Sidling up to difference
American Public Media featured a proposal for dealing with diversity and difference - especially among and between groups that have mutual suspicion and even hostility:
Traditionally, an earnest effort at dialogue is seen as the way to peace: sit down and talk it out. Explore your differences, talk about them -- confront your mutual distrust and lay it bare. But the guest on this program begs to differ. Don't sit down and talk it out. Instead, sit down and talk about -- oh, baseball, or cooking. Paint a porch together. Eat together. Let a common life grow the way common life grows, which is usually not by means of summit meetings. Relationships grow by relating, and this happens best in ordinary -- not extraordinary -- ways. We learn to relate by relating, not by talking about relating.
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Our Civil Conversations Project continues with the Ghanaian-British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. His parents' marriage helped inspire the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He's studied ethics in a world of strangers and how unimaginable social change happens. We explore his erudite yet down-to-earth take on disarming moral hostilities in America now.
Listen here.
h/t to Barbara Crafton at The Geranium Farm.
