by disowning their leader. Instead of highlighting success they let themselves believe the Republican narrative – which was adopted by a typically lazy media – of a "deeply unpopular president." It did them no good. Most candidates in tough fights who distanced themselves from the president lost.
It was no surprise that the base did not turn out. Why would African Americans be energized when candidates held the first black president at arm’s length? Why would Latinos turn out for the Democrats when the Obama administration decided to delay executive action on immigration until after the election in the hopes of protecting vulnerable candidates? In Texas, Republican Greg Abbot garnered 45 percent of the Latino vote in his successful gubernatorial campaign.
Democrats relied too heavily on single issues such as women’s reproductive rights. By appealing only to minorities, single women and millennials they may be able to win the White House but not the House or Senate. Republicans were more disciplined than in previous elections and managed to keep the lunatic fringe in check. And there is serious thinking going on among some leading conservatives on reforming the tax code to make it friendlier to work and to families and to close loopholes; others are looking at criminal justice reform.
There is another factor that Democrats ignore at their peril. They must take seriously the need to reach white males, both middle class and blue collar workers, and address their anxieties.
Vast numbers are still suffering as a result of the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2009 the net worth of an average family fell by $50,000. Many of those who experienced unemployment for the first time in their lives – often for months or even years – now find themselves working two or more jobs at far lower wages just to put food on the table. In his book Losing Our Way: an intimate portrait of a troubled America, Bob Herbert describes through numerous personal interviews a sense that the country is falling apart. Failing infrastructure and a fraying social contract cause many to look at the future with pessimism. By 2009-2010 the number of Americans committing suicide was approaching forty thousand annually, more than the number being killed in motor vehicle accidents. The suicide rate among men in their fifties increased nearly 50 percent from 2000 to 2102.
There is enormous anger at political elites – Democrats just as much as Republicans – who are completely entwined with megacorporate interests and Wall Street. A sense of insecurity and of unprecedented abandonment among millions of ordinary Americans allows vested interests to exploit racial, ethnic or class divisions and as well as historical resentments.
In a nation where political allegiance is increasingly defined by geography, Virginia stands as a key gateway state between North and South. This is important because our national political and cultural divide reflects in part the unhealed history of the Civil War and white Southerners reactions to President Johnson’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. To avoid ongoing gridlock we need some political leaders who can work intelligently to overcome mindsets stemming from historical resentment, condescension and acceptance of the usual stereotypes.
Although they are both Democrats, our Virginia senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine may be able to play a bridge-building role. Warner is respected for his business acumen and his bi-partisan approach to budget issues. Kaine takes his Catholic faith seriously and his father-in-law was a Republican governor who exemplified the best of the party’s tradition. Both are rooted in values important to a more conservative electorate. Could they help generate an honest dialogue and encourage the best contribution from their colleagues of both parties for the sake of the country?
Yes, Republicans worked shamelessly to suppress the vote in Texas, North Carolina and other states. Yes, the Koch brothers and others flooded key campaigns with money. And yes, some irresponsible voices played on fears of the electorate with wild statements conflating threats of Ebola, terrorists crossing the border and executive over-reach in Washington.
But the Democrats have only themselves to blame for an inept campaign that completely failed to build on a solid record of accomplishment. How could they do so badly despite a healthy growth rate, unemployment under six percent (although this figure masks a much grimmer reality), consumer confidence at a seven-year high and low inflation?
Their worst mistake was failing to champion the landmark reform that has delivered health care to 10 million people. They embarrassed themselves by disowning their leader. Instead of highlighting success they let themselves believe the Republican narrative – which was adopted by a typically lazy media – of a "deeply unpopular president." It did them no good. Most candidates in tough fights who distanced themselves from the president lost.
It was no surprise that the base did not turn out. Why would African Americans be energized when candidates held the first black president at arm’s length? Why would Latinos turn out for the Democrats when the Obama administration decided to delay executive action on immigration until after the election in the hopes of protecting vulnerable candidates? In Texas, Republican Greg Abbot garnered 45 percent of the Latino vote in his successful gubernatorial campaign.
Democrats relied too heavily on single issues such as women’s reproductive rights. By appealing only to minorities, single women and millennials they may be able to win the White House but not the House or Senate. Republicans were more disciplined than in previous elections and managed to keep the lunatic fringe in check. And there is serious thinking going on among some leading conservatives on reforming the tax code to make it friendlier to work and to families and to close loopholes; others are looking at criminal justice reform.
There is another factor that Democrats ignore at their peril. They must take seriously the need to reach white males, both middle class and blue collar workers, and address their anxieties.
Vast numbers are still suffering as a result of the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2009 the net worth of an average family fell by $50,000. Many of those who experienced unemployment for the first time in their lives – often for months or even years – now find themselves working two or more jobs at far lower wages just to put food on the table. In his book Losing Our Way: an intimate portrait of a troubled America, Bob Herbert describes through numerous personal interviews a sense that the country is falling apart. Failing infrastructure and a fraying social contract cause many to look at the future with pessimism. By 2009-2010 the number of Americans committing suicide was approaching forty thousand annually, more than the number being killed in motor vehicle accidents. The suicide rate among men in their fifties increased nearly 50 percent from 2000 to 2102.
There is enormous anger at political elites – Democrats just as much as Republicans – who are completely entwined with megacorporate interests and Wall Street. A sense of insecurity and of unprecedented abandonment among millions of ordinary Americans allows vested interests to exploit racial, ethnic or class divisions and as well as historical resentments.
In a nation where political allegiance is increasingly defined by geography, Virginia stands as a key gateway state between North and South. This is important because our national political and cultural divide reflects in part the unhealed history of the Civil War and white Southerners reactions to President Johnson’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. To avoid ongoing gridlock we need some political leaders who can work intelligently to overcome mindsets stemming from historical resentment, condescension and acceptance of the usual stereotypes.
Although they are both Democrats, our Virginia senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine may be able to play a bridge-building role. Warner is respected for his business acumen and his bi-partisan approach to budget issues. Kaine takes his Catholic faith seriously and his father-in-law was a Republican governor who exemplified the best of the party’s tradition. Both are rooted in values important to a more conservative electorate. Could they help generate an honest dialogue and encourage the best contribution from their colleagues of both parties for the sake of the country?
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Lessons from long distance runners
John was born in New York and grew up in privileged circumstances in Boston and San Francisco. According to his obituary: “He attended white-tie dances at FDR's White House, meeting the President and dancing with Eleanor Roosevelt and then listening to Gershwin himself play Rhapsody in Blue. Yet he was never a snob. At age 18, John met Dr. Frank Buchman, founder of Moral Re-Armament [now Initiatives of Change], a network of people of many nationalities and backgrounds, committed to building trust and constructive relationships within and between nations. From Buchman, John learned, ‘If I listened to God, He would tell me what to do.’ Listening became the cornerstone of his life, enabling him to forge deep friendships with people, who were sometimes enemies, as he sought to help them overcome personal pain and prejudices sufficiently to unite to solve problems in their communities.”
Among his lifelong friends was my dad, a former shipyard worker from Scotland, who spent many years in the US in efforts to overcome industrial conflict in the nation’s steelworks, automobile and aircraft factories and coal mines. He and John – both in their twenties – would travel the country together, meeting labor leaders and employers in work that was seen as vital to the war effort. They both served in the US Army.
In the post-war years, John’s future wife, Denise, whose mother was French, was a trusted colleague of Irène Laure, a key figure in Franco-German reconciliation, and interpreted for her on her international travels.
After an active life working on several continents, the Woods settled in Pasadena, California. John became the director of development for the Braille Institute in Los Angeles and Denise served as dean of students at a private girls' school. As they approached retirement years they could have settled for a well-deserved quiet and comfortable life. Instead they launched into a whole new adventure by addressing the needs of Pasadena as an increasing number of immigrants made the city their home.
As senior warden of All Saints Episcopal Church, John volunteered to explore the possibilities of creating a regional skills training center. This required building a partnership between city government, the school system and a community college – all of which guarded their territory jealously. At first John was hesitant. “I’d only been to Harvard, which doesn’t prepare you for real life all that well.” But his open, persistent approach and ability to build trust paid off. More than 4,000 trainees, many of them immigrants, now attend the center each year.
John was a gentle, gracious man. His most important asset was his love of people and an ability to listen and respond without judgement. The head of the community college noted his leadership qualities, his “low-key personality, not excitable and able to meld the various groups together and come up with something that would be workable. It was essential that all three parties felt they had done something constructive.”
In 1983, All Saints Church commissioned Denise to conduct a survey of the quality of life in Pasadena. In the course of seven months she conducted over 100 personal interviews with community leaders. She said, “I went to these interviews with no hidden agenda of my own; I went to be taught.” The result was a report, Experiencing Pasadena: The Needs, Promises and Tasks of an American City. It depicted a city that was rapidly becoming two cities: a rich city and a poor city. As a result of Denise’s report, All Saints founded the Office of Creative Connections to identify urban needs and resources. Now in its fourth decade of operation, the center has incubated several major projects, including "Young and Healthy," which provides health care to uninsured children and "Day One," a city-wide effort to combat alcohol and drug addiction.John and Denise’s style of teambuilding in the community was distinctive. They called it “caring for the care-givers.” They would invite individuals who were knowledgeable or affected by a community issue to come to their home for informal conversations over coffee or a simple lunch. They discovered that many of those working in the city’s 192 social service agencies did not know each other. Often people were meeting for the first time or at least for the first time over a meal.
It was during this time that the Woods built a friendship with John Perkins, an African American pastor, civil rights activist, author and community developer from Mississippi who founded the Christian Community Development Association, which is now active in neighborhoods across America.
Even after their final move to a retirement community at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, this remarkable pair continued their outreach by creating an after-school program, "After-the-Bell," for local middle school students, resulting in a feature in Time magazine.
Richmond owes much to John and Denise. They visited several times in the late 1980s and shared their experiences with leaders of this community. Their encouragement and wisdom gave impetus to the emerging network of honest dialogue and inclusive partnerships. The methodology employed in Pasadena provided a foundation for what is now known as Hope in the Cities. Key lessons include:
- Listen to the people of the community one by one and to its public bodies to gain a living picture of its needs, its strengths, and its possibilities.
- Discern the meaning of what has been heard and the imperatives of what must be addressed.
- Report to the community – not blaming or name calling, but not watering down the truth – and speak with a moral voice to the whole community.
- Connect citizens around common concerns and create coalitions and structures to carry out what needs to be done.
A senior Pasadena attorney said of the Woods’ contribution: “Nothing gets done until you have people like John and Denise whose motivation...has been truly directed to transcendent values of the community, even at the expense of their own personal economic benefit.”
Thank you, John and Denise, for all that you taught us. You have made a difference.
To read more about John and Denise Wood see Basil Entwistle, Making Cities Work (Hope Publishing House 1992), and Corcoran Trustbuilding, an Honest Conversation on Race, Reconciliation, and Responsibility (University of Virginia Press 2010).
Monday, September 15, 2014
Why story matters
This week Scotland will vote on independence. Whatever the outcome, the campaign is a reminder that identity, culture and the power of story can trump rational argument and economic self-interest.
Story matters. For centuries Scots have told a story of the English as dominating neighbors and oppressors who have looked on Scots as inferior. There is truth in this. But this version of history persists despite Scots’ prominent role in every aspect of British life including in its rise as an industrial power and its imperial ventures around the globe. Indeed there can be few cases where a minority has exerted such a deep influence on a majority population.
According to Margaret Smith, in Reckoning with the Past, history and memory “provide material for group myths that are the source of social cohesion because they supply operational codes and a system of ethics…. History becomes narrative when it turns into a frame of reference for individuals and groups in their daily lives.” The group “story” provides psychological security. “Regardless of the material benefits a person derives from group membership, the person will have a strong psychological proclivity to support certain narratives that keep her own psyche intact.”
The power of historical narrative is seen clearly in Northern Ireland which was the subject of Smith’s research. Even after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which ended decades of violent conflict, provocative sectarian marches continue to keep alive partisan historical narratives that have been handed down from generation to generation.
In Russia, President Putin builds popular domestic support for his policies in Ukraine, despite US and EU sanctions, by playing on his compatriots’ resentment at loss of prestige since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and an emotional desire to relive the glory days of Catherine the Great. The memory of China’s thousand-year history as the world’s wealthiest nation and its humiliation by colonial powers is a motivating force for its leaders and for its people who demand respect in the world. Every Iranian knows that the US participated in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in order to preserve its oil interests. And anyone who has visited the ruins of Persepolis, founded in the 6th century BC by Darius the Great at the height of the Persian empire, will understand better the immense pride of Iranians and their insistence on a right to nuclear power.
Steven Ward, who teaches government at Cornell University, wrote in the Washington Post earlier this year about Russia’s escalation of the crisis in Ukraine: “Defending honor, responding to insults, avoiding humiliation and building prestige are intangible values that are difficult to incorporate in a cost-benefit analysis. And history (and recent scholarship) shows that states have sometimes pursued these values at the expense of economic and security interests.”
The same dynamics can be seen at work in social and political debates in the US where rational argument does not always prevail. For instance, in a recent Pew poll, 46 percent of Republicans said there is not solid evidence of global warming, compared with 11 percent of Democrats. Since the 46 percent includes a large number of highly educated individuals who are aware of the overwhelming scientific evidence, other factors must be influencing the survey.
A column in the New York Times by Brendan Nyhan entitled “When beliefs and facts collide,” offers important insights on the question of cognitive dissonance. He highlights surprising findings by Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan:
In Richmond, Virginia, my Hope in the Cities colleagues and partners ran a regional project on race, class and political jurisdiction using census data to illustrate how poverty is entrenched in certain inner city areas and how it is rapidly increasing in the surrounding suburbs. The three-part presentation included a segment showing the historical events that had led to the current reality. Some groups were exposed to both the data and the history. Other groups saw only the data. While both groups reported increased understanding, the group that was exposed to the history saw a far greater impact.
Our report stated: While attendees began with similar perspectives and backgrounds in working to address poverty in the community, those attending the sessions in which local history and current systemic challenges were discussed were more strongly impacted. Results suggest that the information and facilitated discussions challenged assumptions about the root causes of poverty, including that the cause is primarily situated in individuals and current barriers. These discussions also provided a new perspective on actions needed to produce community change. While data about current trends is important and needed, understanding how we got where we are today gives that data meaning that impacts understanding and motivation to act.
On national issues that are polarized by race, politics and culture we would do well to note Brendan Nyhan’s advice: “We need to try to break the association between identity and factual beliefs on high-profile issues – for instance, by making clear that you can believe in human-induced climate change and still be a conservative Republican.”
As people connect with each other’s individual and community stories and are able to have open and respectful conversation about their sense of identity, their values and their beliefs, they may be better able to deal with facts.
Story matters. For centuries Scots have told a story of the English as dominating neighbors and oppressors who have looked on Scots as inferior. There is truth in this. But this version of history persists despite Scots’ prominent role in every aspect of British life including in its rise as an industrial power and its imperial ventures around the globe. Indeed there can be few cases where a minority has exerted such a deep influence on a majority population.
According to Margaret Smith, in Reckoning with the Past, history and memory “provide material for group myths that are the source of social cohesion because they supply operational codes and a system of ethics…. History becomes narrative when it turns into a frame of reference for individuals and groups in their daily lives.” The group “story” provides psychological security. “Regardless of the material benefits a person derives from group membership, the person will have a strong psychological proclivity to support certain narratives that keep her own psyche intact.”
The power of historical narrative is seen clearly in Northern Ireland which was the subject of Smith’s research. Even after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which ended decades of violent conflict, provocative sectarian marches continue to keep alive partisan historical narratives that have been handed down from generation to generation.
In Russia, President Putin builds popular domestic support for his policies in Ukraine, despite US and EU sanctions, by playing on his compatriots’ resentment at loss of prestige since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and an emotional desire to relive the glory days of Catherine the Great. The memory of China’s thousand-year history as the world’s wealthiest nation and its humiliation by colonial powers is a motivating force for its leaders and for its people who demand respect in the world. Every Iranian knows that the US participated in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in order to preserve its oil interests. And anyone who has visited the ruins of Persepolis, founded in the 6th century BC by Darius the Great at the height of the Persian empire, will understand better the immense pride of Iranians and their insistence on a right to nuclear power.
Steven Ward, who teaches government at Cornell University, wrote in the Washington Post earlier this year about Russia’s escalation of the crisis in Ukraine: “Defending honor, responding to insults, avoiding humiliation and building prestige are intangible values that are difficult to incorporate in a cost-benefit analysis. And history (and recent scholarship) shows that states have sometimes pursued these values at the expense of economic and security interests.”
The same dynamics can be seen at work in social and political debates in the US where rational argument does not always prevail. For instance, in a recent Pew poll, 46 percent of Republicans said there is not solid evidence of global warming, compared with 11 percent of Democrats. Since the 46 percent includes a large number of highly educated individuals who are aware of the overwhelming scientific evidence, other factors must be influencing the survey.
A column in the New York Times by Brendan Nyhan entitled “When beliefs and facts collide,” offers important insights on the question of cognitive dissonance. He highlights surprising findings by Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan:
The divide over belief in evolution between more and less religious people is wider among people who otherwise show familiarity with math and science, which suggests that the problem isn’t a lack of information. When he instead tested whether respondents knew the theory of evolution, omitting mention of belief, there was virtually no difference between more and less religious people with high scientific familiarity. In other words, religious people knew the science; they just weren’t willing to say that they believed in it.This finding supports what those of us who conduct community dialogues have often found to be true. Facts are vital but constructive dialogue is more likely if they are presented in ways that do not involve the humiliation, or threaten the security and deeply held values, of key stakeholders. Facts may be received better and understood if they connect with the belief systems and values of all participants. And if individuals and groups feel their stories are being heard and respected, they are much more likely to be open to accepting challenging facts.
In Richmond, Virginia, my Hope in the Cities colleagues and partners ran a regional project on race, class and political jurisdiction using census data to illustrate how poverty is entrenched in certain inner city areas and how it is rapidly increasing in the surrounding suburbs. The three-part presentation included a segment showing the historical events that had led to the current reality. Some groups were exposed to both the data and the history. Other groups saw only the data. While both groups reported increased understanding, the group that was exposed to the history saw a far greater impact.
Our report stated: While attendees began with similar perspectives and backgrounds in working to address poverty in the community, those attending the sessions in which local history and current systemic challenges were discussed were more strongly impacted. Results suggest that the information and facilitated discussions challenged assumptions about the root causes of poverty, including that the cause is primarily situated in individuals and current barriers. These discussions also provided a new perspective on actions needed to produce community change. While data about current trends is important and needed, understanding how we got where we are today gives that data meaning that impacts understanding and motivation to act.
On national issues that are polarized by race, politics and culture we would do well to note Brendan Nyhan’s advice: “We need to try to break the association between identity and factual beliefs on high-profile issues – for instance, by making clear that you can believe in human-induced climate change and still be a conservative Republican.”
As people connect with each other’s individual and community stories and are able to have open and respectful conversation about their sense of identity, their values and their beliefs, they may be better able to deal with facts.
Saturday, August 9, 2014
If you’re not safe nothing else matters
In May of this year I was called for jury duty. Every Wednesday for a month I joined more than 100 other Richmonders of all backgrounds at the John Marshall courthouse. For hours we waited patiently to be called in groups to different courtrooms where final jury selections were made. The process was slow and sometimes boring and I never made the final cut. But I was deeply impressed by the care taken by the lawyers and judges to safeguard the fairness of the trial by ensuring that we all understood our duties as potential jurors and by emphasizing that presumption of innocence is the legal right of every defendant until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
To pass the time during the periods of waiting, I read The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence. The book is a stunning reminder that what we take for granted in the US and most developed countries – protection under the law – is simply not a reality in much of the developing world. It exposes the “vast hidden underworld of unseen violence where the common poor pass their days out of sight from the rest of us.”
The lead author, Gary Haugen, is founder and president of International Justice Mission which seeks to protect the poor from violence; he was awarded the US highest honor for anti-slavery leadership. His co-author, Victor Boutros, is a federal prosecutor who focuses on police misconduct and international human trafficking internationally. Their core argument is that violence is the single greatest factor that keeps people in poverty: “If you are not safe nothing else matters.”
The current surge of children crossing the border from Central America into the US desperate to escape violence of drug gangs is stark evidence of this harsh reality. Most of the 2.5 billion poor people in the developing world live outside the protection of the law. They live every day with the threat of being robbed, raped, threatened or killed by gangs, imprisoned without trial, having their land stolen, or being forced into slave labor. In fact, there are more enslaved people today – about 27 million - than were taken from Africa during the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade.
In many countries there is a complete absence of a functioning criminal justice system. Worse, the most pervasive criminal presence for the global poor is often their own police force: “Poor people regard the police as agents of oppression not protection……just another armed, predatory gang in the community that steals, rapes, extorts from and assaults them. In fact, it is likely that the local police extort and rob money from poor people on a more regular basis than any other criminal presence in their community.”
In a small Peruvian town, an eight-year-old girl from a poor family is brutally raped and killed at a community celebration in the home of a wealthy family. Her body is left on the street. The police do nothing in the face of an eye-witness account that points to the guilt of the son of the powerful family. After community protests the case comes to court and the family use its wealth and influence to secure an acquittal. Finally, the police arrest a simple-minded young man. They torture him for three days until he confesses. His mother sells her small plot of land and uses all her life savings to pay a lawyer who does nothing. Her son, without any legal representation, is sentenced to 30 years in prison. This is just one of many similar stories from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The authors provide helpful historical context. In the 19th century, even as they were developing their own civilian-friendly domestic police forces, Britain, France and other imperial powers introduced militarized police forces to maintain control of their colonies. The system was designed explicitly to protect the colonial regimes from the common people, not to protect the common people from crime. When the colonialist left, many laws changed but law enforcement did not. An Indian historian who served at the highest levels of his country’s police force notes that the Police Act enacted by the British in 1861 to “protect the ruler against all threats to their power and authority” still governs the organization, structure, philosophy and function of Indian police.
In much of the developing world, court proceedings are still held in the language of the colonial power. In Mozambique, Portuguese is the language of the court although 60 percent of the population has no working knowledge of the language. In Malawi, just one percent of the population speaks English yet this is the language of the courts. Spanish is used in many Latin American counties although the indigenous poor may speak another native tongue. In the Philippines, proceedings are conducted in English, a major obstacle to poor and marginalized groups.
Court proceedings are agonizingly slow. Up to 10 million people globally are held in “pre-trial detention” which can last for years. The average pre-trial detention in Nigeria is 3.7 years. India has 30 million cases pending.
In the face of a dysfunctional criminal justice system, the new elites in developing counties have built a parallel system of private justice with private security forces and alternative dispute resolution systems that leave the poor at the mercy of broken public systems.
Readers in the US will recognize a similar trend in this country where gated communities and private security protect the more privileged. And the US has its own history of notoriously violent and corrupt police activity in cities such as New York in the late 19th century as well as pogroms against the Chinese in Seattle and attacks on union workers in Pennsylvania. In the 20th century, segregation was enforced violently by local police, and public lynchings were carried out with impunity. Today our prisons are filled disproportionally by young men of color convicted of non-violent drug offenses. We have criminalized a whole segment of the population and now have the world’s largest prison population.
Haugen and Boutros remark that the focus of the international community has been on countering narcotics, terrorism and maintaining commercial stability. In conferences on poverty, everyday lawlessness is rarely highlighted. The human rights and development field has “spent decades devising ways to help poor people to survive in the absence of ‘a working pipeline of justice.’” The human rights community focuses mostly on compliance with international legal standards but not the practical work of building and supporting local law enforcement mechanisms. Yet Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, concluded that “the most fundament prerequisite for sustainable development is an effective rule of law.”
The good news is that change is possible.
In 2003, Georgia was rated as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. Its police were the object of particular hatred by the population. Yet by 2010, Transparency International ranked Georgia first in the world in reducing corruption and its police were seen as less corrupt than police in Germany, France and the UK!
Five steps contributed to this remarkable change: Building social demand for change; looking for decisive and courageous reformers inside the system; attacking corruption in the criminal justice system first; cleaning house (Georgia actually fired its entire police force and started over); treating the new police with respect (provide training, uniforms, better pay); and winning public trust through effective crime fighting ad public relations. The result? Crime dropped by half and 95 percent of the residents of the capital city report “feeling safe at all times.“
In the Philippines, International Justice Mission has worked to reduce child trafficking for the sex trade. A four-year project supported by the Gates Foundation in Cebu, the nation’s second largest metropolitan area, brought together police, prosecutors, courts, and social services to “stop the violence before it begins.” This resulted in a 1000 percent increase in the rescue of trafficked children and a 79 percent reduction in the availability of children in the commercial sex trade. More than 100 sex traffickers were successfully convicted. Other stories of hope come from Brazil, Sierra Leone and India.
The Locust Effect is a call to fundamentally change the conversation about global efforts to combat poverty by honestly facing the need for functioning criminal justice systems.
To pass the time during the periods of waiting, I read The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence. The book is a stunning reminder that what we take for granted in the US and most developed countries – protection under the law – is simply not a reality in much of the developing world. It exposes the “vast hidden underworld of unseen violence where the common poor pass their days out of sight from the rest of us.”
The lead author, Gary Haugen, is founder and president of International Justice Mission which seeks to protect the poor from violence; he was awarded the US highest honor for anti-slavery leadership. His co-author, Victor Boutros, is a federal prosecutor who focuses on police misconduct and international human trafficking internationally. Their core argument is that violence is the single greatest factor that keeps people in poverty: “If you are not safe nothing else matters.”
The current surge of children crossing the border from Central America into the US desperate to escape violence of drug gangs is stark evidence of this harsh reality. Most of the 2.5 billion poor people in the developing world live outside the protection of the law. They live every day with the threat of being robbed, raped, threatened or killed by gangs, imprisoned without trial, having their land stolen, or being forced into slave labor. In fact, there are more enslaved people today – about 27 million - than were taken from Africa during the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade.
In many countries there is a complete absence of a functioning criminal justice system. Worse, the most pervasive criminal presence for the global poor is often their own police force: “Poor people regard the police as agents of oppression not protection……just another armed, predatory gang in the community that steals, rapes, extorts from and assaults them. In fact, it is likely that the local police extort and rob money from poor people on a more regular basis than any other criminal presence in their community.”
In a small Peruvian town, an eight-year-old girl from a poor family is brutally raped and killed at a community celebration in the home of a wealthy family. Her body is left on the street. The police do nothing in the face of an eye-witness account that points to the guilt of the son of the powerful family. After community protests the case comes to court and the family use its wealth and influence to secure an acquittal. Finally, the police arrest a simple-minded young man. They torture him for three days until he confesses. His mother sells her small plot of land and uses all her life savings to pay a lawyer who does nothing. Her son, without any legal representation, is sentenced to 30 years in prison. This is just one of many similar stories from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The authors provide helpful historical context. In the 19th century, even as they were developing their own civilian-friendly domestic police forces, Britain, France and other imperial powers introduced militarized police forces to maintain control of their colonies. The system was designed explicitly to protect the colonial regimes from the common people, not to protect the common people from crime. When the colonialist left, many laws changed but law enforcement did not. An Indian historian who served at the highest levels of his country’s police force notes that the Police Act enacted by the British in 1861 to “protect the ruler against all threats to their power and authority” still governs the organization, structure, philosophy and function of Indian police.
In much of the developing world, court proceedings are still held in the language of the colonial power. In Mozambique, Portuguese is the language of the court although 60 percent of the population has no working knowledge of the language. In Malawi, just one percent of the population speaks English yet this is the language of the courts. Spanish is used in many Latin American counties although the indigenous poor may speak another native tongue. In the Philippines, proceedings are conducted in English, a major obstacle to poor and marginalized groups.
Court proceedings are agonizingly slow. Up to 10 million people globally are held in “pre-trial detention” which can last for years. The average pre-trial detention in Nigeria is 3.7 years. India has 30 million cases pending.
In the face of a dysfunctional criminal justice system, the new elites in developing counties have built a parallel system of private justice with private security forces and alternative dispute resolution systems that leave the poor at the mercy of broken public systems.
Readers in the US will recognize a similar trend in this country where gated communities and private security protect the more privileged. And the US has its own history of notoriously violent and corrupt police activity in cities such as New York in the late 19th century as well as pogroms against the Chinese in Seattle and attacks on union workers in Pennsylvania. In the 20th century, segregation was enforced violently by local police, and public lynchings were carried out with impunity. Today our prisons are filled disproportionally by young men of color convicted of non-violent drug offenses. We have criminalized a whole segment of the population and now have the world’s largest prison population.
Haugen and Boutros remark that the focus of the international community has been on countering narcotics, terrorism and maintaining commercial stability. In conferences on poverty, everyday lawlessness is rarely highlighted. The human rights and development field has “spent decades devising ways to help poor people to survive in the absence of ‘a working pipeline of justice.’” The human rights community focuses mostly on compliance with international legal standards but not the practical work of building and supporting local law enforcement mechanisms. Yet Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, concluded that “the most fundament prerequisite for sustainable development is an effective rule of law.”
The good news is that change is possible.
In 2003, Georgia was rated as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. Its police were the object of particular hatred by the population. Yet by 2010, Transparency International ranked Georgia first in the world in reducing corruption and its police were seen as less corrupt than police in Germany, France and the UK!
Five steps contributed to this remarkable change: Building social demand for change; looking for decisive and courageous reformers inside the system; attacking corruption in the criminal justice system first; cleaning house (Georgia actually fired its entire police force and started over); treating the new police with respect (provide training, uniforms, better pay); and winning public trust through effective crime fighting ad public relations. The result? Crime dropped by half and 95 percent of the residents of the capital city report “feeling safe at all times.“
In the Philippines, International Justice Mission has worked to reduce child trafficking for the sex trade. A four-year project supported by the Gates Foundation in Cebu, the nation’s second largest metropolitan area, brought together police, prosecutors, courts, and social services to “stop the violence before it begins.” This resulted in a 1000 percent increase in the rescue of trafficked children and a 79 percent reduction in the availability of children in the commercial sex trade. More than 100 sex traffickers were successfully convicted. Other stories of hope come from Brazil, Sierra Leone and India.
The Locust Effect is a call to fundamentally change the conversation about global efforts to combat poverty by honestly facing the need for functioning criminal justice systems.
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Mystery is a gift to be enjoyed
Abraham Lincoln is often quoted as saying, “My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side.” But too often political and religious leaders select passages from sacred texts to bolster their own beliefs or prejudices.
God must be appalled at hearing his/her name being used as justification for bigotry, discrimination, torture and murder. Each week brings horrifying reports of atrocities by supposedly religious groups: Christians slaughtering Muslims in the Central African Republic; Buddhists killing Muslims in Burma; Sunni and Shia bombing each other in Iraq. Europe suffered centuries of religious violence between Catholics and Protestants. US history is full of examples of religious bigotry. Even slavery was supported by established Christian churches and discrimination was often cloaked in religiosity. More recently, the burning of a Koran by an American pastor in Florida provoked deadly riots in Afghanistan and American evangelicals are actively supporting Uganda’s human rights abuses against gays.
Worldwide persecution based on religion is increasing. For example, one hundred years ago Christians accounted for 30 percent of the Middle East’s population; today they represent just three percent. The region risks losing its historical diversity and tradition of tolerance.
So it was with relief and gratitude that I rediscovered a small gem of a book entitled God’s Favourite Colour is Tartan*. Susan and I read it during our morning reflections while on vacation. The British author, Tim Firth, who died recently, was a prominent Catholic priest who, finding that for him church doctrines “ceased to be convincing interpretations of reality and a basis for living ,“ left the church and pursued a career as a human resource manager with an international accounting firm. With his theater director wife he became deeply involved in the arts as a vehicle for spiritual renewal.
To a large extent Firth’s book reflects his own journey from the certainty of a specific religious tradition into a wider world of unknown paths and a new understanding of spirituality. He notes that we are all innately spiritual beings; religion is a comparatively recent creation. It is, in the words of Diarmuid O'Murchu, “the local harbour that points to the vast ocean beyond, without which the harbour would never exist in the first place.” Firth focuses on exploring that vast ocean and the many ways in which humans connect to what he calls the "Mystery of Being."
He repeatedly cautions against the “either/or” trap of doctrine, recalling the words of Ludovic Kennedy: “Believing may be what people die for but doctrines can be what people kill for.” He encourages the reader to take a “both/and” approach. Human beings crave certainty and we fear the journey in the unknown. But according to Brian Boobbyer, “Mystery is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be enjoyed.”
Firth affirms that religion plays an important role in providing a framework and identity. Where it goes wrong is in claiming exclusive fullness of the truth. The Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths said, "Be true to your roots, but go beyond their limitations.”
Prayer, art, myths, stories and symbols are helpful because they tend to unify across cultural boundaries: “Beethoven speaks universally; the same principles of geometry are found in Stonehenge, the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, the Kaba in Mecca and Chartres Cathedral because their architects all believed that by building on geometric proportions they were building – the same proportions God used in building the cosmos – they were building truth. There is no such thing as Hindu geometry or Islamic beauty or Buddhist music – there are just mathematics, geometry, beauty and music.”
Firth believes we all have an “an in-built compass to believe what our instinct tells us will give us life and hope.” Obedience comes from the Latin “ob-audience” which means listening – listening to our conscience and attending to the Mystery of Being. In the end it is about relationships: “You must live in a certain way and then you will encounter the sacred within.”
Personally I think God might welcome a year with no public mention of his/her name. Instead, people of all faiths and spiritual traditions could simply live out the universal core values of honesty, love, forgiveness, compassion and justice. The world might be a very different and much better place as a result.
*God’s Favourite Colour is Tartan, Tim Firth, Catholics for a Changing Church 2007 London, UK.
God must be appalled at hearing his/her name being used as justification for bigotry, discrimination, torture and murder. Each week brings horrifying reports of atrocities by supposedly religious groups: Christians slaughtering Muslims in the Central African Republic; Buddhists killing Muslims in Burma; Sunni and Shia bombing each other in Iraq. Europe suffered centuries of religious violence between Catholics and Protestants. US history is full of examples of religious bigotry. Even slavery was supported by established Christian churches and discrimination was often cloaked in religiosity. More recently, the burning of a Koran by an American pastor in Florida provoked deadly riots in Afghanistan and American evangelicals are actively supporting Uganda’s human rights abuses against gays.
Worldwide persecution based on religion is increasing. For example, one hundred years ago Christians accounted for 30 percent of the Middle East’s population; today they represent just three percent. The region risks losing its historical diversity and tradition of tolerance.
So it was with relief and gratitude that I rediscovered a small gem of a book entitled God’s Favourite Colour is Tartan*. Susan and I read it during our morning reflections while on vacation. The British author, Tim Firth, who died recently, was a prominent Catholic priest who, finding that for him church doctrines “ceased to be convincing interpretations of reality and a basis for living ,“ left the church and pursued a career as a human resource manager with an international accounting firm. With his theater director wife he became deeply involved in the arts as a vehicle for spiritual renewal.
To a large extent Firth’s book reflects his own journey from the certainty of a specific religious tradition into a wider world of unknown paths and a new understanding of spirituality. He notes that we are all innately spiritual beings; religion is a comparatively recent creation. It is, in the words of Diarmuid O'Murchu, “the local harbour that points to the vast ocean beyond, without which the harbour would never exist in the first place.” Firth focuses on exploring that vast ocean and the many ways in which humans connect to what he calls the "Mystery of Being."
He repeatedly cautions against the “either/or” trap of doctrine, recalling the words of Ludovic Kennedy: “Believing may be what people die for but doctrines can be what people kill for.” He encourages the reader to take a “both/and” approach. Human beings crave certainty and we fear the journey in the unknown. But according to Brian Boobbyer, “Mystery is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be enjoyed.”
Firth affirms that religion plays an important role in providing a framework and identity. Where it goes wrong is in claiming exclusive fullness of the truth. The Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths said, "Be true to your roots, but go beyond their limitations.”
Prayer, art, myths, stories and symbols are helpful because they tend to unify across cultural boundaries: “Beethoven speaks universally; the same principles of geometry are found in Stonehenge, the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, the Kaba in Mecca and Chartres Cathedral because their architects all believed that by building on geometric proportions they were building – the same proportions God used in building the cosmos – they were building truth. There is no such thing as Hindu geometry or Islamic beauty or Buddhist music – there are just mathematics, geometry, beauty and music.”
Firth believes we all have an “an in-built compass to believe what our instinct tells us will give us life and hope.” Obedience comes from the Latin “ob-audience” which means listening – listening to our conscience and attending to the Mystery of Being. In the end it is about relationships: “You must live in a certain way and then you will encounter the sacred within.”
Personally I think God might welcome a year with no public mention of his/her name. Instead, people of all faiths and spiritual traditions could simply live out the universal core values of honesty, love, forgiveness, compassion and justice. The world might be a very different and much better place as a result.
*God’s Favourite Colour is Tartan, Tim Firth, Catholics for a Changing Church 2007 London, UK.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Will America create healthy integrated public schools?
That same year, our youngest son graduated from Richmond Public Schools. Nearly half of the city’s schools had fewer than ten whites in their student bodies and eight had none at all.
A glance at the 2014 demographics shows that while the number of white students has increased, due largely to greater participation in elementary schools, white participation in middle and high schools remains low. Out of a citywide population of 1,153 12th graders there are just 100 white non-Hispanic students. The largest number is at kindergarten level and 146 out of the total 258 are clustered in two elementary schools. Some schools have lost ground. The middle school that our sons attended has just two white 8th graders (there were 19 in 2004).
But Richmond is actually faring better than many school districts nationally. As we mark the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, the resegregation of America’s schools as documented by Jonathan Kozul in The Shame of the Nation:The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, is relentless. And in a 2007 ruling, the Court effectively buried Brown by outlawing even voluntary initiatives to create racial balance, as for example in Seattle and Louisville. Justice Stephen Breyer, in a scathing dissent, likened the inequality in our schools to “a caste system rooted in the institution of slavery and 50 years of legalized subordination.”
A compelling case study, Segregation Now, by Nikole Hannah-Jones in The Atlantic, April 2014, examines the story of one school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that has experienced both integration and resegregation.
By the 1970s, public schools in the South had become the most integrated in the country, largely as a result of court-ordered action. Central High School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was “one of the South’s signature integration success stories.” In 1979, a federal judge had ordered the merger of two largely segregated high schools. For two decades, students at the new integrated Central High performed at a high level academically and in sports.
But the Tuscaloosa school system was steadily losing white students. Once a majority, by the mid-1990s they made up less than a third of the population. Many white parents had decided to send their children to nearly all-white private schools or to move across the city/county line to access the heavily white Tuscaloosa County Schools. And the business community, concerned about the eroding tax base and hoping to attract new industries, wanted to be able to say that Tuscaloosa City Schools would not be “an inner-city school system.” In 2000, after much back-room lobbying to build support from key leaders (including some African American leaders), another federal judge released Tuscaloosa City Schools from the court-ordered desegregation mandate.
“Freed from court oversight, Tuscaloosa’s schools have seemed to move backwards in time,” writes Hannah-Jones. The citywide integrated high school was replaced by three smaller schools. Central High is now “a struggling school serving the city’s poorest part of town, it is 99 percent black...Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to Central have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools.”
To be sure, there are no all-white schools; most of the city’s white students attend schools with significant numbers of blacks. “But while segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else.”
And this appears to be the key point: Across America, the overwhelming majority of white and middle-class parents do not wish their children to be educated alongside poor black and Latino kids.
Yet integration has been shown to benefit whites and blacks alike. The Atlantic story cites a 2014 study by Rucker Johnson, a public-policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who found that African Americans who attended schools integrated by court order were more likely to graduate, go on to college, and earn a degree than those who attended segregated schools. Five years of integrated schooling increased the earnings of black adults by 15 percent. They were significantly less likely to spend time in jail and they were healthier.
The reasoning behind Brown was not just about black kids being able to go to school with white students. It was about having access to equal resources and similar opportunities which could only be achieved through integration. Research by Richard Kahlenburg in All Together Now:Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice shows that both lower-wealth and higher-wealth students perform better in economically integrated schools.
Our sons all say that their experience as white minorities in Richmond schools prepared them for living in a diverse world. Our middle son, Mark, says that despite the challenges, “the public schools did set us up socially by teaching us the thing that is fundamental in life: being with people who are different.”
My wife, Susan, comments: “I guess I hoped that if our boys were in the public schools, some African American kid would have the experience of knowing at least one white person who was an OK guy, and it would help to break down some stereotypes. Equally, for our boys, if the black guy sitting next to them was better than them at math or won the science prize, they are less likely to have negative images of African Americans.”
Andrew, our youngest son, is now director of programs at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter high school. Located in Anacostia in Southeast DC, it serves an all-black population, mostly from low-wealth families, and prepares them for college. US News & World Report highlights the school in Fixing the Education Gap 60 Years after Brown.Every student in each of the school’s graduating classes has been accepted to college and the alumni are graduating college at rates five times higher than their neighborhood peers.
But despite the remarkable success of Thurgood Marshall Academy and a few other standouts around the country, the vast majority of black and Latino students are attending schools that are underfunded, badly equipped and lacking in resources. Dedicated professionals and volunteers work tirelessly to mitigate the impact of segregation, but a friend who has done much to support Richmond’s schools says, “No-one is talking about the importance of a healthy integrated school.”
At this point it will be virtually impossible to reverse the resegregation trend without courageous, determined and sustained action by citizens of all races and social classes – but particularly by white upper- and middle-class parents who are prepared to invest their families in building community. My blog of last April highlighted some Richmond families who are doing just that.
A wise friend who does racial healing work in Oakland told me, “We have to keep going upstream about consciousness and ask ourselves: what are the truths we have lost sight of? If we recaptured them, things would be very different. One such truth is that we are all connected. Our social structures are set up to help us forget this.”
Race and class largely determine the neighborhoods we choose to live in, our friendships, our recreation and our places of worship, as well as where we invest our time and resources and how we vote. As Michelle Obama told students in Topeka, Kansas, “Brown is still being decided every single day, not just in our courts and in our schools, but in how we live our lives.”
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
A welcoming space for difference
It takes courage to reveal your true convictions when you feel you may be alone in your beliefs among a large and vocal group. It is doubly hard in the polarized political climate of the US today where we so quickly form stereotypes around words like conservative and liberal.
An organization like Initiatives of Change which claims that it is for “everyone everywhere” must take special care not to allow prevailing orthodoxies of left or right to create a culture where honest conversation is stifled.
When Susan and I first came to live in Richmond thirty years ago, many of the people we came to know, including our work colleagues, were deeply conservative. As the son of a trade unionist, I often felt like an outsider. But one of my early “aha” moments was the realization that my natural inclination to make judgments about conservatives was a barrier to my effectiveness in building the teamwork needed for social change and that I had something to learn from everyone – including those whose political bias was different from my own.
Today the scene is very different. I would venture to say that the great majority of those with whom I interact are strongly liberal, so it becomes especially important to hear and encourage the more conservative voices. No one has a monopoly on truth.
I am convinced that one of the greatest obstacles to progress in this country is the prevailing sentiment among liberal activists that “we are the solution and others are the problem,” or at least in need of education. I recall a meeting of national social justice advocates where I remarked that we were “like an airplane with one wing.” How could we change the country with only people of one worldview?
Some years ago, I invited a dentist friend who devoted much time to pro bono work to attend a “dismantling racism” workshop. He withdrew in frustration because the trainer insisted on group acceptance of a particular social construct and historical interpretation. My friend was made to feel that his contribution to the community was of no value – worse, in the prescribed victim-victimizer paradigm, he was identified as a perpetrator of injustice who must be reformed. A potential ally was lost.
Similar feelings of exclusion can occur around matters of faith. One of the most significant moments of a recent national meeting of Initiatives of Change occurred in the final hour. A woman from Northern Virginia rose to say she was aware that most people in the room were liberals, but she wanted everyone to know that she was a conservative Christian and marched in pro-life rallies. But she also said that she was committed to social change. (Later one person said to her in surprise, “But I thought all pro-lifers were mean people!”)
Many of my sons’ generation would describe themselves as spiritual and are deeply committed to making practical change and to building just communities. They do not believe in a God confined behind church doors, where the emphasis is more on gaining members than addressing social ills, where doctrine excludes rather than welcomes and where judgment supersedes love.
My own spiritual beliefs and my views on abortion, gay and straight relationships, racial and economic justice, and a range of other issues do not fall easily within prevailing political or religious orthodoxies. I suspect that many people are frustrated by the liberal/conservative or cultural and religious boxes in which we insist on placing each other. Life is complex and we must allow for ambiguity.
Now more than ever America needs spaces where honest conversation can flourish and where unexpected partnerships become possible. If people feel they must check their true selves at the door, the dialogue will not be honest and we will miss opportunities to celebrate the richness of our diversity. As I wrote in my book, Trustbuilding, “true dialogue involves inquiry, attentive listening, and sharing of experiences as well as information and assumptions with the purpose of learning.”
Monday, March 24, 2014
Democracy depends on good losers
I have been reading Making Our Democracy Work by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (Knopf 2010). One passage may be of particular relevance to the struggle for democracy now underway in many parts of the world from South Sudan to Egypt. It is also a challenge to those in Washington whose reluctance to follow the basic operating principles of a two-party democracy has led to government paralysis.
In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore won the national popular vote. But elections are decided by the electoral votes and everything hinged on Florida. Under Florida law (like most states) the candidate who receives the largest share of state’s popular vote also receives all the state’s electoral votes. In the original count, Bush led Gore by fewer than two thousand votes out of the six million cast, thus triggering an automatic recount. Bush still came out ahead but by a narrower margin and Gore challenged the count in four districts.
The Florida Supreme Court then ordered a recount of the entire vote. Bush’s legal team leapt into action and challenged the state’s decision. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and in a highly controversial decision voted by 5 to 4 in Bush’s favor.
The process had been complicated by hand counting of machine-uncountable ballots due to various types of voter error. Subsequent studies produced conflicting conclusions on which candidate would have won, had the state been allowed to do a complete recount. For many the Court’s decision was a huge disappointment and many regarded it as unfair.
Justice Breyer, who was among the dissenters on the Court, writes: “Whether the decision was right or wrong is not the point here. If I and three other members of the Court thought the decision was very wrong, so did millions of other Americans. For present purposes, however, what is important is what happened next. Gore, the losing candidate, told followers not to attack the legitimacy of the Court’s decision. And despite the great importance of the decision, the strong disagreement about its merits, and the strong feelings about the Court’s intervention, the public, Democrats as well as Republicans, followed the decision. They did so peacefully, with no need for troops… without rocks hurled in the streets, without violent massive protest. The leader of the U.S. Senate Harry Reid, a Democrat, said that the public's willingness to follow the law as enunciated by the Court constitutes a little-remarked, but the most remarkable, feature of the case. I agree”
In a New York Times commentary on December 13, 2011, Scott Farris reflected on what some observers have called one of the great political speeches in American history: “In many countries, losing candidates do not peacefully accept defeat, and their obstinacy leads to political chaos, riots and sometimes civil war. Gore understood the risks to America from a prolonged dispute over an unresolved election. Our democratic political system works only when the losers give their consent to be governed by the winners. So, on Dec. 13, 2000, Gore chose to begin a process of healing. He did not merely concede, he gave a remarkably upbeat and friendly concession speech and quoted an earlier losing candidate, Stephen Douglas, who pledged to Abraham Lincoln upon losing the 1860 presidential election, ‘Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.’”
In order to function, democracy requires a loyal opposition which puts country before political partisanship. Al Gore offered a lesson we all will do well to remember.
In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore won the national popular vote. But elections are decided by the electoral votes and everything hinged on Florida. Under Florida law (like most states) the candidate who receives the largest share of state’s popular vote also receives all the state’s electoral votes. In the original count, Bush led Gore by fewer than two thousand votes out of the six million cast, thus triggering an automatic recount. Bush still came out ahead but by a narrower margin and Gore challenged the count in four districts.
The Florida Supreme Court then ordered a recount of the entire vote. Bush’s legal team leapt into action and challenged the state’s decision. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and in a highly controversial decision voted by 5 to 4 in Bush’s favor.
The process had been complicated by hand counting of machine-uncountable ballots due to various types of voter error. Subsequent studies produced conflicting conclusions on which candidate would have won, had the state been allowed to do a complete recount. For many the Court’s decision was a huge disappointment and many regarded it as unfair.
Justice Breyer, who was among the dissenters on the Court, writes: “Whether the decision was right or wrong is not the point here. If I and three other members of the Court thought the decision was very wrong, so did millions of other Americans. For present purposes, however, what is important is what happened next. Gore, the losing candidate, told followers not to attack the legitimacy of the Court’s decision. And despite the great importance of the decision, the strong disagreement about its merits, and the strong feelings about the Court’s intervention, the public, Democrats as well as Republicans, followed the decision. They did so peacefully, with no need for troops… without rocks hurled in the streets, without violent massive protest. The leader of the U.S. Senate Harry Reid, a Democrat, said that the public's willingness to follow the law as enunciated by the Court constitutes a little-remarked, but the most remarkable, feature of the case. I agree”
In a New York Times commentary on December 13, 2011, Scott Farris reflected on what some observers have called one of the great political speeches in American history: “In many countries, losing candidates do not peacefully accept defeat, and their obstinacy leads to political chaos, riots and sometimes civil war. Gore understood the risks to America from a prolonged dispute over an unresolved election. Our democratic political system works only when the losers give their consent to be governed by the winners. So, on Dec. 13, 2000, Gore chose to begin a process of healing. He did not merely concede, he gave a remarkably upbeat and friendly concession speech and quoted an earlier losing candidate, Stephen Douglas, who pledged to Abraham Lincoln upon losing the 1860 presidential election, ‘Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.’”
In order to function, democracy requires a loyal opposition which puts country before political partisanship. Al Gore offered a lesson we all will do well to remember.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Pain and hope in Ukraine
It is difficult not to write about Ukraine at this time. And I realize how little I and most of us really know about this huge country, the second largest in Europe, which now stands at the crossroads of history.
Recently, I read Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by historian Timothy Snyder of Yale University (Basic Books, 2010). It is a sobering read, a meticulously researched history of how 14 million people were murdered in Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945. Snyder writes, “During the years that Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or Europe, or in the world.”
For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was the place that “would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics, rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image.” Everything depended on control of Ukraine's fertile soil and its millions of agricultural workers.
In 1933 Ukrainians suffered the “greatest artificial famine in history of the world.” As a result of Stalin’s policy forced of collectivization and export of grain from starving villages, 3.3 million Ukrainians died (some say up to 6 million). In the spring of 1933 they died at a rate of 10,000 a day. Thousands of others were deported to the Gulag or to Kazakhstan.
Then, in 1937 and 1938, NKVD operatives shot 70,868 inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine in the operation against the so-called “kulak resistance.” A disproportionate number were of Polish origin. Of the 681,692 death sentences in the Great Terror, 123,421 were carried out in Soviet Ukraine (this does not include natives of Ukraine shot in the Gulag).
When Hitler seized control in 1941, writes Synder, he tried to realize his own colonial vision beginning with the shooting of Jews and starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. The German plan envisaged “a vast eastern colony.” The native pollutions were to be deported, killed or forced into slave labor. Depending on demographic estimates, between thirty-one and forty-five million peoples, mostly Slavs were to “disappear.” Under the “hunger plan” sixty-five percent of the population of western Ukraine and eighty-five percent of Poles, and seventy-five percent of Belarusians were to be eliminated.
The German military conquest failed, but three million Ukrainians (non-Jews and as many as 900,000 Jews) were killed, sometimes with the assistance of local police forces.
Further suffering followed when the Soviets regained control. Synder records that many new Gulag prisoners were from the lands that Stalin had taken in 1939 with German consent and then took again in 1945. Between 1944 and 1946, more than 182,000 Ukrainians were deported from Southern Ukraine to the Gulag.
This is just some of the history that continues to impact Ukraine today and which the courageous young Initiatives of Change team in Ukraine has set out to heal as described by one of its leaders, Lena Kashkarova. It is a daunting but vital task. Last fall Lena, who is of mixed Ukrainian-Russian background, interned in Richmond, Virginia, with the Initiatives of Change program Hope in the Cities. She is currently in Crimea interpreting for CNN. Her recent emails help to correct some impressions created by the media:
Events of the last three months united people from different backgrounds from East and West alike. As I see it, a big part of the population finally lost Soviet identity and became aware that Ukraine is home for all of us, no matter what origin we come from, and learned to hold responsibility for this home.
Another important factor is the role of churches of all confessions as well as other religions who demonstrated enormous support for the protest movement. It started with the beatings by riot police youth by offering refuge in the Orthodox monastery, and it continued with the installation of a prayer tent at Maidan square, and turning churches into underground hospitals; then providing space for cooking, running dialogues and meetings in the cities where no other institution would dare to host them; staying for hours between riot police and protesters; and reading the last rites for those killed. At times of attacks on Maidan, all the churches rang bells in warning.
In the past there was lots of controversy between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Ukrainian Patriarchy and Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Russian Patriarchy (which is subordinate to the Russian one). Not any more. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Russian Patriarchy condemned Russian occupation of Crimea along with its Ukrainian counterpart, despite a completely different message from its 'boss' in Moscow. In my opinion they all became not separate institutions but one real Christian Church and played a huge role together with doctors, journalists, veterans, students, etc., in making true what seemed to be completely impossible three months ago.
Paradoxically, Russian occupation both divided and brought more unity among Ukrainians. There are people from East and West alike who are ready to defend their country. Russian-speaking Ukrainians with Russian background are ready to fight against the Russian army. There are almost no Russian citizens in Ukraine! There are many people of Russian or mixed origin (as I am) whose native language is Russian, but they are not citizens of Russia. There are huge lines of those who want to get mobilized in the Ukrainian army in a country where [normally] people pay bribes and do everything not to be mobilized for [required] military service.
At the same time there is a huge divide with those people who hold what I would describe as 'Soviet' identity and – what is most important – have listened to Russian propaganda that pours from Russian TV and other media. The amount of lies and bluff is just overwhelming.
Overhearing Russian TV is just painful. It is not just manipulating facts; it simply fabricates news and rouses hatred! No wonder people who listen to it are scared of "fasсists" from the West and are full of hatred towards them. This propaganda will affect our society for a long time.
It's easy to bring division and conflict. It is very hard to reconcile.
Recently, I read Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by historian Timothy Snyder of Yale University (Basic Books, 2010). It is a sobering read, a meticulously researched history of how 14 million people were murdered in Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945. Snyder writes, “During the years that Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or Europe, or in the world.”
For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was the place that “would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics, rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image.” Everything depended on control of Ukraine's fertile soil and its millions of agricultural workers.
In 1933 Ukrainians suffered the “greatest artificial famine in history of the world.” As a result of Stalin’s policy forced of collectivization and export of grain from starving villages, 3.3 million Ukrainians died (some say up to 6 million). In the spring of 1933 they died at a rate of 10,000 a day. Thousands of others were deported to the Gulag or to Kazakhstan.
Then, in 1937 and 1938, NKVD operatives shot 70,868 inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine in the operation against the so-called “kulak resistance.” A disproportionate number were of Polish origin. Of the 681,692 death sentences in the Great Terror, 123,421 were carried out in Soviet Ukraine (this does not include natives of Ukraine shot in the Gulag).
When Hitler seized control in 1941, writes Synder, he tried to realize his own colonial vision beginning with the shooting of Jews and starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. The German plan envisaged “a vast eastern colony.” The native pollutions were to be deported, killed or forced into slave labor. Depending on demographic estimates, between thirty-one and forty-five million peoples, mostly Slavs were to “disappear.” Under the “hunger plan” sixty-five percent of the population of western Ukraine and eighty-five percent of Poles, and seventy-five percent of Belarusians were to be eliminated.
The German military conquest failed, but three million Ukrainians (non-Jews and as many as 900,000 Jews) were killed, sometimes with the assistance of local police forces.
Further suffering followed when the Soviets regained control. Synder records that many new Gulag prisoners were from the lands that Stalin had taken in 1939 with German consent and then took again in 1945. Between 1944 and 1946, more than 182,000 Ukrainians were deported from Southern Ukraine to the Gulag.
This is just some of the history that continues to impact Ukraine today and which the courageous young Initiatives of Change team in Ukraine has set out to heal as described by one of its leaders, Lena Kashkarova. It is a daunting but vital task. Last fall Lena, who is of mixed Ukrainian-Russian background, interned in Richmond, Virginia, with the Initiatives of Change program Hope in the Cities. She is currently in Crimea interpreting for CNN. Her recent emails help to correct some impressions created by the media:
Another important factor is the role of churches of all confessions as well as other religions who demonstrated enormous support for the protest movement. It started with the beatings by riot police youth by offering refuge in the Orthodox monastery, and it continued with the installation of a prayer tent at Maidan square, and turning churches into underground hospitals; then providing space for cooking, running dialogues and meetings in the cities where no other institution would dare to host them; staying for hours between riot police and protesters; and reading the last rites for those killed. At times of attacks on Maidan, all the churches rang bells in warning.
In the past there was lots of controversy between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Ukrainian Patriarchy and Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Russian Patriarchy (which is subordinate to the Russian one). Not any more. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Russian Patriarchy condemned Russian occupation of Crimea along with its Ukrainian counterpart, despite a completely different message from its 'boss' in Moscow. In my opinion they all became not separate institutions but one real Christian Church and played a huge role together with doctors, journalists, veterans, students, etc., in making true what seemed to be completely impossible three months ago.
Paradoxically, Russian occupation both divided and brought more unity among Ukrainians. There are people from East and West alike who are ready to defend their country. Russian-speaking Ukrainians with Russian background are ready to fight against the Russian army. There are almost no Russian citizens in Ukraine! There are many people of Russian or mixed origin (as I am) whose native language is Russian, but they are not citizens of Russia. There are huge lines of those who want to get mobilized in the Ukrainian army in a country where [normally] people pay bribes and do everything not to be mobilized for [required] military service.
At the same time there is a huge divide with those people who hold what I would describe as 'Soviet' identity and – what is most important – have listened to Russian propaganda that pours from Russian TV and other media. The amount of lies and bluff is just overwhelming.
Overhearing Russian TV is just painful. It is not just manipulating facts; it simply fabricates news and rouses hatred! No wonder people who listen to it are scared of "fasсists" from the West and are full of hatred towards them. This propaganda will affect our society for a long time.
It's easy to bring division and conflict. It is very hard to reconcile.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Diary of an Encuentro (continued)
Tuesday - Day 5
Getting practical
Throughout these days there has been virtually no public criticism of the United States. This is remarkable given its long history of interference in Latin American affairs. However, I think most people here recognize that there is a need for honest conversation and I have appreciated the opportunity over meals to at least begin to hear some of the feelings beneath the surface. Hopefully these days will have created the trust that will make that more difficult conversation possible.
This morning we worked in small groups to identify some important focus areas for IofC over the next five years. Among them:
Wednesday - Final day
A commitment to support each other
"I felt empowered. All voices were taken into account. Diversity is not just having everyone at the table but it is about their voices being heard."
Perhaps this statement by Fabiola Benavente Mancilla from Mexico, sums up better than anything the spirit of the Encuentro of the Americas which closed this morning.
I am writing this on the bus back to Bogota, trying to digest all we have experienced over the past four days.
Coming from 11 nations of the Americas and Caribbean, the group has left with a commitment to support each other despite the challenge of distance. Pilar Griffith is starting a "cyber quiet time group" and plans to work on a manual on "how to start a team" using her own context of Costa Rica as a pilot. Another group plans to work on ideas on how to build bridges of trust between generations in IofC and to support transitions to younger leadership.
We are also looking at how to make existing resources more widely available. Some Colombian friends are expressing ideas to translate my book Trustbuilding into Spanish.
I was particularly interested in a group that discussed ideas to align business models with social and spiritual change. The goal would be to develop values-based businesses that provide goods or services that generate income to support IofC workers.
Of course the "elephant in the room" at such meetings is the US-Latin America relationship. As I noted in a previous blog, this gathering was notably free of recrimination. However, Rodrigo Martinez Romero from Mexico and I and others have agreed to start a working group dedicated to seeking ways, in partnership with other organizations, to heal the relationship and build new partnerships for the future.
Getting practical
This morning we worked in small groups to identify some important focus areas for IofC over the next five years. Among them:
- Collaborative, sustainable, and replicable models of reconciliation and social justice focused on key issues. This might also involve partnerships with like-minded organizations whose goals are aligned with our strategic vision.
- Reconciliation with the earth. In the spirit of IofC we must start with ourselves. We also need to develop a new language of spirituality appropriate for today's world.
- Ability to have internal dialogue within the IofC Americas network and also to promote constructive public dialogue on critical issues.
- Trustbuilding between Latin America and the United States; and also between and within the countries of Latin America around issues of class and the indigenous people. In this context there is also a need to address Issues of identity.
- Capacity building in such areas as project management, funding, increased human resources, and communications.
Wednesday - Final day
A commitment to support each other
Perhaps this statement by Fabiola Benavente Mancilla from Mexico, sums up better than anything the spirit of the Encuentro of the Americas which closed this morning.
I am writing this on the bus back to Bogota, trying to digest all we have experienced over the past four days.
Coming from 11 nations of the Americas and Caribbean, the group has left with a commitment to support each other despite the challenge of distance. Pilar Griffith is starting a "cyber quiet time group" and plans to work on a manual on "how to start a team" using her own context of Costa Rica as a pilot. Another group plans to work on ideas on how to build bridges of trust between generations in IofC and to support transitions to younger leadership.
We are also looking at how to make existing resources more widely available. Some Colombian friends are expressing ideas to translate my book Trustbuilding into Spanish.
I was particularly interested in a group that discussed ideas to align business models with social and spiritual change. The goal would be to develop values-based businesses that provide goods or services that generate income to support IofC workers.
Of course the "elephant in the room" at such meetings is the US-Latin America relationship. As I noted in a previous blog, this gathering was notably free of recrimination. However, Rodrigo Martinez Romero from Mexico and I and others have agreed to start a working group dedicated to seeking ways, in partnership with other organizations, to heal the relationship and build new partnerships for the future.
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