Arts
Berkeley filmmaker, novelist, playwright and teacher, Mary Webb, discusses her latest short film Living Room Revolution: The Race Dialogues which shows how the power of listening can tackle stereotypes and build community.Transcript:Announcer:This is Method to The Madness, a biweekly Public Affair Show on KALX Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Today, host, Ojig Yeretsian, is speaking with Mary Webb. She's a novelist, playwright, teacher, filmmaker, trailblazer and peace builder. Her latest short film is Living Room Revolution: The Race Dialogues.Ojig Yeretsian:Hi, Mary. Before we launch into the film, can you please tell us what inspired you to create a dialog group in the first?Mary Webb:In the first place, it was a film and it was called Long Night's Journey into Day, not to be confused with Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. It was two Berkeley women, Deborah Hoffman and Francis Reid who made this film. I saw it alone. It wasn't as if I was chatting with my friends afterwards.I was thinking and thinking it was a film about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. I thought we used to pick at them because we thought we were ahead. Now, it seems as if they're ahead. A lot of people on the radio were talking about people should talk about race and they don't do it. I thought, "Well, I know some people. I have a living room. Why don't I do it?"Ojig Yeretsian:Did you ever think in those days that whatever you created would move forward 18 years?Mary Webb:We've started the 20th. I didn't think about it one way or another. I'm not a big think about the future person. Let's deal with what we're doing right now.Ojig Yeretsian:You just had your 72nd meeting. What do you think it is about this dialogue group that sets it apart from other conversations?Mary Webb:That's a great question. It's an attempt to get people from very different kinds of backgrounds to communicate with each other on a deep level about one of the worst problems in our society, namely racism. People have to say why they're there at the beginning. A lot of people say, "I'm here to listen and learn." That's kind of beautiful. I think that's true. We share food as they say in Africa first. Everybody brings food, no money exchanges hands. We have a topic each time. We have two moderators to keep us in check mildly. We go at it.Over the years, relationships have developed between people who would never have met had they not come to my house for this event. That's a wonderful thing too.Ojig Yeretsian:As a society, we're so entrenched in our particular set of viewpoints and polarized. Why are stereotypes and racism so hard to talk about and why is it so important to talk about these things?Mary Webb:That's a big question. For certain African-Americans, for example, they would not particularly want to talk about what they really felt in front of white people or after all the perpetrators in terms of a group. Some white people are maybe carrying a lot of white guilt and they would think they didn't want to talk about that. But people, in general, if you can get them into talking as they eat and as they make personal contacts, I think do want to go deeper.I was aware when I started this that I was probably going to give up a lot of my social life if I did this because it would be work to get it going. But it is a social life, and it's a social life on a much deeper level. I can remember going to parties when I was 19 and saying, "Why don't people discuss serious things at parties?" Everybody would say, "Oh yes." Then, they'd go back to what they were doing. And I'd say, "Well, why don't you do it now?" This was not a popular thing to say. I was a troublemaker even then.Ojig Yeretsian:How do you create or ensure safety in this environment? What makes this environment so special?Mary Webb:The moderators do that. We go around the room at the beginning and the moderators ask each person to say why they're there. We get a little sense of people if they're new people there. If you're having a dialogue in your house against racism, you try to make the house feel friendly to people.I also teach classes in my house. For me, it's fairly easy. I love the idea of people using my home in this way to actually communicate with each other on a very deep level about important things and then they get to know each other and they come from different groups. Some people might never have gotten to this. Now, people say from Africa, one of our moderators, Deborah Hailu is Eritrean and Ethiopian and our other moderator at this time is African-American, Karl Debro. Those are the people who are "the authority figures" in the room, but it's very gentle in a way and yet there's a lot of freedom.Ojig Yeretsian:With topics such as race and health, African-American, and immigrant groups, rivals or allies and parenting against racism, conversations can become heated. In my experience with dialogue, it requires a certain level of openness to being uncomfortable. How do you maintain respectful communication when there is strong disagreement in the room?Mary Webb:Well, I have to go back to the moderators. The moderators are the main reason that that happens. Kate Mayer, who's my filmmaking partner, makes these incredible brownies. Every now and then, a few people would get too upset and it was close to dessert. Someone would say, "Give them one of Kate's brownies." It's become a joke that people come only for Kate's brownies. There's a lot of joking. There's a lot of laughter. If you look at the film Living Room Revolution: The Race Dialogues, 10 minutes, you'll see laughter there. That helps.Ojig Yeretsian:Can you tell us about any problems you've had to face as founder and host of the Living Room Dialogue group on race, racism and ethnicity, and from where do you draw your energy?Mary Webb:I think that, to the extent that I plan, that I always plan to have things I start continue. That's just the way I think. I have, they told me, a fair amount of energy. I think everyone has energy and they choose to put it somewhere or somewhere else. I try not to spend most of my energy watching other people do things. I like to go to the theater. I like to go to movies, but I've also done stage productions. I'm learning to make films. Kate and I made this film with Ed Hertzog who was our cinematographer for that Living Room Revolution: The Race Dialogues. That's how we learned to make a film.I would rather do things with my energy than watch other people do things or sit around and talk about the world would be wonderful if only these people would do this. My reaction to that is, "But what are you doing?" I love doing things, and I love seeing these people come together and I realized that isn't just social, but it is social.Ojig Yeretsian:I think people get inspired from seeing your commitment and your level of perseverance. Having been to a few of your meetings, I know how exhausting it could be afterwards because your mind is still spinning and your heart has opened in a way. It's like vulnerable making.Mary Webb:The solution to that is that some of us sit up for three or four hours in process and then sometimes people stay over and we go to brunch the next day. Processing is helpful. You can do as much or as little of that as you want. I suppose you could have a small group meeting, say, the week after to see how something went if you wanted to do that.I always meet with Deborah Hailu and Karl Debro way ahead of the date so that we can get a date, a specific date we can all do decide on the topic and talk about any difficulties that might have occurred at the last dialogue.Ojig Yeretsian:What compelled you to make this film?Mary Webb:I was thinking about that only yesterday. I always knew from the very beginning that there had to be a film if I was going to start the dialogue. Ed Hertzog happened to be in my class. He was in my writing class and I said, "Ed, would you make this film when we start this?" We hadn't even started yet. He said, "Sure." He could work it out. He did all the footage and then he had too many things to do.Suddenly, he couldn't do the whole film and then I thought, "Well, Kate Mayer had actually made her living doing videos at one time, medical videos." I said something to her about, "Would you look at this footage?" She said, "I was thinking about the same thing you were thinking." It ended up that she took it all home and two weeks later, I was involved as a film maker with her because she liked the idea of us doing it together, and I did too, but there was always going to be a film. I don't know why because it popped into my head very soon after the idea of doing the dialogue.Announcer:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today, Ojig Yeretsian is speaking with Mary Webb about her innovative social justice endeavor, The Living Room Revolution: Race Dialogues.Ojig Yeretsian:Do you think it's a resource and an example like a way to show people to demonstrate what dialog is if they might be interested?Mary Webb:It's an amazing resource. We had Mark Verlander, graphic artist who made us a beautiful card, so I can give the card to strangers and say, "I have something I want to give you." Then, I showed them this and say, "This film will take only 10 minutes of your very valuable time to see and perhaps you'll be interested in starting one yourself or in coming to ours."Ojig Yeretsian:The film is available for viewing by the public. It's available at livingroomrev, R-E-V.com, One word livingroomrev.com. Yes.Speaker 4:People are talking about race and single race groups, right? When people get together with people are their own race, they're talking about their perspectives and what they think. But very rarely is it the case that people are talking across racial lines to each other about their experiences. That's what's missing in that sort of the national dialogue about race. It's almost exclusively a single race discussion.Speaker 5:It brought to mind my own history of having been born during the Second World War Jewish and the tremendous push, unspoken push, to not connect with my Jewish heritage in any of the religious or history to feel culturally Jewish. Yet in terms of the interface with other kids at school, it was this message of don't forget you're Jewish and fit in. It's very painful, painful.Speaker 6:When I speak about my experiences, no way intended to silence you for one or anyone else. If that needs to be the space, if I can't tell you that something bothers me, then I decided to myself that racism perpetuates itself in silence. I want you to always feel that you can speak up and I may not respond to you in the way that you might feel comfortable with, but that's okay.Speaker 7:If I wanted to fill out an application, I'm supposed to really fill out the white. Did I feel the racism or anything in this country? I don't know if I can call it racism, but I never felt comfortable.Speaker 8:My other friend was a little surprised. She didn't feel to me a minority. In some ways, when she came to the dialogue, she realized, "Oh my goodness, I'm a minority." I mean, who is white? I don't know. I don't feel white because even though I tell them, "I'm white." Who are you? What are you? I say, "I'm white."Speaker 9:I'm trying to figure out what that means and what we're talking about when they say, "Iranians are considered white by who and where and how has it manifested?"Speaker 10:It is great to have a place to come where you can commune with people, where you can break bread and share thoughts and feel like you have a community that provides you with a psychic support and spiritual support and, sometimes, even political support.Speaker 11:That's really a joy to sing with that group of eight bases and I am the only white boy.Speaker 12:What are you? People want to classify you. If they can put you in that kind of box, they don't feel good, I guess. I don't know.Speaker 13:If you don't have a lot of color in your skin, you can't go around really saying that you're a person of color or can you?Ojig Yeretsian:On there also are other resources such as starting your own dialogue in 10 easy steps. You're trying to get the word out and you really want to promote this as a way to navigate our political cultural terrain by having these civil conversations with each other.Mary Webb:Yes, I want it to be a national movement and some have started in San Francisco, one in Half Moon Bay which is bilingual. As we build communities that are multicultural, as people begin to understand each other's points of view more deeply, that's conceivably a deep cultural change. If you feel that you want to start something like this and you feel you're not the most perseverant or extroverted person in the world, you need to get a partner to work with you who will do the things that you don't want to do. As we start the 20th year, we have had only two sets of moderators, one producer, me, one place to have it.People feel good when they walk into my house. This is what I've been told. When you open the door into the living room, the living room invites you to come in. You could have arranged the furniture in 60 different ways that wouldn't have been as good. Everyone can speak from every chair in the room and reach everyone else. Occasionally, when we're really crowded, we have a few people sitting on the stairs and they sometimes have to stand up and come down so people can see them. But for a limited space, it works very well. I cannot emphasize enough how important food is.Ojig Yeretsian:I'm more familiar with dialogues that take place with groups that are in conflict. There's Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Arab ones, and the one you host is unique because it focuses on the American experience with all the diverse cultures and the history and the background of racism. Tell us how you've come up with the topics.Mary Webb:Okay. We have this thing called the box. It's a cardboard box, and I was trained in the south, although I grew up in New York City, I was trained in Letcher County, Florida, in doing things the grassroots way. That means the simplest possible way you could do it with the least amount of money spent. You take a cardboard box, and you cut a slot in the top. People can take three by five cards out of it if they're going to have to write down what they will say later because they have to wait. They have to raise their hands and wait.They can also put a topic in the box on a three by five card. Then, we try to encourage people to give us a lot of topics, choices. Then, Karl and Debbie and I meet, and we go through all these. We try to either pick one or synthesize some and come up with a topic that will be interesting enough and popular enough so that people feel it is worthy of their coming to this event and giving up after all, in our case, it is a Saturday night when you could be doing many other things in the Bay Area.If you knew this was going on, why would you want to be anywhere else? There's nothing like this anywhere else. Now, what I want to see happen is there will be things like it anywhere else. Yours is different. Each one is different and that's fine. They can be done in schools, workplaces. They can be done in people's homes.Ojig Yeretsian:It seems like it builds community and promotes understanding and growth. Where can our listeners get more information?Mary Webb:If you go to livingroomrev.com, and it will tell you some things about it and you can contact me through my email, maryh as in Harry, webb13@yahoo. Please, when you email me, give me your phone number too. It's much faster.Ojig Yeretsian:That's Webb with two Bs. Why race, racism and ethnicity?Mary Webb:I don't think I picked it. I think it picked me. I had been in the civil rights movement in the south. I had started an African-American dance troupe, which I was told by white people in Berkeley I couldn't possibly do. I did it. I ran it for seven years, and it's still going on with my lead dancer running it. Currently, it's called the LaVern Porter dance troupe because she's the one who's running it. This is something that's bothered me since I heard of it and I started studying in the Holocaust when I was eight years old because I went to a largely Jewish school and people were all impacted by that.I thought if we have anything like this, I'm going to be involved in it. Of course, I didn't realize we had already had many, many things like that. That's always been something that I felt that I needed to deal with, and this was a new way of dealing with it. I'm very, very, very passionate about this and very, very committed to it. I believe that the more dialogues you start, the more you will see what a flexible way of getting people together it is.People are always complaining about getting people together and my response to that is, "Fine. Get them together then." It's not that hard. It takes some work, but anything that's worth doing takes work.Ojig Yeretsian:It seems like in Berkeley, it might be easier to get people together to talk about race. Maybe, that's an incorrect assumption. How about other places like rural parts of the state or in the country or other geographic regions?Mary Webb:One of the reasons I get to do so much is because I do things rather than thinking about what could happen if I were to do things. I'm throwing this out to people right now. If you're interested in starting something in your workplace, I don't care if you live in Berkeley or Timbuktu. Then, you can email me. If you leave me a number, I will call you back, and we can talk about it.I don't believe that it's much easier in Berkeley. I think it's different. I saw how things were done in the south. It was easier to build community in the south than it is here because, here, everybody thinks they're right and that they know it all. This is not good for learning and listening. It's nice to see those people get in there who know everything and have them say they'd like to listen and learn.We're in a high-powered intellectual community. That doesn't mean that everybody's heart is educated. We're educating people's hearts. It's terrible what's going on in this country. Of course, there are terrible things that have gone on all over the world. When people get together and they respect each other and they learn sometimes to love each other, everything changes.Ojig Yeretsian:In your group, it encompasses all different ages and ethnicities and cultures.Mary Webb:We have someone from Zimbabwe who has very interesting things to say.Ojig Yeretsian:And Filipino-American and South American and Asian like there's a breadth.Mary Webb:A lot of-Ojig Yeretsian:Of voices.Mary Webb:A lot of African Americans, a lot of, say, European descend and white people. Those would be the two large groups. Then Africans, obviously, Deborah Hailu, Eritrean-Ethiopian and [inaudible] from Zimbabwe and [Anne Wigo]. It's different every single time. Wilfred Galila, our cinematographer, is Filipino and he's been with it a while.Ojig Yeretsian:Having come from a deep tradition of activism, being the founder of these dialogue groups, what have you learned?Mary Webb:I've learned more patience. I've learned flexibility about certain things. You think things should go one way, but maybe they shouldn't because you want to meet the needs of the whole group. I've learned that you can't keep everyone happy "at all times" but you can keep the group growing and going and being wonderful and everybody's sense of humor is enormously important in this.Never think that you're not doing the work when you're laughing because that's one of the most important things to really understand the deep, deep, deep level. I learned this in teaching too. This is not about you meaning me. It's about the group. There are times when you have to sacrifice some of your own needs really quickly to get the group to be as powerful as you wanted. At the end of each dialogue, we stand and we hold hands.I feel very strongly about this, and people can meditate or do whatever they want to do. But at the very least, the energy is going from hand to hand to hand. We take that out when we leave.Ojig Yeretsian:Do you have any experience or any initiatives working with children in the schools?Mary Webb:Well, I'd love to do it. I'd love to start dialogues there, but somebody has to ask me to do it. I did run a daycare center. When I ran a daycare center with two, three and four year olds, I had the children vote for the rules of the school. Then, we posted them at the height of a two-year-old, and you take a little two-year-old named Sabrina Boo and you say, "Boo, what did you do wrong?" She says, "Running in the classroom."Then, I remind her that she voted for that rule, and I said, "You won't do it again, will you?" She says, "No." Two year olds are capable of voting for their own rules. These dialogues are perfect for elementary school, middle school and if you didn't get it before high school.When I said that I was studying the Holocaust when I was eight years old, that's the most important thing in a sense because it was always there with me. I was very independent at a very early age.Ojig Yeretsian:Was there a seminal moment that led you to your activism on the East Coast and was there a seminal moment that led you to your activism on the West Coast?Mary Webb:No, I mean this is the way I've always lived. When something comes up, if I think of something, I tend to start with my own ideas. The dance troupe was my idea as far as I know. I was in Berkeley dancing to something called Very Last Day. That was the song, and I was a dancer. I had some dance training. I saw African-American girls in black leotards and tights doing a dance to this.Now, did I really see them? No. I saw an image. If you use the word visionary and it doesn't get to, oh my God, a visionary kind of thing, I am a visionary because I see things like a picture of the dancers and I go, "Oh, I will do that." Then, white people in Berkeley tell me I can't possibly do it as I said before. Then, my vigor is a redoubled by people's projection. I have the kind of personality where if you say, "You can't do this," it's like in my head I'm going, "Just watch my fire."Ojig Yeretsian:You weren't afraid of failing. It was a risk taking you were very comfortable with. As an innovator, that kind of courage and fiery spirit, I think, is what we want to hear about.Mary Webb:There is a time to give up something that isn't working. That's part of it. Now, how do you get a fiery spirit? I don't say, "Try," and I don't say, "Despite the outcome." I say, "I'm going to do this." I have a living room. I know some people. With the dance troupe, I said, "They don't have an African-American dance troupe. I will start one." I got there. We were moving there from California, and I got there and they didn't have a dance troupe. I started one. I didn't know how to do it. I learn how to do it in the process.Ojig Yeretsian:Is that the same with the Living Room Dialogue?Mary Webb:Absolutely. It's what I do with everything. We'll figure it out. Not everybody has a seminal moment. I mean I know who I am very well and very deeply. I don't ever know what I'm going to do next. In fact, I have a website called Suck the Juice Out of Every Moment. It's about my experiences and my philosophy sort of.Ojig Yeretsian:Can you please tell us about your published works?Mary Webb:The first one I published, Dark Roads, R-O-A-D-S, under another name, Leah Ross because there was a Mary Webb already that people had heard of at that time, and I didn't want to go into competition. That was a novel about the south and some of my experiences in the south that has dance troupe in it.The second one, which we're bringing out in a second edition within the next six months is The God Hustlers, which is about religious cults and the nature of evil. The question I'm asking myself in that book is when all around the world there are terrible tyrants and they want to take away everybody's right and kill them and torture them if they're not willing to give them up, how is it that so many people are willing to give up their own rights and join something where someone else is going to run their lives? I'm not a big fan of religious cults as you might imagine.This took me five years. It was spurred in 1978 by what happened at Jonestown. If you turn over your paycheck and your personal rights to a group, there is no limit to what the leader of that group may ask you to do. Check out Alice Miller, the psychiatrist, her books, the ones that are really about the process that went on in various countries that allowed people to take over everything from other people.Ojig Yeretsian:Okay, awesome. Thank you, Mary.Mary Webb:Pleasure. I love it.Announcer:You've been listening to Method to The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll see you again in two weeks.