University Place

Race & Public Discourse in Progressive Cities

– I think we all agree that one of Madison’s and society’s more complicated topics is racism. Racism takes many forms, including both individual implicit biases we harbor inside us, but also systemic institutional embedded racism. Even in what we feel is a progressive community like Madison with a long history of civil rights, public dialogue and media coverage of racial inequality can often be strained. Our speaker today has studied these issues and is passionate about analyzing the obstacles to open public discourse to help us move forward as a society. Dr. Sue Robinson is the Helen Firstbrook Franklin professor of journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications here in UW-Madison. She joined the faculty in 2007 after a 13-year career as a journalist throughout New England and New Jersey where she covered fish, cows, nuclear power, and state economics as a business reporter. It’s kind of a wide variety there. Now she teaches classes in journalism theory, multimedia, social media, qualitative methods, and reporting and she’s loved by her students, I can attest to that. She’s the author of her 2018 book called Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities. And that was published by Cambridge University Press. The book examines how we talk about race in public spaces like journalism in Madison and other progressive cities across the United States. Using data from her book she works with newsrooms and professional communicators, like superintendents of schools, to facilitate conversations about racial disparities in more productive ways. She also holds dear the Wisconsin Idea and works to enact the spirit in all areas of her life. Please welcome Sue Robinson. (audience applauding)

– Hi everyone. First, I’d like to just acknowledge that I’m speaking today on the land of the Ho-Chunk Nation before I start my little talk. So I’m going to do kind of a cross between a talk about behind the book and a reading, pretty much. So, I want to just sort of set the scene for you. The year that I started this book was 2010 and at that time Madison was a very media-saturated city. It had four regular news organizations. It had a bunch of different magazines. It has a bunch of different bloggers. It had a really healthy alternative and ethnic media presence, and everybody was on social media. At that time it was particularly Facebook. So… hopefully this works here. OK, so I was a journalist who turned into a journalism professor and I came here and my expertise is on digital technologies and how they inform how information flows in local communities, so that was my expertise. So that’s really what I wanted to kind of find out in this book was how social media platforms are reconstituting those flows. So I’d heard about this charter school called Madison Prep that was going to be educating Black boys and girls and that it was coming down the pipe. And it was being proposed by the Urban League of Greater Madison, and particularly this guy, Kaleem Caire.

It immediately ignited a whole lot of discussion, especially mediated discussion. So we first spent a summer kind of cataloging, right, all of those different platforms that were going to be talking about this topic, which was the K through 12 schools and particularly race within those schools. And so that’s what we did, but then it was like, OK, now what do we do now? I was really interested in looking at power and how power and privilege influenced those flows. Like whose voices were absent, whose voices were present, and of those voices who were present who was being listened to and who was being ignored? So from a researcher’s perspective this is a super exciting research opportunity for me. And it seemed like a pretty straightforward task at the time. (chuckles) All right, so I’ll start right from the beginning so you can– this is the very beginning of the book. When Kaleem Caire arrived back at his hometown of Madison, Wisconsin in 2010 after working with President Obama on the Race to the Top education plan, he found a community little changed from the one he left years prior, at least in terms of the opportunities available to people of color. He, his wife, and his five children were African American. Yet, there in that mid-sized college-dominated city the achievement disparities between White, Black, and brown people were some of the worst in the United States. African American and Latino students trailed their White counterparts at all education levels. In areas such as reading test scores one in every two Black males in Madison were failing to graduate high school in four years compared to a graduation rate of 88% for White students.

The situation seemed to get worse every year as more and more African Americans and Hispanics and other minorities enrolled in the local schools to the point where now the minority students comprise a majority of the Madison School District. The thought of raising his kids in that environment dismayed the new head of the Urban League. And, he was ready to effect change in a real way. While he was away, people had been working on the problem, of course, right? Committees had been formed, a lot of committees. Reports had been written, but political stalemate, financial uncertainty, inertia, and an unwillingness to direct resources away from other student groups for 20% of the student population at that time stymied any major solutions from being implemented. So Caire rolled up his sleeves and got to work. In September 2011 Kaleem Caire won a planning grant to develop a publicly-funded charter school called Madison Prep Academy that would educate Black and Latino boys in grades six through 12. After much research, Caire had landed on what he considered to be the best alternative to the public schools. He’d researched charter schools all across the country. The students would wear uniforms. They would attend school for longer hours. They’d participate in summer learning activities. It was going to cost the district an additional four million dollars over the course of five years. That number fluctuated quite a bit. It wasn’t perfect, but Caire thought it was a stab at something, an experiment in a place that seemed to him to be badly in need of new ideas. Caire needed the approval of the 2011 Board of Education, which was made up of White, older progressives with the exception of one Black male at that time. The BOE represented Madison voters, which are mostly White, but not Madison kids, now a majority minority, and had historically strong connection to the local teacher’s union.

He also knew he needed the community of Madison behind him. The capital city of nearly 250,000 skewed liberal. Indeed, it liked to brag about itself as the birthplace of the Progressive Party. Madison regularly appeared on best city lists for its friendly community and its bike paths and its dog parks. Its White citizens imagined themselves to be community-oriented, volunteered in their kids’ schools, gave money to charity. And if White people did not encounter many people of color during their commute to the university or the law offices of the capitol, they enjoyed hearing several languages spoken, and many considered themselves colorblind. And these White residents were well off with an average household income of 61,000. And Madison also ranks as the highest concentration of PhDs in the country. Yet Madison, like many places in the world harbor implicit biases and enacted institutionally racist policies. Cops picked up Black teens at a rate six times that of White teens, employers passed over Black applicants such that the unemployment rate for Black people was 25.2% compared to just 4.8% for White people in 2011. Even the schools were disciplining, at that time, Black children more harshly and frequently than the White kids with a suspension ratio of 15 to one. And though many White people in town would bristle at the idea that such an intellectually progressive place could harbor such racial problems, the Black people I talked to for this book without exception described a segregated city where hostile environments were the norm for people of color. Caire knew he had an uphill battle, not only in behind-the-scenes negotiating with school officials, but also in the public realm.

He knew he’d encounter resistance and suspicion and defensiveness. He just wanted people to stay in the room to hear him out. So on one level this book documents the story of Mr. Caire and his Prep and the aftermath as it unfolded in the public sphere. This book goes to about 2016. As a White liberal professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, I had a front row seat to the onslaught of vitriolic commentary and the stilted debate that occurred in the news media on Facebook, on Twitter, and the blogosphere. I read all of Caire’s public Facebook, Twitter, all his blog posts, his YouTube channel. (chuckles) And everything actually that we could collect. We had a bunch of different meta crawlers that caught all this content for us. And I became intrigued at the ineffective communicative patterns that I saw, and especially how important voices in this discussion about the achievement gaps were ignored, suppressed, or completely absent. I began documenting how the community information circulated on the issue via different media, social, traditional, and otherwise. And I was particularly interested in the quality of the material that was flowing so quickly, so voluminously and wondered, how can public content about significant racial issues reflect inclusive, credible, meaningful information that could create healthier deliberation? I began looking at other similar microcosms like Madison; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Evanston, Illinois; Chapel Hill; North Carolina and Ann Arbor, Michigan. They were all close to major universities. They all had giant racial achievement disparities, and they were all committed to resolving them, right, just like Madison is. And all of them were hyper-liberal, even progressive, and yet had difficulty navigating the tricky discourses around race. And all of them, I and my research team found intense ongoing public dialogues about the gaps between White people and Black and Brown people combined with frustration and confusion about why things had not improved much.

There was a lot of defensiveness and a keen desire to do better. And in all of them we found excellent, well-meaning journalists whose coverage of disparities consistently failed to meet the expectations and hopes of many in those supporting marginalized communities. And in all of them we found community leaders, activists, would-be politicians writing in blogs and Facebook to bypass media and posts that often ignited healthy debates even as they also advanced the political careers for those ensconced in the dominant White progressive hegemony shifted power networks and helped amplify conversations that had once been private. This book explores how we can improve public dialogues about race in liberal cities that should be better at such conversations. OK, so I had known that this was going to be a really intense and substantial project with a lot of different moving parts, and I knew I was going to have to bone up on a lot of areas of research that I didn’t know about like all of these, education, policy, and race and media and all this, and so I dug down into my reporter roots and also my social scientist roots and got started. So I figured I was going to do in-depth interviews and I was going to do focus groups and I was going to get everybody to talk to me about what was going on and then nobody showed up. So when I tried to get Black and Brown parents to my focus groups to talk about what they were seeing in the schools, I got nothin’ right? And so I asked Dr. Reverend Alex Gee, you probably know him. He’s a prominent African American community leader in town to let me put my request on his Facebook page to try to get more parents and he was like, no. (audience laughing)

He’s like, you haven’t built trust with me. You haven’t built trust in them, why should I? I don’t know where you’re coming from. You’re a White academic. All right, so I’ve listened to that transcript over and over again, and I cringe every time I listen to it at the defensiveness in my voice. And I was obviously very frustrated, right, ’cause it seemed to me that people were complaining about being excluded, and here I was trying to include them, right? And I had trouble also seeing what some community members were telling me was racist. Like the headlines of my local media, most of which were being written by my friends and those school policies that I supported particularly ’cause my kids go to those schools. I thought they were wonderful. And they were all being picked apart by my participants, and I wasn’t always clear why, right. And I was beginning to understand that this was going to be a lot more complicated than most of my other projects had been. So I’ll just read a little part about myself and this reflexivity that this book also has in it. vernment safety nets such as welfare programs, Social Security, and other programs, and informing institutions to make them more democratic, you get the gist, right? I’ve long considered myself racially aware and knew enough to know that we were not in a post-racial America, however, as a White person who grew up in a tiny seacoast town with very few people of color I had little experience talking about race in college, and I interacted with very few people whose skin looked different than mine.

Until I embarked on this book, my White privilege occupied all of me with nary an awareness of its presence. This venture parallels my own racial journey as I moved beyond the recognition of my White privilege and sank into what my racial stake meant for my research. Peppered with personal memoir, the book at hand relates my uncomfortable experiences during interviews as reflective of the paths these progressive cities will have to take to better facilitate conversations around race. And from the first awkward conversation where I was called out for failing to build trust to the final interviews where my connection with informants merely highlighted how long my own journey will be, a strong reflexivity informs this work. I contended with my stubborn conceptions regarding proper engagement in an interview, for example, and the dominating role of researchers in focus groups. And even as I interviewed Mr. Caire and others about their charter school I felt conflicted about the idea of such a venture and was sympathetic, but not convinced to the arguments and opposition. And I struggled in other words with the very power dynamics and identify confliction that I uncover and interrogate in these communities. So it quickly became clear to me that in addition to my regular methodologies that I needed to subject myself to some pretty intense training, not only in ed policy and network analyses, but also in race relations. And then I needed to get involved in a way that I had always shied away from as a journalist and then as a social scientist.

So when I talk about my journey here, I’m talking about reading and training in social justice, researching my own family. Researching my own work as a reporter. Going to conferences, auditing classes, doing workshops, volunteering around town in places where I could see what was happening and what was not happening. And most importantly, I am talking about listening. And in this process my perspective and with it my mindset, all my paradigms, my social circle and my approach to teaching and research and my entire life transformed. In all I spent seven years researching and writing this book with some 17 students who helped me at various stages along the way. We talked to 120 people in in-depth interviews, often several times, and we analyzed about 6,000 pieces of content like news articles and blog posts and social media threads. And we did end up conducting several focus groups. Actually a few weeks after I’d asked Reverend Gee to put my request on his Facebook he called me and he said that he had been in commune with God and that they decided I was on the right path and he was going to help me out and I was like, “Oh, thank you, God, woo!” That was great. So that happened, and then we also scaled the project as I read to these other similar cities. They all had high per pupil student expenditures, but most of all they were all progressive enclaves with long histories of proud civil rights. We actually had eight cities that we did, but it turns out that progressive identity is what made the difference and that was the key here. I didn’t set out to do anything about that. That’s another, I had to research political communication to which I hadn’t really much of.

OK, so I’m going to talk a lot about this, but I use this kind of new technique called network ethnography and it helped me because it was a mixed method. It calls for me– It entailed quantitative work and network analyses of who authored what content on which platforms with which sources. And then I use those analyses to show how the digital content was changing local information flows and then to determine who to interview. So in the network analysis I made a lot of pretty maps. And I’ve showed you basically what you can perhaps already guess, that there was a core group of people that included policy makers talking amongst themselves about racial disparities and then there were a lot of smaller echo chambers that were essentially disparate and closed with only a few people connecting them. Journalists inevitably use community leaders like Mr. Caire as punctuation points in their stories rather than as bridges, so that was kind of a theme in the book. The maps also showed us visually which platforms were being used for discussion. So all the pink on this map is social media and all the red is mainstream news organizations. This data could also show us which links were being used as evidence. This is a nice long-tail map that basically showed most of the links that were being used in all of this data were the local mainstream media, and then there were a ton of blog posts and reports and that kind of thing that sort of trail off.

The data also could show us who was most influential informationally, OK, so we would expect a test like this would show us that reporters and journalists are the most influential informationally in this network, but in fact if you look on the top 10 of the most influential, there’s only one mainstream reporter on there, DeFour, and the rest of them are community leaders in some way. We could also see that the typical power players like the superintendent were only influential in the mainstream news realm, and they were almost completely absent from the social media news realm. So in this next excerpt I begin a chapter on why this was. It’s called Obstacles to Public Discourse about Race. And if you want to buy the book and you don’t like all the theory, you just skip to this chapter four. (laughter] And it gets more interesting. OK, all right, so this the scene of the BOE meeting when they denied the charter school. For weeks ahead of the vote, Kaleem Caire, and the supporters of Madison Prep blanketed social media with pleas to come on out and let your voice be heard. The Board of Education will listen, they just had to. The schools are failing their kids and finally people seem to be taking note. Long dialogues on Facebook preceded the night, December 19th, 2011 with parents asking, how could they get their children into the schools, and back and forth about the chances of the proposal passing. Everyone knew that three BOE members had declared themselves against it and two for it, but the remaining two votes were unknown and people figured it could go either way. They strode into the auditorium full of cautious optimism, with others feeling as if they were on a fool’s errand. But they all came anyway and they spoke up and one by one they offered up personal experiences of racism, disparity, inadequacies of the schools and laid out an argument in support of Madison Prep. But after several hours they found themselves just sitting, listening in stunned silence as one by one school board members read from prepared statements pulled out of pockets and bags. The members spoke of the legalities associated with charter schools and teachers’ unions, of disproportional expenses for a small segment of the population during times of school funding strife, including what some saw as unreasonable admin fees of 900,000 to the Urban League over five years, and of worries that the schools would be leaving out many of the children who most needed this one-on-one attention.

They also disliked that the plan would give unprecedented oversight to the Urban League instead of the school district and its management. Little of the people’s long hours of testimony seemed to be considered or even acknowledged in these prepared statements. Little of the people’s words seemed to have been heard. At least that’s the way attendees felt. And long after the Board of Education members had gone home the verdict and the five-two no, to Madison Prep hanging heavy in the air the supporters of Madison Prep sat with their disappointment not quite successful in squelching the resentment choking them. Caire rose to address the morose, defeated crowd. He reminded people to keep up the good fight, that they would just take the school to the people. Do some fundraising, do it themselves. He urged people to run for school board to change up the power dynamics, and he talked of filing a racial discrimination suit. He said, “We are going to challenge the school district like they’ve never been challenged before, I swear to God.”

And slowly people started to leave the room in trickles, comforting each other as they went, some talking to themselves, saying, “I can’t believe what I just saw.” And they trudged out of the hall back to their families, and as they left in the weeks and the months that followed distrust sidled in, replacing that optimism. Caire left too and soon after left the Urban League nurturing the seeds of an idea to privately fund Madison Prep. Five years later, five years later in focus groups and interviews people who had been at that meeting spoke of that moment as a turning point for them. The moment where any hope they had had that the school district would somehow respond to the intense racial disparities flittered away and they spoke of that moment as a moment that they gave up. This theme of giving up echoed throughout our cities in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, North Carolina, Massachusetts. Some citizens refrained from participating in public forums about the opportunity gaps, a problem plaguing each city. The superintendent of Cambridge, Mass. described the information exchange problem as one of income and education gaps. He says, “Basically what you had here was you have a very educated, very savvy half of a population. The middle class wants to preserve the status quo because it was working for their kids. And then you have the voiceless who are not in any of those hearings who are too busy working three jobs.”

And these absences carried over into the media. When many of the local reporters in these cities approached Black or Brown parents to find out more about their children’s experiences in schools they heard an earful, but when it came time to catch the source’s names for the published story the answer was often “No.” One freelancer said, “Honestly, it got to the point where I stopped trying.” On this point many of the journalists interviewed for the study agreed, finding parents who talked about issues involving racial achievement disparities in a publishable way was nearly impossible. Few wanted to go on the record and have their names associated with negative information. One network television reporter in Wisconsin remembered making a beeline for Black and Brown community leaders in public meetings rather than seeking sources in neighborhoods. And he said, “You went to these people because you knew you could trust they would go on camera in a timely, reliable way. If I go into neighborhoods I cannot reliably and quickly find somebody truly engaged in the issue who would also be willing to speak publicly on TV.”

“The timing of the public hearings was often an obstacle, too. We have a 10:00 p.m. deadline and a constraint on the length of the story so you could only share so much. Those were always our frustrations.” One parent whom reporters frequently asked for comment understood this difficulty perfectly. She said, “People are afraid of repercussions. I mean, I applied for jobs I didn’t get because of my outspoken comments on certain topics that didn’t make people feel comfortable.” She added that people of color feel judged when they speak out, with every word scrutinized and constant confrontations with random White people. And at work the morning after she spoke at a Madison Prep public hearing a coworker came up to her to challenge her on her views about charter schools and she told me, “Well, she got really upset with me. Even though this coworker had no child in the school district she wanted to tell me that my view was totally wrong and I had to stand up for myself and let her know we could talk after work, but I’m not going to discuss this with you at work because it’s not the proper place.”

Cynicism, wariness, fatigue, frustration flowed from our focus groups we held with other parents. They told story after story about offenses and instants that they perceived as being racially motivated. Most of their stories had to do with their kids’ schools. They spoke of a PTO function where White parents dominated, disproportionate punishment for their kids of color, and principals and teachers who implied that parents didn’t care, they worked too much, or they did drugs. They also mentioned the difficulty of having a physical presence at meetings concerning their children’s education. They often learned about school hearings on proposals like Madison Prep at the last minute, only to find out the meeting was across town. And even if they made it to the meeting, these meetings typically resulted in nothing. So one gentleman said, “So why would we bother anymore? At some point you just give up.” Over and over we heard how the progressive politics in these cities inhibited good deliberation about solutions.

A school board member in Ann Arbor, Michigan described similar dynamics there. She said, this is her, “Oh, we love to talk. We’re great in Ann Arbor. We’re very smart people. We’re very engaged. It’s nothing for us to get 200 parents in the auditorium at one of our board meetings around certain issues. I mean, that’s just nothin’. And schools see education as what we do in Ann Arbor. That is our income, it’s our base, it’s our livelihood, it’s our brand, but we struggle. I mean, we’re quite a liberal town, but we’re also very conservative, so when you start talking about race and disparities you see very ugly signs and evidence of how not liberal or not equitable we can be at times when it comes to those who are disadvantaged, particularly socioeconomically.”

The advantaged peoples in these cities– This is what came out of our data– comfortable with reports and statistics in academic jargon effectively dominated conversation while the institutional and organizational structures that perpetuated the disparities remained unchanged. Said a national YWCA Black activist who grew up in Madison but lived in D.C. now and was familiar with all these cities said, “The progressive liberals have never figured it out, but they are quicker to congratulate and pat themselves on the back.” In Cambridge one Black city official noted how the progressive mindset reflected the social segregation at work and exacerbated the disconnect. He said, “People with goodwill will try to do things, but it doesn’t change the structure, and I think for a lot of White people there’s just obliviousness. you lots of facts about what’s wrong but they still live in a world of privilege. Because you want to talk about race and you want to talk about how the kids of color and their achievement in schools is not the same but you don’t want to talk about what percentage of kids of color are spending the summer in their apartment or in public housing, and what percentage of the White kids are spending their summers on the coast of France or in Vermont, or visiting relatives around the country.”

Often attempts to change the institutional structures were met with resistance or proposals watered down to the point of ineffectiveness. See, all of these systems that have been put in place have been carefully constructed with progressive reforms in mind sometimes as much as a century ago. Progressives identify with these systems because we’ve built them and maintained them and because we devote our lives to them, right? And because we have put into place norms and routines and checks and balances to make sure that things are fair and balanced and equitable. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, right? And getting us to understand that these systems were really only benefiting White people is really proving quite difficult, because that’s like telling me, a trained reporter, and the daughter of two public school teachers, a proud progressive, that my entire soul has been wrong, and everything I’ve worked my whole life for has been complicit in oppression. And that’s how it felt to me at first. But I was wrong, and all the people who are going to come up to me after this talk and talk about the nefarious intentions behind charter schools or want to talk about the rumors that Mr. Caire was a puppet for the Koch brothers, which isn’t true, are entirely missing the point, right?

And the point is this. OK, when progressives replace their political lens and all the baggage that comes with it with racial ones, we can actually make more of a commitment to progressivism to reform because we start to see the areas where we have gone wrong and continue to go wrong. And I am including all the journalists in this room, the professors and the researchers and the community leaders and the teachers and the activists and the parents and all of us in this assessment. It is my argument in this book that it’s only by appreciating and working within these identities communicatively that we can work through these systemic obstacles. I am not arguing that White reporters should dismiss objectivity or balance or accountability. I am not arguing that White progressives should stop fighting vouchers or charter schools. That’s not my point. I am arguing, I am arguing that we consider the backgrounds of ourselves and that of all of our constituents whether they’re kids or voters or whoever, that we consider that the status quo that we have built and are maintaining is a broken way of doing things and when we do our good work. And that the space to do this is within our public places of dialogue and deliberation like journalism and school hearings and election debates. And it is also in the more private spaces that inform that public discourse, like in the meetings that we have at work or the conferences we have with our kids’ teachers or in interviews we do with our job candidates. Or even in the conversations we have at home with our kids or at coffees with our friends. But it does mean giving up some power and giving to people who do not look like us and perhaps do not think like us as well.

So in this work I explore the way in which the progressive ideology over time has become the status quo and that this entrenchment has meant the ways in which we talk about racial disparities have had to abide by this grand narrative that was really been in place for 100 years. In this time it’s useful to understand the way in which the information stream was manipulated in these cities and how rarefied the dominant way of thinking because of the structures and routines in place over generations and how deadlines and meeting coverage routines privilege those voices who showed up with the credentials and the confidence to speak with names and in grand city halls. These habits of talking have meant missed opportunities with highly networked influencers who could be bridges instead of punctuation points. And especially how the constant failure to not only bring, but to really listen to those Black and Brown voices over time resulted in distrust. In these cities those who are not only networked but also abiding by the dominant ideology of progressiveness achieve power, for example, in almost all of our cities we had a prolific White progressive blogger who ended up being elected to municipal office during her study periods, while those who were challenging the status quo and were similarly prolific and savvy fell out of the information stream. And I thought, well that’s kind of weird.

And then I started analyzing a little bit and I really believe it was their constant presence in the mastery of all the communication opportunities of their cities that come them elected. And it was their adept use of information and how it was networked and with whom it was networked that got them elected. And we can see this on the maps. They could get their message out in front of the right people over and over and over again. And they did it using the tools that the policymakers in town valued. The reports from the very organizations that were perpetuating the disparities. We saw progressive activists with agendas dominating the conversations in digital spaces. In digital spaces it was a 36% larger conversation than what was going on in the public information flow of news organizations, that’s huge. And activists, as I mentioned, were much more influential informationally than reporters were. And that authority came with this constant presence in communication spaces as long as that presence abided by the ideological rules. All right, so I called my last chapter “Outcomes and Opportunities.” And in it I detail how communication infrastructures can be unsettled with networked collaborations.

I talk about how to use online information connections to access and amplify marginalized voices. And this is chapter six, so if you’re really short on time and you just want to go, tell me what to do, chapter six is for you. I’m just going to read a little bit of it. After a long day of meetings, school visits, and public hearings Cambridge Public School Superintendent Jeffrey Young was finally driving home reflecting on the day’s revelations. So to start the day the School Board had held a hearing at 9:00 a.m. to discuss controversial proposals where citizens were given three minutes to voice their concerns. Young found himself asking a series of questions about the participation he saw. “Who do you think is available at nine in the morning to show up at a city hall and make a speech? Who is not intimidated by the city hall?” Remember we’re talking about Cambridge, Massachusetts, a big city hall.

“By speaking in the city hall chambers? Who doesn’t mind speaking into a microphone? Who speaks English? Who wants to be on cable television when they’re making their speech?” he said in our interview. After that hearing he arrived at a scheduled walkthrough of one of the less advantaged schools where he met the entire seventh grade, nine African American boys how were learning in science that hot and cold water make warm water. All right, finally he drove to a school in a more affluent neighborhood near Harvard Square and there he was invited up on stage with the 60 seventh graders who were presenting the finale of their oral history project for which they had interviewed major Cambridge luminaries and dressed up like historical figures that held the history of Cambridge.

And he ruminated on this evening of festivities with us. He says, “Beautiful! Exactly what seventh grade is supposed to be doing, right? History, research, working in groups, public speaking, real, authentic voices. The auditorium is standing room only. All the parents are in there cheering and screaming their kids on. They all have video cameras, taking movies of their kids on stage who have absolutely done a splendid job. And so I’m driving home that night and I’m thinking about the three parts of my day. The public hearings, the nine Black boys, and the 60 kids in the oral history project and I’m thinking, what is wrong with this picture? How can I come to work tomorrow and say this is OK.” “And of course the answer was, I couldn’t. The complete inequity of the experience took my breath away, and yet made me more sure than ever that we had to change.”

So he implemented a new kind of public interaction. Meetings, the public housing project seeking out, finding parents who would not be able to attend hearings. Small groups, food, community centers, translators. You guys know the drill. No entourage officials, just talking with people not at them. No three-minute time limits, not even microphones. And I was impressed with Young as he talked about his results. More input, better policymakers. But then, we talked to Denise Simmons, who is a Black Cambridge city councilor who was in the middle of what ended up being a successful campaign for mayor. For Simmons officials like ourselves and the journalists covering them need to go beyond the potluck dinners with childcare. Consider the work of facilitating conversations about disparities in a more holistic manner. “One must commit soul and body to understanding the communities you want to reach,” she says. This is her, “Anybody regardless of what you do should steep themselves in culture competency. I don’t think anyone can write about someone they don’t understand enough. And if you’re in any direct service of the community you should be steeped in cultural competency. For years Cambridge used to struggle with, why does this meeting start at six o’clock and no one is here? Well, six o’clock for some people just means quarter to six. And six o’clock to other people might mean 6:15. But if you don’t understand social-cultural nuances of the constituents you serve you’re going to make judgements. When we have a school department where 60% of the kids are kids of color, if you don’t have a room with 60% of people you’ve not done the work.”

So it’s not enough to take strides to include other people. It’s also about embracing a concept of community as a diverse multiperspectival, fickle, complex organism that cannot always be structured into a potluck dinner. And furthermore, such a community thrives only once representation is not only achieved, but also enacted upon and people are listened to. Improving dialogues about racial achievement disparities must center on making connections in all constituent communities and building trust among their members. Over and over the advice to emerge from the interviews was, be courageous, stay in the room.

But how do we do this when so many participants will hear things that cut at their very identity and prompt defensiveness, shutting down conversations and deliberation? The answer emerges in understanding how to work around and within those constructs through key strategies that reconceptualize and recommit to fundamental principles at the heart of progressive ideology and turn failed outcomes into successful policy. There’s a number of recommendations in here. I’ll just go through a few of them. First, appreciate the messiness of what true inclusion will mean in public community dialogues. This guy, Shakil Choudhury wrote a book called Deep Diversity: Overcoming Us Vs. Them. It’s a great book. He’s an international consultant on racial dialogues. And he says this means pointing out how instinctual implicit bias is and asking people to embrace the emotion of the topic both from others, but also within themselves. And he says, “We approach this as though this was a rational topic, and so we expect people to understand the stats and reports and kind of just engage in it, but nothing about our identities is rational. Everything about our identities evokes a deeply emotional place. As weird as it sounds, everyone, White people react to issues of race and they don’t want to talk about it ’cause at some level being wrong or being bad means being rejected and that we’re out of the tribe.”

Acknowledging these competing instincts can lead to a deeper appreciation for other’s perspectives, even when those perspectives come off as a little bit racist. A big part of establishing the right conditions for making communication around racial disparities is being sensitive to this us versus them mentality. I talked to Glenn Singleton who wrote Courageous Conversation. He’s awesome, and he really counsels you to try to be careful of the language that you use, right. So there are words that the society is more ready to take on like unconscious bias, but that’s very different than a phrase like White privilege. And then I talk about a lot of different things, but storytelling and narrative, and how telling stories of humanity and demonstrating the flawed nature of everyone helps people feel less defensive in such conversation. And then I also talk about when you’re up here or you’re a journalist or whenever, that you put your vulnerabilities front and center to help that conversation going.

So the data, that when you have data brandished in hearings from reports and other formal sources they tend to stall dialogue, creating a chasm between those comfortable with this type of evidence and those who valued a different, more informal kind of evidence. Our interviews supported this finding. In our focus groups parent after parent talked about not feeling welcome in public hearings in which people much more credentialed and much more practiced in public speaking wanted to be right rather than to be heard. They had stores to tell and experiences to share, but the three-minute turns at the microphone could not do those pieces of evidence justice. Furthermore, the fact that all of our cities are populated by so many academics with higher degrees created an uneven deliberative ground for conversation, and people without such education felt their contributions were not as valued and disengaged. For journalists, a true commitment to facilitating community forums beings giving people space to contribute stories in a safe setting in order to achieve the ideals of in-depth critical multiperspectival news, journalists must exhibit a willingness to move off center stage to give up some of their long-held monopoly over access to the public sphere in order to make room for other voices.

So as you know– OK, so first of all it’s not just about getting people in the room. You got to do all this other work for it. That’s kind of the summary of chapter six. And as you know, much has improved in Madison since 2012. Right, we have Madison365. We have renewed commitments from most of the local mainstream media organizations to cover issues of race differently. We’ve made progress in election of Black and Brown candidates to local office. So in the book I talk about– I interviewed a whole bunch of experts around the world about having dialogues and how they would advise communities like ours to be more productive around this. And I talk about what needs to happen from everyone involved to do this. And so this also meant for me, right, like I had to sort of walk the walk after writing this whole book and I’m still on my journey. So I needed to transform not only internally, but also how I taught, and how I worked with journalists, how I worked with students, and how I work in my organizations, I’m a member of our PTO, for example.

So here are just some photos of my changing and my journey. This is a service learning class that I created using the data from this book. The class sends out our advanced journalism students into youth organizations around town to train Black and Brown youth mostly how to amplify their own voices. We went back to the places where we had the focus groups, follow-up is huge, to let them know what kind of impact that their time and their efforts and their words had and what happened to their words. I think that’s super important particularly for journalists. You know, we’ll interview somebody and they never hear from us again. That’s part of that distrust, right? But following up and saying, here’s what happened. I didn’t use you in the story, but it informed me in these other ways, right? I speak at workshops across the country with journalists on how to build trust in marginalized communities. This is with Kettering Foundation on Ohio. And we’re talking to West Coast journalists and bloggers and citizen journalists. I started organizing social justice workshops with my PTO, this was how to talk to your kids about race with the Families for Justice. And in this process I met people who I witnessed change entire community dialogues around race.

And one of those people is Kaleem Caire, the man who first proposed that Madison Prep charter school. So since then he’s started up two schools, one an independent non-profit preschool and the other a public charter school serving 4K and kindergarten, right now. He’s on track to add grade one next year and up to grade six eventually. The two schools together right now serve 90 kids. And I’d like to publicly thank at this time all the people who talked to me for this book. I notice a couple of them are in the room. And for putting that trust in me. But I’d also especially like to thank Mr. Caire for being so forthcoming with me, but also for making this conversation in Madison so visible to more people and for not giving up. And so at this point I’d like to ask Mr. Caire to come on up for the Q and A because this is really about him and his stories and those stories that resulted from his communities. Get that mic right there. (audience applauding) Mr. Caire. So we’re going to do the Q and A now. And I think there are microphones going around. So remember, this is being taped, so if you could talk right into the microphone that would be great.

– [Man In Audience] Thank you for that very informative presentation. The question that I have is from the perspective of the university, what actionable steps can we take in this community to be a more successful and inclusive society?

– The university is like city in and of itself. A lot of people here don’t get off campus much, even if they live off campus. Their life happens here, and so honestly I think one simple thing is that people who live in this city, who do their work in this city, should get more involved in the city and find out what’s going on and figure out where they can lend a hand and be involved. You know, this was so visible that people couldn’t necessarily escape it if you watched the news or your listened to the newspaper, so people all had, at least the people I met with, all had an opinion, but it was very interesting that a lot of those people really didn’t have any foot in the community and didn’t really know what was going on. Saying a lot of opinions and a lot of ideology, but not a lot of understanding about how this was affecting people or would affect people on the ground.

– [Woman In Blue] Thank you, Sue, and thank you, Kaleem, for being here.

– How you doing?
– Doing good, thanks. I’m sat here as kind of a former city council member. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about– It’s one of the things that government really struggles with and I saw it in what you’re talking about here is sharing information effectively out to the public about what’s happening in government regardless of what the issue is. It’s something that I have a really hard time. I’d always run into people saying, “But I didn’t hear about this meeting, or I didn’t know how to get the input in.” And I think it’s something we have to do a lot better at. And so I wonder if, certainly Kaleem, if you have ideas about how we can do better here in Madison in terms of both communicating outward from government, but also for citizens communicating into government. And then Sue, I wonder if you have any examples that you ran across in any of the cities that worked in that you think should be lifted up.

– Well I was going to say what Sue had put up there on the slide about highly networked people being involved or having a connection with them, I think cities could benefit themselves by hiring those people. Once if you have people who are of these communities, of these different demographics and neighborhoods, then you have people who are with you every single day who have an ear in to what’s happening. They can be a filter. And Madison has really struggled with that. We’re always reaching out to get information, but it’s not been where– We do it in a way where we’re disrupting people’s time. We want them to come to a meeting or an event and if they can’t do it, we usually set those meetings at an event on our calendar around times that we’re available and then we want them to be available to come to us and that’s been the history of how we do things here. And so I think changing that paradigm and getting people more involved in the operation of the city is one way. And the second way is to get more involved in the organizations and the life of the people in these communities through volunteering. You know, city leaders can do that. They can get out and volunteer. Showing up at different activities and events and engaging with people. Don’t just sit in the audience, but engage with folks so we get to know who people are. Those are some simple ways to do that.

– Yeah, and in some of our cities that we looked at there were a lot of different really great strategies that worked here and there, and some of them included also changing up your routines. So for example, instead of holding the city council meeting in city hall, you hold it in a community center. And you rotate around the city and then you leave time on either end of the meeting where you actually have to go and talk to people who happen to be there. That’s true for newsrooms also. You always have weekly meetings, sometimes more meetings. Have some of those meetings off site into some of these places and get used to getting out of our little institutional bubbles.

– [Man In Audience] Hi, I noticed that we had in today’s talk kind of a big divide between communication through traditional media and social media as two large categories. And I’m wondering if you have any comments on the traditional side differences between print and visual stuff. And on the social media side, between different kinds of social media because I know there’s quite an age stratification between grandkids, parents, grandparents in terms of which social media they use. And I’m wondering if that played out in your studies at all.

– In Madison the population that we were talking about at that time was all on Facebook. In some of our other cities, for example Chapel Hill, they had a racial incident that happened on Instagram and Snapchat and so you could see there the differences between, there was one conversation happening among the high school students of that incident that happened and then a whole other conversation that was happening on Facebook with the progressives who led that city. And so we could see those kinds of dichotomies. But in terms of, like we couldn’t drill down into the data enough to know what age people were per se. We only captured names and what their role was in the society, but I think today this study would look way different right, because of bots and Russian operatives and fake, right? I mean it would, like I don’t even know if we’d be able to do this today because of what’s going on in social media. But at that time it was still pretty clean.

– [Jason] Hi, my name is Jason Atkins. I’ve worked here for a couple of years now. I don’t know so much if I have a question, more just I would like your thoughts on this. We all live lives of essentially quiet desperation. Every day is kids or work or like whatever crisis that we’re fighting at any given moment. And obviously the problems that exist in our society are systemic, like this is not something only one of us can do, though it will be done one person at a time. Like if you can change the minds of 150 people inside a room and all of them can change the minds of 150 more, that’s how you make change on such a grand level. But how do you work that into– I got to go back to work. I got a meeting like literally right now that I have to be at that I decided I’m going to be late to because this is too important to just ignore and to just say, “Well, my question, my thoughts don’t matter enough.” So I’ve made that choice for myself. And this is a tiny little step, a little baby step of saying that meeting can wait. What can we all do– I guess I do have a question. What are you suggestions on working this into an actual daily life and not making it, I’m spending five minutes here and then I’m going to go back to my life for the next three years, because it never changes until a lot of people decide this is a priority and not just that thing that’s sitting in the back of my mind that I’ve been ignoring for the last 35 years.

– So I’m going to give you an example. The Black Lives Matters movement, right? It is a movement that is very diffuse and very uncoordinated and a very short lifespan. And we’re already writing about it in past tense in many ways. The reason is movements need three things. They need money, they need a message, and they need management. People who do this work every day. And so the money part, it costs money to get your message out. And you can use social media, it only goes so far and it only lasts so long. And so having those resources is important, but you also need money for the other part which is the management of it. Who is going to see to it that the message continues to get out? That the message changes and modifies to address people’s heightened level of interest. We hit people at the awareness level with the shock, but you can’t keep people at that level, because they’ll stop paying attention. You’ve got to deepen their understanding and you’ve got to appeal to their heart. And then you got to get ’em to act. You got to get ’em to do something. So they get involved in the movement and then they’re a part of it. The problem with the movements, and your suggestion about how do you get engaged with all these things. Me as a person who leads movements, right, has to figure out when to engage you, how to engage you, and then how to make valuable use of your time so that you feel like, man, this isn’t stressing me out, ’cause what’ll happen is, two things will happen, you’ll feel excited about getting involved and then stressed out that you can’t be involved enough. And people who care really deeply, oftentimes they don’t want to disappoint so they don’t show up.
– Yep.

– And we think that they’re not showing up because they’re disinterested, it’s actually the opposite. It’s because they are very interested, but we haven’t made a way for them to get involved where they can feel like they’re participating and having an impact, ’cause they got to have an impact. And so it’s just looking at things a little bit differently at how we do our work on our end of kicking off these movements. So the worst time to start a movement is after a shooting. If it’s immediate, it’s going to be gone quick, too. Because we don’t have time to build a machine around that to keep it moving, but what we can do is see the proliferation of these shootings and figure out, well OK, now how do we create a movement around that and management and bring resources to that so that we can reinvigorate that movement. It keeps happening, so there’ll never be a time when there’s not a shooting. Now we’re ready to launch and keep people engaged.

– Right, right, yeah. (audience applauding) And I’ll just add onto that, because I hear you and I feel that same sort of pressure of time. And I have little kids. And so one of the things that I try to do is input it into every part of my life so that I look at everything in my life, even conversations with my next door neighbors with a racial lens that’s very different from how I used to look at it before. And so that means I read different kids’ books to my child than I used to. They’re full of Black and Brown people. It means that when I’m having a conversation with a neighbor and I hear an unintended microaggression. They didn’t really mean to do it, but there it is, and I call them out on it and that’s how I do it within the daily part of my life. It means that when we’re looking for job candidates that I come up with a list of alternative places than we normally look that might engage another applicant pool than we might normally. So it’s embedded within your daily routines. You look at everything with a racial lens and to do that it’s just about, you know, educating yourself and reading a lot of books to figure out, and talking to people and listening to what they have to say.

– [Peter] We’re going to squeeze one last question in.

– So thank you so much for this wonderful presentation. The discussion today really reminded me a lot about a problem we face in public health, which is that some of the things that we all want to promote actually intensify disparities. For example, nutrition labeling. It is something that we all agree is beneficial, right? We can better make choices, but it actually disproportionately helps educated people who are predominantly of certain racial groups. And it actually increases, has been shown in some studies to increase disparities. And so what would you say to people who say, well we only have this many resources for health care, education, how do we best marshal those resources when some people feel that that’s a zero sum game, meaning that we can either use it on nutritional labeling, which is going to, we know, help certain groups and not as much others versus seizing those same expenditures to help the folks that are the furthest behind.

– You know, let me liken that to education reform where people have invested, there have been groups, Mark Zuckerberg being the latest who invested $100 million in education reform in Newark, New Jersey. Decided I’m going to go to one of the poorest school districts in the country, I’m going to invest these resources there, and we’re going to get the impact. The problem was he invested in a system that was terribly broken, and broken in so many areas. And beyond dysfunctional, there was a lot of corruption. So what happened was they found out that literally almost 25% of the money was spent on consultants who produced manuals of, “Here’s what you do.” Not a lot of it made its way into the classroom. Now they’re looking at it and it has had actually no impact. $100 million is actually zero. And so my argument is, if you’re going to invest that, invest that in areas, be strategic. that you talked about, if more educated people are using the labels, how are they using them, why are they using them? What are they using ’em for? And then use that as data to figure out, well OK, how can that help people who don’t use those labels, it doesn’t speak to them, how do we help educate them so they can become similarly savvy users of it? If you choose not to do it or you go directly to the people that aren’t using it right now it could be that same kind of sinkhole that Newark was. So I tell people, if you’re going to try and invest in poor people or people that are disadvantaged, don’t think that you just have to go there. Sometimes you got to go to that next level up. Who were those disadvantaged people that they were disadvantaged but they’re not now? How did they make that transition, and what can I learn from that so that I can move more people along? So maybe you need to invest a little bit more downstream too in order to figure that out.

– [Peter] All right, well I want to thank everybody for attending, especially on a rainy day like this and let’s give a hand to Mr. Caire and Dr. Robinson for a really good talk.
– Thank you.

– Thank you. (audience applauding)