OK, summer break is over.  Time to get back to work.

My last post was on the verdict in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case.  I’m glad to see that the case and the larger issues it brings up haven’t been pushed by the wayside.  I was happy to hear both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder speak so eloquently about their own experiences as black men in America.  As is usually the case, hearing real stories about people we know or feel we know is vastly more affecting and illuminating than generalities about nameless, faceless masses.  

Unless you’ve got issues with the issues or simply hate the President and the Attorney General, that is.  In that case, you won’t take time to learn anything on your way to the land of anger and indignation.  Typically, the loudest voices on the conservative side began denouncing both men as if they’d stood before seething mobs holding AK-47s over their heads and screaming “Death to whitey!”

As the calls for us to have “A Conversation About Race” began to multiply, it was the calm, measured, heartfelt words of both President Obama and Mr. Holder that made me think we really might be able to make some progress.  Their comments also helped make it clear that that most of the progress won’t come from big institutional (i.e., forced) exchanges like the various trainings and workshops many of us have been subjected to in order to increase our sensitivity.  It’s going to come from a million and one little, casual conversations.  No capital letters.  No announcements that “Now we’re going to talk about race.”  No structure.  They’ll be two or three people having coffee when one feels free to ask a question or make a comment and the others answer or explain their point of view.

Of course getting that multi-racial coffee klatch to take place is the first big step.  We all have a tendency to hang out with people that make us feel comfortable and usually those people look a lot like we do.  I don’t have a great idea of how to get that process in motion.  Seeking out new friends specifically for their color seems almost as insulting as avoiding them because of it.  It may be that the approach is the same as what we singles get to find people to date:  join clubs, take classes and then talk to a variety of people while you’re there.  A mutual interest in pasta-making is as good a start as any.

I’m more and more a proponent of the one-on-one/small group approach because it helps avoid an underlying obstacle that I rarely hear anyone talk about – the simple fact that no thinks he’s the bad guy and no one wants to be told he’s the bad guy.  Even Ariel Castro, who kept and abused three women in his Cleveland basement for a decade, protested this week that he is not a monster.

The problem is that white folk are inherently the bad guys in this situation.  And the weakness of big discussions is that they always seem to devolve into litanies of the evils whites have visited upon everyone else.  It’s important to have a sense of that history, but I don’t know that it’s constructive to cover every last detail.  People will start shutting down out of natural self-preservation.  I attended a training in which an entire day was spent on setting up historical context – which means story after story after story about terrible things whites had done to African-Americans and Native Americans and Asians.  By the end of the day I was left with the sense that I, my whole family and all of my ancestors were evil at base, that we were irredeemable and that there was no way to solve the race problem in America.  See?  Too much.  All we really needed for that training was a handful of vivid, well-documented examples and some really strong follow up.

I know going forward that there will be conversations both big and small and I hope both move us to a better place.  I also know that most of them will be as imperfect as this post, if not more so.  We just have to keep trying.