Thursday, March 20, 2008

Dallas Dinner Table aims to improve race relations through candid conversation

By Catherine Cuellar

DallasDinnerTable.com

Participants at the 2007 Dallas Dinner Table at Community Christian Church

Dallas Dinner Table started nine years ago as a project of the Greater Dallas Chamber's Leadership Dallas class. In the years since, it has grown to include more than 900 people locally and been imitated in cities nationwide.

The concept is simple: offer people from all walks of life a free three-course meal and create a safe space where they can converse candidly about racism.

It's awkward at first, but ground rules are established to promote comfort (no interrupting, what is said here stays here). Venues city-wide range from neighborhood churches to office conference rooms. Groups are limited to no more than 10 people who don't otherwise know one another. A trained facilitator refrains from participation in conversation-starting exercises in order to keep attendees on-topic and on-schedule.

To break the ice, guests ask each other to finish open-ended sentences like Local corporations consider racism ... or Affirmative action is ... .

After everyone has been introduced, the conversation continues with attendees drawing and reading notecards with race-based questions, then discussing answers aloud in a few minutes or a few sentences. The fact that topics were confined strictly to race (not ethnicity, gender, or religion) was surprising to some in my group.

The format provides plenty of space for people to speak freely, but because of the rules, the conversation was actually a series of monologues rather than a true dialogue (as one guest at my table pointed out).

It was heartening to see people give up three and a half hours on a weeknight evening (during Spring Break no less) to dine and discuss tough topics with total strangers. The exercises brought us closer together, with some exchanging business cards and others hugs at night's end. Still, the feeling persisted that those who might benefit most from the insights gained weren't in attendance, either due to lack of interest or lack of awareness. To wit: three chairs at our dinner table were without participants to fill them.

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