The big issues right in front of us right now have been making me want to take action. What action to take hasn’t been as clear, and so I’ve found myself reading and reflecting a lot this summer, in search of a direction. A common theme in the “how-to” of anti-racism has been a suggestion to start by listening and discussing, first steps that seemed far too passive to me at first but which have proven more clarifying and useful than I originally expected. At home and at work, I’ve benefited from deeper discussions about racism. I’m apparently not alone. In the past few days, I’m seeing more dialogue opening up. From what I can tell, social media is still an echo chamber of ranting and digging in on the same repeated points. In more thoughtful media and in actual person-to-person conversations, I’m seeing a change. People are starting to talk about how to have a constructive dialogue. In course, they’re realizing we have more common ground than many of us realized. A good example is this recent op-ed in USA Today: Americans appear to be deeply divided. But we found a different story traveling the U.S. I’m also seeing articles about how to go about having a constructive dialogue, such as How to (Actually) Change Someone’s Mind in HBR. I’m only through the intro so far for A House Divided: Engaging the Issues through the Politics of Compassion, but it’s already reinforcing that we need to seek out shared aspirations, such as helping each other, and then to look for initial axioms we can agree on and build upon together. Perhaps finding the right actions to take really is as simple as deciding together, in actual person-to-person dialogue, what really matters.
JP Snow 