ABSTRACT
Despite our collective recognition of its importance, entering into conversation about racial and ethnic diversity is inherently risky. There are all kinds of potential losses in play. We could lose “the other,” the one from whom we thought we could clearly distinguish ourselves and this, in turn, would occasion loss of self, at least as self had been previously constituted. We could lose our position of privilege, or of victimization. We could lose the repository of all things about ourselves that are unwanted and disavowed. And we could lose the powerful forms of escape from freedom (cf., Fromm, 1941, 1969) that being other affords. Dialogue about diversity, particularly when it involves that which is personal, is scary because it threatens to reveal those aspects of ourselves that are most unformulated and unknown. It is almost guaranteed that all parties in a cross-racial dialogue will have occasion to experience, at least unconsciously, deep levels of shame.
