How can deliberation help America heal from racial divisions? Palma Joy Strand tells us how one community in Nebraska is working towards addressing legacies of racial injustice through decentred strategies of creative dialogue, collective commemorations and honest conversations.

On September 28, 2019, a crisp fall morning, I, together with several hundred other people, gathered on the steps of the Douglas County Courthouse in Omaha, Nebraska in the United States. The group was mixed racially, though predominantly white and Black. A few people brought lawn chairs; most stood chatting quietly. Acquaintances greeted one another. I saw folks I knew from faith communities, from city and county offices, from local schools and universities and from arts and other nonprofits.

The ceremony commemorated the 100th anniversary of the lynching of Will Brown, an African American man accused of raping a white woman. While he was in police custody on September 28, 1919, a white mob stormed the Douglas County Courthouse, seized him, murdered him and burned his body.

The ceremony started promptly at nine. The mayor, the chair of the city council, the chief of police, a representative from the sheriff’s office and the district’s congressman all spoke of sorrow and regret. The chair of the Black studies department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha gave a graphic history of lynching in the United States. A representative from the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama spoke of the need for an ‘era of truth-telling’ on a path to racial reconciliation.

Douglas County Courthouse. Photo by Palma Joy Strand.

Now, a year later and at the end of 2020, the call for truth-telling and reconciliation could not be more relevant. The killing of George Floyd, on top of other homicides of Black Americans, galvanised #BlackLivesMatter protests around the nation at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than drawing on specific incidents of racial violence, the protestors took on policing as a system that has a racialised history as well as a racialised present.

Indeed, the year 2020 put race and systemic racism on the national agenda with renewed urgency. Conversations have started about ‘defunding the police’ and reallocating state spending to social services. These conversations build on prior calls for a ‘national conversation about race’ as well as proposals to convene truth commissions to address systemic racial wrongdoing and injustice.

For truth-telling and racial reconciliation to unfold, public dialogue about the structural underpinnings of racial injustice is critical. This dialogue and deliberation, moreover, must take the form of community-level engagement as well as policy discussions and legal action. Racism as it manifests across the U.S. is similar, but not the same. Different communities have different histories and experiences around race, which demands localised and grounded sharing and processing. In addition, conversations that truly connect people to lived experiences of racism must be person-to-person.

In this essay, I describe a community-based racial justice and reconciliation initiative located in and focused on Omaha, Nebraska. This initiative incorporates dialogue and deliberation into a community’s intentional connection of the commemoration of a specific historical incident of racial violence to continuing, present-day structural racial injustice. Reflecting on this initiative offers insights into the usefulness of dialogue and deliberation in addressing systemic racism as well as building relationships across difference.

Dialogue and deliberation play a key role in facilitating racial justice.

The Importance of Community-level Deliberations on Race

The U.S. today is faced with the challenge of institutionalising system-wide reform to address racial injustice. This challenge, however, demands more than a shift in policy. Institutional norms, practices and conventions are grounded in the ideology of white supremacy and longstanding white privilege. To dismantle racist policies, there must be a shift away from cultural norms that exclude and devalue people of colour. This shift entails understanding the history of past violence and oppression, linking this history to current institutions and practice and recognising how our society perpetuates the racism that underlies policies prevailing today.

Dialogue and deliberation play a key role in facilitating racial justice. These processes allow people to listen across differences, learn together and transform norms, values and assumptions. Such transformations are the genesis for changes in policy and law. Dialogue and deliberation can unfold in many spaces: from formal sites of decision-making like Congress and the Supreme Court to powerful sites of discourse formation such as newspapers, television and social media.

An essential site for dialogue and deliberation, however, is where people live and encounter each other—in communities. In communities, people engage with others who are different in a multitude of various identities and life experiences, including race. In communities, people have opportunities to interact relationally as multifaceted human beings with complex life experiences that resonate despite and across difference.

These community-based conversations create space for people to connect not only on the level of what they think, but also on the level of how they feel. Iris Marion Young’s reminder remains salient today: For democracy to thrive, people must be able to hear each other’s stories and express themselves in ways that spring from their own life experiences. The relationships formed in authentic interactions through dialogue and deliberation facilitate transformation that begins with individuals, spreads to people they connect to and ultimately ripples out to the community at large.

For democracy to thrive, people must be able to hear each other’s stories and express themselves in ways that spring from their own life experiences.

On Civity

Why, one might wonder, am I focusing on the role of community dialogue and deliberation for an issue so systemic as racial injustice and for wounds so deep as those caused by a lynching a century ago?

The catalyst for my thinking was Sherrilyn Ifill’s stirring book On the Courthouse Lawn. Ifill documents the events surrounding two lynchings in the 1930s on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and then delves deep into the profound effects of silence about lynchings on both Black and white communities. Ifill—who at the time of the book’s writing was a law professor and is now president and director counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund—writes compellingly of the need for racial truth and reconciliation and of the possibility for local community conversations around historical lynchings as part of a healing process.

Ifill’s insights provided a frame for my involvement as a white person in the Omaha commemoration of the lynching of Will Brown. Awareness on the part of white communities about the rootedness of today’s racial violence in the past is necessary for racial healing. And white people are essential to changing the cultural norms around race that underlie structural injustices.

Within this truth and reconciliation frame, my work on civity or civic social networks provided the touchstone of proceeding relationally. Civity recognises that communities are built on relationships that bridge across social difference. These relationships are ‘weak ties’ that keep communities from fracturing. To build these relationships, community members must intentionally craft relationships of respect and empathy with those who are different. It is civity that converts social networks into a resilient community.

Civity recognises that communities are built on relationships that bridge across social difference.

Ifill’s work and civity guided me as I engaged in one-on-one conversations in 2017 and 2018 with Black and white Omaha community members about the upcoming 100th anniversary of the lynching of Will Brown and the need to engage as a community, cross-racially, around that anniversary. One-on-one conversations offer a powerful way of creating authentic relationships, which lie at the root of cultural transformation that emerges from dialogue and deliberation.

My work on the centennial of Will Brown’s lynching connected me with leaders in Omaha’s African American community who were affiliated with organisations such as the NAACP, the Urban League, the Great Plains Black History Museum, a local nonprofit Black Votes Matter, the city and county, the Omaha Public Schools, and the University of Nebraska at Omaha Black studies department. Colleagues from Creighton University also joined the conversation, including the inaugural vice provost for institutional diversity and inclusion. These leaders had also been spinning threads, connecting Omaha’s racial past and present. And they had linked efforts in Omaha to the truth and reconciliation work of a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

I learned a lot from taking part in community dialogue and deliberation about racial justice in Omaha. For the purposes of this reflection, I focus on two key insights that will hopefully provoke reflection or spark inspiration for those seeking to find ways to facilitate truth and reconciliation in other contexts.

These lessons are as follows: First, I experienced firsthand the value of self-organising deliberative initiatives for racial justice. Second, I saw how decentred anti-racism strategies are equally as important as top-down anti-racism directives. I will discuss these reflections in turn.

Self-organising Deliberative Initiatives for Racial Justice

The various activities surrounding the commemoration of Will Brown’s lynching were connected through the Omaha Community Council for Racial Justice and Reconciliation (or the council). The council is a consortium of the local community groups listed above, which is led by the Omaha chapter of the NAACP. These community groups include nonprofit groups with missions centred around racial equity and public institutions with a responsibility for the well-being of all racial groups. One of the participating community groups was Creighton University’s 2040 Initiative, which I direct. The NAACP, founded in 1909, is the nation’s flagship civil rights organisation and has local chapters in communities throughout the country.

The council had coalesced around the dual goals of commemorating the 100th anniversary of the lynching of Will Brown and facilitating community awareness of racial violence in Omaha today. The group is self-organised rather than brought into being by an external entity.

There are two implications of the self-organising character of the council. First, the council was built on a dense social network which fostered a one-with-another, rather than an all-connected-to-the-centre, kind of relationship. The council celebrated the networked character of dialogue with multiple centres of ideas. This shaped the deliberative character of the network, which I will describe later.

Second, the council is centred around the community. The council is focused on forging dialogue among members of the community rather than concentrating on forging interactions between community members and government officials. In this sense, the council differs from truth and reconciliation commissions in places like Chile, South Africa, Canada, and the State of Maine in the U.S., which were created and authorised by official government bodies. The council was created by community leaders; it is not an official body with official power.

The council’s self-organising character shaped the group’s purpose and process. Simply put, the group’s purpose is to recognise the link between racial violence in the past and the goal of dismantling racial injustice today. Choosing the name Omaha Community Council for Racial Justice and Reconciliation reflects its grounding in the community. It also communicates a conviction that racial justice and reconciliation are inextricably connected.

Moreover, the council’s focus is broader than the histories of violence generally addressed by state-commissioned truth and reconciliation commissions. While the commemoration of the 1919 lynching tethered the council to a particular act of historical racial violence, the council is continually motivated by the urgency of addressing current, ongoing structural injustices. The 1919 lynching did not stand alone. An avalanche of acts by government and nongovernment actors in Omaha over the decades created and now perpetuate the substantial racial disparities that exist in the city today. This larger purview, this ongoing community-level focus, is what makes dialogic process so appropriate—and so necessary—for the council’s work.

‘Nebraska nice’ is a practice of surface cordiality that makes everyday life more pleasant but that can mask or suppress significant social tensions.

Meanwhile, the council’s origin story and overall process are essentially deliberative and dialogic. Several small-scale meetings in mid-2018 among various combinations of local leaders coalesced into an inclusive and diverse working group led by the Omaha NAACP. This working group organised a community meeting in August that was attended by people representing a range of organisations with a stake in Omaha’s racial history and future. Over the next year, the working group evolved into a steering committee, which conducted monthly community meetings and coordinated with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery to commemorate the lynching of Will Brown, as well as another earlier lynching in Omaha in 1891 of George Smith.

These community meetings cultivated the virtues of dialogue and deliberation. Having cross-racial conversations about race is difficult. White people are often inexperienced in talking about race. Some opt out of such conversations on the basis of ‘colour blindness’ or because of the view that the U.S. is already ‘post-racial’ during the administration of President Barack Obama. Black people and other people of colour may not be eager to reveal themselves or their experiences in mixed-race contexts. In addition to these challenges, the Omaha culture reflects what is locally referred to as ‘Nebraska nice,’ which is a practice of surface cordiality that makes everyday life more pleasant but that can mask or suppress significant social tensions.

Beginning with the first community meeting in August 2018, the council has modelled and facilitated cross-racial dialogue. All monthly meetings have been attended by black and white community members, with Latinx and others also represented. With people of different races and ethnicities in the room, participants can ‘talk race.’ At the initial community meeting, for example, attendees moved into small groups and deliberated on manifestations of racial injustice and violence. Various issues surfaced. Education, housing, health, employment, the media and criminal justice were named as examples of the pervasiveness of racism. At subsequent meetings, community members talked to each other about these issues along with sharing plans and events sponsored by different organisations to illuminate and process Omaha’s racial history.

With people of different races and ethnicities in the room, participants can ‘talk race.’

The council was, by no means, the first organisation to conduct cross-racial dialogue in Omaha. There is a longstanding tradition, for example, of ‘table talks’ or opportunities for community members to meet and engage with people of other races. The local nonprofit Inclusive Communities runs this initiative. What I wish to underscore is not the novelty of the council’s approach, but the usefulness of dialogue in exploring and exposing structural injustices such as systemic racism in the U.S. Because structural injustices emerge from the interactions of many people—the majority of whom may well lack intent to harm—collective awareness is essential for the kind of cultural shift that grounds policy and institutional change.

Decentred Strategies for Racial Justice

The second lesson I learned relates to the importance of engaging in decentred strategies for racial justice.

The decentred nature of structural injustice calls for decentred strategies to dismantle it. Structural injustices such as persistent racial disparities emerge when many people act and interact as part of a wide range of legal and social institutions and in alignment with a multiplicity of social norms, biases and conventions. Because of the decentredness of the actions and attitudes that constitute systemic racism, anti-racism directives cascaded from the top down are unlikely to happen without widespread support. And even if they do, they need fertile soil in order to take root. The work of culture change is not quick, and it is not ‘one and done.’

Dismantling structural, systemic racial injustice thus depends on going beyond standard ‘head-based’ approaches of deliberation and dialogue where ideas are exchanged. In Omaha, we linked experiences of dialogue and deliberation to localised initiatives of collective learning where community members coexperience feelings of sorrow, as well as hope.

The decentred nature of structural injustice calls for decentred strategies to dismantle it.

During the entire month of September 2019, a broad range of Omaha organisations provided opportunities for citizens to learn about, discuss and reflect on the violence of September 1919. The local film theatre screened the lynching-focused documentary Always in Season followed by a facilitated public discussion. Creighton University invited Ted Wheeler, author of Kings of Broken Things (a fictionalised account of the Red Summer of 1919 that led up to the Will Brown lynching), to join a panel of academics in reflecting on the book, its historical context and its contemporary relevance. The Blue Barn Theatre presented the play Red Summer. The Douglas County Historical Society and Humanities Nebraska sponsored a symposium. And more.

Many of these community experiences were relational, opening the space for ‘heart’ interactions. The 2019 commemoration of Will Brown’s lynching, for example, did not end with speeches.

After hearing from the speakers, community members took part in a collective ceremony in which each person scooped up a trowel of dirt gathered from the courthouse grounds and poured it into one of five large glass jars labelled ‘Will Brown, 9/28/1919.’ One jar was destined for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Displayed in this memorial are jars with soil collected from different lynching sites collected by different communities around the country. Meanwhile, the rest of the jars remained in Omaha. One of them is at the Douglas County Courthouse where the 1919 lynching occurred.

After a benediction brought the ceremony to a close, people milled around. Many were reluctant to leave. Members of the crowd came forward and added dirt to the jars until they were full. People embraced each other. The mood was sombre yet hopeful.

Initiatives to foster community interaction and reflection were not confined to those leading up to the 100th anniversary of Will Brown’s lynching. In my own work, for example, I led a symposium in the spring of 2017 entitled ‘50 Years of Loving: Seeking Justice Through Love and Relationship.’ The symposium explored how the creation of cross-racial families and the growing number of citizens who claim multiracial identity has transformed and is transforming the nation’s racial landscape. It marked the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that held interracial marriage as a constitutional right. The relationship between Richard and Mildred Loving transformed law, and that change in law gave rise to a transformation in relationships between couples and within families and in how our culture perceives them.

This symposium was hosted at Creighton University by the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (NCR) program and the 2040 Initiative. I am a faculty member in the NCR program as well as the director of the 2040 Initiative. I was mindful of being a white faculty member affiliated with a historically white university. I was convinced, however, of the importance of the white population of Omaha coming to terms with the effects of racial injustice on community members, both past and present. Community-level dialogue-and-deliberation and truth-and-reconciliation work can take many forms.

Truth and Reconciliation in Communities Today

At the core of systems and structures are people and relationships. As part of the problem, we all act and interact in ways that create racial injustice. As part of the solution, we must purposefully shift how we act and interact so that racial justice can emerge. Self-organising and decentred dialogue and deliberation in communities are essential to this cultural shift, which is in turn essential for systemic transformation.

About the Author

Palma Joy Strand is professor of law and director of the 2040 Initiative, Negotiation and Conflict Resolution program at Creighton University.

Acknowledgements

I thank my colleagues Jackie Font-Guzmán and Bernie Mayer for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay as well as the members of Creighton’s 2019-2020 Kingfisher Institute Seminar on Race, Violence, and Reconciliation. The Creighton’s Kingfisher Institute for the Liberal Arts and Professions provided much-appreciated support for this endeavour.