Cross-cultural stories of race and change

A progressive discourse on race is impeded by several factors: debates on the reality or unreality of the term race itself; discussions of ethnicity that tend to marginalize a discussion of race; the view by majority members of society that race is a topic for discussion principally by minorities; and the lack of models for non-confrontational public conversations on the subject. In the process, a discussion of racial change rarely enters the discourse beyond brief responses in opinion polls. This study proposed the Race and Change Dialogue Model to facilitate the exploration of how race operates in society on an interpersonal level in everyday lives of people across cultures and how changes in racial attitudes occur over time. Theories of race and ethnicity, language, effective communication strategies, and social change provided a starting point, but a "re-languaging" approach was used to advance the innovative nature of this work. In audiorecorded oral histories for public dissemination and interviews in a documentary series on public television, cross-cultural narrators were provided with a safe rhetorical space to tell their stories and to be heard, and a framework of "racenicity" allowed for the discussion of the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, class, and culture as fused aspects of the same issue. An environment was created that enhanced effective communication of a difficult subject. Despite the challenges that arose in the patterns of talk about racial change, the door has been opened to bring change into the dialogue in a more prominent way that moves the discourse on differences in more productive directions. An alternate model for public discussions on race as "racenicity" was created that has the potential to build coalition in the U.S. and has implications for other societies as well.