A couple weeks ago I was able to attend The Democracy Imperative conference at the University of New Hampshire, an exciting weekend of discussion and learning on how to strengthen participatory democracy and citizen engagement in governance from local issues to national policy. It was great to learn about the work of so many people involved with creating more opportunities for people to participate in the grand experiment we know as the United States.
The field is not without its challenges of course, and one of which raised during the conference was the topic of language used to talk about the democratic process. For example, “deliberative democracy” is rather academic sounding and does not necessarily resonate as something that people could easily understand and want to be involved with, or inspired by! Through my many discussions at the conference I had my own experience with an interesting language issue that brings to light an even broader challenge to the dialogue process.
One evening I was in a conversation about one of the sessions at the conference that linked deliberative democracy practice to social justice. Another person dropped in, and one of his first reactions was that the term “social justice” sounded very negative. I was immediately surprised if not taken aback, as to me social justice is a very positive term. Exploring this further, we discovered that my perspective was coming from a Jewish cultural background where social justice is a guide to leading one’s life.
The other perspective in the conversation was coming from a conservative political background, where the term social justice related more to court systems and punitive measures. In fact, he said that social justice could also be perceived as wrongly implicating people for past transgressions by association even if they were not involved. In other words a negative term with a very different meaning from what I was thinking. Bottom line a term I took for granted meant something very different to another person.
Later in the conference I went to a workshop titled “Restorative community justice.” I was pleasantly surprised to learn about a field I knew nothing about (an alternative to traditional justice systems), although I had gone into the discussion thinking it meant something else due to my preconceptions about the words community and justice.
But the story continued further, as after the workshop I discussed this thread around the meaning of social justice with another person, expressing my observation that there were several interpretations. He happened to be African American, and when I mentioned the initial conversation above he assumed the other perspective was coming from an African American, which was not the case. This was based on his own experiences in the past and wanting justice for racial transgressions that he had been affected by.
So in just a few days of conversation I had several fascinating dialogues around a few words that carried sometimes very different meanings and connotations depending on the person’s background and life experiences. As another one of my colleagues noted it is very easy to actually be talking past each other while we think we understand the words that another person is speaking. A reminder about the potential complexities of the dialogue process.
