Some time ago, one of my students reached out to me about strategies for improving race relations at our law school. After some discussion, we arrived at the idea of starting an informal brown-bag lunch group that would discourse on race. The student invited 10 students, taking care that the group would be diverse as to race. He explained that the goals of the group would be to:
(1) Gain some new appreciation of racial diversity;
(2) Gain some new understanding of people with a different racial identity;
(3) Learn about ways of using diversity to the advantage of your legal practice/business/personal life/community;
(4) Change negative assumptions about race to positive assumptions; and
(5) Motivate every participant to leave his/her comfort zone and take some positive step towards change and reconciliation.
We developed a simple exercise for the first meeting. We put together a questionnaire (in Microsoft Word) and emailed it to all the participants in advance of the meeting. We asked them to complete the questionnaire in the word document (so no identifying handwriting), print it out, and bring it to the lunch. We explained that the questionnaires were to be anonymous, and we asked students to take care