If you’re serious about justice, you will have difficult conversations. How to accomplish justice is not something everyone naturally agrees upon—if it were, we might have accomplished it by now. But we disagree. And we make mistakes. We’re learning. And so we have painful conversations.
I recently received an email from someone who described a painful encounter with his family:
“…I brought up diversity at the family dinner table. What began as a lively conversation with at least three different sides turned into alienation with only two of us left at the table. I sincerely desire along with you for these ‘difficult discourses’ to cease to be so difficult.”
He was writing to say he had found an article of mine helpful, so I’d like to share that article with you, too.
Here’s the big idea: Difficult conversations can get less difficult if we agree to practice.
Last spring, I joined a group of Wheaton faculty for a seminar on Political Polarization in the University Classroom. We read an article by sociologist Derisa Grant, who suggests that there is nothing inherently difficult about many of the conversations that people imagine to be “difficult.” She says conversations about identity-related topics—race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other categories that humans deem salient for social sorting—are uncomfortable not because they have to be uncomfortable, but because we make them to be. We deem them ineffable or optional. We set aside these topics until some marginalized person or group has been harmed so deeply as to have to bring it up.
If discussions of social identity challenge us, Grant says, it’s because we are unpracticed. Any unpracticed task will be challenging. Further, if we believe that our skills in a task can never improve, we have no reason to practice. We will avoid, resist, dread, and fear that learning.
In that faculty seminar, I filled pages of notes with strategies for civil discourse:
Build trust through friendship both in and out of class time.
Practice easier topics before delving into touchier ones.
Focus on extending charity to authors and to each other.
Unlearn the human reflex to re-narrate the intent of others.
Take vulnerable risks and thank people when they do so.
Vigilantly avoid humiliating, debating, or “scoring points” on each other.
Remind students that love is both the means and the goal of learning.
The stakes of politicized conversations are only getting higher. At this time when political decisions are churning out at an unprecedented pace, we also need to remember why we have difficult conversations.
Difficult conversations aren’t just to prove who’s right.
Please don’t instigate a difficult conversation just to prove you can have a difficult conversation or to prove yourself right. Reaching perfect agreement probably isn’t a reasonable goal either. If you find yourself stymied in a particularly tough relationship, you might need to take an honest look at your goals and let go of some things. If your love for somebody else is dependent upon whether they will affirm everything you believe, is that really love at all?
Here’s one good reason difficult conversations do matter: because we have a responsibility to protect human flourishing—our own and that of others. I hope you’ll keep the goal in mind, let your ego fall by the wayside, and stay in this for the long haul.
For more tips and a story of a classroom interaction that worked, find my full article here.
This article is part of new series on proven, effective ways to pursue justice for the long haul. We’re going to need perseverance, strategy, accomplices, humility, tears, and a lot of other things. That’s why I decided to call this series “What we still need.” Read more posts in this series here.