Wallace Warfield

Former CRS Mediator, New York and Washington, D.C. Offices; Associate Professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University

In the social science field there's a tendency to sort of demonize white communities. You know, "They're all one thing or the other." Well, the truth of the matter is that so-called white communities are fairly diverse in and of themselves. So the fact that you have a white leadership in a community, probably Republican, is supposed to mean, in the popular conception, that these are people who adhere to all the kinds of things that are an anathema to your perspective. You know, they're right-wing people, they're conservatives, they're against affirmative action, so you just name a litany of things and that's where they are. Well, if you got into these communities, what you began to discover was that when people live their lives in these communities, they articulate a different kind of perspective. It becomes a matter of, "We have to get through this particular situation." So in some instances, you find some white leadership adhering to that kind of popular line, but on the other hand, you also find whites who say, "You know, we know this change is coming. It's going to be inevitable; we have face up to this. We may not like it, but our children are going to grow up in this town, and we need to find a way of dealing with it." It didn't necessarily mean that they were ready to give away the proverbial shop; it's just that these realizations and recognitions were there, and a good intervener would find a way to capitalize on that.