The Glance of the Other
The Glance of the Other
What we learned – and didn’ t learn – from public engagement on issues of race
Matt Leighninger
Vice President for Public Engagement Director, Yankelovich Center for Public Judgment Public Agenda United States
I
n the last two years, incidents in the United States and other parts of the world have reminded us that issues of race and difference are critical to how we educate children, ensure public safety, and achieve democratic governance. In an era of # BlackLivesMatter and # AllLivesMatter, the need for public dialogue on race has emerged once again as an obvious public priority. To better understand this challenge and opportunity, we should look back at previous attempts at public engagement on race, to identify what we learned, what we achieved, and what we were unable to achieve. In the United States, race has played a key role in the development of public engagement practices, not just on issues of difference but in engagement on education, policing, immigration, health, budgeting, and many other public priorities. Race was arguably the most common focus of public participation in the 1990s, and those processes had impacts on hiring practices, economic development decisions, and school redistricting plans. But while those efforts to engage citizens on questions of race, had many worthwhile outcomes, and helped write the playbook of effective participation practices, they did not produce structural changes in how public institutions function. In other words, while they seem to have affected the decisions made by public officials, school superintendents, and police chiefs, and strengthened relationships between citizens and their public servants, they don’ t seem to have had lasting effects on the ways that local governments, school systems, and police departments make decisions or interact with the public. How we learned to talk about race in the 1990s In tracing the evolution of public engagement, one important turning point was the series of race-related civil disturbances that exploded in major American cities in the mid-1990s. The turmoil surrounding Rodney King, and
40