A Review of Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race

摘要

Over the past year, a series of high-profile racialized incidents have generated mass media coverage, sparking outrage from coast to coast and highlighting the sobering reality that well into the 21st century, topics of race and racism remain politically charged and emotionally laden lighting rods within American society. The deaths of several unarmed Black men-including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray, among others-at the hands of law enforcement officers and the subsequent "Black Lives Matter" movement, civil unrest and protests in Ferguson and Baltimore, Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump's polarizing comments characterizing undocumented Mexicans as alleged criminals and rapists, revelations that Rachel Dolezal, the local president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP, is secretly a White woman who had disguised herself for years in order to present herself as Black to others, the mass shooting of nine African American parishioners at Emanuel AME Church, a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by White nationalist sympathizer Dylan Storm Roof, and political efforts to remove the Confederate flag from state property throughout the south have all contributed to putting matters of race and racism on the front burner of American social discourse. However, this discourse has often been contentious, emotionally charged, and, at times, hostile in nature; the shrill and polarized rhetoric surrounding these events may lead well-intentioned observers to wonder if true racial healing, awareness, and reconciliation is likely or possible in an American society that is rapidly undergoing profound demographic shifts.