Try never to ignore or talk away someone's perception.
Instead, try to understand where it is rooted.
Those who support or facilitate transformational processes therefore need to think about how to create multiple forums for addressing identity. Too often we think of the transaction as a one-time event that deals with identity and then is over. Instead, it is better to see process as a platform that permits ongoing learning about self and other, while at the same time pursuing decisions about particular issues that symbolize the deeper negotiations surrounding identity. This is why, for example, conflict transformation views the dispute over a parade in Belfast or Portadown, Northern Ireland, as simultaneously an issue requiring specific decisions related to that episode and an iterative platform to explore and shape identities of people with shared childhoods and geographic horizons. You can use the episodic issue as an opportunity to explore identity, but you cannot use the limited time and scope of the decision-making process about a specific issue as an adequate mechanism for addressing identity concerns.
As we seek appropriate forms of interaction or exchange, we can easily fall into a technique-oriented approach toward dialogue and assume that it can only happen in direct face-to-face processes. Appropriate exchange suggests there are many ways that learning and deepening understanding about identity and relationship can happen. We need not fall prey to “process” overload that suggests “dialogue-as-talk” is the only path to understanding. In deep identity work the opposite may be true. Appropriate exchange may include dialogue through music, the arts, rituals, dialogue-as-sport, fun and laughter, and dialogue-as-shared-work to preserve old city centers or parks. All of these may have greater avenues for learning and understanding than talk can possibly provide. The key to this fifth capacity is an ability to recognize opportunity and to design response processes with innovation and creativity.
Finally, we need to be attentive to peoples’ perceptions of how identity is linked to power and to the systems and structures which organize and govern their relationships. This is particularly important for people who feel their identity has historically been eroded, marginalized, or under deep threat. Here change processes must address the ways in which structural relationships symbolize and represent the perceptions. The key: try never to ignore or talk away someone's perception. Instead, try to understand where it is rooted. Never propose or tinker with structural arrangements as a tactic to avoid the deeper perception. When dealing with identity-based concerns encourage participants to be honest as they look at and address systemic changes, which they need in order to assure them both respect and access to the structures.
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Practices such as these are not natural skills for many of us. They take commitment and discipline, but when developed they increase our capacity to think and respond transformatively to conflict.
Applying the Framework
I am sitting in a coffeehouse in the town where I live in Colorado, next to several people who are in animated , sometimes heated, discussion about a rising controversy with local police. The town's newspaper has been filled these past two months with letters to the editor deploring recent policing actions. The police seem to have decided that speeding and rolling stops require much more attention.
At the table next to me the voices rise as one person details her recent experience of getting a ticket for speeding. She explains that she had not been stopped in 20 years, and she is convinced that the current drive is just a ploy to fill the town coffers. She concludes with a lament about the loss of citizenship in what used to be a friendly town. A few weeks ago a protest march was organized on Main Street, followed by a public forum to air grievances and to decide on the next steps.
This is not the first time controversy has arisen around the police. Four years ago the main complaint in the papers was that the police were too slow in responding to calls for help, especially in an area where out-of-state people were starting illegal campfires. Last year the letters to the editor carried wide-ranging views about police personnel issues and what should or should not be done about a recent firing. I overheard one friend of the police comment, “Some say they move too slow. Some say they are too worried about speed. They must be about right.” That remark was not well received by the person who had just gotten a ticket.
In the stories at the coffeehouse, the protest march slogans, and the letters to the editor we can see the elements discussed in the preceding chapters. How would a transformational view look at this controversy? What might a platform for conflict transformation look like in response? Let's imagine, in Little Book fashion, what our lenses would pick up and suggest.
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