Initiatives of Change - Hope in the Cities - Stories of community change

Honest conversation at a dialogue in Camden, New Jersey

“For many of us, race determines where we live, where we send our children to school and where we worship. Because racism is deeply embedded in the institutions of our society, white individuals are often insulated from making personal decisions based on conscious racial feelings and do not experience the daily burden that their brothers and sisters of color have to carry. We must change the structures that perpetuate economic and racial separation. But no unseen hand can wipe prejudice away.” (Emphasis added)From “A Call to Community”

In November 1998 and again in November 1999, I attended two national conferences sponsored by Hope in the Cities. These conferences brought together interracial, multiethnic teams from U.S. and Canadian cities to help participants deepen their understanding of the Hope in the Cities’ principle of “Honest Conversation on Race, Reconciliation and Responsibility.” I attended the first conference with two other members of the Camden County Human Relations Commission and the second with several Camden, New Jersey residents interested in developing a Hope in the Cities project in their city.

As a white woman, and the vice chair of a county human relations commission, I found it profoundly humbling to truly listen to African Americans share their personal stories and to look within my own heart for the places where racism remains. Through examining both my personal life and my work on the commission, I saw that for each of us honesty about racism in the past and the present must precede any possible racial reconciliation in the future.

The process inspired me also to look more deeply into other prejudices I had been denying. I discovered that, as a Jew, I still held hardened feelings toward Germans. As I began to examine those feelings, I saw the similarity between my own anger, fear and revulsion toward Germans, including those who had nothing to do with the Jewish Holocaust, and the anger that many African Americans feel toward white people, even those who had nothing to do with slavery or its aftermath. I came to recognize that without working on my own hardened feelings I could not ask others to work on theirs. Personal insights such as this create the basis for honest conversation about race.

The Hope in the Cities Model: Is Honest Conversation Just a Lot of Talk?

The power of the Hope in the Cities model lies in its call for honest interracial dialogue. The goal of this dialogue is to explore the possibility of achieving true racial and ethnic reconciliation. Reconciliation arises from all participants accepting responsibility for past injuries and moving through and beyond the pain caused by those injuries. But the Hope in the Cities approach does not end with dialogue. Rather, it begins with dialogue as the foundation for community organizing activities such as those aimed at improving education, housing, economic development and law enforcement. The approach recognizes that reconciliation too is a process: again one that begins with dialogue, but continues through the hard work of bringing justice to our communities.

Hope in the Cities’ model of “Honest Conversation” as a prerequisite to community building is now taking root in a number of places around the nation, among them Camden, New Jersey and Selma, Alabama. There are, on the surface, vast differences between southern cities like Selma, with its history of deadly white violence against the Black civil rights movement and northern cities like Camden, which is populated primarily by African American and Latino residents, and is deeply scarred by years of “white flight,” neglect and conflict. Yet the process of healing in both cities is beginning with the creation of interracial, multiethnic teams committed to honest dialogue as the basis for working on community problems.

In Camden, a small, committed group of residents and community leaders from different neighborhoods and ethnic communities has come together to bring the idea of reconciliation to bear on the numerous problems of their city. Like many urban areas, the enormous economic difficulties of Camden are further complicated by racial and ethnic divisions, particularly at the political level. At a recent weekend training for Hope in the Cities dialogue facilitators, participants shared painful personal memories of being victims of racism, bystanders to acts of bias, and even, at times, perpetrators of prejudice. Honest sharing of these personal stories was, in itself, a step toward trust and thus toward reconciliation.

The Camden City Council, despite its ethnic and political differences, has endorsed the reconciliation approach of Hope in the Cities. The current Chair of the Hope in the Cities Steering Committee is an African American community leader and the Vice Chair is an Hispanic city councilman. Despite the continuing crises of the city, there is good reason for hope when leaders and citizens commit to overcoming their differences through dialogue.

Interracial Dialogue and Personal Responsibility

Critical to the Hope in the Cities model is an understanding of “city” in its broadest, regional sense, not simply as an isolated, decaying unit within a field of suburban sprawl. The experience of the Richmond, Virginia Hope in the Cities project has been that interracial dialogue encouraged a new sense of personal and civic responsibility among participants from the suburban areas. In other words, redefining “city” to include the interdependent metropolitan area intertwines issues of prejudice and privilege, responsibility and reconciliation. Though some urban policy-makers understand the need for this redefinition, true support for it will come from approaches such as Hope in the Cities’ Honest Conversation on Race, Reconciliation and Responsibility.

Whatever broader, societal results interracial dialogue may achieve, participating in it cultivates the inner call to take responsibility for one’s actions. I have learned, in part through the Hope in the Cities process, that taking responsibility means always working on at least two levels simultaneously: Even as we work to diminish the power of racism in our communities, we must continually explore our own attitudes, our own prejudices, our own understanding of privilege. Since “no unseen hand can wipe prejudice away,“ the responsibility falls to each of us personally to own the problem and to move beyond the personal pain it causes to actions which challenge friends, family, coworkers and especially the institutions that perpetuate racism in all its forms.

Written by Randy Ross, Vice Chair, Camden County Human Relations Commission