Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference (review)

It is the season of presidential candidate debates as I write, and I have assiduously avoided watching any of them. Walsh’s ethnography of interracial groups talking about race in several Midwestern cities reminds me why. My reason rests on the distinction between two forms of public discourse – dialogue and debate.

Debate produces a particularly sterile and unsatisfying form of public discourse, focused on one-upping others, scoring points and “winning.” It’s all about the horse race, and the content is incidental at best. As an ideal type, dialogue emphasizes listening and understanding others, finding common ground and confronting differences in a civil way. If it also includes reaching a decision, it meets the normative criteria for deliberative democracy. Would that the presidential debates were dialogues, but there seems little chance of this ever happening under our current nominating and media systems.

The dialogues that Walsh observes are structured interpersonal discussions among citizens, some of them including public officials as well, conducted by a trained facilitator. The participants are not a probability sample from any specifiable universe, but Walsh attempts to include a range of cities and groups and the citizen participants are not elites but ordinary people. Her cities vary sharply in median family income and in the disparity of income by race. Finally, she supplements her primary observations with data from semi-structured interviews and available survey data on racial attitudes.

It is unusual for interracial groups to talk about the difficult issues of race. Walsh suggests that the groups sometimes tend to ignore the facilitator’s mantra that this is a dialogue, not a debate. Sometimes they challenge and confront differences, and this produces a deeper level of discussion. But much of her description suggests that this balance that they find between unity and difference, carried on in a face-to-face setting of civility and active listening, really honors the instruction at a deeper level. Taking differences seriously, Walsh’s data strongly suggests, enriches a dialogue beyond what a search for unity and common ground can provide.

The participants can reach easy agreement on the idea that race shouldn’t matter, but black participants often insist that, in reality, it does matter and offer evidence from their own experience. The following example (121) is typical. John, who is white, expresses the idea of color blindness:

Samuel: Can I say something, John? And I don’t mean to be abrasive, but for us blacks, we hear white people say that all the time to us.

Maria (Latina, the facilitator): Say what, Samuel?

Samuel: Say that, ah, “It [race] don’t make a difference – my best friend is black, color don’t mean anything.” We hear that all the time, but in reality it do make a difference.

In some of the cities observed, the dialogue on race had official sponsorship and a number of the group discussions included city officials. Walsh was interested in the extent to which this status difference influenced the discussion, making it into a situation in which officials expounded and citizens listened passively. This didn’t happen. In fact, she found that the differences between public officials and the others tended to become irrelevant and disappear. At their best, these groups produced a dialogue among equals.

Of course, not all of the groups produced a high quality dialogue. Inevitably, in some groups, there were individuals who talked too much, didn’t listen and silenced people who wanted to say about their own experience. But more often than not, they succeeded in approaching the normative ideal for at least part of any given session.

Walsh describes some 400 cities in which non-profit organizations or city governments have been promoting some form of inter-group dialogue similar to the groups she observed in detail. It has become a virtual fad, and she acknowledges that there is good reason to be skeptical as she conscientiously examines counter-arguments...