For nearly two years, the Mississippi Humanities Council has been participating in a learning exchange with five other state councils to develop programs that help communities work through divisive issues using the knowledge and practices of the humanities. Funded by the Kettering Foundation, we were tasked with imagining what the humanities can do to limit our differences from impairing our capacity to live and work well together.

 

Taking our lead from our peers at Oregon Humanities, which has already created two dialogue-based program models that bring citizens together to talk--across differences, beliefs and backgrounds-- about important issues and ideas, our Mississippi model asks how race, and our different experiences and circumstances, impacts our opportunities to participate fully in our shared community life. Our model acknowledges that not everyone experiences the world in the same way, but like Oregon, our model asks communities to consider how all our lives are interconnected and ways we might come together to create stronger, healthier communities.

 

Just this week, we concluded the first "test run" of our dialogue-based exercise, which we call  The Story of Us: Confronting What Divides Our Communities, in Tupelo where the local public school district wants to increase minority student enrollment, particularly African American students, in advanced placement courses. African Americans comprise 52 percent of the TPSD enrollment, but only 14.2 percent of the total AP enrollment. Before attempting to lay out action steps to address AP enrollment inequities, participants first used a series of humanities-rich exercises to gain a historical perspective on educational inequities in our state and where race has been a factor. These exercises helped participants share individual experiences as students, educators and parents maneuvering the public education system in Mississippi, and examine perceptions about access to educational offerings available to them.

 

One of our facilitators for this dialogue series shared a poignant example of the value of considering the human experience as we work through divisive challenges. In the final session, participants were asked to bring a "totem" symbolizing the impact of educational access on their lives. "The participant brought a family Bible that traced her family's history back to 1776 and slavery," our facilitator recalled. "She also brought a silver box the 'master' had given her ancestor that has been preserved through the generations. In sharing it with us, she talked about the illiteracy of her grandparents and her uneducated parents. With tears in her eyes, she said that where her family had been, made this issue matter so much to her. I can't imagine any circumstances that would have brought this community together without MHC."