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The Transforming Community Project seeks to mobilize individuals in every sector of Emory University to engage in a reflective, fact-driven creation of this institution’s history as it relates to race. For the full five years that we explore and reflect upon the past, we will have our eyes and our intentions always on the future.
—2005 overview of the project
Emory University is large and dispersed: It comprises approximately 2,700 faculty, 6,400 staff members, and 12,300 students across nine academic divisions. How could a community such as ours talk more honestly and openly about race—both about incidents of racial insensitivity and outright racism and about positive aspects of racial difference and diversity? What would make us willing to investigate what race means at Emory and in each of our lives? Then how might we move from such honest conversations to actions that will help us transform the way we see and move though the world at Emory and beyond?
A series of unfortunate events in 2003-04 in Emory College, the university’s undergraduate school of arts and sciences, inspired several groups of people to begin asking these questions, eventually giving rise to the Transforming Community Project (TCP). The project, which has received consistent encouragement and generous financial support from Emory President James Wagner and Provost Earl Lewis, is a five-year program to enable members of the Emory community to deliberate on the long history of race at the university, how that history affects its identity, and how we might enable members of the Emory community to respond creatively and confidently to racial diversity and its impact on campus.
The name “Transforming Community Project” begins with a recognition that all communities are constantly evolving. University communities in particular see an extraordinary amount of change: Every year a group of undergraduates arrives and another graduates, while graduate schools, master’s and doctoral students move through the university at varying rates. Faculty may stay longer than students, but every academic department has had its intellectual trajectory shift when a key person disappears or a position is redefined. Non-academic departments too experience change as long-term staff members leave and new ones arrive with different knowledge and ideas about the work at hand. These kinds of changes are accepted as part of the “natural” patterns of university life.
But the populations of many universities have changed dramatically in other ways in the last 50 years. Colleges and universities have shifted from being exclusive, often racially and sexually homogeneous institutions designed to reinforce students’ middle-class or upper-class mores to being racially and sexually diverse institutions from which students graduate with a variety of goals. The diversity of students is mirrored by the faculty, although to a lesser extent, and by staff. This change provides an opportunity for an institution to reconsider its guiding principles—both how the institution has changed and how individuals within it can actively address the challenges and opportunities that increased diversity introduces.
The Transforming Community Project is oriented to both process and product. The process of meeting and deliberating creates new ways for individuals and groups to practice the experience of living in diverse communities and negotiating ways to approach the challenges and opportunities that result. The products include a larger group of people with the comfort and capacity to address questions of racial difference in their daily lives, community-based knowledge of the history and current experiences of race at Emory, and ultimately a number of creative projects (plays, films, books, articles, art exhibits) that will be available for classroom and community use.
Confronting the History of Race at Emory
Emory’s existence is rooted in some of the most difficult times in this nation’s racial history. Founded in 1836, Emory was a jewel of the cotton and slave South, dedicated to upholding the slave system and to creating leaders for that system. Emory remained a segregated, predominantly white (and male) institution through much of the 20th century.
But that history of race is more complicated than might be apparent initially. African Americans were employed by the institution from its founding, first as slaves and then as wage laborers, undermining the idea of its having a completely white culture. In the early 20th century, Emory College admitted Jews when many elite northern universities excluded them. Furthermore, the university’s Candler School of Theology maintained a strong relationship with students from Korea, Japan, and China who wanted a Christian education. And in 1902, Andrew Sledd, a Latin professor, published an article in the Atlantic Monthly critical of the lynching of African Americans, a practice widespread in the South at that time. The article led to protests against the university and against Sledd, who resigned his teaching position in the aftermath.
Later in the 20th century, Emory was also a leader in the desegregation of higher education in the South. The first private higher-education institution in Georgia to admit black students, Emory successfully sued the state for this privilege in 1962. Since then, the school has attracted a remarkably diverse population of staff, faculty, and students, often landing at or near the top ranking in terms of the number of black faculty, according to Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. In 2006, Emory boasted 25 percent minority faculty (15 percent Asian, 7 percent black, 3 percent Hispanic), 27 percent minority students (13 percent Asian, 11 percent black, 3 percent Hispanic), and 47 percent minority staff (36 percent black, 8 percent Asian and 2 percent Hispanic).
In the face of such success, it might be tempting to ignore the more-troubling racial past, but current-day diversity brings with it difficulties that are the price of success and that may be rooted in Emory’s past.
Emory’s students often find the residence halls the most diverse living situation they have ever experienced. The reality of living among and attending classes with members of racial groups they previously may have only seen at a distance can bring very real challenges. Everyday practices as simple as hair care, religious traditions, and eating habits can spark curiosity, mild indifference, or outright hostility.
The racial diversity of faculty and staff members varies widely by department, and, overall, the staff is heavily minority whereas the faculty and students are not. Some work units are virtually all white, others virtually all black. No academic departments have a majority of black, Asian, or Hispanic faculty, with the exception of the Department of African American Studies in Emory College. And institutional status tracks race: As at many historically white institutions, the upper levels of administration are increasingly white and male as one moves up the chain of command.
Precipitating Events
The challenges that diversity brings came to a head at Emory in the 2003-2004 academic year, when, in an early fall department celebration, a prominent white professor used a racial epithet to illustrate a point. This led to charges of racial harassment by an untenured African-American faculty member. What followed were a range of efforts, from local facilitated conversations to university-wide town hall meetings, to examine the lived experience of race at Emory.
But before any resolution occurred, Emory experienced a Halloween incident in which two students from another campus came to a party in blackface. Then that spring, an invitation to Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, to speak at the 2004 Emory commencement sparked accusations of anti-Semitism based on Robinson’s involvement in the 2001 United Nations International Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. Further strife about the campus racial climate was fomented when conservative speaker David Horowitz was invited to talk about the Robinson incident and to comment on race and political correctness.
The tension generated by these events revealed deep divisions regarding the university’s record on race. Different views of the meaning and importance of race at Emory circulated among racially and hierarchically distinct groups, such as undergraduates and administrators or faculty and staff members—groups that rarely exchanged opinions about their differing perceptions and experiences.
These incidents also revealed a more fundamental problem. As is the case at many institutions, many people at Emory felt ill-equipped to discuss racial differences, ill-informed regarding the history of race relations at their university or in the nation, and unable to find constructive ways to address such issues. As a result, discussions about race only occurred in the wake of troubling incidents such as the ones described—probably the worst time to try to reach a consensus on the long-term meaning of race in a community.
United by the desire to make real and sustainable institutional progress toward building a community better equipped to address issues of racial diversity, from late 2003 through summer 2005 an ad hoc group of faculty, staff, and students began to develop the Transforming Community Project. Nearly 200 faculty, staff, students, and alumni weighed in on the shape of the project over the course of those nearly two years of planning.
Leading the initial creation and development of the project were Leslie M. Harris, associate professor of history and African American studies and chair of the Department of African American Studies and Catherine S. Manegold, then the James M. Cox, Jr., Professor of Journalism. Working papers were developed that evolved into the two major prongs of the project: first, to provide a space for small groups to discuss issues of race and Emory’s particular racial history openly and honestly (the community dialogues) and second, to engage in a community-based recovery of the institution’s racial history.
Dialogue
Although all parts of the project have been received with great interest by the Emory University community, the most popular by far has been the community dialogues. In fall 2005, faculty, staff, students, and alumni met over a series of meals to discuss an established syllabus of readings and films on the history of race in the United States and at Emory.
In doing so, they moved past their own fears and broke an implicit taboo that exists in many institutions and communities against talking openly and honestly about racial beliefs, histories, and experiences. Although racial issues are omnipresent in our society, directly addressing and discussing them—or even defining racism—have been notoriously difficult. But in our experience, individuals are hungry for honest, open, and safe spaces in which to have these conversations. The participants in the first community dialogues committed to constructive engagement and reflective action for their own and the university community’s good. By providing a syllabus, ground rules for discussion, and peer facilitators, community dialogues encourage the sharing of histories and stories about and across race and class.
During the inaugural year, participants were largely drawn from those who had helped construct the Transforming Community Project and through word-of-mouth. Our invitation to participate now goes out via an “All-Emory” email, which reaches everyone who has an Emory-generated email address. We also ask recipients of these emails to circulate announcements to those who may not check email regularly. Generally, within 48 to 72 hours of posting the invitation, we receive between 200 and 300 registrations, resulting in a remarkable variety of participants each semester.
From fall 2005 through fall 2007, 44 community dialogues drew a total of 664 individuals. These groups have mixed faculty, staff, and students from the arts and sciences, from the business and law schools, and from the health sciences and hospitals. Staff members from campus services—including facilities management, the police department, parking, and more—have also been active participants, along with employees from human resources, information technology, and campus life.
The racial diversity of these groups, while not precisely mirroring that of the larger community, has been impressive: 46 percent of the participants have been white, 42 percent black, 5 percent Hispanic, 4 percent Asian, and 3 percent of mixed race. Faculty members have made up 12 percent of the participants (commensurate with their proportion in the Emory community), with students accounting for 39 percent and staff members 38 percent.
One of the most important things that participants learn is about the diversity of opinion and experience not just among but within groups, which is often not apparent in the midst of a crisis generated by an inflammatory incident. Many whites assume that all African Americans hold the same opinions on racial issues; similarly, African Americans and other minority-group members may remain unaware of the capacity that some whites have developed to deal with racial issues. Through dialogue, participants experience the full range of opinions and capacities within the university community.
As we move into the third year of this project, we continue to use a syllabus for the community dialogues that is rooted in the events that encouraged us to construct the project initially. The syllabus (see sidebar) was constructed over the course of a summer by a group of faculty, staff, and students who chose readings and films that reflected central themes in Emory’s racial history and recurrent concerns on campus. Each film or set of readings that addresses the national context of race is paired with a film or readings from campus publications that show how the issue reverberated at Emory.
We begin with slavery. The ownership of an enslaved woman, Kitty, by Bishop James O. Andrew, chairman of Emory’s board of trustees, is central to Emory’s early history. Andrew’s ownership of this slave led to the split in the northern and southern branches of the Methodist Church in 1844, with Emory becoming the leading center for Methodism in the Southeast. The meaning of that story and the ways in which Kitty’s relationship to Andrew is understood by blacks and whites today in Oxford, Georgia, (where Emory was founded) help participants see how history provides a context for the present. Andrew Sledd’s story then allows participants to examine the centrality of racial violence to the early 20th century South and the consequences of speaking out against racism.
Later readings focus on how to define race and racism. Every other year or so, there is a party on campus at which one or more students show up in blackface—throwing students and those faculty and staff who learn about it into turmoil. The students involved often claim ignorance of the practice’s long, derogatory history. Others ask why such events, meant as a joke, are so upsetting. The deeper meanings of blackface and other caricatures of African Americans are explored in community dialogues through the film Ethnic Notions by the late Marlon Riggs, while current discussions of race and genetics are explored through the first episode of the three-hour PBS documentary film Race—The Power Of An Illusion. And since use of the word “nigger” in a departmental celebration was the spark for the decisive year leading to the Transforming Community Project’s founding, one session is spent discussing Randall Kennedy’s book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.
Facilitators are chosen from among the participants in previous community dialogues, which prepared them to take on leadership responsibilities. A half-day orientation invites them to reflect on what made their own experience in the previous dialogue useful and to build on other experiences they may have had that would make them good in this role. The facilitators work in pairs, which almost always differ by race, ethnicity, age, gender and/or institutional status. This demonstrates the project’s commitment to diverse leadership, which is considered crucial to addressing these issues.
Facilitators are given a couple of tools during the orientation:
1. An “icebreaker,” adapted from the National Coalition Building Institute’s “Up/Downs,” helps participants in the dialogues see lines of connection as well as differences by asking participants to claim relatively low-risk parts of their identities—such as age, birthplace, and family birth order—in addition to more daunting identities such as race, class, and sexual orientation.
2. A set of “Guidelines for Engagement” were created following the first semester and have been refined since. Groups read these guidelines aloud together during their first meeting as a way to reinforce both their commitment to the group process and the need to respect each person’s place on the path to understanding and capacity to address racial issues.
Action
A central goal of the experience of the dialogue is for participants to move from conversation to transformative actions in the wider Emory community. Facilitators encourage participants to think about constructive actions they have seen on campus or elsewhere and how similar or new ones might lead to positive change. Participants are encouraged to start small—even engaging a co-worker in a discussion about issues of racial diversity can have an impact. Indeed, many participants report that when they return to work after a session, at least some co-workers are eager to hear what the participant has learned. Participants also find out that engagement doesn’t always mean ease—that the greatest moments of risk-taking often involve initial discomfort, but that in the long run, discomfort can be for the greater good.
To encourage individuals and groups to take action, each participant in a dialogue may apply for a mini-grant of up to $300 to create other events. We encourage recipients of these grants to consider a broader audience than faculty and students, to further blur institutional hierarchies and perceptions of racial knowledge.
Although some successful applicants have brought stellar speakers on racial issues to campus, others reach beyond the traditional academic lecture or seminar. Mini-grants have helped groups attend local theater productions of The Bluest Eye and Charm School, visit exhibits such as "Red Was the Midnight" based on Atlanta’s 1906 race riot, and bring in non-academic lecturers. A popular mini-grant idea is for dialogue participants to take a film used in a community dialogue into their workplaces. A bioethicist in the School of Medicine, for instance, showed all three episodes of Race: The Power of An Illusion to 20 students, staff, and faculty in her department. A physical education and dance instructor proposed a mini-grant to modify his social dance course by bringing in experts in salsa and hip-hop. He got departmental as well as TCP support for the very popular enhanced course, enabling him to offer it for four consecutive semesters, with the possibility that the department will adopt it permanently.
Some dialogue participants have pooled their mini-grants to support larger projects. One group merged five mini-grants to pay for 24 people from across campus to take a day trip to visit civil-rights sites in Birmingham, Alabama—the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church and the Civil Rights Institute. Archiving their experience (of, among other things, a flat tire that serendipitously strengthened the bonds within the group) with a video and written report, this group committed to share their experience with others on returning to Emory. So far, they have made a public presentation and published an article in The Emory Report based on their trip.
The Future
Recently, mini-grant proposals involving artistic renderings and exhibits have flourished. One artist proposed using what he describes as his “internal dialogue” to create an illustrated thought piece for internal and public reflection, using ink, paint, and collage on canvas. He will contribute the piece to stimulate future dialogues. A nurse in Emory’s Student Health Service asked two colleagues in a dialogue group to join her in producing a six-foot-by-four-foot wall hanging portraying the earth, with pictures of people and places on campus superimposed, that will hang near the entrance to a major university building. Two phrases will indicate its meaning: “It Takes All of Us to Make It Work” and “Emory Student Health Embraces Diversity.”
Although a full-scale evaluation of the program won’t begin until next year, annual surveys of the participants in the community dialogues indicate that the Transforming Community Project has succeeded in many ways. Members of the Emory community who would have never met, much less been engaged in long-term, committed conversations about race, are re-energized to improve their local communities and the university with regard to diversity.
This is particularly true of those in the “messy middle” of race relations: people who want to do the right thing but who have not had, or not known how to create, opportunities to engage in reflection and then action. The Transforming Community Project has provided such people with colleagues and a loose and responsive structure in which they can experiment with different ideas and recreate themselves as engaged members of the community. The range of ideas that emerged from their dialogues is a testimony to the vitality that is possible when groups deliberate about problems, rather than debate them.
From the project’s founding, participants have considered the potential for the Transforming Community Project to be a replicable model. What if, for instance, this intertwining of community deliberation and academic engagement were used to address issues of gender, class, sexuality, or academic freedom? Similarly, how would a project like this affect a small liberal-arts college as opposed to a university, or a public institution as opposed to a private one?
The Transforming Community Project is modeled in part on similar city-based projects, such as Richmond’s Hope in the Cities, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Wilmington Race Riot Commission, and the Southern Truth and Reconciliation Commission (STAR) here in Atlanta. Those projects, in turn, owe a debt to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which highlighted the centrality of honesty, openness, and safety as central to the process of revealing personal histories that allow individuals and communities to claim responsibility and make amends for the most painful elements of the past.
The Transforming Community Project builds on these models by situating individuals in the larger historical context within which their personal stories fall. By engaging individuals in deep discussions about the history and the current experiences of the environments in which they live—and by providing some of the tools of academia to those who often think of themselves as outside of that world—the Transforming Community Project may encourage a broader, less self-interested way for communities to engage in deliberation and constructive action to address enduring issues of racial inequality in the United States and beyond.
Leslie M. Harris is an associate professor of history and African American Studies, chair of the Department of African American Studies, and co-founder and director of the Transforming Community Project (TCP) at Emory University. Jody Usher served in several administrative posts at Emory, most recently as associate dean of the School of Public Health, before joining TCP as co-director in 2006. The ongoing project received a $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation's Difficult Dialogues Initiative to fund faculty seminars to design new courses or add material to existing courses to address Emory's racial past and present.