Pairs of people stand in a room palm to palm, pushing against each other.

Training for Conversation

Training for Conversation

In a bright and airy meeting room in the Davis Center, students, faculty and staff stand in pairs, back to back. Each takes a step forward, turns to face their partner and raises their hands to meet, palm to palm, as if they’re about to start dancing. Instead, they begin to push and struggle against each other, many laughing nervously as they try to maintain their ground.

This exercise and others throughout the next two hours surface a variety of emotions and reactions, from discomfort with close physical contact to “Aha!” moments of deeper understanding. Guest speaker and workshop facilitator Mo Asumang uses the activities to help people understand the nature of arguing—and how they can have discussions that don’t result in altercations.

The event is Conversations in Polarized Societies—The Mo:Lab Dialogue Principle, co-hosted by German professors Christophe Koné, Peter Ogunniran and Gail Newman. Koné, director of the Oakley Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, says he invited Asumang and co-facilitator Heidi Denzel after hearing that they were coming to the area on a speaking tour. He already knew of Asumang as a TV presenter and filmmaker and wanted to bring her workshop to the Williams campus.

Asumang, a visiting professor of German studies at Dartmouth College, created a documentary called The Aryans in 2014 after being threatened by a neo-Nazi group while working as one of Germany’s only Afro-German TV presenters. In the 3sat television documentary, she approaches self-identified neo-Nazis in Germany and Ku Klux Klan members in the U.S., initiating conversations and listening politely, often discovering that once people engaged with her in a meaningful way, they questioned their own rhetoric and began to change their attitudes and behavior.

Photo of Mo Asumang standing in front of a curtain and pointing toward a screen that is showing a photo of her with two other people
Presenter and Mo:Lab founder Mo Asumang

“I found out it’s better not to jump into the hate loop,” Asumang says, describing how she made the film to workshop participants. “It’s better to go into dialogue and strengthen dialogue instead of hate.”

The experience of making the film led to her found Mo:Lab, an organization that offers workshops to create “dialogue ambassadors”—people who can facilitate conversations with those who discriminate based on race, gender, religion, socioeconomic status and more.

Ogunniran assigned a viewing of The Aryans in his seminar Heimat: Identity, Belonging, and Home in German Literature, which focuses on how German representations of homeland affect individual and collective identities. During the workshop, Asumang plays a clip from the film in which she converses with a man in a park who accuses her father, a Ghanian, of “racial gene-hijacking”—stealing white genes from her German mother. His insults continue as Asumang listens with curiosity and interest, while audience members in the Davis Center visibly wince. After the clip, she and Denzel, also a professor of German studies at Dartmouth, encourage participants to discuss their reactions. As people talk, they use words like shock, anger and disgust. They counter with observations of Asumang’s behavior in the film: playful, spontaneous, curious, patient. She then helps participants practice these kinds of argument-defusing reactions in the workshop.

Under Asumang’s direction, Koné joins in an activity in which he gives another participant a bit of information about himself that someone might use to try to hurt him emotionally. His partner spends the next few minutes improvising a string of offensive comments. A third participant watches Koné to see if he reacts other than to nod and say calmly, “Oh, that’s what you think.”

Afterward, the trio discuss how difficult it was—to make the hurtful comments in the role of the aggressor, to not react or take the bait as the person being attacked, and to watch the dialogue play out. They agree that the activity, meant to train participants in remaining silent while someone insults them, is harder than it seems.

In another activity, one person insults another and then physically runs toward them, fist extended. The recipient bends backward and away from the oncoming person while watching the insult and fist go by. It looks a little like tai chi, one person notes, and Asumang agrees.

“We’re doing this because this is just a movement, and maybe you forgot all our words that we said in this workshop, but you remember—your body remembers,” she explains.

When someone lashes out, the mind can come back to this moment visualizing an insult sailing past. The slight might come in the form of a direct confrontation or an angry email, but a curiosity about why the person thinks that way, Asumang says, is key to avoiding a conflict and beginning a true dialogue.

Ogunniran says it was useful to bring Mo:Lab to Williams because of the “importance of being able to hold dialogues even in a polarizing politicized world.” He adds, “It’s a universal thing: We don’t have enough regard for our political standings or how we see one another. I think it’s very important to have such dialogue.”

Conversations in Polarized Societies—The Mo:Lab Dialogue Principle was sponsored by the Center of Global Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; the Department of German and Russian; the Department of Africana Studies, the Davis Center; the Oakley Center for Humanities and Social Sciences; the Gaudino Fund; and the Global Studies Program.

Regina Velázquez is an associate editor and senior writer in Williams’ Office of Communications.

Above: German professor Gail Newman maintains her “standpoint” during an exercise in the Mo:Lab workshop. Photographs by Peter Ogunniran