It’s not just the students who are transformed. Their instructors (the dialogue facilitators) are changed as well. Said one,
I have had the great honor of accompanying this remarkable group of students as they practice and hone their facilitations skills. As they prepare themselves for leading their own dialogues next term and taking what we have learned beyond the classroom, I can’t help but feel inspired to do the same and think about how I can integrate this dialogic pedagogy into my future teaching. Whenever we do go-arounds and reflect as a class on how the day’s activities went, I always feel a sense of gratitude for the students and the ways that together we are transformed through dialogue. I am confident that feeling will remain with me for many semesters to come.23
Does dialogue lead to social action? The research evidence suggests the answer is yes! Both White students and students of color demonstrate attitudinal and behavioral changes, including: increased self-awareness about issues of power and privilege, greater awareness of the institutionalization of race and racism in the US, better cross-racial interaction, less fear of race-related conflict, and greater participation in social-change actions during and after college.24
The fact that the Michigan IGR program has been in existence for almost thirty years and is providing students with the inspiration and the tools they need to be change agents after graduation is hopeful by itself, but even more encouraging is that dialogue programs are spreading to other campuses.
Dr. Ximena Zúñiga, who was one of the original architects of the Michigan IGR program, now teaches at the University of Massachusetts in the Social Justice Education program, where she is training graduate students who want to become expert in dialogue facilitation and related research. Like Michigan, they offer intergroup dialogue courses. I had the opportunity to sit in on two dialogue group sessions in November 2016, just ten days after the presidential election. It was powerful to hear students talking about how they had been able to use their dialogic skills outside of class to have difficult conversations with peers about the election at a time when so many of their elders were struggling to have such conversations themselves.
The ripple effects of the Michigan and UMass models can be seen at Skidmore College, where Dr. Kristie Ford, associate professor of sociology, is now the director of the Skidmore Intergroup Relations Program, where they have adapted the Michigan model to suit their small campus. In 2012 Skidmore became the first college or university in the US to offer a minor in intergroup relations. (Even though it is the leader in intergroup dialogue, University of Michigan did not establish its intergroup relations minor until 2015.) Unlike UMass or the University of Michigan, Skidmore is a liberal arts college and does not have a ready supply of graduate students to serve as dialogue facilitators. Instead, Skidmore has an intentional focus on developing peer facilitators to lead the dialogue groups. They are selected based on their academic performance, developmental maturity, leadership potential, and demonstrated facilitation ability. They take at least three courses over a three-semester period as preparation, and they are provided ongoing support and supervision from a faculty member during their peer-facilitation experience. It is hard to imagine a more powerful leadership development experience that a college student might have.25
In her book Facilitating Change Through Intergroup Dialogue: Social Justice Advocacy in Practice, Ford documents the postgraduate effects on those undergraduates who learned to be facilitators. Their commitment to social justice is evidenced in their career choices and their continued growth as White allies and as empowered people of color.26
It has been said that to teach is to touch the future.27 Helping students to see the past more clearly, to understand and communicate with others more fully in the present, and to imagine the future more justly is to transform the world.
There is nothing more hopeful than that. I started this book with the question, Is it better? My answer is: Not yet, but it could be. It’s up to us to make sure it is. I remain hopeful.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I retired from the presidency of Spelman College in July 2015, I did not know that I would spend the next fourteen months taking care of dying parents. Two weeks after I left my job, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she passed away in November of that year at the age of eighty-nine, leaving behind her husband of sixty-four years, my father. Though my dad suffered from dementia, he never forgot that I was his daughter Beverly, and he often asked me, encouragingly, “Are you working on your book?” He passed away peacefully in September 2016, just a few days after his ninetieth birthday. It is with deep gratitude for the gift of such loving and supportive parents that I dedicate this book to them. I thank my siblings, Patricia Daniel Keenan, Kevin Daniel, and Eric Daniel, for their help and support during that difficult time.
To begin this book revision, I sought out feedback from faculty and students who had been using the earlier edition in their courses to see what concepts had been most useful and remained most relevant for them, in addition to other questions I had. I hired Creative Research Solutions, a research evaluation firm, to help me with that data collection. The fact that my oldest son, Travis Jonathan Tatum, and his wife, Shanesha Brooks-Tatum, lead Creative Research Solutions made that collaboration especially wonderful. Thank you, Travis J. and Shanesha, for your assistance! Thanks as well to all of those who responded to their survey and interview requests. I hope you see the positive impact of your comments in this new edition.
So much of the original version of my book was informed by my teaching career at Mount Holyoke College that it seemed only fitting to return to MHC to talk with current students taking the Psychology of Racism course I created, now being taught by Jen Daigle-Matos. Thank you, Jen, for opening up your classroom to me, and to Dr. Sandra Lawrence, for connecting me back to Jen. Thanks as well to Pat Romney and Patty Ramsey, who also shared reference materials and words of encouragement as I pushed forward on this revision. Thanks, too, to Susan Kennedy Marx, for her enthusiasm for my project and the many ways she has put my work to good use in her own antiracist teaching and consultation. Susan, your encouragement and affirmation are much appreciated!
The years I spent living in Northampton, Massachusetts, were enriched by my friendships with Five College faculty colleagues, some of whom are or have been associated with the Social Justice Education program of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Massachusetts. Thanks to Charmaine Wijeyesinghe, Maurianne Adams, and Rhonda Cobham-Sander for your insights. In particular, I want to thank Ximena Zúñiga and her Social Justice Education students: Eun Y. Lee, William Syldor-Severino, Nina Tissi-Gassoway, Amer Ahmed, Shelly Perdomo, Dave Neely, Isaiah I. Iboko, Ro N. Sigle, Carol Huban, Rachel Card, Shady Kimsey, Itza Martinez, and Molly Keehn, for sharing your feedback and providing the opportunity to observe dialogue groups in session.
Thanks to Victoria Malaney for introducing me to Kristie Ford and the Intergroup Dialogue work being done at Skidmore College. Kristie, thanks for sharing the advance copy of your book, Facilitating Change Through Intergroup Dialogue (Routledge, forthcoming). Thanks to Mana Tahaie and Shelly Tochluk for our helpful conversation at NCORE.
Whenever I returned to Northampton, my friend Joan Rasool made space in her home for this writer’s sanctuary. Our many conversations helped “prime the pump.” Joan, thanks for your feedback on the new Chapter 8, especially. To my longtime friend and cofacilitator of many Unlearning Racism workshops, Andrea Ayvazian, thanks for keeping me lifted with your prayers. To Rita McDougald-Campbell, those “Are you finished yet?” text messages certainly helped me stay on task!
At the University of Michigan, David Schoem, an Intergroup Dialogue pioneer, generously hosted my meetings with U-M students who are participating in the Michigan Community Scholars Program. Thanks, David, for your many years of using the book and your insights about today’s students. Thanks to Rebecca Christensen for sharing your dissertation on the impact of MCSP as well. Thanks, too, to
Deborah Ball, former dean of the University of Michigan School of Education, for helping to identify faculty willing to share their feedback. It was invaluable!
Thanks to Basic Books publisher Lara Heimert for inviting me to do the twentieth-anniversary edition, and to my literary agent, Faith Childs, for helping me to bring this project to fruition. It was just the right opportunity for me to consider as I transitioned from the presidency at Spelman.
After the death of my father, when I needed a jump start to my writing, I spent two weeks in retreat at Rancho la Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. I wrote a tremendous amount in those two weeks and had the momentum I needed when I returned home. Thank you to the RLP staff for taking care of all of my needs during those weeks. It made all the difference!
As I put the finishing touches on the book in the spring of 2017, I had the wonderful opportunity to serve as the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University. I want to thank the Haas Center staff for providing such a warm welcome, and the Stanford faculty, staff, and students whose conversations helped me fine-tune this project.
A special thank-you to Gaye Theresa Johnson, Imani Romney-Rosa, and Kia Darling-Hammond for your very timely feedback about inclusive language.
To my youngest son, David, thanks for your careful reading and helpful feedback on the prologue, in particular. Your millennial perspective is important! Finally, to my dear husband, Travis the elder, who reads every word I write—you are truly the labor coach for yet another “baby.” Thank you for your love and devotion. Life is so much sweeter because of you!
Photograph by J. D. Scott
Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD, is President Emerita of Spelman College and received in 2014 the Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology, the highest honor presented by the American Psychological Association. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
MORE PRAISE FOR
WHY ARE ALL THE BLACK KIDS
SITTING TOGETHER IN THE CAFETERIA
“When I began my own journey of anti-racism, Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria was the first and most instructive work I discovered. Its anniversary edition—with timely new research, revisited institutional issues, and personal examples so fresh they seem to have come from the headlines—is the book that everyone in America needs to read right now. With clarity and grace, Tatum chronicles how our country has become so racially polarized—how the methods and signifiers may have changed, but the world has not, sustaining inequities for people of color in terms of school segregation, law enforcement, economic obstacles, and voting rights. From the spate of police shootings to the challenge to Affirmative Action, from the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the parallel swell of hate crimes based on race, this updated version of a classic is the clearest illustration I’ve found of how fear and anxiety in the declining White population of the United States has created a living environment of fear and anxiety for people of color. We don’t talk about race in America, but we must start if we are going to heal this broken country—and Tatum’s book is exactly the conversation opener we should be using.”
—Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things
“Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria was a landmark publication when it appeared in 1997. Twenty years later this updated edition is as fresh, poignant, and timely as ever. Bias, explicit and implicit, limit options, produce deadly encounters, and gnaw away at the fabric of our social contract. Racism, prejudice, and discrimination remain active characteristics of life in our society, notwithstanding the prominence of African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and Native peoples in the media, entertainment, sports, politics, and many domains of business. Beverly Daniel Tatum reminds us that against this backdrop individuals sometimes seek out others like themselves because it secures their sense of self in a world that often makes them feel insecure. As a result, group congregation becomes a means of flipping the power dynamics and affirming oneself in a social context. If you somehow missed this book in its original form, I recommend this revised edition to you. It remains a must-read.”
—Earl Lewis, president, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
“Beverly Daniel Tatum answers the question posed in the title of her book in a brilliant synthesis informed by history, developmental psychology, and great wisdom. Stereotypes, omissions, and distortions—each rooted in our nation’s history of slavery—cause each of us to breathe the ‘smog of racism.’ It is little wonder that Black adolescents rely on one another for social support as they navigate identity development. In the twenty years since Tatum first published her classic book, Black people have been disproportionately affected by the economic crisis of 2008, mass incarceration, and a backlash against affirmative action. In this revision, Tatum finds a way to remain hopeful as today’s youth lead movements exposing racial hierarchies, race and class privilege, and seemingly invisible systems of oppression. This book should be required reading for every American.”
—Kathleen McCartney, president, Smith College
“We read the original version of this book twenty years ago and learned a great deal about race, racism, and human behavior. This updated version provides even more insights about the racial, ethnic, and cultural challenges we face in American society, and particularly in higher education. What makes these insights so valuable is the author’s ability to look at our problems from different perspectives and to challenge us to look in the mirror as we think about who we are and whom we serve. She gives excellent examples of leaders who succeeded during times of crisis, and of others who struggled. Any American leader wanting a deeper understanding of these issues should read this book.”
—Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
“Set today against the backdrop of a highly divisive and still persistently racialized societal landscape, this newly revised and updated publication is still a must-read classic. Tatum unpacks with moving narratives, the psychology that drives us all, as we grow up in largely homogenous communities, schooled in the nuances of difference that define too starkly our racial identities, even as we strive to learn how to embrace rather than distance [ourselves] from the many others that define our world. Just as this experienced psychologist and wise educational leader reminds us here that we cannot talk meaningfully about racial identity without talking about racism, so too must we learn from her words about how to talk and teach and dialogue across those boundaries, in the hopes of better realizing the potential of our diverse democracy.”
—Nancy Cantor, chancellor, Rutgers University-Newark
“In 1997, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? changed the conversation about race and racism in our nation. Twenty years later, this new edition is sure to do the same, this time with thoroughly updated information about the growing ethnic, racial, cultural, and religious diversity that now characterizes the United States, as well as important insights about persistent barriers to authentic integration and shrinking opportunities for many segments of the population. Given the current sociopolitical context in which we find ourselves, a context too often defined by exclusion and the stubborn persistence of bigotry and racism, this new edition couldn’t have come soon enough!”
—Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“In the face of setbacks economically, socially, and racially, Beverly Daniel Tatum’s work is ever relevant. Spanning so very much history in recent decades and engagingly written, this book remains the go-to volume on identity groups and social exclusion, especially among college-aged people.”
—Roger Brooks, president and CEO, Facing History and Ourselves
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