The background presented in key words: Racial charges and counter charges; a new and growing racial war; the thinking of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and black theologian Howard Thurman; race discrimination and diminishment can whip up an incredible amount of continuous stress; good education programs, by and large, can and do help relieve racial stresses; thinking outside the box when creating community programs on what still today is an often covert reality; still another chance to bring race into the open; difficult issues.

One plausible model of how to conduct
the difficult conversation on race

The local and national conversation on race continues. Last February 10 [2008] at the Oak Park Public Library saw eight local mediating and educational institutions (list below) and 75-plus individuals come together to try a newer dialogue paradigm for grappling with the complex issues of race and racialized thinking. The two main questions  were (1) “How to create a more successful racially diverse community?” and (2) “What else must we do?” The dialogue focused on ways to generate greater fairness, equity, and inclusiveness, especially in areas of education, housing and improved human relations.

Here are the list of seven presenters and the closing remarks of Rickey Sain, Sr., executive director, Resources Unlimited Foundation, an education institute in civic engagement.

Chronological order of presentations

Moderator: Denise Rose, Ph.D., sociology professor, Elmhurst College

Carl Spight, Ph.D., institutional researcher, Oak Park-River Forest High School

Michelle Harton, president, board of School District 97, founder-director of the Math Academy

Ralph Lee, Ph.D., board member, School District 200, from which he retired as science instructor

Rob Breymaier, executive director, Oak Park Regional Housing Center

George Bailey, Ph.D., faculty member, Columbia College Chicago, director of the AMENS group of mentors serving at-risk black youth

John Williams, M.Ed., director of youth services, Oak Park and River Forest Townships

Rickey Sain, Sr., executive director, Resources Unlimited

The race enterprise: Bringing more understanding and coherence

—Rickey Sain, Sr.

“I am different from you, you are different from me, but there is dialogue and respect. We keep speaking in order to remain not altogether silent.” Paulo Freire, educationist, Pedagogy of the City (1993).

INTRODUCTION. We seem all to be part of a continuing dialogue, both national and local, involving a spectrum—a rainbow—of perspectives on race and racism. Thank you to Oak Park Public Library, moderator Denise Rose, to the six presenters who came before me, and to those here in attendance who will participate in the dialogue which follows my remarks.

I’m something of a “public theologian” who happens, proudly, to be black. Much more important perhaps, I am a humanist administrator of a nonprofit, an educator and a public health specialist, a preacher, an ordained minister, and a published writer of articles and essays on both secular and religious affairs, including public testimony and reviews in a variety of venues.

Here today in particular I am the last speaker and public testimonialist. In his passionate chronicle of black church practices, titled My Soul Looks Back (1986), systematic theologian James H. Cone says: “Testimony is an integral part of black religious tradition.”  Currently, constructive theologian Dwight N. Hopkins explains the how and whys of powerful storytelling based in hope, in his study Changing Conversations: Religious Reflection and Cultural Analysis (1996).

In this space here I am, of course, a fully engaged citizen of a certain town and place—clearly Oak Park in this instance. We residents have a long-approved tradition of what I call Thick Diversity, meaning that we frequently work hard to engage a rich civic practice of crossing boundaries to get to know each other better. We value the gifts we offer each other in building mutual ownership of community.  We are not—just by looking at us empirically—more of the same. We are different.

I have served on a handful of civic commissions, boards, and task forces, generally focused on issues concerning an improved quality of community life.  Among the assignments in the last decade are included two consecutive terms of elected service on the Board of Health, as well as contributing to the Vision 2000 task force and the Regional Exchange Congress, and six years ago writing a final draft research report, one based on service rendered to the Commitment to Diversity Task Force Community Life Committee. The service included conducting and then promulgating results of a research survey from 67 on-the-street random interviews in 2001, concerning race and other community life challenges.

In the last 15 years my organization has also addressed critical issues of local community vitality and public health, including life-threatening diseases, as well as housing, education, and civic life. Most recently, we felt privileged six months ago in August to promulgate and disseminate 22 Strategic Actions to Improve Education—recommendations to the administrations of School District 97 and School District 200.

Importantly the dissemination effort included teachers at all levels, as well as still other invested stakeholders. The recommendations center on ways to undertake any of several imaginative and specific planning and educational initiatives. The recommendations are based on the principle of provoking dialogue to produce change—a core mission of my organization. The recommendations are part of collective efforts to help ensure a future based on improved frameworks of human valuing.

The efforts are surely complex (and complicated!). Through hard work and compromise, the efforts are intended to achieve higher-quality education. In the process are always the inevitable incongruities and ambiguities. “Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself,” is an apropos truism from Rita Mae Brown, 64, a prolific American writer active in the American civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the gay liberation movement, and the feminist movement.

THE ISSUE. Clearly I am here with gifted presenters and an attentive audience. I’m here largely because of what has transpired collectively over the last decade in the numerous conversations, formal and informal, on racialized attitudes. Now in this most recent discussion today, we are here because of the difficult ideas for action, examined in Denise Rose’s sociological dissertation on integrated community, interracial families, black-white relationships.

In that time much good has happened with individuals and institutions; more remains to be done certainly as we continue—in this gathering itself and elsewhere—to generate more racial inclusiveness, greater equity, improved parity, increased thoughtfulness.

You have heard this afternoon from the other presenters. In general we seem to have been grouped into five fairly natural perspectives. Including mine, the points of focus have in common favoring the use of civility to solve common concerns in housing, public community health, and education:

Five perspectives in the discussion

1. Leadership that legitimately wonders who in the system is or is not to be blamed, who is or is not at fault, who has or has not been let off the hook in the mess. Who gets the credit and who gets the blame has been an underlying concern.

2. The presentations have offered some comfort in communicating the details, some specifics. They tell what’s happened, what’s been tried, what has failed or succeeded against some adopted measuring standard, and especially tell of ways to solve or improve something immediate or short-term, something that might be dragging us down.

3. We have heard about “The Process.”  So we naturally wonder and ask, "How should this problem be handled or issue be addressed?” Must there be a new sequence of events, a continuing sequence whose objective is greater clarity and therefore greater understanding of policies and the following of procedures? What can we use from the past in living a better present into an improved future?

4. We have heard about the importance and critical value in more and better communication. Who is to be the object of the communication? How are we to talk to each other if there is to be some betterment? Reaching out in improved communication by listening to all invested constituencies is a form of reaching out in better care for, and with, each other.

5. We have heard larger contextual talk of slowing down and stepping back a bit, this in order to get a better grip on how things ended up the way they did, given human frailty and the inevitable failures and successes in any system.

AMPLIFICATION OF THE ISSUE. There is good news (and inevitable limitations) in each of the five approaches summarized. The perspectives—including likely the ideas and insights to come shortly during the open dialogue period—all help shape and inform still other re­sponses from us. Each perspective is by no means exhaustive. Each offers some clearer truth.

Each perspective is based on thoughts and activities formed by our own experiences and personalities, and formed as well by our uniquely gifted contributions here. At least we keep the conversation going. This is a welcome gift, no matter the constraints and challenging opportunities realistically before us when we confront—as a gift of mutual learning and discovery—issues of inferiority and superiority, issues of who exactly is “less than” and “more than.”

My educational and civic work in the last 30 years has included listening to and adopting one or more of the perspectives, typically. I am doing that kind of listening here today. All approaches and perspectives depend on what we think is needed, and on our willingness and determination to bring more understanding and coherence to the enterprise. That’s what complexity looks like, for ill or good ultimately, in nearly all worthwhile projects of community development education.

A SOLUTION. Stands to reason that we have to decide what piece (or pieces) of the complexity to work with.

If anything, we are a vibrant, sometimes scintillating, and typically engaged and therefore very complicated grouping of thinkers and doers. Our being together is part of the town’s long tradition of discourse and conversation on so many issues of controversy and ferment. Now and into the future of the subject for today, others will be part of the dialogue tradition also.

In most instances the goal is to create and to advance something new and better. Newspapers and blogs are but two important communications instruments that give a greater feel for and understanding of the realities. I claim here a love of and for the life of the mind, one of the things education at its modest yet entrepreneurial best looks like as a norm.

Among many things, my education tells me that inequality, oppression, bias, and the struggle for unity amid difference are the rugged realities that frequently compete and fight with the profound social justice ideals of a democratic nation. Social justice to me means right relationships.

What is social justice? Social justice is right relationship in action. We do what we can, mindful that if you have to be perfect to lead, then none of us can lead. But shared leadership for change, a democratic principle of civic life, means sharing the workload with a goodly range of goodly people. Is there any other way?

The human spirit is a great force for change through shared leadership and—important to say in troubled times—equally shared sacrifice. To all of that haven’t we all pretty much offered a commiserating word of comfort like, “It ain’t easy, if you know what I mean.” 

In the struggle life is still often parceled out unequally. Community is sometimes defined by alienation and division. Some empathy is in order surely—if ironically it happens that personal identity may sometimes have less and less to do with the integrity of individual personality, or with the unalienable sacredness of personhood.

A RESOLUTION. One answer is to work at cultivating an improved sense of thinking globally while acting locally. What does acting locally look like in practical terms? Simply put, I myself must name and claim my racialistic attitudes by what I say and do at home, at work, in community. I must bring myself to a higher level of “glocal” consciousness about the need to embrace difference openly.

The action of paying attention is a critical ingredient in respecting others and, in turn, my winning their respect.

Ageism, classism, heterosexism, homophobia, sexism, racism, and still other “isms” (including on occasion both “liberalism” and “conservatism”) separate out and sometimes isolate. They are barriers preventing me from engaging people authentically. When all is said and done, acting locally for me means living out the idea that my equality, rights, freedom, belief in cultural pluralism, and desire to build a “more perfect” community are all closer to fulfillment, surely, when I am authentic in each encounter. Truth to tell, that is no small task. Dare we say “enough said”?

Being authentic means, then, that I take personal responsibility for creating the change I seek. If I desire equality, I must be equitable. If I seek freedom, I must free others to be who they are. The talent of reconciliation and compromise requires sacrifice—and is a rigorous discipline. It sometimes asks greater vigor of us, taking the form of calling for more robust thought. We have to look harder in order to see the development of a few of the many sides of a legitimate claim on our attention.

Indeed, if I believe in the democratic value of cultural pluralism, then I must create spaces that are culturally and educationally pluralistic. And finally, if I work to achieve the beloved community, then I must respect the inherent dignity and worth of humankind in the spaces.

Yet I understand that race as used historically and culturally is a social and not a scientific construct. We sometimes choose to engage it, or not. Mostly we have little choice but to engage. For who here hasn’t witnessed, for example, a student marginalized from a rich and unique ethnic heritage to a “Latino student” or an “African-American student?”

We are social beings. Who also hasn’t had to deal, for another example, with black people who assert that white people are generally covert and meretricious in their racialized attitudes toward people of other skin colors?

In hope, we can change or diminish use of the social construct by employing interdisciplinary mechanisms for engaging each other. “Black” is a race, as is “white,” “brown,” “yellow,” etc. Each of us, a unique human being, has a distinctive family history and background…and interests. In so much of our culture—including over a roughly 50-year span in this village—society is constructed around the concept of race as a principle of both inclusion or exclusion.

A question then: Who is doing the excluding and including, and why?

My own experience growing up involved hearing messages about being black—light skinned vs. dark skinned—as well as about particular ways of dealing with or not dealing with whites who were mostly invisible to me until segregation ended in my hometown of Gary, Indiana. Respected commentators and eminent historians, other scholars too, have examined the negative psychological and environmental effects of systemic racism and nuanced habits of racialized thinking.

Like the other educationists here, I have time to offer but one modest way to avoid and lessen the negative effects of race as a social—hardly “scientific”—construal of presumptive inferiority and superiority. This formulation has often been bereft of reasonable equality.

Abundant human-ness is the preferred option in an all-of-us-in-this-together world. To borrow here from eminent pastor, teacher, educator, writer, and theologian Howard Thurman, regarded as one of the quietly influential “spiritual” fathers of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-50s and the 60s. His innovative, powerful ideas of equality through building constructions of compassionate interdependence are—still today—engaged critically by citizens of nearly all callings. Says Dr. Thurman in The Luminous Darkness (1965):

“The burden of being black and the burden of being white is so heavy that it is rare in our society to experience oneself as a human being. It may be, I do not know, that to experience oneself as a human being is one with experiencing one’s fellows as human beings. Precisely what does it mean to experience oneself as a human being?

“In the first place, it means that the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organic kinship that binds him ethnically or “racially” or nationally. He has to feel that he belongs to his total environment. He has a sense of being an essential part of the structural relationship that exists between him and all other [people], and between him, all other [people] and the total external environment.

“As a human being, then, [a person] belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, [one belongs to] a part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a human being then, is to be essentially alive in a living world.”

Thus Dr. Thurman. In the open dialogue period, which follows immediately, I and my colleagues urge you to be alive to—more aware of—the many ways to engage this dynamic dialogue on race and racialized thinking, both now and in the hopeful gatherings planned into 2008 and the longer-term future.

CONCLUSION. So in concluding I ask: What is the difference between these two things:

(1) a discrete act of racism and

(2) racialized thinking that separates out in unfairly biased ways? The stress here in my remarks is on racialized “thinking,” in contradistinction to pointing out random acts of racism that may be misinterpreted uniquely out of a meaningful conceptual or practical context. We know how easily it is for us publicly (sometimes haughtily) to reproach racism in others.

The harder, demanding part perhaps is to place emphasis on examining ways that racism and racialized thinking are often part of the air we breathe every day, often unconsciously. We almost can’t help ourselves sometimes. Thus the dialogue here gratefully opens us up to a broader—therefore more expanded—understanding of the difference between a unique, out of context act of racism and the habit of racialized thinking. Left unchecked, the habit can unfairly isolate and segregate through an undue accumulation of racialized attitudes concerning who is, or isn’t, superior to another.

It’s complicated. All the more reason to continue the vital dialogue. In the idiom of educationist Paulo Freire, we ought to continue the conversation “in order to remain not altogether silent.”

Thank you in deep gratitude and humility for the opportunity to be here and say this. Rickey Sain

(Special thanks to Jim Boushay for assistance in helping organize the presentation.)

Please note that the dialogue on race was a public event, held at a learning institution that receives local, state, and federal tax dollars. Therefore the report here may be quoted or republished in full or in part.