EDITOR’S PAGE

By The time you read this, the mayor’s task force on race relations, Dallas Together, will have issued its long-awaited report- the “measurable action items” aimed at reducing racial tensions. The seventy-odd ethnically diverse volunteers, of whom I was one, will have distilled nine months of dialogue and interaction into a positive albeit incomplete outline for change. The four-pronged report (education, political participation, economic opportunity, the underclass) will have been described in the newspapers, debated on public television, and no doubt heralded by politicians from the mayor on down. Among the rest of the folks, it will be viewed as either long overdue or irrelevant; too much, too soon; or too little, too late.

The report itself contains numerous positive steps that will help address inequities that condemn large numbers of citizens to lives of despair, But to look at Dallas Together solely in terms of its written output is a little like reducing a weekend of bowl games to an account of the final scores.

At times the dialogue was heated-or worse, quieted by the gulf that can separate people who have few common experiences. I remember one particularly tense moment during a discussion on the first night. We had been placed in small groups and asked to relate an incident when we had experienced racism-either on the giving or on the receiving end. Awkwardly at first, an older Hispanic man told of being refused service at a luncheon counter in Arkansas. A white woman haltingly attempted to explain her prejudices, Then it came time for a prominent black attorney to speak. He refused. “I feel like I’m back in college,” he said. “It seems incredible to me that twenty years later, we’re still having to sit around with’a bunch of white people and talk about how minorities have been discriminated against.”

The tension in the ensuing silence dogged the rest of the evening’s discussions. And the man’s comment would return to me again and again. Why did it take Dallas so long to initiate official dialogues between races? And were we the right people to be doing the dialoguing now? What, if anything, could come from talks such as these? And even if some magical synergy developed, what good would it do in an almost totally segregated city?

In the beginning, the idea behind Dallas Together seemed simple enough. Ask a bunch of people of varying colors and backgrounds to sit down together. Get them to admit that there is a problem. Ask them to find a common means for attacking it. Develop quantifiable, achievable goals for chipping away at it. Articulate those goals to the community at large.

In a sense, that’s exactly what happened. But, at least from my perspective, there was more-more depth in defining the problems, more consensus in unlikely places, more opportunity for blacks and Hispanics to buttonhole whites and force them to understand and to care.

Some didn’t. Some copped out of the process early on. Life’s too short for that kind of aggravation. A few blacks also chose not to participate. Who needs another damn committee? For those who stayed, the task seemed overwhelming at times, the frustration contagious. The education committee, for example, took weeks even to arrive at a definition of education. Some thought the term should be construed to mean raising the consciousness of the community about racial issues. Others interpreted the charge more narrowly, preferring to focus on one aspect of “education”-the dropout rate, for instance, or the school board.

Group discussions resembled at times the old story about the blind men and the elephant. We all reached out of our own unique circumstances and called “The Problem” by a different name. In the end, my own sense of accomplishment was overshadowed by the enormity of the task, and I sensed that others felt the same way. We could agree at least that the problems were enormous, stretching across the decades. We could confess our frailty in the face of documented discrimination in every aspect of life: jobs, education, housing, the political process. If we couldn’t promote the quick fix. we could at least suggest a few ways to apply the wrench. And therein lay the window of optimism.

It goes without saying that the items on the list require follow-up, in some cases by public bodies like the City Council, in others by the members themselves, many of whom have volunteered to stick with it and see their recommendations implemented.

But in the final analysis, true progress occurs in small pockets of the soul. What did I leam? I learned that minority leaders who have been willing to quietly negotiate change are tired of always coming away with the short end of the stick. I learned that the paternalistic attitudes of well-meaning whites are almost as loathsome to blacks as the hostility of racists. I learned that honesty in a mixed-race setting is extremely difficult to achieve-for both sides. And that trust in this town is a long way off. I learned that blowhards come in every color. That some people benefit from racial polarization and have a transparent stake in its continuation. 1 came to believe that there really are two Dallases- one temporarily stymied by current economic conditions, one doomed to sink farther into the quicksand of deprivation. I learned that consensus-building is a messy process, but it can work. 1 learned that “task force” isn’t the dirty word I had believed it to be, and that “just another committee” may be better than no committee at all.

Now that Dallas Together has officially disbanded, one of two things can happen. Either the report will be promptly ignored, or all thinking persons in the community can ask themselves, what can we do to foster better opportunities for minorities?

A few weeks ago I was editing an article in which an anonymous source was quoted as saying. “Can you imagine Ray Nasher [read: powerful, wealthy, white] reporting to Park Department chief Frank Wise [read: newly empowered, not wealthy, black]?” After I scratched it out, I had to admit that a year ago, that remark might not have offended me as much as it does now.