Let me introduce myself. I'm Lellingby Boyce, and I'm your presenter for today. You're going to see my name flash on the screen again in a moment. But let me say for now, in addition to welcoming you and thanking you for being here, today's program, as well as future programs I do during the month of February, will fall under the rubric, Understanding U.S. Race Relations. To better understand U.S. race relations, I, your presenter, Lellingby Boyce, will share insights and ideas from a recent bestseller on the topic of race relations and segregated neighborhoods. And you see there the title of the book. Oh, there we go. There it is, the title, The Color of Law. A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. It's done by Richard Rothstein, a very distinguished social scientist, and this book was published in 2017. Before I move on, I'm going to look at the word forgotten. Richard Rothstein is the first to say he has not unearthed any new information. It's been out there. Social scientists have known it for years. He's rebirthing it because he thinks we now need to have the light shown more strongly on this area. This is an extremely well researched, very readable history detailing how local, state, and federal governments promoted and sustained segregated neighborhoods. Now, before we jump into this heavy topic, I thought it would help us to have a little warm-up. And Susan, you have an edge. I will ask you to choose whatever first name you want to be known by and introduce yourself to your nearest neighbor or neighbors to discuss the following topic next. I'll let you read through this warm-up and then I'll ask you for questions. Okay, I want to say fate is funny. The first time I presented this material, it was shortly after Las Vegas. I didn't plan Florida, but here we are. Does anyone have any questions about what's being requested? Okay, I'm going to give you a few minutes to introduce yourself to your neighbor, share your ideas. When you think you have done it, just look at me and your fresh faces will tell me it's time to share with the group. And I assume that you all have heard that within the past few days at least a half dozen businesses that have sponsored activities with the NRA have withdrawn their sponsorship. Now when corporate America weighs in with the dollars, we're moving significantly. It's not that they're concerned about guns, they're concerned about their bottom line. And they're looking at their pocketbooks and they're gambling that the students are going to win. There is someone who hasn't spoken yet, I'm going to call on then. Yes, on the screen now is an example of what I call the arc of the moral universe. You've all heard this, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And this is a pleasant reminder that with chipping away as best we can, which I am doing today actually, chipping away. We start accumulating small successes and eventually they lead. The arc actually will bend the way we want. Sometimes it's erratic, but you understand the situation in the U.S. This occurred in 2016. We have attorney Elizabeth Julian on the left and home resident Bernstein Williams. And they sued HUD, Housing and Urban Development, the federal government, and Dallas over discrimination. And they won in 2016. I'm not sure how long the suit went on, but it says here, and this is from Rothstein's book, by the way, a settlement enabled Bernstein Williams to move to a little-class neighborhood and raise two college-bound children. So even when you have money, even when you have education, it's not always easy to move into the neighborhood you want. Speaking as a black person, I will say, you never graduate from blackness.  I remember in the past eight years or so, Oprah was over, Oprah Winfrey was over in England, and she wanted to buy a purse in a certain store. And it's kind of handbag I would not even look at. We're talking in the hundreds of dollars. They wouldn't let her in the store. They just looked at her and knew she could not afford it. And that's a prime example of what I'm talking about. But we have positives to look forward to. Also, I'm going to start reading from Rothstein at this point. And the major thing I'm going to present today is his thesis, his ultimate position on this issue of segregated neighborhoods. When, from 2014 to 2016, riots in places like Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Charlotte captured our attention.  Next, this is Rothstein continuing. Rothstein next lists five examples of de facto segregation. But first he says de facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes. Next, this is the first cause he lists. Next, this is the next cause he lists. Next, we're going to talk a lot about redlining today. Would anyone care to volunteer their definition of redlining? Redlining. And by the way, I have to say, when I turned on the radio first thing this morning, I got up a little late at 10 o'clock, and I turned on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. And what was the feature program? Redlining, modern day redlining. I said, thank you, Amy. And I'm going to get into a definition further on. We have a whole section on it, but let us just say quickly that, hello, it's nice to see you. I haven't seen you in a long time. Redlining refers to lenders of money and insurance companies who refuse to lend to you or insure you because you live in a certain district that they deem unfavorable. And we'll spend some time on how these districts got to be considered unfavorable. One thing you will find, Rothstein and other social scientists concerned with this matter, they will emphasize that what has happened in the past with redlining has lingered on with us today. And on Amy Goodman's program, they were giving some fine examples of it. Okay, next. Now I want to pause on this one and discuss some things that I rarely hear discussed. Black families prefer to live with one another. Let me start by saying the latest reports I've heard say that most black families prefer to live in mixed neighborhoods, neighborhoods that reflect the overall US population. And I have to say coming from the Bay Area and loving San Francisco, where I always felt part of the greater world, I do miss that in Davis. And by the way, I didn't move to Davis, I landed in Davis. I'm one of the refugees from the Loma Prieta earthquake. And since I come from Berkeley, a university town, and I had to choose between Sacramento, Davis, and Fairfield, I decided Davis would be the best fit, I think. They all had to have beyond Amtrak because I'm handicapped and I don't drive. Well, let me continue here expanding on this black families prefer to live with one another. I have written notes to myself that says, and whereas some black families prefer to live with one another, there are other black families who are best described as preferring not to live among whites. This latter group can best be explained by Rothstein's chapter number nine titled State Sanctioned Violence. I'm going to pull the book out now. Here it is. Otherwise, I would not be able to get to this material. There's so much in this book. But it is enlightening for a lot of people who don't know, understand the violence. We understand that the South held a reign of terror over the blacks first as slaves and then later on as after they were released. But a lot of people don't know about the violence that has taken place in the 20th century outside of the South, especially when blacks who did have the income moved into neighborhoods that had been exclusively white. Here's Rothstein. In the Los Angeles area, cross burnings, dynamite bombings, rocks thrown through windows, graffiti and other acts of vandalism, as well as numerous phone threats, greeted African Americans who found housing in neighborhoods just outside their existing areas of concentration. In 1945, an entire family, father, mother and two children, were killed when their new home in an all-white neighborhood was blown up. Now mind you, Los Angeles is not the deep South. Of the more than 100 incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism that occurred in Los Angeles between 1950 and 1965, only one led to an arrest and prosecution. And that was because the California Attorney General took over the case after local police and prosecutors claimed they were unable to find anyone to charge. Now Rothstein gives many examples of this occurring, but let me get back now to what I was saying about blacks who prefer not to live among whites. The South has had a long history of terrorism beginning with the arrival of the first transatlantic slaves. And when this century's long terrorism, when these centuries long terrorism combined with 20th century terrorism, it left some blacks viewing whites as demonic and not to be sought after as neighbors. People don't talk about that very often, but some blacks function with a deep trauma. I can remember living in a very lovely neighborhood in Berkeley. The Elmwood, I was in an apartment there and discovered that about a half block away, a house was going up for sale at a delightful price for that neighborhood. So my grandmother had been complaining about her neighborhood. We really liked the house a lot, but the drug dealers had moved into the neighborhood. And I thought, this was her opportunity. She could be the down payment, I could be the monthly. But she looked at the house and it had a lot of nice features. She just couldn't deal with the idea of living where she was surrounded by white people. And I had a friend who died recently at age 98. She and her husband had been very hardworking and very money wise and could easily have afforded a home in a nice white middle class neighborhood. But that was not a move she would ever consider. Her husband, who died many years before she did, he would never consider it either because he was part of a family that was run out of the south. They were given 12 hours to get out of town.  And they were given that leeway because everybody around knew which white family they had descended from. And some were so white they could pass. But my friend's husband could not pass, although you could see the white influence. And so they left very quickly. Now my friend on several occasions asked me, Why do they hate us so much? What have we ever done to them? And of course I had no answer. So that is what I felt is not discussed very often. There are blacks who can afford to move but do not want to be around white people. They just, at a deep gut level they just don't trust them. My grandmother preferred to stay in the neighborhood where she didn't like people, the way they're keeping up their property or not keeping up their property. She didn't like the signs of drugs coming into the neighborhood, but she'd rather stay there than be surrounded by white people. Okay, I'm now returning to Rothstein's list of desegregation examples. Next, well, I should read something to proceed that. Rothstein says of his examples, all of these have some truth, but they remain a small part of the truth. Submerged by a far more important truth. And you are beginning to read the far more important truths. Next, this theme is emphasized over and over by Rothstein and many other social scientists. And by the end of the program we'll be examining a good example of this. Next, I just want to look one moment at purposeful imposition. Rothstein will criticize not only what our government did purposefully, but what they did not do. Like those examples I read you of LA, the violence there. That was an example of what the government did not do and should have done. And Rothstein has so many examples of that. How many have heard of Levittown? Yes, that was the model community at one point in our history. And when the first black family moved in there, it was well over a month before the police started doing their job to stop preventing bricks being hurled through windows, etc. So our model town became a nightmare for the people who moved in. They had the education and they had the money. But in most of these cases it's not the education or money that gets the crowds out. It's the color of the skin. I can remember as a child, Ralph Bunch. How many remember Ralph Bunch? Yes, Nobel Prize winner, international peacemaker. Just highly decorated for his achievements working on societies. I can remember, I think this was in D.C. but my memory, this goes way back to my childhood. He moved in a neighborhood, crosses were burned, crowds gathered, and it was then I realized it wasn't a matter of class. Because he outclassed probably everybody in that neighborhood or most people. He would outclass most people in most neighborhoods in terms of achievement. It wasn't education. It wasn't achievement in the society. It was because of his color. And he was less brown than I was. And as a child I understood then what racism is about. And let me see where we are right now. Click. Now this author Rothstein is very passionate about law, about the Constitution, and about the jury. And he's next. And because he feels strongly about this, we will examine the amendments he leans on most heavily. He says up here our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, but I would add, and the Reconstruction Amendments, and maybe especially the Reconstruction Amendments. I'm reading Rothstein now. The Fifth Amendment written by our founding fathers prohibits the federal government from treating citizens unfairly next. Now the Fifth Amendment, if you confront it directly, is a long paragraph. And it's usually taught in five sections. What we have done here, we have taken the beginning of the Fifth Amendment and combined it with the last section. And that is the section that quite obviously relates to issues of property. And we are here experienced enough to know that it also relates to issues of race. The due process clause here, where else do we run into the due plot process? Here I'm going to call it a phrase. Where else? Due process here refers to the federal government. We're going to find out that one of the Reconstruction Amendments, the 14th, has due process, but it is explicitly defined for the states. Often though with cases, these are conjoined like twins at the hip back to Rothstein. The Thirteenth Amendment adopted immediately after the Civil War prohibits slavery or in general it prohibits treating African Americans as second class citizens next. And the Thirteenth Amendment has two sections. Next, we will soon see how important this second section is. But before I forget, I think the amendments that Rothstein refers to are pretty clear and direct. You know, we quibble over the Second Amendment, but there's not that much, at least on the face of it, to quibble about the amendments Rothstein is concerned with. Rothstein again. The Fourteenth Amendment also adopted after the Civil War prohibits states or their local governments from treating people either unfairly or unequally next. The Fourteenth Amendment is a long one. Next, next, the fifth and last section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Again, empowering Congress to write whatever legislation they deem necessary to enact the provisions of the amendment. Now we're going to click quickly through the Fifteenth which next, next. The Fifteenth is important and it is important especially during a voting year like this and it does relate to segregated neighborhoods because when you have segregated neighborhoods, it makes gerrymandering easier. Now again, we're looking at Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation and it's okay if we dwell on this a minute. Rothstein says we typically think of the Thirteenth Amendment as only abolishing slavery. Section one of the Thirteenth Amendment certainly does so and section two does so even more and section two is like this section two we see here with the Fifteenth Amendment giving Congress the right to do the appropriate legislation. The second section empowers Congress to enforce section one next. Now it's important to note that as early as 1866 the USA had a civil rights act banning racial discrimination in housing. We're still fighting it aren't we? Back in 1866. So you've read what's up there and now I'm going to let out a big but next, next. White rage. Okay, I have it but I haven't read it. I hope to. Badge of slavery. Anybody else want to comment on that? To me, badge of slavery was what Oprah was manifesting when she tried to get into that shop to buy the purse. Badge of slavery is what I'm manifesting as I stand up here. But let me go into further examples. By the way, I have found the senior center extremely supportive, extremely helpful. In fact, I think it's one of Davis's jewels. I learned to use a computer here. I learned about riding wheels and truss here, etc. But whereas I have found the staff wonderful. This is a public facility and I've had some very interesting experiences here and I want to make sure it doesn't reflect either on the staff or the facility. This is a public space. I want to demonstrate badge of slavery. On two different occasions, I walked down the far north hallway heading westward to the area where the receptionist is. I sat down and the person I sat down, it's when they had those winged back chairs that I liked so well they were so supportive. The person I sat down next to slowly looked up and saw me and jumped out of her seat like that to go sit elsewhere. Now that's an example for you of the badge of slavery. This happened twice in the early 2000s. Nothing has happened say in the past 10 years. Another time I was coming down that same hallway heading toward the receptionist and just as I turned to be in full view of anyone standing in the area. A lady that was part of a crowd, a group of four, was facing me. And let me just say now, the two ladies who jumped out of their chairs and a huff and took seats elsewhere were definitely in their 80s. But this lady I'm focusing on now was more like in her early 60s. And soon as she saw me, she said to her friends, loud enough for me to hear because it was for me.  Yes. The incidents I mentioned happened in the early 2000s. As I said, I don't recall anything out of order in the past 10 years or so. And so I hope we're clear on that. I think I'm going to say, no, we are where I want us to be. Again, Rothstein as well as many other social scientists stress the enduring effects of de-jury segregation. And the latter portion of this presentation will detail one current day manifestation of de-jury segregation. I have circled here by failing to recognize. I want to say Rothstein is asking us to be real, to be honest. And he feels and I feel those are essential steps to making a change. And I made a note here that says when I first entered school and was taught the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States. And it ends with liberty and justice for all. By the time I was five, I knew that was a crock. The United States was having lynchings. How could that be with liberty and justice for all? And as a child, I thought, why are they lying? As I grew older, I thought it would be much better, a much more solid hold on reality to simply say striving for liberty and justice for all, which is a noble thing to do. And I mentioned this because some people have really swallowed this and they're not dealing with the real world today. I can remember speaking here a few years back and there was a lady I spoke to afterwards. She had read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. And after a few pages she put it down and discussed because it couldn't possibly be true. That's sad. It's really helpful to get a grasp on reality. You may not be able to change anything, but at least you're mentally healthier. Okay, click. This is Rothstein again. Again, I want to repeat, he's extremely passionate about this position. Click next. Does anybody want to comment on Rothstein's position? I think we have made it abundantly clear. Okay. Not yet. And it's still a relatively new book. But I think in the next five years we're going to hear more about Rothstein's position. Right now I just want to hit on a few things to demonstrate what Rothstein uses to buttress his argument, what he uses to show what the government should have done or didn't do. And if the government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn't previously taken root and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees, federal housing administration that was back in the 30s, FHA is different today. I'll start that over. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, if only they had integrated working class suburbs. Excuse me, I got off here. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working class suburbs would likely have matured with both African-Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African-American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residents, middle-class African-Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. And here's the last one I'll read. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. Now, the book is just loaded with such examples. He approaches it with a broad net. But I'm looking at the time, so I'm going to ask you to go to next. That's a happy face for us. I was going to have another group activity, but we're going to skip that. So next. Ah, it didn't come in there. Well, it's good. We're looking at the main reason that I decided to do a PowerPoint presentation. This is an example of red lining. And let me give you a little history here. Under FDR's New Deal, there was a great effort, and this is noble and very impressive, to make home ownership more within reach of the masses. So programs were created to lower the down payment to where most people, most working class people could afford it. And to help lower it, the government tried to enlist the aid of private financial groups. And to help entice them through its 1935 City Survey Program, the Homeowners Loan Corporation, and that was the big group that was formed under FDR, although there were others. HOLC gathered data about neighborhoods from approximately 239 cities across the United States and compiled the results in a rating system that ranged from the letter A grade to the letter D grade. Now communities with A ratings represented the best investments for homeowners and banks alike. And they were colored green. Now you may not be able to see the green from where you are that well, because it bleeds into blue quite a bit. And we'll talk more about it. Letter B neighborhoods were colored blue and considered still desirable. So we've gone from best to still desirable. Letter C used the color yellow and that marked neighborhoods in decline. And D were considered hazardous areas. What color did D get? Anybody want to raise their hand and venture forth? What color did D has it? Yes, red. And that's where we got the term red lining. And this allowed homeowners, but more importantly, lenders of money to decide where they were going to place their money. You just had a quick scope of an entire city. Detroit. We're going to see some, in fact, click. This is Atlanta, Georgia. Click. This is where I come from, the Oakland Berkeley area. And I can't see the streets well enough to say where my grandmother's house was. But I can say I think that kind of clear white area up near the top but surrounded by yellow, there are several areas like that. I think that's University of California property. My guess is that we're dealing with West Oakland here. And somewhere around here we're dealing with Berkeley. South Berkeley and West Berkeley. But as I said, it was fun when I came across that to see the red lined areas. Let me continue here. The ratings given by the government agency purported to use objective criteria, but racism did sneak in. H-O-L-C, Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Home Agency valued homogeneity over heterogeneity. So there were mixed neighborhoods that represented the population fairly well, but they didn't get very high ratings. And it appears that the government agencies really look very strongly at ethnicity and race. Those communities depicted in red usually contained minorities. African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and sometimes newly arrived immigrant groups like Slavs, Jews, and Italians. Reminding us that so many groups when they first came here encountered discriminatory treatment. But most of those groups I've mentioned could gradually work themselves into whiteness. They learned the language, they got different haircuts, wore different clothes, and gradually they became white. Whiteness is more than just skin color, although it's dominantly the thing. And I was amazed to discover that at one point in the Los Angeles area, African Americans and Japanese were the people that they were most discriminatory about. But I think the Japanese have worked themselves generally. I don't want to say everybody, but generally out of that category of hazardous. And the impact of redlining cannot be overstated. Redline communities struggled to receive federally backed home loans. That's what you were talking about, Susan. They struggled to get, well, this made property ownership much more difficult for them as a result. Moreover, it made getting loans for home improvements, maintenance, upkeep and renovation, though not impossible, very likely. Not being able to get your hands on that loaned cash, especially when the government worked with private lenders to lower things, to put them within reach. And as you told us about Susan, the GI Bill, my family was very crushed that they could not use the GI Bill. And I have not really recovered from the disappointment my mother felt. So neighborhoods that weren't allowed borrowed money fell into a vicious cycle of decline. The inability to access capital led to disrepair. And the physical decline of a community's housing stock, which in turn reinforced the redline designation. That redlining became equated with race and class, led to a kind of naturalization of segregation. And I'm going to stop now because I want to start winding up. I told you this morning I turned on the radio and heard Amy Goodman talking about a study that was released just this month. There's a news organization in the Bay Area called Reveal. It's investigative and they spent most part of 2016 and most of 2017 making a study of big 61 metro areas. And they found, and by the way, their study has been endorsed by people who know the quality of studies, data, research and assessment. They've been rated very high. They have discovered that modern day redlining persists in 61 metro areas, even when you control for applicants having similar or the same incomes. Even when you control for applicants asking for the same loan amount. Even when you control for applicants trying to move into the same or similar neighborhoods. The analysis showed black applicants were turned away at significantly higher rates than whites in 48 cities, Latinos in 25, Asians in 9 and Native Americans in 3. In Washington DC, the nation's capital, Reveal found all four groups were significantly more likely to be denied a home loan than whites. So you see there is a spillover of this racism. Blacks get it the hardest in this particular area, but it does affect other people. And it gives you a better understanding of our anti-immigrant position, or I should say the position of some people. Lending patterns in Philadelphia today resemble redlining maps drawn across the country by government officials in the 1930s. And that was when lending discrimination was legal. This practice of redlining has been outlawed for 50 years now. And for the last 40 years, banks have a legal obligation under a law called Community Reinvestment Act to go out and solicit clients, borrowers, depositors from all segments of their societies. Well, they found that overwhelmingly these banks were located in white neighborhoods, overwhelmingly. And the money given to the Community Reinvestment Act, which was meant to reinvest in low-income communities, is being given to whites for gentrification. We've all been aware of certain areas if we travel being more gentrified. Well, they're being more gentrified because the banks, instead of doing what the law says they should be doing, are just following old established patterns. I am going to give you an example that carries a lot of weight. There is a young woman named Rachelle. I'll just use her first name. Rachelle was raised by a public school teacher mom, and Rachelle was sent to private schools and all her education went to college. She's prepared to live the middle-class life. She's 30, she was 33, she may be 33 now because all this began in 2016, I'm not sure, but you get the general range of her age. She was rejected twice by lenders, and this is in Philadelphia. When she tried to buy a brick-row house, and from the way they describe it, I'm assuming it's in a dominantly minority neighborhood, and she tried to borrow from a group. Well, Reveal found that the group she tried to borrow from were 2.7 times as likely to deny a conventional mortgage to a black-qualified person as to a white. And when Rachelle applied for a loan in April 2016, she thought she was an ideal candidate. She holds a degree from Northwestern University, had good credit, and estimates she was making approximately 60,000 a year while teaching computer programming as a contractor for Rutgers University. Still, her initial application was denied, and I won't name the bank and confuse you. An independent broker, well, the bank that denied her was independent, and it made nearly 90% of its loans to whites in 2015 and 2016. I'm sorry, the broker wrote to Rachelle in an email. She said that Rachelle's contract income wasn't consistent enough. So the next thing Rachelle did was get a full-time job at the University of Pennsylvania, managing a million-dollar grant. But still, that wasn't enough. When she tried again a year later with another bank, the process dragged on for months. Eventually, they stopped responding to her phone calls, and then she got the bright idea. Let me try this. She has a partner, and the partner's name is Hanako France. Hanako France is half Japanese and half white. Hanako, at this period, was between things she really wanted to do. So she was working part-time at a grocery store, and at the point when she signed on to the request to borrow money, her most recent pay stub showed she was making $144.65 every two weeks, so essentially $72 a week. And once she signed on and called up, she got immediate response. Within a few weeks, they had their home loan. I find that just deplorable. But I couldn't get a better example to illustrate that redlining is still going on. And our current federal government has even lowered the requirements on the lenders who are supposed to be under the Community Reinvestment Act. The law already was weak. They weren't being properly monitored. And I want to say this, getting back to what Susan told us about home ownership and building wealth. The disproportionate denials and limited anti-discrimination enforcement help explain why the home ownership gap between whites and African Americans, which had been shrinking since the 1970s, why that gap has exploded since the housing bust. And then let me say this, the fact that minorities were targeted for the subprime loans is another excellent example of how the past really has not passed, how it's still with us. It was okay to wipe those people out and some of those people should have qualified for prime loans. But they were being talked into, loans they shouldn't have been. But again, the banks weren't doing what they were supposed to do, what the law tells them. This gap, oh, the gap now between white ownership and black ownership is wider than it was during the Jim Crow era. And the Jim Crow era spans from the 19th century somewhere into the 1960s. This gap has far-reaching consequences. In the United States, wealth and financial stability are inextricably linked to housing opportunity and home ownership. For a typical family, the largest share of their wealth emanates from home ownership and home equity. And Susan gave us an excellent example of the GI Bill, which my family could not get. The latest figures from the Census Bureau, U.S. Census Bureau, show that the median net worth for an African American family is $9,000 compared with $132,000 for a white family. Latino families weigh in at $12,000. One person said in Pennsylvania, an activist in fair housing, it's like a glass ceiling. Okay, we allow you to go this far, but you're not going to go any further. Okay, let's click. Next, and who says computers are a problem? Well, I'm going to start talking. I'm returning to Rothstein at this point because you've just got the latest update, and you're likely to hear more about this modern-day redlining. In his bibliography, Rothstein duly commends his sources. He thanks them for the work they've done and what they have contributed to his work. But he sets aside a special paragraph that begins. I also recommend Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. And there's my picture for that, that little boy again. Does anybody know where I got that picture? Time magazine in the past six weeks had him on their cover and also inside, and I just love the little picture. But the lines by his picture say, residential segregation underpins our racial problems today. And I think he's right. And the mass incarceration of young black men, often without sufficient cause, is the most serious. And I have more pictures here. Integrating the nation residentially is a long-term project. But the criminal justice systems targeting of young men living in black neighborhoods is an urgent crisis that we can, if we have the will, address quickly. Oops, I forgot. I'm tied to a string. I'm not supposed to be walking. Well, the string tethered me in quickly enough. I hope somebody recognizes the pictures I'm showing now. Oh, that's okay. I have to have the book because I'm going to continue. Well, let me show that side of the room and I'll bring it right back. Okay. Yeah, we did quite a bit of research to get that. And it had been the big screen I would have asked, do you recognize? Thank you. A frozen laptop. Well, it happens to the best of us. I feel so like I have a tail here. But I'm still winding up because Rothstein finally says, absorbing the analysis of Michelle Alexander's, the new Jim Crow, can be a step in the right direction. He strongly recommends that. And I might insert a recommendation here also. Ta-Nehisi Coates, now classic essay on the case for reparations, goes into a lot of personal detail about what happened in Chicago. And you can read that online. Okay, I'm ending the program with a quote. And I'm going to ask you to guess who made this quote. Here it is. Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. There are differences, deep corrosive, obstinate differences, radiating painful roots into the community and into the family and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. Who can guess who made that statement? It was a famous person. And it was not in this century, it was in the last century. Can anybody tell me the race of the person? I'll tell you the gender was male. And what makes this even more moving? It's a white male born in Texas, raised in Texas, President Lyndon Baines Johnson. His insights could not have been better written by Ta-Nehisi Coates or James Baldwin. I think that's a hopeful note to end on. And thank you for coming. And thank you for the applause. And let's thank the senior center for all the work they've done too. Let's give them a round of applause.


Good evening, everyone. I'm Michelle Singer. I'm the Adult Programs Coordinator here at the Kellogg-Cubbard Library. And I'd like to welcome you to our library tonight. We're very happy to have you. Hello to everyone on live stream. We're happy to have you as well. And thank you to Orca Media for live streaming for us tonight. The library has been partnering with the League of Women Voters for seven, eight. This is the eighth year we've been in partnership with their speaker series. And it's a great partnership, but we're happy to continue it. Kate Rader is going to come up from the League of Women Voters and make the official introduction. Thank you, and I would like to welcome you on behalf of the League. It looks like we're still getting used to being out in public together again. So for this program, on election issues, we present Susan Clark speaking on constructive discourse. Clark is a writer and educator focusing on community sustainability and citizen participation, an award-winning radio commentator and former talk show co-host. She has taught community development at the college level for 10 years. Excuse me. Clark's small-D democratic activism has earned her broad recognition, including the 2010 Vermont Secretary of State's Enduring Democracy Award. She serves as town moderator of Middlesex, Vermont, and she is a member of the League of Women Voters. Before I relinquish the stage, let me invite you to next month's program on January 10th on civics education, where we will hear Secretary of State Sarah Copeland-Hanses and from the agency of education, Martha Dice. And now I will give it to Sue. Those little Christmasy things. Thank you so much. And thanks to everybody for coming out on this snowy night. Can everybody hear me? Is this okay? Yes. All right. Great. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. I know that constructive discourse is an important topic to all of us, and maybe some of us would rather be at home having eggnog. So good for you for saying, no, actually, this one's for me. So Kate introduced me. I won't go much further. I just did want to say I do work with communities across New England on effective public engagement. And researcher and writer, slow democracy tells stories of communities across the United States using local democracy to make a difference. All those in favor is a book I co-authored with Frank Bryan, an awful lot about Vermont town meetings. And we sort of called this one the reader's digest version of his 30-year study of Vermont town meetings. And Freedom and Unity, not technically a book. It's a comic book. Okay. But it was so much fun to make. And I'll tell you, it came out last fall. And if you're looking for some great therapy sometime, find a cartoonist, speak your truth, and then see what happens two weeks later when they give it back to you in a cartoon. It was a really satisfying, fun experience with the Vermont Humanities Council and the Vermont Secretary of State's Office and the Center for Cartoon Studies, which we have one of in Vermont in White River Junction. So you can see from all of that that I'm a local democracy nerd. So sorry about that. I will be addressing this topic of constructive discourse primarily from that local democracy perspective. But as we will see, a lot of the issues that we're facing at the national political discourse level have parallels in our communities and in our neighborhoods and in our families and in our marriages and in parenting because there's a common problem that runs through all of these. Anybody spotted it? Human beings, right? Human beings deeply flawed. So we're going to see what we can do about that. So I'm going to start by talking about some of the unique challenges we are facing today in terms of constructive democratic discourse. I'll touch a little bit on brain science, how our brains have gotten us here, and then putting this together, what tools, what innovations might we bring to our current situation to sort of navigate and create more constructive discourse. So let me just start with some of the current strains on our society. I don't need to tell anybody here how exhausted everybody is from the past few years. The pandemic took its toll, of course, on our individuals and families and local economies. At that same time, you will recall that America experienced and, of course, is still experiencing a long overdue racial reckoning. And meanwhile, climate change, the July flood experience is still very much with us and climatologists are telling us to prepare for disasters as the new normal. So these are real pressures and we're going to need to agree on how to address them. But will our democratic skills be up to that challenge? And January 6th was just one of many visual aids showing us that we are experiencing one of the most polarized and democratically fragile moments in American history.  There was a recent survey that showed that fewer than one in 10 Americans polled think that political ranker between average Americans will decrease in the next decade and nearly half think it's going to increase. So even the title of my talk today had to be carefully crafted. The League's initial impulse was to have me speak on civil discourse. Ooh, civil discourse. I can tell you right now, deliberative democracy practitioners, the word civility itself has become charged because they're activists working to dismantle racism and they reject that call for civility. They're arguing fundamental changes require confrontation. We don't want civility. We need to call people out in public and we need to disobey unjust laws in order to get elite's attention. I've seen whole events blow up and fail just over that one word of civility alone, which just kind of tells you where we've gotten to. So Democratic scholars are refining their language. There's a Harvard professor named Arshon Fung who said deliberative Democrats don't deny the need for conflict or adversarial politics. But think that a central purpose of that conflict is to establish the political conditions for fair and inclusive deliberative democracy.  What's the model really before? And how do we model that? There's a UNH professor, a deliberative scholar who said our goal now has just been to help people get to the table and stay at the table, please stay. Because this is not sustainable. We all know that we're going to have to work together to solve our problems, so how? How do we engage more constructively when there are so many forces that keep us polarized? So there's some good news about this, but I'm just going to finish with a little bit more bad news. This is a funny slide, but humor is a way to cope with our scary reality. That is not an actual scientific study. But public engagement is increasingly inflamed by misinformation, I think we all know that. Social media and Amanda Ripley wrote a book called High Conflict, which I would really recommend, and she has coined the term Conflict Entrepreneurs. Think about that. These are partisans and media outlets who make it their business to so distrust. Because they actually benefit from polarization. So remember this term, Conflict Entrepreneurs. I'm going to use it a few times. Amanda Ripley, R-I-P-L-E-Y. Her book is called High Conflict. Yeah, fascinating. She goes all different kinds of conflict from wars to divorces, gangs, and what they have in common in terms of, again, the human brain. Yeah, Conflict Entrepreneurs, you might know some from time to time, you might even be one. So we'll come back to this. So in addition, sometimes we are just our own worst enemies. Conventional participation, this is what political scientists call things like public hearings. Public hearings, by the way, the most common way that we bring people together in democracy today, have, according to a lot of research, actually made things worse. Social scientists have been collecting data on that sort of two minutes at the microphone thing, that conventional participation, which are enshrined in law. They have, 50 years ago, we started doing things via public hearings. And if you can imagine life with no hearings, then you're talking smoke-filled rooms. So it's like, you get it. That public hearings were intended to make things more transparent. But the way they are formatted, public hearings are frequently neither. They are usually poor representation of the public, and there's very little hearing that's going on. So here are some direct quotes from, this is a textbook on public administration. Conventional participation, things like public hearings, tend to be harmful to citizens. It increases our feelings of powerlessness, decreases our political interests, decreases our trust in government. It can also increase polarization. If you think about a public hearing, usually it's like, all right, we have a proposal. If you want to speak for it, stand there. If you want to speak against it, stand there. Very little, it actually tends to exacerbate the differences rather than thinking about what they have in common. There are a number of other critiques in public hearings, but this is a, this idea that it can be hard, really hard on the people who are involved. And it's not just, yeah. Well, ignorance is what comes to mind, is that if you're not exposed to the public hearing, you don't know, so you're like, I'm ignorant, so everything's happy. But if I do get exposed, it might possibly create these things. So in a strange way, those bad things are more informed, citizen, I don't know. I just offer that. Am I a more informed citizen if I go to a public hearing? Right. Right. I mean, maybe, although I might also be a more inflamed citizen. What I'm looking for is a better process than a public hearing. Sure. So these are for the folks in the audience, but what about the leaders? They don't like it either. It's frustrating. It's discouraging. It can actually even be dangerous to deal with a hostile, uninformed, argumentative citizens who are at public meetings. And ultimately, we're talking about outcomes. As the relationship deteriorates between the people and their public institutions, the legitimacy and the financial sustainability of the governments continues to decline. So I know that's a lot of bad news. And I think no wonder many of us are sick of democracy. So the question is why? Why is it so hard to create systems where we can hear each other? And what is it about humans that makes us... It makes it so easy for conflict entrepreneurs to manipulate us. So to answer that, I'll take a little brief foray into the amazing and amazingly frustrating human brain. There was a study that was done... First done in 2006. It has been replicated many times since where researchers wired up some voters to explore exactly what happens inside our brains when we receive new information, especially when we perceive that that information does not fit our world view. So they had a group of self-described Republicans and Democrats who were subjected to unflattering information about their own party's candidates. And according to their MRIs, this is brain reading, when the subjects were confronted with information that contradicted their biases, their brains actually under-processed the information. So the prefrontal cortex that's responsible for conscious reasoning, it hardly even fired.  So basically, participants' brains used emotion to ignore information that they didn't want to hear but that they couldn't discount intellectually. And what we have to remember is this is physical. This is a physiological reaction. So there are scientists like Jonathan Hyde who explain it.  Who's on my team and who isn't? It gave us a survival advantage back when we were banding together in tribes for protection. Thank you very much. Evolution, right? And Hyde explains that many of our individual characteristics, this is a really interesting book, by the way, including whether we're the kind of person that gets excited about change or whether we're the kind of person who kind of prefers the status quo, that literally makes us more likely to be liberal or conservative. Those aren't simply opinions. We're talking about significantly inherited qualities and they make up our identities and we're physiologically wired to embody them and defend them. So if we want to live in a world where people can take in new information and can find new ways to move forward together, it is easiest if we frame the conversation in ways that don't challenge those identities. And it takes patience and it takes, frankly, a lot of big-heartedness. Another great book, Catherine Schultz, the author of the book Being Wrong, has comically pointed out, she has a great TED talk on this, when we encounter somebody we disagree with, we often react on a three-point scale. So you and I are talking, we realize we disagree. My first thought is, oh, this person just needs more information. So I kindly share my facts with you, right? But we still disagree. So then I'm going to move on to number two.  So what if that turns out not to be true? What if the person we disagree with has all the information and they turn out to be pretty smart? Uh-oh, that's really scary. We're going to have to move on to number three, right? This person is evil. They know perfectly well the truth, but they are distorting it on purpose because they are wicked. And you'll notice that this latter leaves no room for the very most common of human realities, which is that intelligent people of good will sometimes disagree. And in fact, the only solution, uncomfortable as it may be, is to get together and to hear each other out. So this is really important, and it's especially important now, because at this moment in history, a lot of today's topics, affordable housing, school consolidations, citing wind turbines are so complex that even science can't give us one simple right answer because of competing identities and underlying values. And it sounds so hard, but here's the thing. The world is full of what's called polarities, two crucial, interdependent, but contradictory variables that have to coexist. Navigating polarities, it's not easy. We manage it every day. Any parents in the room here? Parents have to be firm and flexible. Two competing realities, two good things. And if you'd rely too much on one or the other, you really need to have both in order to be a good parent. A good boss is both grounded and visionary. Organizations have to embrace both continuity and change. And in our home state of Vermont, since 1788, we have somehow functioned under our paradoxical motto. Anybody remember? Freedom and unity, that's right. If we were all completely free, we could never be unified. And if we were all totally unified, we would never be free. It is the ultimate motto of paradox. In New Hampshire, at least, they know where they stand, live free or die. But we have been operating and understand that these two competing things, two competing goods, need to be considered in lots and lots of decisions that we make. The trick about, if you have a polarity dynamic, but what if there are multiple poles? What if there are three things? Analysts call that a wicked problem. Anybody remember seeing signs like this? I think pinkies used to have one. It reminds me of this. We can do it good, we can do it cheap, and we can do it fast, but you can only have two. So balancing multiple poles, it's like a magic trick. But planners do this all the time when they're looking at a parcel of land and they've got one group that's really interested in environmental issues like wildlife. You've got another group that's very interested in economic development. You've got another that's got social issues like affordable housing it's trying to work on. There's no one single solution that you're just gonna pop off the shelf and it's gonna please everybody every time. So the trick is rather than thinking about solving wicked problems, we need to think about managing them. Naming and understanding the underlying competing values, exploring the trade-offs together, and doing that hard work of finding the best balance in each case. There's a professor at Colorado State University named Martine Carcassonne who explains that most of the time, most problem-solving models that we have do not work this way. They focus on one of two tools, expertise or activism. Expertise, we bring in the scientific experts and they will tell us what to do. Or activism, right? Just organize a campaign, one side wins, the other side loses, boom, problem solved, right? Until the losing side comes back. Polarities and wicked problems are inherently different. They don't respond to one single technical solution. They don't respond to advocacy. What they do respond to is trusting face-to-face communication. Carcassonne has said that solutions begin when we recognize that with wicked problems, it's the problem that's wicked and not the people. Wonderful best-selling book, The Some of Us by Heather McGee. She tells the story of desegregation in the American South in the 1950s and 60s where some towns were so against allowing black people to swim in swimming pools that rather than desegregate, they literally drained the swimming pools. So nobody could swim. So rather than this crazy drained pool politics, zero-sum policies where both sides lose, McGee, her book is filled with more modern examples of deeper cross-cultural understanding and creates what she calls the solidarity dividend. I love that term.  We actually both can benefit when we figure it out together. Because the good news is that brain science tells us we can actually use our intellectual capacity better when we don't trigger that fight-or-flight-us-them response. So we need techniques to frame issues and engage people in less divisive ways so that we can honor our differences and integrate the diverse values into the solutions. To recap, polarities and wicked problems, they never get solved. That's the bad news. The good news is they do get managed or they can be managed. In fact, I think some of the greatest human suffering comes from treating what's really a polarity as if it were a problem to solve. It's a polarity to navigate, and if you treat it as a problem to solve, that's where we really start to suffer. So how? How do you navigate a polarity? Exactly. So we could do a month-long workshop on this. If you're interested, it's definitely worth the time, I'm just going to do a little whirlwind tour. And this work draws on a book by Brian Emerson and Kelly Lewis who are building on Barry Johnson's groundbreaking work, Polarity Management. So what are some typical common polarities that you might see in everyday life? We mentioned some of the ones that parents see, certainly in your relationship with friends, you're going to see something like structure and flexibility, you're taking a trip, planning a trip with a friend, and one of you really, it's like, I want to do this on Tuesday, I want to do this on Wednesday, I want to make sure to see the blah, blah, blah, and somebody else is like, I want to see what happens, let's just take life as it comes.  These are some of the ones that organizations have, some of the ones you see in leadership. Things like action and reflection. Are you somebody who just really wants to answer questions, or are you more of a slow thinker? Reality and hope, that's one that we're all struggling with right now, I think. Many of us have a preference on these polls. You might see yourself up there and know exactly which one you are on candor and diplomacy, for instance. It's really natural for any individual to have a preference on one of those. And of course, none of these, if you look at the way these are framed, none of these things is bad. For example, you'll notice structure and flexibility. It's not like, if I were a person who is really into flexibility, I might say, rigidity and flexibility? But it's like, no, we're not doing that. On both sides, when we're talking about a polarity, both sides are good. We're not one versus the other, we want them both. On the other hand, there is such a thing as taking any of these things too far. So navigating a polarity, this is what's called a polarity map, and this one is continuity and change. So two sides, and this is the kind of thing that we can do in our brains, or we can actually actively do them on paper or in public forums. But the two sides represent the two poles. Over here, continuity, over here, change. The top represents a healthy use of that pole. If we could just focus on continuity and not worry about it, not worry about change, what good things would we get, what benefits would we have if we could just focus on change and then over uses the consequences if we overused that pole. What happens if we focus only on continuity and neglect or ignore the other if we take this pole too far? So I'll give you an example in a second, but there are lots of different ways you can use a tool like this. I've done it with folks where you actually have four flip charts in the room, and you visit each of the flip charts and you fill it out. It can be an actual, really, a physical experience. You can sense at which pole you feel the most comfortable at which one you just kind of tense up. I had a colleague tell me one time that he was working out west with some farmers and they were talking about a continuity and change issue, I think it was, that had to do with farmland. And everybody was willing to discuss all four of the poles, but there was one farmer who would not walk to that flip chart. He was willing to throw out some ideas, but he would not stand next to it. You can see how powerful it can be to experience this with a whole room. But another way to do it is through polling. You can have individually, have people fill these out. So here's an example that some of us may have seen or experienced. Should we renovate the old town hall or the school or fill in the bank, or should we tear it down and build a new one? Continuity and change. So you can imagine if you were in your community, maybe you're even on the planning commissioner on the select board, and you know that this is a hot one. You know that this is going to be about more than bricks and mortar. You sense in this case, I'm not in every case, but maybe in this case you sense that there's some values involved. Maybe some old-time or newcomer stuff. It could turn into an ugly fight. You'd rather have constructive discourse. So how much do you use a polarity tool? I did this with a group this summer. And here are some of the responses that we saw if you think about it. Some of the benefits of continuity, of sticking with the old town hall. And by the way, we took money out of the argument. Just for the sake of our money, we took money out of it. Let's say it costs the same. So here are some folks saying it's going to respect our local history. It gives us a sense of place. We understand it. We know how it works. Having a historic building is a draw for tourism. Oh, I should have taken out that cheaper thing. Anyway, the environmental impact doesn't increase our taxes for now. Some of the things that they were brainstorming. And they also were pretty... It was pretty easy for people who really liked continuity to think about how mad they would be if things did move too fast. And what if we did just go ahead and tear down the old town hall. It disrespects long-term residents. They lose their sense of place, lose their sense of control. So some very negative things down there under that. But we also filled in the other ones as well. And so this idea that you can innovate that the town will look less run down. We could attract new families. It might be a healthier building. And start to name some things that we don't... The people over here seem a little rigid to me. These words start to sound pretty negative. They're not even innovative. In fact, we're even going to start saying that they're exclusionary and that there are equity issues here as well. Which starts to get pretty personal. Down here, when we start talking about some of these negatives, it can be raised some really hot issues. And if you've ever been in one of these conversations with somebody who really was attached to their poll and it was a polarity. A polarity to navigate, not a problem to solve. What tends to happen in these conversations if you don't pay attention, is that I will tell you all the good things about continuity and the overuses of change. Whereas you will tell me all the benefits of change and all the overuses of continuity. And we will have one of these kinds of diagonal conversations where we talk past each other endlessly yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, green, green, green, green, green, green, infinity loop. Ever happened to anybody at Thanksgiving, by the way? We're talking past each other. I'm convinced that I'm right and you're wrong. And this is the way conflict entrepreneurs love to frame issues. My side wants the benefits of yellow and I will frame the other side purely in terms of its overuses. And it's really painful to live down here in the overuses. They may be true, but if you put me here, it's going to make my brain turn off.  And down here, if you tell me that the benefits have changed, all of a sudden you're going to tell me that I'm disrespecting long-term residents and I'm an elitist. I'm also going to be very grumpy. It's really painful to live down here and our brains turn off if we live down there. And rather than being a creative problem solver, if I'm being placed down here, what I'm going to act more like is an animal in a cage. And furthermore, I'll probably start calling you these things over here. So this is called the suffering paradox. If we treat polarities like a problem and try to solve them, it has some definite symptoms. You'll probably recognize some of these. We preference, we attach, we wet ourselves to one pole. Othering, we create the other. We start to be unable to see a possible compromise. The either or is so strong that we kind of neglect the idea there could be a both-hand. And it results in hampered communication, damaged relationships, you know, inferior results, bad outcomes. Oh, I have a little visual, just a second. You've all seen these, but it really brings to mind a finger trap. When we start to pull apart from each other because of this, we, it's a trap, right? It's a trap when we pull apart from each other. We see the similarity here that we have to coexist. We're stuck together, but we're triggered, and we want to pull away, and it only tightens the trap. And there are a number of reasons that we might resist coming together while we might pull apart. We could be scared that we would lose part of our identity. We might anticipate judgment from other people who are on our side who have the same preferences at challenging our team. And, you know, we could be threatening our side's values. But there's some real strength, real power in brainstorming these lists together in an open, honest discussion. When I actually hear you, you know, if we're really open and brainstorming, I could hear you say, well, I don't happen to believe this, but I know some people think that this could disrespect long-term residents. That's a pretty powerful thing to have me hear you say that. And we start to, it's like, just for the sake of facts, we understand there is such a thing as an overuse of my side. I still prefer this side, but yet it can go too far. And a shift can really happen. When I hear you say out loud the overuses of your way and the benefits of mine, and it siphons that energy out of the infinity loop. And what happens is that the words are the same, but the emphasis, the conversation is transformed. Because all of a sudden we can come together, I can get my fingers out, and rather than talking against each other, yellow versus green, side versus side, we start to recognize that we are unified in wanting these good things. And we are unified in really wanting to try to figure out how to avoid these bottom things. So, again, the same facts, but it's a more relaxed, not the infinity loop. Everybody wants the top. And then you can start talking about the third way. What is the third, what is the way that we are going to get something that respects our local history and also might give us a healthier building? What can we do to have a really strong sense of place and also innovate and have fresh ideas? If you start framing the question that way, you come up with different kinds of answers. So, this is a tool that can be used in a bunch of different ways. It can just be a lens that you can bring. I actually use it a lot these days, especially when I'm listening to the news. But also in a conversation with your neighbors or friends, who framed this question? Is this being framed by conflict entrepreneurs? Is this somebody just trying to push me into my corner and make my brain turn off? Is there a polarity underneath this that maybe could be framed more productively? So, you can ask yourself the question. It's also one that you can use if you are actually talking with somebody, to a colleague or in the community. If you have something as A versus B, you might ask them what would happen if we step back and looked at things a little more holistically. We both recognize this tension. We value both of these two good things. How can we honor them both and find a way forward together? What might a solution look like that would honor both of those sides?  But watching out for conflict entrepreneurs, they will never frame a conversation this way. They want us to live down at the bottom with the overuses. So, I mentioned that if we want to help people move forward, it's easier if we frame things in a way that doesn't challenge a person's identity. I just want to mention a superpower that I think we have here in Vermont. And that is the sense of place. And the United States, you know, place isn't simple. In the United States, we have centuries of place-based sins to reckon with. We've violently displaced Native American populations from our homelands to forcibly, we also forcibly relocated enslaved Africans to our shores, so place is not a simple thing. That said, whether or not by design, the United States is a nation that's full of immigrants, multicultural communities. We have refugees from across the globe. Whatever each of our personal histories, many, many people feel a strong organic sense of place in the place they now call home. So it's natural for humans to want to engage with place. And in Vermont, right here, we have some place-based advantages that have helped us to understand each other. One of them, of course, is right outside your door. Winter. And, you know, the days are even still getting shorter for another week or two. And it makes winter feel even longer when you just lost your power at a heavy wet snow, as most of us did. So when somebody tells me that they've just survived their first Vermont winter, I can share a celebration with them. Or if they tell me that they've been here for a decade, I mean, that's ten winters, right? Or that they tell me their family's been here for seven generations. Or that they are of Native American descent. Any of these statements is embedded with meaning and it's an opportunity to connect, that we can use it as an opportunity to connect with each other. Another one that we have, of course, is our scale in Vermont. Our post-colonial settlement patterns, in response to the natural landscape. We are clustered in small human-scale communities. A lot of people don't know this about Vermont, but we are technically the most rural state in the United States, according to the most recent census. And what does that mean? It doesn't mean we're Wyoming with these vast open areas. It means, because it's a census, it's about people, right? It's because we have, by far, the most people who live in communities of 2,500 or less. That's how it's defined as rural in the census. So nearly 65% of Vermonters live in these small communities. And what that means, it's how we govern ourselves, it's how we know our neighbors. It's a huge factor that gives us a sense of connection. And that's, again, super power that we can build on. Town meetings, of course, you will hear me talk about this as an inheritance. There are over three-quarters of Vermont towns make decisions of some kind at-floor meetings. They're little tiny legislatures dedicated to self-governance and direct democracy, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. It changes our democratic DNA and our expectations of how we make decisions together. And, of course, shared experience over time builds social capital. It's that place-based trust and neighborliness and reciprocity. They're a powerful inheritance so that we can push together. So conflict entrepreneurs will make it their business to nationalize issues. They will name and frame things in ways that will rile up their base. But the more we can resist that nationalization, the more we can think about what we have in common with our neighbors is a canny response to celebrate what we share. And place is our common. So I'm just going to give a couple of examples. You know, there's been increased polarization. We know that. The good news there is that there are a lot of new groups that have emerged to take on bridge building. A lot of you have heard of probably Braver Angels, which facilitates conversations across a red-blue divide. I will name just a few more. Some of them are pretty fun. This one, this is Living Room Conversations. This was founded by Joan Blades. And you may not have heard of Joan Blades, but you have probably heard of another organization that she founded, moveon.org. Oh, thanks. Denied. You've been denied. So Joan Blades, who co-founded moveon.org, she has created a process where you have two people, you and a neighbor, host a conversation on a controversial topic. But the trick is that one host has to be a self-identified liberal and the other one a self-identified conservative. So they invite over a few of their friends, but again, they have to maintain that balance. And so if you Google Living Room Conversations, you'll see that they have a whole host of topics, from voting practices to food and health, how to talk about politics that are framed in a way that you can have these Living Room Conversations. You can have them on Zoom as well. And the idea is not to find agreement, shared beliefs or opinions, but alignment, shared intention. So a very cool process worth looking into. Here's a new one. I don't know if any of you has seen this documentary called The Abortion Talks. If you want an inspirational example, there's an organization called Essential Partners. And it was involved in some very unusual constructive discourse that's covered in this documentary. So in the 1990s, in the aftermath of a shooting at an abortion clinic in Massachusetts, they convened six women, three leaders of pro-choice groups and three leaders of pro-life groups. And these women were so horrified by the shootings at the clinics that they risked their professional lives and their personal safety, frankly, to meet secretly. And they said, yes, we will meet once, secretly, as long as it can be completely, you know, just come in. They met once with a mediator from Essential Partners. They said, we'll do it again. They met once more. And eventually, regularly, over the course of six years, they kept on meeting these six women in mediated conversations. And the purpose wasn't to change each other's minds. That was never going to happen. This is like the head of NARAL and the head of pro-choice and pro-life groups. But they wanted to understand each other better. And ultimately, they changed how they would speak about each other in public. Ultimately, they humanized each other, which dialed back the public rhetoric, which had inflamed their followers. They gained extraordinary mutual respect, and they even started to engage in some cross-partisan efforts. So worth taking a look at these amazing six women and the conversations that they had. This is a more playful example. It's just so wacky that it seems to be working. The Warm Cookies of the Revolution. It's a civic health club in Denver. Of course, every event, they do have milk and cookies. And of course, it's Denver. They always have the gluten-free cookies and the soy milk. But the idea is to help people come out of their ideological corners and also to have fun. So they have some really silly events. This is the Civic Stitch and Pitch panel discussion with moderators on political topics, things like gentrification and gun safety and legalizing marijuana. But you are required to bring a craft. You have to bring your knitting. Or if you don't have one, then your craft supplies are supplied. It helps people kind of stay human, reduces speechifying. They have a Thursday night football game where during half-time, they have timeouts to discuss social issues that revolve around professional sports. They had an emergency preparedness event that touched on actually not just zombies. But they did include some group activities during that awareness event. And clearly, just had a lot of fun. For a local example that's similarly fun, I hope some of you have heard of the Civic Standard, which is a new group out of Hardwick. They call themselves a mobile cultural center. So they are in the old newspaper building in Hardwick, but they also will do things at different places, whether they're hosting a harvest celebration at the Grange or free soup nights. They've got speakers and workshops and music junkets. They did a homegrown theater production about their own community in Hardwick where the town manager played the town manager. And they're just doing very creative, very exceptionally playful and super serious work of reweaving the fabric of their community. And while we're talking local, I'll just give a couple of fun local examples. Peacham has an elaborate partnership between the school and the town where each grade goes through a democratic process to nominate a name for a town, Snowplow. And then the voters at town meeting get to vote on it. It's inspiring, it's unforgettable for the kids, and it's this lighthearted moment of public discourse for the adults. You probably also heard about what happened in Woodbury recently where the town moderator teamed up with the elementary school to moderate a mock town meeting. And the students got to debate several issues, including whether to spend 500 real dollars on new playground equipment or a field trip.  What are the trade-offs? Vermont Public did a great story on this. And in the end, spoiler alert, they did choose the field trip. But the Fairbanks Museum executive director heard the radio story and was so honored that they would choose a field trip that he donated the field trip, which meant that they got to get the playground equipment. I'm not sure what the democratic lesson is there. But a fantastic experience for them and for the community. So to wrap up, I will just mention a little dialogue process that's called the Conversation Café. And this is a format. I've got the little cards here. I've got them with my yes, along with my finger trap. Conversation Café cards. They offer ground rules, things like if you're going to have a conversation with a friend, open mind, having an attitude of curiosity, speaking with sincerity, speaking from your personal experience, try to keep it brief. Some ground rules like that. And my favorite part is on the back, these are reminders that you can just carry with you and you're in a conversation that's on the verge of becoming uncivil. There's these questions that can help you to bring things back together. Ask your person who is saying things that you disagree with. What happened that led you to this point of view? Ask them for a story. How does this affect you personally? Which is an interesting way of getting past the talking points that they might have heard on the radio. How does this affect you personally? I'm curious, can you say more about that? Boy, we never say that when we're in arguments, do we? And then, of course, the ultimate here is what I heard is that what you mean? Which is a very, very powerful way to help people make sure that they're saying what they mean. Oftentimes, there will be a follow-up. Yeah, that's what I mean and you can dig a little deeper. I think the idea with these is to take a breath and to discover the concerns beneath stances, the interests beneath the positions. Because when we are feeling heard, it helps our minds relax, it helps our minds open and even might allow us to recognize the gaps in our own knowledge and to become curious, to learn more. So the goal is not to embrace, not to validate, not to convince, it's to understand. And in the work of constructive discourse, there isn't any more powerful tool than listening. So that's it. That's for me. I'm happy to take questions. And I have more of these cards. Any thoughts on polarities? Public discourse? Snow plows? Framing. Issue framing? The worst conversation you ever had at Thanksgiving? What were you calling the people who are the entrepreneurs? Or what about state powerhouses? Say again? State powerhouses. They're not entrepreneurs. They're the state that has the public relations strings and is putting the story out this way and this way. It can be, things are definitely spun and that's the world of advocacy and sometimes that is a thing that advocates do but it's worth asking, is this framed in a way that often times it will be framed in a way that makes my side look good. But is it framed in a way that is actually making the other side look bad and is actually trying to inflame the narrative? That's one of the questions that we can ask in these situations. You can ask that question and it doesn't create more inflammation. I'm talking about asking it in my brain. When I'm trying to be in this world to live as a human being it certainly is a question that once an issue has gotten polarized I'm thinking of for example that town hall example which is a pretty toned down example compared to a lot of the things we're fighting about these days so that's why it's helpful to use it but once you've already had one of, you've already really really gotten polarized and one side has already started name calling and those kinds of things it's really hard to do this kind of conversation. This is a much more useful tool to use upstream of the polarization because again it's like people's brains have already turned off but it's not impossible and it is at least helpful especially if you have what you might call a third way solution to say here's why I'm proposing this solution because I think that there are benefits of both of these and there can be over uses and we're trying to avoid these so it can still be useful. I want to be clear that some of the issues we're dealing with today things like racism for example that's not a polarity it's not a well you know there's upsides you know but there are ways that certain issues that we are dealing with can bring in racism and can bring in I mean even in the town hall example you can you know people can say oh those people it might not be about race but it might be about exclusion of another kind it they those kinds of key issues can get brought into a polarity so it's useful to step back when we start talking about some of those issues. I'm thinking for example of when we want to rename a school mascot if you looked at a school mascot issue from the point of view of continuity and change and we're really able to step back you might see that some of the people who want to stick with that school mascot are doing it for you know I mean you'll hear an old man say I proposed to my wife underneath that school mascot it's about change sentimentality about you know or a connection to place that transcends whatever that mascot image is it's not what it means in that person's mind it doesn't mean the mascot doesn't need to change it does mean that we can understand each other better and not just assume that the person who wants to stick with that mascot is absolutely must be racist because how could they not be if they wanted that you know instead be able to step back a little bit and start to say how are some geez maybe we need to make sure we stick with that color and honor the history and the number of games that were won under that mascot you know that's what it takes yeah have you heard of where the deep canvassing yes great example well it's not quite the same as what you're saying here what is your how's that fit together it's very very relevant so the question is about deep canvassing which is an innovative tool that I believe was in California during that was during an initiative and referendum process around maybe gay marriage I think it was and what they realized was that the organizers that they were if they were just going to go at it head on this issue of you know win lose there should be gay marriage well I think they lost so they started doing something called deep canvassing which is door knocking but with listening so rather than ding dong hi my name so and so blah blah blah blah let me tell you all the reasons that you need to believe what I believe instead it's can you tell me what your views are on this issue can you tell using some of these kinds of questions what's what's your experience with it you know what happened to you that made you feel that way starting to connect personally with that door to door it's much more time intensive but actually allowed people to understand that here was a human who in the course of conversation came up that they were a person who wanted to get married and they were gay and here was their story and that it's measurably changed minds measurably changed the way the conversation was happening so it's a very powerful listening is a super powerful social change tool even though it might seem when you're on the face of it it's like no we have to fight in fact it can be more powerful almost it's more sort of an eastern to use the energy coming at you to make the change there is a video I guess it's out of Yale that's supposed to be introducing people just in time I didn't find it all that helpful because they had the example they gave a couple of examples so someone interviewing knocking on the door and talking to them and it was like well that was a prime candidate they just seemed too quick as they started by asking a question but the guy was really pretty ready to he didn't really believe the position the low hanging fruit it was definitely low hanging so I didn't really I felt that I didn't really learn from this video it would have a little bit more challenging interaction would have been helpful it ended up leaving me with the impression you start listening until you get a sense of the emotional basis and then you go in there ohhh okay well if it starts to feel weird and manipulative then maybe it's not for you well that's why I was wondering whether it didn't seem like what they said the description they gave I felt didn't quite fit the example they gave I think I'd like to be able to send you the link to this video I wonder between you and Michelle is there any way that all those people that are watching it are live streaming or watching the recording later can respond to some of their ideas to you or to the library or up to you Michelle but I'm happy if people want to send an email with a question yeah I can respond to those sure all the people we sent the original notice to yes I'd be happy to okay I can't guarantee I'm going to know a lot of answers take the questions more likely know the answers than I will sure okay absolutely have you been using this in your town moderating skills to some effect the navigating polarities it is town meeting is wonderful town meeting is intended to have 150 or 200 people in a room at a decision making point so town meeting is the decision making moment is the end result exactly so less useful in that sort of Roberts rules of order parliamentary procedure moment and in fact we are making it oftentimes in either or decision at a town meeting that said absolutely it's crucial during the year ahead of a town meeting time ahead of a decision that we're making a yes no decision to be able to have those rich conversations town meeting was never intended to be the only time that we get together during the course of a year so I have been working actually a lot with select boards and to some degree school board leaders as well in looking at how this tool can be used in their work in micro situations as well as macro ones so that ultimately when we do come to one of those decisions it's been informed by these values and process like that. Thanks, my pleasure. I just can't tell you how powerful it's been for me to be able to I just feel like so often in public conversations I feel like there's something wrong here and when this tool came up for me some years ago I was just like this this really helps to figure out why some of these processes are so frustrating so you know what's interesting too is that it's used a lot in I use it in public spaces as we mentioned but I think it's used even more in personal coaching and even in therapy for people to be able to understand the polarities within ourselves so it's an interesting tool to think out in all different kinds of scales. Great, thanks. If you need a little conversation cafe card I've got them. I would love one, thank you.