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Stillborn ConversationsAugust 03, 2009 Like the president, I was fascinated by the country's fascination with the Gates incident -- although I'm not sure how fascinated "the country" is with it all. The usual pontificators sure like to pontificate about it, and to read the entrails of their pontifications, and plenty of others are gathered around jeering or heckling or going "Rah, rah, rah!" Plenty of people wish we could have a "national conversation" about race, but I often get the impression that most of them think that the perceived lack of one is somebody else's fault. Me, I wonder if we're capable of having a smart conversation about any significant topic in this country, but this is as good a place to start as any. Conversations require not only speaking but listening. There's precious little listening in U.S. national discourse these days. Negotiating, sure, and horse-trading and mutual back-scratching, but not much listening. Race and racism, like other important subjects, are addressed in speeches, monologues, diatribes, rants -- you name it. Whether the speaker is Barack Obama, Rush Limbaugh, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Moore, or Al Sharpton, we can hear them, but they can't hear us, even if we talk back to them. That's not a conversation. What passes for national conversation in this country is carried on primarily by top-of-the-heap journalists ("pundits"), academics, and politicians, most of whom are lawyers. These people are all trained in, and rewarded for, one-way communication. They're skilled at debating. Debates are not conversations. Conversations don't have winners and losers. If you try to "win" all your conversations, pretty soon no one will want to talk with you. If these people converse at all, it's mostly with each other, at work or at cocktail parties. In these settings they're unlikely to meet anyone new or hear anything they didn't already know, and in the -- improbable, but certainly not impossible -- event that they encounter someone from a different, less privileged background, the chances are excellent that this someone will be circumspect and polite. One of the privileges of being privileged is that you can not-hear anything that makes you uncomfortable. (You can appear to be listening very attentively but take in only what you choose to hear.) The still-rolling aftermath of the Gates incident is so frustrating. Professor Gates hoped his unhappy experience would become a "teaching moment" -- in true professorial style, he emphasized the teaching, not the learning. The speaking, not the listening. So we've had lectures, speeches, expositions, and pontifications ad nauseam. It remains to be seen what we've learned: for sure we've all learned something, and I hope it isn't "There's no point in even trying to talk about this stuff."
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