On an Ordinary African-American Citizen Negotiating Voting Rights and Voter Intimidation in Ohio 2012

Abstract

I thank the Cardozo Journal for Conflict Resolution for the opportunity to present at the November 5, 2012 Symposium, “Negotiating the Extremes: Impossible Political Dialogues in the 21st Century.” This article builds on my presentation about my experience at a voter integrity group named True the Vote meeting at its Ohio Summit on August 25, 2012 and subsequently. As I have reflected on that experience it seemed that it might be useful to examine that experience through four lenses. First, I tell the personal story. Next, I reframe the experience in terms of negotiation theory with regard to difficult conversations. In making that reframing, it did occur to me that the negotiation theory analysis I was doing might be well informed by recent work on explicit bias, implicit bias and stereotype threat that could have been a second order frame around the negotiation. Third, given the positive and negative reactions to me in that space over that day and in subsequent events, I was drawn back again to Derrick Bell’s work on interest convergence theory. Fourth, with these three strands operating as the ordinary citizen experiencing a kind of dissociative moment that led to a certain galvanizing of my own activity, I was brought back to the work of Francesco Alberoni’s on how movements get started and in particular a person reaches what he terms the nascent state, seeks affinity with others and movement and institution were also relevant. Through these four lenses, I hope to assist reflection on a manner of thinking about negotiating extremes in settings of impossible political dialogue.