Sheldon Hackney

‘A National Conversation,” a program launched in 1993 by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is funding community organizations across the county to stimulate a national debate about race and what it means to be an American.

Senior-citizens homes, choirs, boys’ clubs, parent-teacher associations, newspapers, a tenement museum in New York, the California Council for the Humanities and many other groups have held, so far, a total of 4,000 “conversations.” The “talks” have included a video conference between students in South-Central Los Angeles and their counterparts in rural California; a Mississippi public-television documentary called “Violence in our Society,” and a high school essay contest on “What It Means to Be an American,” held in the Mariana Islands.

It was a then-new NEH director, Sheldon Hackney, who initiated the conversation a year after the Los Angeles riots. He was concerned about still-high racial tensions on university campuses, as well as around the country. He wanted to know: In the midst of all this diversity, what is the glue that holds this country together?

Using both high- and low-tech forms of communication, Americans assembled in town halls, libraries, museums, churches, theaters, cinemas, universities, via television and radio and in the webbed, digital community of cyberspace. Americans of every race, gender, ethnic origin and religious persuasion joined in a continuing discussion of the meaning of American identity and pluralism.

Hackney, 63, recently resigned as NEH director to return to the University of Pennsylvania. As a scholar of American history, he had specialized in the civil-rights movement and had served as the university’s president for 12 years before chairing the NEH. His wife, Lucy, is a lawyer specializing in juvenile law.

At the endowment, Hackney sought to address the issues at the heart of American life. Through conversation, he wanted Americans to confront their differences in an atmosphere of sitting at the “dinner table, with some long-lost cousins present, and perhaps a couple of neighbors.”

Hackney discussed “A National Conversation” from his Philadelphia home, where he is working on “One Nation Indivisible,” a book about the endowment’s massive project.

Question: Where did the idea for a National Conversation come from?

Answer: The idea for a “national conversation on American pluralism and identity” came to me as I was preparing for my confirmation hearing [for the National Endowment for the Humanities] in the spring of 1993. On the Penn campus, there were serious issues of racism and how to respond to it. Nationally, this was just a year after the riots in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King jury decision. Racial friction was, and still is, evident throughout the country. As W.E.B. DuBois predicted in 1903, in “Souls of Black Folk,” in America, “the problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line.”

It occurred to me that one thing the NEH might do is to bring Americans together, across lines of race, ethnicity, age, education and economic status, to talk about what holds us together as a country in the midst of our diversity. The question would be: What does it mean to be an American, as we move into the 21st century? What values ought we to share despite the particular identity group to which we belong? . . .

Q: The New Deal, the Great Society, the civil rights movement were all nationalism movements that began with a collection of individuals gathering in debate and dialogue and planning action. Were you hoping to stimulate these types of movements with the National Conversation?

Ian L. Parker is a writer who lives in Southern California.

A: No. The NEH does not do public policy or advocacy. The National Conversation was designed to allow Americans to learn from some texts, chosen by the local recipients of NEH grants, and from each other. No action, and certainly not a major national reform movement, was anticipated. At the same time, I must confess that I would be surprised if people participated and began to see the interrelationships among racial discrimination, social pathologies and the absence of serious public engagement in, or deliberation about, common problems and did not resolve to get involved in some sort of civic renewal. What is happening now around the country amounts to a civic renewal movement of large proportions, even though it has not yet been noticed by the press or perhaps by the broader public . . . .

Now, as to the other part of your question, while some people on the political left and on the political right are very leery of nationalism, for different reasons of course, I think that some sense of belonging to a national community would be a good thing, as long as it is neither exclusionary or coercive. We need national loyalties in order to mobilize the society to solve some of our common problems that can only be addressed properly at the national level. We need, therefore, some sense of what that inclusive national identity is. What values should Americans hold in common? What do we owe to each other as citizens?

Q: In your book, you speak of social fragmentation, of lost purpose and a public hungry for conversation about our national concerns. What are the reasons for this?

A: I think there are four root causes of our current unease, and it is that sense of insecurity that is driving us into our own private worlds and homogeneous enclaves to hunker down and take care of ourselves. First, there is the transformation of the economy as it joins the global marketplace. Second, the continual restructuring of the economy as it becomes more and more dependent upon high technology and knowledge. Third, there is the end of the Cold War, leaving us in a world suddenly unstructured and thus less predictable than the old bipolarities of the Cold War. Last, we have yet to come to terms with, or to integrate completely, the changes that occurred in the 1960s. Groups that previously were marginalized and discriminated against have now moved into the mainstream, however incomplete the social-justice movements actually have been, and they are not going to be rolled back.

Perhaps for that reason, the more tenuous shifts in values and in acceptable behavior that were asserted in the ‘60s have become the battle grounds of the “culture wars.” Because of the anxiety and absence of cultural consensus, Americans have been fleeing from the public square into more homogeneous and less risky social positions . . . .

Q: Is it possible, given the economic disparities among races and ethnic groups, to have a discussion of race that does not include class?

A: Though the conversations were pointed at race and ethnicity, class almost always came up in some way. To the extent that conversations worked their way around to one’s notion of social justice, or to the content of the American dream, disparities of wealth have to be addressed. To what extent are they legitimate? What constitutes equal opportunity? How can one have democracy in this media age when it costs so much money to “speak?”

Q: During the course of the National Conversation, what did you find was the difference in perspective in terms of what it means to be an American?

A: There is an overwhelming similarity, in general, in the motives of immigrants. They come to find a better life for themselves and their families. This usually is defined at the outset in economic terms, of course, but it is interesting that my impression is that new Americans frequently have a sharper sense of what America means to them than native Americans who tend to assume so much. Recent immigrants, however, soon develop a keen appreciation for the various freedoms that America offers. On several very poignant occasions, for example, I heard Asian Americans explain how they had risked death and privation in order to get their families to America. They worked hard for the benefit of their family, meaning a multigenerational unit, only to see their children become individualistic Americans who defined the purpose of their lives very differently.

Q: When discussing the media, you talk about drive-by debates and combat TV. What do you mean by this? Were you hoping to nurture a particular communicative style?

A: Yes, we chose the term “conversation” quite deliberately. It was supposed to suggest a discussion into which every participant came as an equal, in which no decision or conclusion was expected or necessary, and in which there was an obligation to listen as well as to talk. I was usually asked at the beginning whether a conversation was possible in the midst of our identity politics, because people would be too interested in asserting their own identities to listen to others and learn about differences. Wouldn’t the “Crossfire” style make conversation impossible. We actually found that people were eager to talk to people unlike themselves and were quite willing to observe a modicum of decorum in order to get to do so. Tensions do mount on occasion. People get their feelings bruised.

On the whole, however, disruption was not at all a problem. We were usually not on television, I should point out, or in public. The incentives to act out were, therefore, minimal.

Q: Tolerance, individual rights and national identity and a sense of national purpose--are we dealing with contradictory aspirations and how were they approached in the national conversation?

A: Yes, I have come to believe that the key to understanding the American identity depends upon being able to understand how two things so apparently contradictory as individualism and community actually depend on each other. We learn who we are through our involvement in community, in groups, with others. A crowd of individuals without a sense of responsibility for each other and for themselves is a mob. We cannot long exist if that is what our idea of America is. Nor can we continue long as the nation we once aspired to be if we impose conformity on all citizens. Equality and liberty are two commitments of this nation, and they can only both be honored if they are seen as each constantly amending the other so that both can be realized.

Q: From the National Conversation, what did you learn about the nature of racism in America today?

A: It is still there, but there is a great deal of goodwill among the American people. At the level of principle, there is much to hope for. The task will be to convert the principles that Americans espouse into actual practices. That was the problem that Gunnar Myrdal described in 1944 in “The American Dilemma.” The dilemma has gotten more difficult because we have gotten more diverse, but we have also made huge strides in social justice, too. When Myrdal wrote, a majority of Americans believed in racially segregated schools. That is no longer true. Our problems have become more subtle and thus more insidious.

Q: If you were asked to define an American in a single phrase, what would you say?

A: I do not yet have a single phrase, and I don’t know of a single metaphor that can be used without a lot of explanation. It is clear to me that the American people want two things at the same time. They want a large cultural space in which all citizens are welcome and can participate and in which all are “just American,” judged by the same standards as all the others, with the same expectations . . . .

At the same time, they want there to be a space into which one can come with one’s particular cultural heritage, to share it with others and to participate in some way in the different cultural traditions that make up America. In this second, pluralistic space, the constituent cultures borrow from and lend to each other. Every culture is changed. The resultant blending is American culture. It is always changing and being renegotiated. Some values and behaviors persist, of course, but they may change form as they do the same cultural work as before. The meaning of America is to be found in our pursuit of the ideals of liberty and justice for all.*