The past week has been an eventful one at Wayne Law. From October 9-11, we hosted the Midwest Clinical Teachers Conference. Professor David Moss, our Director of Clinical Programs, built the conference around Kevin Boyle’s book, Arc of Justice. The book details the efforts of an African-American physician, Ossian Sweet, to settle with his family in a southeast Detroit neighborhood in 1925 and the legal aftermath of these efforts. Speakers at the conference included former Detroit Mayor and ABA President Dennis Archer, the author Kevin Boyle, the Hon. Damon J. Keith, and our first Damon J. Keith Visiting Professor, john powell of Ohio State.  (Yes, he prefers that his name be set forth in lower case.)  Professor powell was again the speaker on Tuesday evening, when he delivered the public address that accompanies the professorship (more on this below). On Wednesday evening, October 14, we inaugurated our Program for International Legal Studies with an address by the Hon. Bruno Simma of the International Court of Justice. On Thursday, we hosted the 17th Annual Bernard Gottfried Labor Law Symposium. Across campus that same day, we welcomed noted mediator, teacher and author Bernard Mayer, who delivered the annual Hank Marx Lecture to help us celebrate Conflict Resolution Day. We capped off the week on Friday by hosting a Michigan Roundtable program examining the roots of housing segregation in the Detroit area. We hope to collaborate further with the Michigan Roundtable as this organization addresses a problem that continues to thwart efforts to make Southeast Michigan all that it can be.

A telling theme ran through both john powell’s and Bernie Mayer’s addresses, without any deliberate coordination on their part. On Tuesday, Professor powell discussed how our insistence on seeing things in a binary fashion diminishes our discourse. Is a South Carolina congressman or a Cambridge police officer a racist? The use of pejorative labels like “racist” or “Bolshevik” itself is a conversation-stopper, powell noted.  (The same can be said of racially or ethnically derisive terms, such as the “n” word.)  Throughout his lecture, Professor powell cited research demonstrating that attitudes toward race stem from a variety of sources, conscious and unconscious, and are usually more subtle than a binary classification such as “racist” or “enlightened” admits. What seems to work most effectively is frank, civilized discussion about race, not the branding of labels or use of epithets.

On Thursday, Bernie Mayer discussed five dilemmas in conflict resolution practice. The first of these is the fact that conflict resolution professionals seek integrative solutions in a world that sees things in a distributive manner. More for you means less for me, or so the thinking goes. My extrapolation: The binary view of the world that Professor powell laments is at work again.  Someone’s a racist or she is not; President Obama is either the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread or the Devil Incarnate. Our insistence that there always be a winner and a loser results in many Republicans trying to gun down the President’s health care proposals simply to deal him a political defeat, and some Democrats seemingly willing to enact most any proposal in order to chalk up a victory. What gets lost is a genuine effort to develop a plan that serves the best interests of the American people.

The insistence on seeing all things in black and white misses not only the shades of gray, but the multiple hues that may color an issue. This has long been the lament not only of mediators but of communitarians. We live in a complex world. While the popular press insists on sound-bite solutions, more sublety is in order. It is time to stop shouting at each other, and to engage in reasoned discourse. We will continue to cultivate such discourse at Wayne, and invite you to join us.