WITH TOBY HERZLICH
***image1***SFR: How did you end up facilitating the Hate Crimes Roundtable?
TH:
I got a call from Dolores Roybal from Santa Fe Community Foundation, in part because I've worked with them before on the Lesbian, Gay Community Funding Partnership. So I've been involved with them in convening and bringing out the voices of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community for many years now.
Were you surprised by how many people who said they had been a victim of a hate crime or knew someone who had?
I was. I really was. I would say that when I said whoever's witnessed casual bias, everyone raised their hands, but when I asked about being a victim of a hate crime, I would say 70 percent of the people in the room raised their hands.
What message does that send to you?
It sends a message to me that prejudice and bias is a lot more pervasive than we're aware of and that typically we try to be a tolerant community and, so, when people witness or experience something that's hateful…[they] say, 'oh well, I'll just turn the other cheek.' But this incident on Feb. 27-this hate crime, this violent act [the alleged gay bashing of James Maestas]-kind of us woke up to the fact that this is going on around us in small ways. It's the unfortunate thing that can happen in a diverse community when attention isn't paid to the kind of education and dialogue and opportunity to engage with one another that we need.
Was there anything about the event that was unexpected?
I was appreciating the diversity in this room. I've attended a lot of public meetings and typically what happens is the people in the group all come from a shared set of values. But here because of the nature of the topic and because people really care, it was a very diverse group. We had people from different ethnicities, different racial backgrounds, different sexual orientations, obviously.
There were moments when it appeared tension could arise. For example, a man criticized the panel for representing the same point of view rather than a conservative one. Another person objected to how a panelist used the term 'transgender' and to the word 'tolerance.' How have you learned to respond in a way that doesn't increase tensions?
Even though conflict or potential conflict can be really challenging, particularly in groups, I think that different points of view and things that may feel like conflict are where learning happens, so part of it is to make the conversation safe for everyone, so I need to be sure there's not personal attacking. So my job is to make it safe for everybody but also to look at those viewpoints that might be challenging to people, so they can get aired and we can talk about it and they're not struck down because, where there is a different point of view and where there is conflict, that's where learning can happen. That's where change can happen.
You've been a facilitator since 1991. What has been your most challenging experience?
The thing that comes to mind is some of the work that I've done in former Yugoslavia with people who are Bosnian, Croatian, Serbs. Their situation is that they live in a society that in many ways is very much like ours. And the prejudice, the bias, the intolerance was just below the surface until the political situation was such that allowed for war to break out and, so, now they're on the other side of that trying to heal that. What we have an opportunity to do in our country is to proactively address those issues, and the more diverse our country becomes, the more diverse our community becomes and, at the same time, the more divided our society becomes. We can learn from places like the Balkans and the Middle East about how to initiate understanding people from different backgrounds and different cultures and different sexual orientations.
Can you say more about mediating in the former Yugoslavia?
What I saw there was even within a group of people who were committed to peacemaking, when those deepest places of victimization and having been oppressed got triggered, it was really, really difficult for people not to react in an angry, violent way, and that takes practice and that's the kind of leadership skill that I'm hoping we can cultivate in our society, of being able to recognize when our buttons are getting pushed, when something's happening that is not fair or born out of prejudice, and be able to transform it into an opportunity for learning and healing rather than having it become a violent, hateful act.
You asked the audience if they've ever made a language faux pas that resulted in offending a particular group. Have you made such a faux pas?
I was in the Bay area and if you call someone there Hispanic who considers themselves to be Latino, it's very offensive.
Do people feel stifled or hesitant to speak when they're uncertain about how to refer to a specific group?
I think there's something that happens among sensitive people, particularly in dominant culture, when you start to get it that we need to be more conscious and more sensitive, and I think particularly people of privilege or people of dominant culture, who are of good heart and don't want to make mistakes, don't know which language is the right language to use and, so, there's this kind of hesitation or backing up or wanting to be politically correct and not knowing what that looks like and, so, people get stuck in doing it right rather than understanding that it's a practice of being respectful.
