Project
"I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."
—James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
Confronting interracial differences with candor and sensitivity
Our conversations attracted the attention of Dr. Aidsand Wright-Riggins, Mayor of Collegeville, PA, who invited us as featured guests on “Collegeville Connects.” See Authors page for video.
We struggled to manage our differences of age (twenty years), career status, personality, and, most strikingly, skin color.
Assigned to an arrangement not of our making, we had no expectations, only apprehension.
We were uncomfortable and doubtful. And yet, there was something compelling about the opportunity to confront our differences of age, professional status, and race.
Our story was featured in "The Value of Friendships That Don't Come Easy." Read more in The Atlantic.
It gave us the courage to launch this website and embark on a "diablog." See blog
Back Story
At different stages of our careers as teachers, we were "assigned" to a mentoring relationship at Grinnell College in 2000. The arrangement was awkward and challenging. Little by little, we found our way into each other's way of seeing the world.
After years of working together at the same college, we faced being separated by a thousand miles. We resorted to a long-distance form of journaling and became poetry pen pals of sorts. Writing and weekly phone calls countered the distance and the sense of isolation we felt, well before the pandemic struck.
One of us spoke confidently through poetry; the other tiptoed into verse. Poetry anchored our writing. Each poem, like patchwork pieces in a lattice quilt, was stitched into our ongoing narrative. We called it "a friendship project."
We spoke weekly, wrote, and struggled with topics that kept us awake at night. We saw the growing racial divide, alarming biases, hatred, and unspeakable violence. We needed to put ourselves "out there," maybe not in the streets, but certainly in words.
Quiet and reserved by nature, we took to heart Audre Lorde's words, “That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength."
Everyone seemed to be talking about race, but we knew many folks (Black and White) had no interest in listening to any of it. Could our story strike a nerve that wasn't dulled by how-to advice, self-righteous rage, guilt, or worse, indifference?
We wanted to turn down the volume and figure out a way to inspire meaningful conversations about race, difference, and our shared humanity, like the kind we had discovered.
Take Aways
More Than Skin Deep: Conversations at the Color Line is designed to open a conversation. Our effort began with our first meeting:
–My first reaction? Who was this person?! I just wanted her to go away.
–How horribly awkward. Her silence and unsmiling glare were glacial.
The decision to walk together led to talking and listening in a new way. Writing poems inched us closer to candor.
Forced to live far apart from each other, we were deprived of our walk-talks.
We saw the world convulsing at the color line. We needed to find a space for shared witnessing, not only to each other, but to a larger public.
We compared the experience of being Black or White at different times and in different places or in the same place. We shared those feelings for the 1st time Driving in Black & White.
Then we visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture together.
–- I remember that we had trouble figuring out how to talk about it. Poetry seemed to be more helpful and expressive than conversation.
We stand shoulder to shoulder
Reading the nation’s history:
Slavery and freedom, 1400-1877.
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was God, but where was God
Each conversation or poem re-enacted our lived reality through COVID-19, George Floyd’s murder, Black Lives Matter marches, struggles of DEI, etc.
We discussed what we saw in the larger world in our Diablog, Our first blog post "Rear View Mirroring" set the tone.
A chance meeting with African American artist Jean Berry further inspired us to add words to her collage of a dancing trio's leap capturing the élan of our friendship. [See Two Merging Poems]
–Have you ever had a Black friend?
–Never. Not until you.
In 2022, we turned to community-engaged theatre. Scripted and directed by theatre professional, Lesley Delmenico, More Than Skin Deep went live. Off the page, we became the actors of our own drama and began to perform our story and invite audiences into live conversation.
Distinctive Features
More Than Skin Deep: Conversations at the Color Line encourages listeners to reflect on their attitudes and feelings about all manner of difference. Our private and candid conversations open up a space for exploring unconscious biases, both our own and those we encounter in others.
Our story is not a "how to" approach; nor is it a topdown approach to diversity "training," More Than Skin Deep honors the individual in each of us. It focuses on shared vulnerability and mutual responsibility.
Black and white perspectives unfold in tandem, exposing contrasting emotions and reactions at different points of time, place, and circumstance over a twenty-year period
Candid discussions of race expose the intimate “in-between” unspoken spaces of feeling vulnerable, judged, insensitive, etc.
Poems offer access to intimate thoughts and explosive emotions impossible to convey in normal conversation.
Paired reactions to shared experiences as in “Driving in Black & White” and “The Museum Visit” (to the National Museum of African American History and Culture) expose the wounds of history and inequality, as in standing before Emmett Till's casket.
Women's contrasting perspectives on life experiences that reflect differences of age, career choices, motherhood, family, disease, skin color, etc.
Responses to events in their unfolding and their effect on how we lived in the world (i.e., COVID-19, killing of George Floyd; death of loved ones, DEI, affirmative actiom, and inequity)
Strategies for successful mentoring as a practice we learned to master in support of diversity
Q&A format in the Diablog presents interactive reactions to current controversies involving racial difference (BLM, teaching of Black history, DEI policies, etc.)
Live Performance of conversations to help listeners "imagine" the other and, perhaps, to dis-imagine themselves.
Advance Praise
“Reflective, inquisitive, and tender, More Than Skin Deep: Conversations at the Color Line shares its voices as it powerfully meditates on friendship, racial difference, the creative process, and what it means to live in America's troubled 21st century.”
Lytton Smith, Author of My Radar Data Knows Its Thing and 2007 winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize for While You Were Approaching the Spectacle but Before You Were Transformed by It.
“This collaboration movingly records and performs the personal and political work of friendship, reminding the reader that the true friend calls us to respond from within, in-between, and beyond our selves.”
Hai-Dang Phan, Author of Reenactments: Poetry and Translations.
“A moving and exquisite meditation on friendship in the best tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, and Montaigne.”
Lawrence Kritzman, Author of The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays, editor of Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and “the Jewish Question” in France, and The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought.
“Jamaica Kincaid says of friendship that ‘underneath one could find worlds.’ The same is true of this marvelous book, a hybrid in so many ways. Whiteness everywhere, like the snow in Iowa, and yet, and yet…a pair, a pairing.”
Ralph James Savarese, Author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, See It Feelingly, and When This Is Over: Pandemic Poems.
“Truly uplifting, this book illustrates the miracle of dialogue when it occurs with honesty and integrity. It can serve as a model to unite us against the evils of racism so prevalent in our society today.”
Harold Kasimow, Author of Interfaith Activism: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Religious Diversity, editor of Abraham Joshua Heschel Today, and co-editor of Pope Francis and Interreligious Dialogue.