Friday, March 31, 2006

Diversity and Dialogue

The new general education program at IU South Bend includes an annual campus theme. Next year’s theme, “Diversity and Dialogue,” has begun to engage my imagination. More than a theme, really, “Diversity and Dialogue” is a challenge posed to us and our communities. The theme entails many kinds of diversity, including religious, cultural, physical, political, and racial. But this project has turned my attention primarily to race relations, evoking memories of strange details from my childhood in Middle Tennessee.

In one of my earliest classroom memories I’m working with three other white boys on a wooden puzzle map of the U.S., when one of them suddenly asks me, “Are you a Yankee or a Rebel?” No doubt he detected an accent. My family had moved to Tennessee from California when I was six. We were originally from Illinois. I knew a little bit already about the Civil War. I knew that the North had won, that the Union victory had put an end to slavery, and that this result was a good thing. I had never imagined myself in uniform. “Are you a Yankee or a Rebel?”

Not a mile from our small ranch house stood “The Hermitage,” the plantation house of President Andrew Jackson. Hermitage was the name of our town; and the schoolroom where the antagonists of the Civil War were so bluntly invoked was in fact called Andrew Jackson Elementary School. Jackson had owned slaves—and although it never at the time crossed my mind, many of the black children in my class were certainly descendents of those slaves.

I was glad enough to say I was a Yankee. The other boy proclaimed, “I’m a Rebel.” He never attempted to gun me down with a Whitworth rifle during recess, or even to win me over to his cause. To him, Yankees and Rebels were like opposing football teams, and he seemed to believe that the Rebels had won, or should have won, or would certainly win the next time around. He was young.

Years later, in my high school American history class, the students debated the justice of slavery. More than a few of my classmates argued, in all seriousness, that slavery had not been all bad. Many slaveholders were good and generous people, they asserted, and had cared well for their slaves. Our teacher had developed a gentle way of bringing everyone around to the recognition that freedom is always preferable; but too much went unspoken. The African American students in that classroom remained silent, and we really pursued no difficult dialogue on this fundamental American problem.

I carry with me an indelible image from my first morning in junior high. I got on the bus and was surprised to see, in the back of that tunneled space, all of the kids sitting tightly packed into the last several rows. Puzzled, I joined them there. What was going on? As the bus made its final stops, and the black kids began to board, I came to understand the arrangement—and in what way race was suddenly supposed to matter for us. The African American neighborhood was called Hopewell, and it sat adjacent to Andrew Jackson’s farm, on the west side of Old Hickory Blvd. I saw chickens in the yards and mules in the fields. It was, in many ways, far from our white suburban lawns—but also just a mile or two away. At the end of the school day, kids piled back into the bus without giving any thought to the order, except to seek out a friend. But in the morning, once again, the white kids filled the back rows, reinstating racial segregation. This arrangement, which no doubt had a traceable history, was designed to make us feel afraid of one another. No one ever talked about it. I don’t think I ever mentioned it to my parents.

Here in Michiana, almost no one talks about our de facto segregated housing. We try to be tolerant, I believe, but we don’t talk about our differences. We tend not to ask whether and how social injustices persist. Like many of today’s political conservatives and liberals, we seek out only those shows, books, papers, and voices, that confirm our opinions and flatter our consciences, and we politely avoid the potential unpleasantness of confronting our differences. It feels so safe in the back of the bus, where nothing can happen.

But where nothing can happen, in the safe neighborhoods of our own minds, nothing good can take place. Nothing new. This is why serious consideration of diversity must be accompanied by the risky activity of dialogue—above all, and first of all, in our educational institutions. Diversity and dialogue. We’ve always needed both.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on March 31, 2006
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