Free Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation by Beverly Tatum

institutions can help foster. In a society where residential segregation persists and school segregation is increasing, familiarity and contact across racial lines requires intentionality. We need to think about how we can structure meaningful dialogue opportunities.
    In Chapter 4 I focus on examples of such opportunities in the context of higher education. Here I will offer community-based examples. For instance, in Atlanta, where I now live, the civic organization Leadership Atlanta each year brings together an intentionally diverse group of seventy community leaders to spend a year meeting in seminars and small discussion groups learning about important social issues in the city (e.g., education, health care, homelessness). The yearlong experience begins, however, with a two-day workshop on race, designed to provide a lens through which all the other seminars will be considered. The focus is on stimulating cross-racial dialogue that has the potential of evolving into cross-racial connections deep enough to support community transformation.
    Another helpful example can be found in the work of the Study Circles Resource Center, a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that helps communities bring people together across divides of race, income, age, and political viewpoints to solve community problems, with particular attention to the racial and ethnic dimensions of the problems they address. Although Study Circles staff members are available to offer advice and training, their most powerful resources take the form of their written guides (available in English and Spanish) that motivated citizens can use on their own to guide constructive cross-racial dialogue. The first such text was published in 1992—a guide on racism and race relations designed to provide tools for structured conversations about race that would allow people to deepen their understanding of one another’s perspectives across racial lines, and ultimately help them move from dialogue to action and change. Since then it has been used by thousands of study circles across the United States in communities as different from one another as Los Angeles, California, and Lima, Ohio. In 2006 the Study Circles Resource Center published its latest guide,
Facing Racism in a Diverse Nation
, and it is a powerful tool to help communities build the kind of diverse, meaningful dialogue our country needs. The model it offers explicitly guides participants past their fear and anger to take the risks that cross-racial dialogue requires, with the clear goal of moving beyond mere talk to effective action and social change. 20
    As educators we need to find our way into such conversations, not only because they benefit our communities but because they strengthen our capacity to help our students have them. We, whether White or of color, need to deepen our own understanding of the systemic nature of racism, its impact on each of us, and how to interrupt it. Such a shared understanding not only creates common ground for the cultivation of friendship, it also is a prerequisite for the transformative education we need for a more just society.

FOUR
In Search of Wisdom
Higher Education for a
Changing Democracy
    Where is the wisdom
we have lost in knowledge?
    Where is the knowledge
we have lost in information?
    These lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” were written more than seventy years ago, yet they still resonate with power today. 1 Our students have grown up in the information age. They have easy access to so much information—but will they use it wisely? There are difficult decisions to make in our increasingly complex world. How do we adequately prepare our students for wise ethical and responsible leadership?
    This is an important question, because while there are certainly wise students among us, their development may have occurred in spite of our efforts, not necessarily because of them. At colleges and universities across the nation, too