Jeffrey C. Isaac, Book Review Editor

Katherine Cramer Walsh's Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference raises important questions about race relations in American society and about the effectiveness of community dialogues as a means of addressing and resolving the politicization of racial difference. In doing so, the book also offers insights into the politics of multiculturalism and the strengths, and limits, of “deliberative democracy” as a model of politics. Due to the importance of these questions, I have asked three reviewers to comment on the book as an account of racial politics and of democratic empowerment. Does Walsh's study support the idea that better forms of dialogue can make a real difference, or does it reinforce skepticism about the ability of such dialogue to substantially addresses long-standing and serious racial inequalities and differences?

J. Phillip Thompson

Katherine Cramer Walsh's book analyzes intergroup dialogues about race in the Midwest. This is an understudied topic, even though more than four hundred cities in the United States have instituted such dialogues since the early 1990s. Walsh's study also makes interesting reading in light of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Few predicted that Obama would have a chance of winning the Democratic nomination, and perhaps Walsh's study can tell us something about what underlies his appeal, or how to interpret it.

Walsh divides leading theories of political deliberation into “Unity” and “Difference” camps. Unity democrats place a high priority on consensus and shared identity; difference democrats call both into question. The latter emphasize that smaller or weaker groups are often marginalized within a politics of oneness, and that by maintaining their separate identities, such groups often find sources of support and a positive identity. After closely observing interchanges among whites, blacks, and Latinos during intergroup dialogues, Walsh found that they did not match what either Unity or Difference theorists suggest about deliberation, and that citizens engaged in intergroup dialogues cannot be boxed into either camp. She argues that engaged citizens develop their own “practical politics … steeped in the idea that in order to deal with difference we have to focus on unity; and yet they are reminded in the course of the dialogues that race matters in their everyday lives, particularly in the lives of people of color in their communities” (p. 7). This tension between urges for unanimity and dissention infuses citizen dialogues on race, and participants struggle with it without final resolution. Nonetheless, Walsh reports that citizens find such discussions of race enlightening and of some practical value. Many whites seemed to know little about the day-to-day discrimination that blacks suffer, which came as a surprise to many blacks. Public officials and service departments (such as the police) that participated in dialogues found that understanding racial sentiments and differences helped engender trust and cooperation with communities of color.

Walsh found that whites were predominantly oriented toward a consensual or Unity view of politics. While nonwhites sometimes joined whites in expressing a desire for oneness, such as the desire to “treat all people as humans” (p. 121), Walsh found that in all cases where this view was challenged the resistance came from racial minorities. Importantly, she acknowledges that participants in interracial dialogue are a self-selected group. Whites who deeply dislike racial minorities are unlikely to participate; neither are blacks and Latinos who are angry or distrustful of whites likely to participate. Those who participate already possess some of the most important qualities of citizenship: a willingness to listen to, disagree with, and challenge the views of other citizens without losing norms of mutual respect and civility. Moreover, perhaps to maintain civility, participants avoided discussion of some of the most hotly contested racial issues.

What, then, can Talking about Race tell us about the ability of interracial dialogue to address racial inequalities and disagreements? At a minimum, it suggests that intergroup dialogue is not a waste of time. Members of different racial groups appear to learn more about the perspectives of other groups and this may lead to changes in community life. At the same time, one has to wonder about the stupefying ignorance of racial problems among whites that the book describes. On any given day, 10% of young black men are in prison, literally. How can relatively informed (activist) white adults not know about this, and how can they not link incarceration at this scale to racial discrimination? Is it possible that the media is responsible, by limiting what citizens know about other racial groups to this degree? Walsh, surprisingly, has little to say about the media. However, given that rap music is popular among young white people in the Midwest as elsewhere, it is hard to believe that whites are as ignorant about race and discrimination as many of the participants appeared to be. Is it possible that feigning ignorance was a way of avoiding shame, or a way of avoiding deeper soul searching about one's own role in the moral corruption of society? Walsh generally took participants' statements as genuine. I am not so sure.

Walsh was careful to note that the dialogues did not engage issues of group interest and sacrifice directly. This is an important qualification in thinking about the significance of the kind of intergroup dialogues described in the study. Every time the Federal Reserve Board maintains that a little unemployment is needed to thwart inflation (for the good of the nation), that translates into double-digit unemployment in black communities, who thereby make sacrifices to the nation; many in the black community are acutely aware of this. It is impossible to talk honestly across race about unity, oneness, or wholeness without talking directly about interests and sacrifices because these are at the heart of racial differences. I do not dispute Walsh's finding that interracial group dialogues have positive effects for participants, or her argument that there is room for racial debates within civil discourse. Yet I do not think such discussions get us very far without addressing hard-core problems of racial disparities in employment, education, and incarceration and about who shoulders the burden of making changes.

This brings me back to the Obama campaign. In many ways, it is a magnification of the intergroup dialogue Walsh chronicles in her study. To be sure, Obama is not running his campaign as a “black” campaign. He is the strongest antiwar candidate in the race, and the Iraq war is highly unpopular. He is also the only candidate with strong appeal to young people (he admits, e.g., to smoking marijuana and trying cocaine while growing up in the 1970s). Yet there is no hiding that he is a black candidate—Bill Clinton reminded everyone if they forgot. Like participants in the intergroup dialogues, Obama seems to be making great headway, with support from blacks and a surprising number of whites, without calling for hard-to-swallow racial apologies or sacrifices from whites. Obama clearly recognizes the powerful appeal of Unity in U.S. culture. He is striking a chord among those tired of partisan political bickering and racial bickering as well. But we should not lose sight of the fact that his white support seems strongest in places where racial minorities are scarce—as in the Upper Midwest and Maine. He has fared as well among whites in places with a history of racial conflict—such as the South. Many blacks who do not agree with him that the United States is neither black nor white also view him skeptically. As with Walsh's intergroup dialogues, it is not clear how the Obama campaign will deal with those with little interest in racial reconciliation—the harder elements on either end of the white–black spectrum. The positive side of his campaign is that he seems committed to “wholeness” rather than oneness. That is, rather than submerge differences into a blanket of sameness, Obama encourages citizens to engage in a civic process, speak for themselves, and work things out with other citizens on their own terms. It is this confidence in the capacity of interracial civic dialogue to transform people and problems that Walsh shares with Obama.

Still, I do not think that the harder elements will be drawn into interracial dialogue directly or easily. There are raging debates in the black community, as Mary Patillo's Blacks on the Block (Reference Patillo2007) shows, for instance, over issues of violence, mutual obligation, respectability, class, and gender that do engage the harder elements. Whether these disputes are resolved in a manner that enlarges democratic imagination and capacity in black communities will go a long way in determining whether harder elements in the black community soften. I am not sure what it will take to soften harder elements in white communities. There is still much work to do.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell

One of the most durable findings in public opinion research is the deep and persistent gap between white and black Americans on issues of race and politics. Blacks and whites disagree about affirmative action, economic redistribution, crime, war, presidential popularity, and defining national events like Hurricane Katrina. Evidence suggests that these disagreements cannot be explained through simple reduction to socioeconomic status or partisanship. The substantive disagreement across a broad spectrum of public policy and electoral political issues seems more entrenched in racial identity and meaning. So what happens when Americans actively attempt to bridge this divide through deliberation about race? Can they find shared vocabulary? Do they seek common ground or emphasize group differences? Does interracial conversation improve the quality of democratic governance? These are the questions that animate Katherine Cramer Walsh's text.

Talking about Race is an important intervention in both the empirical study of American public opinion and the broader theoretical work on deliberative democracy. My own research agenda has been structured by an interest in how ordinary citizens engage one another politically through conversation and contestation of ideas. Quite different from Walsh's text, my Reference Harris-Lacewell2004 book takes up conversations that operate within the racially homogenous sphere of the black counterpublic. By paying careful attention to the content and effects of these black-only conversations, we gain a clearer understanding of the diverse range of ideological perspectives endorsed and contested by African Americans. Walsh explores a very different kind of race talk. The groups she studies are interracial in composition and intentional in nature. While many of my respondents end up talking politics while attending worship services or getting their hair cut, Walsh's subjects come together for the sole and explicit purpose of talking about race. Their gatherings are not indigenous counterpublic spaces; instead, they are sponsored by government and nonprofit organizations in local communities. Rather than encouraging debate and confrontation, as many counterpublics do, these interracial dialogues clearly instruct participants to engage in dialogue, not debate, and they thereby discourage cross-talk.

Walsh begins by picking up the gauntlet thrown down by deliberative democracy theorists who argue for the ability of deliberation to help a “public constitute itself as a whole when it is characterized by ethnic, racial and cultural differences” (p. 19). Talking across difference is meant to reduce distrust by generating common identity and recognition of shared interests. To empirically investigate these deliberative claims, Walsh investigates several community-sponsored racial dialogue programs throughout the Midwest. Her analysis of these dialogue programs allows her to explore two importantly interrelated issues. First, she seeks to understand why communities choose deliberation as a means for addressing race. Second, she explores how participants navigate competing goals of unity and diversity within these interracial contexts. Her findings are often surprising.

Walsh finds that cities adopt dialogue programs as a genuine and substantive attempt to address race, not out of a cynical posture of substituting talk for action. Her data show that “governments pursue dialogue programs on race under the same conditions as organizations that openly pursue social justice” (p. 70). Interracial talk is not a symbolic substitute for addressing racial political concerns; it is a sincere attempt to address the interests of marginalized citizens. It is not primarily wealthy, homogenous communities that choose discourse; instead, working-class, diverse cities where racial groups share electoral power are at the forefront of these civic dialogues. These localities appear to believe that dialogue is part of a larger substantive strategy of democratic inclusion.

The author finds that intergroup dialogue is not focused solely or predominately on the self-actualization goals of participants. Individuals who take part in these conversations describe their motivations in terms of social justice rather than personal growth. Civic dialogue is not a therapeutic device. It is instead an active attempt to promote communally held values that stress conversation as complementary to action. The individuals who take time from their families and jobs to talk with their neighbors about race are not just trying to “feel better”; they are trying to “do something.” The action-oriented sincerity of the participants is an important element of the intense and complex discussions that she reports.

Walsh discovers that citizens actively engage the ambiguities of unity and diversity. The preface acknowledges that she “expected that this interracial talk would help people develop overarching identities with one another that would minimize conflict and set the stage for future collective action” (p. x). After suggesting this hypothesis, she quickly explains that “I was wrong.” Instead of finding a unidirectional move toward greater collective identity in these groups, she discovers citizens engaged in the complicated, messy business of asserting their identities, seeking recognition of their narratives, and discovering their distance from others in the community. Although participants spoke openly about the desire for unity, their conversations more readily focused on difference, and “few people actually identified a source of similarity across people” (p. 117). Both white participants and persons of color engaged in these negotiations of difference and unity, and struggled to find a balance between asserting the uniqueness of their experiences and striving to find common ground. By quoting extensively from the discussions, Walsh allows us to listen in on the participants and to adjudicate her claims about them for ourselves. The mere presentation of the content of these conversations is itself a significant contribution to our empirical understanding of deliberative democracy.

While Walsh's text is an important contribution, it suffers from two important weaknesses. First, it does not adequately address how the contrived nature of these civic dialogues influences the way we should read them. The subjects are voluntary participants in publicly sponsored intergroup, racial conversations. These participants are undoubtedly vastly different from other members of the groups that they represent. Those who actively pursue these kinds of conversations and are willing and able to bear the opportunity costs incurred by participating in them are likely to be unrepresentative. This self-selection might make little difference to Walsh's claims about the internal processes of these groups, but it makes a great deal of difference in any application of these findings to broader deliberative contexts. There is no reason to believe that her findings obtain when minority and white citizens encounter one another in daily life, in political coalitions, or in policy deliberations.

Also, the text does not adequately cope with the way in which racial stereotypes, privilege, and power structure the internal dynamics of the conversations. Walsh is interested in demonstrating that formal power derived from authority outside the group does not necessarily translate into legitimacy and authority within the group. For example, she shows that when elected officials and civil servants participate as group members, others do not automatically defer to them. She is careful to think about patterns of power, but in the end, she asserts, “we have seen from these programs that public talk across lines of difference can occur without running roughshod over the perspectives of marginalized groups” (p. 236). The data evidence this possibility, but by no means assure this outcome. The text does not consider the possibility of the veiled meanings, missed cues, or different vocabularies that likely mark interracial discourse. Scholars such as James Scott and Robin Kelley have insisted that we take seriously the unspoken cues that infiltrate stratified discourse. Walsh takes most assertions by participants at face value. Ultimately, this weakens the text's claims regarding the usefulness of interracial discourse. The book would be stronger if it took more seriously how America's broader racial context influences local conversations about race by influencing how participants present themselves, judge others, edit word choice, communicate nonverbally, and process meaning when the group meetings conclude.

Despite these weaknesses, Walsh's text is careful and original. It fills a gap in our understanding of deliberative democracy and offers a substantial empirical contribution to the study of race in American public attitudes.

Dara Z. Strolovitch

In an article published a few days after Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson wrote, “There's no doubt that for one night, in one state … [r]ace didn't matter … but talk of unity and common ground did, as Mr. Obama galvanized his supporters by promising to toss historical and political division aside.”Footnote ¹ Johnson's framing—which juxtaposes “race mattering” and “division” against “unity” and “common ground”—is at the center of Katherine Cramer Walsh's compelling and provocative new book. Echoing the framing of Obama's victory in Iowa, Walsh argues that tensions between the politics of difference and the politics of unity have long animated democratic theory and American political culture, and that these tensions are key to understanding the possibilities and limitations of community dialogues about race as a way to address race-based inequalities. Critics of the politics of difference, she explains, worry that recognizing differences among groups is inherently divisive, undermining consensus on basic moral questions, identification with “the nation as a whole” and, ultimately, the pursuit of the common good (p. 20). She notes that many critics of difference suggest instead “that the best way to foster democracy in contexts of difference is to strive for unity” (p. 21). But Walsh reminds us that the presumption “that public life can be constituted around a universal conception of the common good” often means that “difference is not incorporated but instead excluded” (p. 27).

Using these contrasting views as a point of departure, Walsh examines “community dialogues about race,” which are voluntary, facilitated conversations among racially diverse groups of 10 to 15 people who meet over several weeks (p. 5). Drawing on rich data—including information from participant observation of six community dialogues, interviews with practitioners, and data from surveys of dialogue participants—she finds that the dialogues neither perpetuate a politics of unity nor promote a politics of difference. Instead, participants in civic dialogues adhere to what she calls a practical politics: While participants might approach the dialogues believing that “in order to deal with difference we have to focus on unity,” they are reminded in the course of the dialogues “that race matters in their everyday lives, particularly in the lives of people of color in their communities” (p. 7). She concludes her examination cautiously optimistic that community dialogues can help to address—and perhaps resolve—racial inequality.

While Walsh's findings provide reasons to be hopeful that community dialogues can be an important part of the struggles against racism, the study also highlights some of the potential limits, and even some pitfalls, of deliberative and dialogue-based approaches. Among the main sources of skepticism about civic dialogues is that they are little more than macro-level talk therapy; they may make participants feel better about themselves, but their individualist approach limits their ability to effect political change. The author finds, however, that civic dialogues are much more than lip service or expressions of white, affluent residents' “desires for self-actualization” (p. 70). Rather, the sessions encourage participants to pursue further action that might “individually and collectively improve race relations,” and participants view their participation in the dialogues as one piece of a broader set of actions and resources necessary to combat racial inequality. In particular, organizers and participants value “talk and action in combination, not talk as a substitute for action” (p. 82). As Walsh writes, participants “were not weighing the pros and cons of dialogue against other possible strategies,” and none saw dialogue as a panacea or thought “that it alone would eliminate racism and hostile race relations” (p. 80). The relationship between participating in the dialogues and engaging in other social justice activities is evident in other ways as well. For example, she reports that “the act of witnessing [white transformation] made people [of color] more likely to seek collaboration with their white community members,” creating a link between the deliberative activities of the civic dialogues and the possibility of activism after the dialogues ended (p. 81). For many participants, it seems, the dialogues are significant precursors to further action.

Skeptics also worry that community dialogues do not force white participants to confront the realities of racism and racial inequalities. On this count, too, Walsh's study is reassuring, as she finds that white participants take the dialogues seriously as venues in which to confront uncomfortable ideas and realities. As such, they oblige white participants to hear—in some cases, it seems, for the first time—about the institutional and structural discrimination faced by people of color in employment, criminal justice, education, and housing, and about individual and interpersonal incidents “in everyday interactions with other community members” (p. 150). Walsh finds that whites were humbled by learning “what it is like to experience racial discrimination,” leading them to confront the possibility that they themselves engage in racist thinking and action and reducing their propensity “to speak on behalf of members of marginalized groups” (p. 81). By compelling them to face “the reality of different realities” (p. 8), the dialogues also forced white participants to recognize that they could not simply will away racial inequalities and discrimination through professed color-blindness. Even if some ultimately preferred a “color-blind” society, most white participants came to understand that “making progress on race relations requires paying attention to race and acknowledging the ways in which racial categories continue to matter” (p. 139).

It is significant that interracial dialogues make visible to white participants the impact of race on the lives of people of color. It is of concern (though hardly surprising), however, that the success of the dialogues relies on people of color recounting “stories of their own experiences with discrimination” (p. 236). This process emphasizes white enlightenment and places the burden (as is often the case) on members of marginalized groups to “teach” the privileged about oppression. Walsh also notes that this process often fosters a tokenizing essentialism of people of color on the part of some white participants, who sometimes expected people of color “to speak on behalf of entire racial and ethnic groups” (p. 181).

The essentialization of people of color raises another concern about the effectiveness of the dialogues: their one-dimensional approach to understanding racial inequalities. Race and racism are, of course, critical issues in American politics and public policy and are no doubt worthy of attention in and of themselves. However, over the past several decades, there has been increasing attention to the ways in which racism intersects and overlaps with other axes of oppression, such as those based on gender, sexuality, and economic status.Footnote ² With this attention has come the acknowledgment that racism cannot be understood or eliminated in isolation from these and other forms of domination and marginalization. For example, in addition to Hurricane Katrina's having had egregious and disproportionately severe effects on low-income African American residents of New Orleans, scholars have noted that—because of gendered norms about caretaking responsibilities and the fact that women are more likely than men to live below the poverty line—the hurricane also had a disproportionate effect on women. As such, its devastating effects are best understood by taking into account intersecting and overlapping racial, gender, and class inequalities.Footnote ³ While Walsh points to some instances in which discussions addressed economic implications of racial discrimination, on the whole the dialogues do not seem to be structured in ways that are conducive to engaging the intersections among racism and other forms of oppression, risking incomplete or even misleading accounts of American inequality.

That race is one form of marginalization within a broad “web of oppression” suggests that the dialogues might also be limited by their reliance on a lens through which race is viewed primarily as a form of “difference.”Footnote ⁴ It is significant that through the dialogues, participants come to see that acknowledging “difference” is not antithetical to democratic politics. It is equally significant, however, that many participants in the dialogues come to understand difference in relation to power and even to acknowledge the privileges and material benefits of whiteness. As such, Walsh's research suggests that the real value of community dialogues is that they can push participants toward institutional and structural understandings of racism. More generally, Talking about Race shows that, under the right conditions, white people can recognize the impact of race on American social, political, and economic life. Consequently, the author's findings challenge the dichotomy between combating racism and promoting unity and belie the notion that the only way to combat racism is to avoid conflict and to emphasize universality and consensus. In this light, her book shows us what we stand to gain by “talking about race”: an erosion of the idea that doing so inevitably promotes immobilizing divisions, and with this erosion, a broader and more critical understanding about the ways in which racialized inequalities in power, access, and resources structure so much of American politics and public policy.