Working Paper 94-18, February, 1994.
By Lerita Coleman, Silke Hansen, Karen Raforth, and David Young
This panel was part of the Intractable Conflict/Constructive Confrontation Project Conference held on November 6, 1993. Funding for this Project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the University of Colorado. All ideas presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Consortium, the University, or Hewlett Foundation. For more information, contact the Conflict Resolution Consortium, Campus Box 327, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0327. Phone: (303) 492-1635, e-mail: crc@cubldr.colorado.edu.
© 1994. Conflict Resolution Consortium. Do not reprint without permission.
The following paper is an edited transcript of a discussion about the constructive confrontation of group differences, which followed four formal presentations on the same topic. The full text of these presentations is available as Consortium Working Papers 94-10 ("Confronting Group Differences and Commonalities in a Diverse Society," by Silke Hansen), 94-11: ("Gringismo: State of Conflict," by David Young), 94-12 ("Confronting the -isms," by Karen Raforth), and 94-13 ("Multiculturalism in University Research and Teaching," by Lerita Coleman).
In their presentations, panelists addressed the nature of intergroup conflict, and considered how these conflicts can be lessened. Silke Hansen, a mediator with the Department of Justice Community Relations Service, described her work in Los Angeles following the first, and preceding the second, Rodney King verdicts. She described both the impediments and the necessary ingredients for diverse groups to work together. Karen Raforth discussed her work as a university counselor, trainer, and consultant on all of the "-isms." In a wide-ranging presentation, Raforth described a systems approach to the "-isms," explaining how many processes and differences all interact to create a very complicated system. Noticing, listening, learning, and understanding were several key factors for overcoming these conflicts, according to Raforth's experience.
Lerita Coleman, a Professor of Psychology at CU-Boulder, described her research on the stigmatization process, as well as the debate within academia about multiculturalism, especially as it relates to curriculum definition. Multicultural conflicts do not need to be intractable, Coleman suggested, if people could stop equating "difference with deficit." This tendency is at the heart of inter-group conflict, as is the fear of difference and the fear of change.
Finally, David Young spoke of his experience as a Chicano and gay rights activist. Young attacked what he called "gringismo," a lifestyle and psychological mindset that, among other things, assumes that whites are always right, and people of color are always wrong. Unlike other civil rights leaders, Young said, his objective is not peace, but justice. Peace will happen when justice prevails--a justice that does not deny someone an opportunity simply because they are differen.
The discussion followed Young's talk, and started with a question directed at Young, referring to a statement he made about Chicanos having to defend themselves because the white police will not keep them safe.
Audience member: Would you use a weapon to defend yourself if you were attacked?
David Young: I am not a violent person. But if I am threatened, I will defend myself. I am a great speaker and my weapons are words. I can usually resolve anything. And I try to avoid threatening situations. If I look down the street and see a gang of white boys, I avoid them; I don't provoke them. I have never had to pull a weapon.
Just in the last couple of days, the government passed a bill for billions of dollars to put more police on the streets and to fight crime. Our governor recently helped pass a law that makes it illegal for kids to carry guns. That is not the problem. The problem is not even anywhere near that. Hate goes beneath the dollars.
Develop jobs in the community. Let's put some of those "gang members," some of those kids of color, into jobs that pay good money. I am not talking $4.20/hr.; I am talking really pay them. Teach them. Train them. They will put those guns away because they will have something else to do. That is where the answer lies. But, America doesn't want to change the economy of people of color, because if we change the economy and we give them a better education and give them more money, then suddenly we have changed the way our system works. People of color will start to gain some sense of power. Our country doesn't want that. In spite of what it says, it does not want that.
Moderator (Guy Burgess): How we can put together a diverse community that can deal with differences, deal with centuries of inequity for people of color, but be something different than a simple exchange of elites? Some of us in conflict resolution make a distinction between "forcing power" and "persuasive power." People don't like getting forced to things. They might submit, but they won't like it and you better never turn your back. They will be plotting against you, trying to figure out how can they get more power than you have the next time around.
Now you can have a society where you have this sort of cycling of power. The way that we "gringos" respond to that is to use peace through strength. We use our power to force everyone else to submit. To get out of that system, you have to use persuasive power, rather than forcing power. You need to persuade people to change their behavior because they want to--because they have come to understand that their old behavior is wrong or ineffective, and another behavior is better. That is the kind of change that can be stable and work over the long term. How would you try to persuade the "gringo" to try to change things?
Young: I will propose something to you. Say we lived in a neighborhood, and I lived in a house that was nicer than your house. You liked my house and you came over and stole all I owned--you took my house, you burned it down. Then you just went back to your house, having taken my goods and having destroyed my house. I know it is you that has done this to my house, and you know that I know it's you. How will we ever reach a point of reconciliation?
Burgess: Well, there are victim-offender mediation programs, where you actually get victims and offenders together to negotiate some sort of restitution. Now the success of these programs depends on the power of the justice system, which is admittedly suspect, and has all sorts of inequities built into it. But, at the core of it has to be some sense of what justice is.
Another thing that we talk about is what we call the "justice mirage." Everyone defines "justice" differently. If the pre-condition for peace is going to be justice, you will never get everybody to agree on what it is, so where does that lead? An underlying principle of this project is that we have to learn how to confront one another and to confront injustice, but to do it in a nonviolent way that doesn't breed hatred and escalation.
Young: But that is not really ours to grope with. What really has to happen between you and me, is that I have to decide how I can best be compensated for what has happened. How are you going to pay me back for all that I have lost? How can we negotiate that? After we negotiate that, then we can talk about how we can live better in that neighborhood of ours without this problem.
See, that is just you and me. Now let's translate that to this country. This government operates on a piece of land that is stolen. Some people need to be compensated for that. And this isn't the only place that it happens. It is going on in Israel. This is going on in Ireland. This is going on in Bosnia and areas like that.
We have xenophobia. When a stranger comes into a community, the community begins to reject them, right away. But when that stranger not only comes, but also takes over, and suddenly he is the oppressor, then some real resolution has to come about. I don't know if we will ever necessarily reach that kind of utopia, where that resolution lasts.
Lerita Coleman: You are not suggesting that this is just happening in the gringo/white community? Historically, it has happened all over the world. That is not taking any responsibility from anybody involved, but the model that you give is characteristic of most societies over time.
Silke Hansen: I realize that in the current context, being with the Justice Department makes me somewhat vulnerable. Nevertheless, in looking at potential solutions, one of the problems that many of us have is that once we think we have the answer, we try to get others to follow it. We tend to think "if only they understood this, then every thing would be different." Or we go into a community and we say "if they would only do such and such, then they would have peace here."
As you [Young] were talking about Los Angeles, you gave the impression that there were certain solutions that we [the Justice Department] were trying to bring about there, or certain things that we were trying to get communities of color, as well as gringo communities, to do. But there wasn't any given agenda. Our primary focus, quite frankly, was just to get people to listen to each other. The bridges that we are talking about cannot even begin to be built until people listen to themselves and listen to each other. It doesn't help them to just hear me talk about other groups, or for me to try to tell anyone what they ought to do, or what someone else is doing. Rather there has to be real listening within the communities themselves.
You also have to deal with the issue of power. It doesn't work to have the "great white father" or mother come in and tell people how to solve their problems. It doesn't work that way. Unless you can look at the power issue and get communities to feel that they have the power to create change themselves, in their own way, it can't work. It doesn't work if people give their power away and hope that someone else will solve the problem for them. If you do that, you aren't going to get anywhere.
We are always looking for models. We are always looking for demonstrations of communities elsewhere that have grappled with these problems successfully--that have really been doing some collaborative problem solving to deal with some of these issues.
Young: You know what the best model is or one of the best? It is the model that our whole constitution is based on.
Hansen: The Iroquois.
Young: The Iroquois, you're absolutely right. Our constitution, contrary to what you believe, did not come from England. There was no model for democracy in the world at the time that our Constitution was written. It came from the Iroquois. The Iroquois had their own confederation all set up. That isn't to say they didn't have problems, because they did. But they developed a model that was effective in helping people get along a little better and it brought about peace. That is a model that we could use if we wanted to delve deeper into the question of how we can help societies get along a little better in this country.
Coleman: Part of the problem, however, is that we have a lot of people--here in the United States particularly-- that think that this is it, that we know best for everybody in the world. It is a vision that is very myopic, arrogant, and really problematic, because we have certainly had lots of cultures that have been in existence a hundred times longer than this one that we could be learning from. But, instead, we think we know what is best for everybody. That is really something that is symbolic in our culture, but it also determines how we act interpersonally. You will see somebody and you will be sitting there thinking, "If they only looked this way, and if they could get their hair to be different, and if they had on this other color, and if they said it this way. . ." We constantly think, "If I were in their place," or "If I could tell them what to do." The tendency to do this is very deeply embedded in our culture--it determines how we operate with people and particularly with people who are different. If somebody is different then we say, "Well, let me see how I can make them more similar," as opposed to saying "let me embrace this difference and see what I can learn from it."
Karen Raforth: Or at least people need to have the desire to ask, "If it is different, is it better or it is worse?" It is almost impossible to say difference is just difference. We always have to evaluate. Is it a better difference or is it a worse difference? Should I be more like that because they are different or should I be less like that? The answer is none of the above.
Audience member: I see one of the biggest problems in multiculturalism is that people have to give up a sense of self. We are all raised to have certain core beliefs and some of those beliefs are not compatible with the beliefs of others. We have to examine our own beliefs, and decide what we want to keep and what we can change. It is a really interesting conflict to me, and something that I have been trying to grapple with personally. How do you give up something that you believe in so strongly, to be able to work with other people that may have other beliefs that they hold as truths?
Coleman: Can I back up for a second? Did you say initially that you thought that people need to give up themselves in multicultural settings? What do you mean by that?
Audience member: If you are raised to believe in a certain things. For example, you may believe that heterosexual sex is the only acceptable kind of sex, or have certain religious beliefs. You have certain core values and other may people have different core values that don't agree with yours.
Coleman: OK. But it sounds as if what you are saying is that you are giving up your self, but maybe you don't know what that is yet. What you may be giving up is some artificial construction about your self, or what it is you think you believe to be your self. A lot of times what happens is that we have an unreflected-upon self. That is, someone has told us, "This is what you ought to believe." You have accepted those beliefs, taken them for granted, and never questioned whether or not they make any sense for you or anybody else. We need to begin to think about those beliefs, figure out where we got them, and decide whether or not they are appropriate for us. Sometimes, in my work, I think that the self is just layers of construction. Some we have abandoned, some are our own. But, most layers are usually stem from other people's--stuff that people dump on you: "You are an African American, therefore, you must be like this." But, you do have the opportunity to say, "Excuse me, no. That is not me and that is not what being an African American woman means to me." There are myriad layers that you can get rid of. But for the most part, people don't think. They don't think about these things that people have told them, and they act as if it what they have been told is "truth."
Young: It is important to realize that we all have prejudices, and that is OK. Today I put on this sweater; I wore pants instead of a skirt. We make decisions every day. It is a problem only when we deny people opportunities because they are different. The problem is not having prejudices. Some people are prejudiced against gay people. That's OK. They have prejudices against black hair or whatever. That is OK. That is not the problem. The problem is denying people the opportunity that you might give to anybody else, simply because they are different.
Coleman: But I don't think a lot of people even realize that the prejudice is there. They are operating on an automatic notion that this is the way things are, as opposed to saying, "Wait a minute. It doesn't have to be like this." You really don't have to act on the bias or the prejudice.
Audience member: I want to talk to you [Lerita] about the word "stigma." I represent people with disabilities. I think that we are by far the most oppressed people. If we are looking for an answer, we really need to look at why are we stigmatized. What are people doing when they are sitting in judgment of someone else? What are their values, and how is that going to affect us?
Coleman: Stigma is a very active term. The work that I focus on is destigmatization or the "undoing of stigm." We don't do much research on people who feel stigmatized. It is really important to understand, too, how to cycle out of that process and not feel stigmatized when someone is attempting to stigmatize you.
Audience member: When you were talking about the house burning down, that image really stayed with me. You asked--and I too ask--how can we reconcile that? What would reconciliation look like? Because I suppose, in my way, by just being a white person, every day I am doing damage, not in my heart, but simply because I participate in this society. I am not sure how not to do the damage, or how to stop doing the damage. I am trying to learn what that would be. Whether or not I believe that I burnt your house down, if I unlock the door between you and me, there has to be something reciprocal. I can't build the bridge myself. If I get to the other end and you say, "Go away," reconciliation won't happen. There has to be willingness coming from the other end, too. I picture a ceremony in which I would participate in a kind of grieving process over the fact that the house burned down, whether I believe I had anything to do with the house burning down or not. What is important is your perception that the house burned, and you have no home. I can build a bridge by saying, "Yes the house is gone. What can we do to start to grieve the loss of the house and build another house?"
Young: Yes, I understand. One example comes to mind that the government did. We all are aware of the fact that Japanese Americans were incarcerated in concentration camps in the United States during World War II. In fact, there was one here in Colorado. Fifty years later, the government said, "OK. We will compensate any survivors by giving you so many thousands of dollars." Now that really doesn't compensate for all they went through and all they lost. It really doesn't. But in a sense, it is an act of saying, "We acknowledge that we were wrong. We are willing to do what we can to build bridges." It is the act, not the money. Because if you burn someone's house down, you can't fix that. It is gone. But, if you can say (and I am using a real absurd example here), "Here is a million dollars to rebuild your house." Some kind of compensation and acknowledgment is very important.
Audience member: How do I compensate if I have no money?
Young: I don't think you can do it individually. The whole country has to do it. The country has to compensate for some of the things that have happened in our history by saying, "OK, there were some wrongs in history, so let's try to do what we can to make them right." It's not just about forgiveness and let's move on. It's about, let's try to make them right and then let's move forward. This is true for many, many different groups.
Raforth: I find the image of the burning house very powerful, too. I don't think it is irrelevant whether I did it or not, because we can't leave out the trust element--you don't think you did it, and David does. He is not going to trust you to not come back and burn the next house that he builds. That is a very hard issue. A lot white people who I work with will say, "I never did this" or "I never owned any land." This attitude does not acknowledge the continuing process of oppression and privilege. Acknowledging the past (as a white person) is like realizing that you are able to go back to your home, where it is nice and warm, while David doesn't even have a house. When you don't acknowledge that, it is like saying to David, "That's too bad that your house is gone, but I can't build you a new house."