The secret to creating the beloved community: Doug Shipman at TEDxAtlanta

thank you it's a pleasure to be here when Todd first called and said that the theme was Community I started looking for the ways that Community is used and they're used a lot of different ways online community business Community White Community black community Tech Community I even crowdsourced this question to my little Cadre of social media followers and I got all kinds of responses where people felt Community festivals football games funerals churches and of course it might not surprise you that if you look at this it doesn't really have much of a meaning it doesn't really tell us what we should be doing if we're trying to build a community when I think about Community I think about Martin Luther King Jr and I think about the notion that he put forward of a Beloved Community he said our goal is to create a Beloved Community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls and a quantitative change in our lives you see the community that King envisioned is all inclusive everybody's a part of it it can't be exclusionary if it's beloved second if it includes everyone the differences of its members have to actually be embraced the Beloved part of the community and then King talked a lot about when he talked about Beloved Community the fact that we all had to work for justice and not only the justice of ourselves but we had to work for the justice of every member of the Beloved Community now that is a pretty tall task but I think it's a necessary one and King thought it was a necessary one because what he said was that in an interconnected world the only way we would develop the empathy required to actually solve our problems across our differences was by building the Beloved Community so that's the challenge how do we build the Beloved Community well what if building the Beloved Community actually meant us taking one phrase and applying it to ourselves and to our actions a phrase we've all heard many times Love Thy Neighbor now I know what some of you are thinking Love Thy Neighbor you don't know my neighbor or like my wife and I our walls were so thin we knew our neighbor far too well but I don't want us to think about a specific person when we think about love our neighbor I think we want to look at the root of the word it actually has two Roots nay near and bore home base or someone's uh heart to a certain extent so if we take this notion of neighbor instead of thinking about the people who live near us I want us to turn it around and think about the people who we live near that we actually start to be a neighbor by living near someone else's home so in other words how do you love someone's home base well you can visit their home base you can visit their community and I'm sure many of us have if I went to your home I'm sure I'd see travel photos and I'd see MOS maybe artwork from other places maybe other foods that you consume at home but those visits are only visits they are not the Deep kind of Engagement that we need when we think about Beloved Community because if we're going to take this notion seriously we have to confront a very tough truth we cannot consume our way to community one click one more friend one more trip is not actually going to build the Beloved Community instead we need an engagement an ongoing engagement with other communities and on their home turfs there was a visit that I made when I was in college imagine a Sunday sticky Sunday in September I'm on the MARTA bus going down to Old Ebenezer Baptist Church King's home Church on Auburn Avenue and I go into the church it was still in the original Sanctuary then and it was a site the original pull pit where King preached the Robes of the choir the long pews the women wearing their sunday hats that you always see in an African-American church and I sat down and the service started and we opened up our himal to the first song of the day and I was shocked to discover that the same song that was first that day on Ebenezer Baptist docket was a song that we used to sing in my allh country Church in rural Arkansas the second song same one third song same one I knew all the songs now I didn't sing them as well or as fast as Ebenezer Baptist but I knew them and so I jumped right in and I sang them and this caused a bit of a stir among my seatmates left and right who I did not know both African-American folks they were curious why this 18-year-old kid knew all of these spirituals so we started talking about it we started talking about church we started talking about family we started talking about home I went back the next Sunday and then I went back again and those visits turned into an engagement which then turned into an academic Pursuit that then turned into a professional Pursuit and for me a lifetime of understanding and studying and engaging Southern African-American history and communities that's more than a visit that's actually being a neighbor it's not only that we build community by being the neighbor but I would argue that being a neighbor is the ultimate expression of love and the reason is because if we truly love our neighbor that connect connection can transform people and it can actually reconcile the fiercest of enemies if you look at the history of the American Civil Rights Movement all the leaders at some point said something along the following lines we weren't just fighting for African-American Freedom we were trying to liberate the oppressors from their mindset and we were trying to liberate America from the plight of segregation and no one no one embodied this more than someone that I've gotten to know Reverend C T Vivian Reverend CT Vivian is a true American hero he was one of the people who sat in in Nashville he was drug out of uh restaurants spit upon he was one of the Freedom Writers where he was beaten in Alabama and Mississippi he was on the bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday this is a picture of CT praying for Sheriff Jim Clark who was the feared and some would say murderous Sheriff of Selma I asked Reverend Vivian one day I saidwhat were you thinking when you walked up every day and prayed for Sheriff Clark and he said' I'd pray in the morning and I'd go to sheriff Clark and he would yell at me and the next day I'd pray and then I'd go and he'd arrest me and one day he even broke his hand across my jaw when he punched me and the next day I prayed again because I truly believed that the next day was the day we were going to be reconciled and that he was going to see the evil of his ways that is stunning and it is what we see in so many different contexts whether you look at Gandhi and the way he thought about the British you look at Mandela and tutu and the way they thought about the Afric coners they believed that they weren't just freeing themselves but they were building a whole new society and they were going to reconcile with their neighbors who they were living near and they were right each of those societies were changed because of the practice of loving Thy Neighbor now these people have risen to the world of almost being saintly and and so it begs the question how do we actually build our own capacity to be a neighbor to practice this notion of loving our neighbors well I believe that actually it is a combination of a mindset the notion of Beloved Community the lotion of loving Thy Neighbor living near their home base and a certain skill set that there actually are a few attributes that you can develop over time and I'd like to just take a minute to kind of run through them first one of these probably most important is a true respect for otherness if you're going to actually venture out and visit someone's home base and be the only person who is different who's there you have to actually truly respect the otherness I've done a lot across Community work and I've often been the only other in the room the only uh AFC the only white person the only male the only Southerner the only whatever and I used to when I first started this I used to try to fit in so you know maybe I dress a certain way or maybe I change my change my accent a little bit or maybe i' try to find an artist that I thought somebody would like and I would make these false connections but that was the ultimate disrespect of the people I was visiting I had to maintain my authenticity to show the actual respect of the other and that's the basis that we have to enter communities we have to maintain ourselves so that we actually can when ask when we ask a question we can actually be asking it in Truth the second is as we venture out we don't have the ability to listen in the regular way maybe we speak the language but we don't know the shorthand we don't know the cultural markers we don't know the landscape and so we have to develop the ability to listen with our hearts a friend of mine who's a social worker tells a story that among grief counselors It's well known that grief is often expressed in one's native tongue no matter how long they've lived in another country whatever they first grew up with is the tongue and the Lang language that they express true grief with and the best grief counselors don't ask them to translate they simply listen emotionally they listen with their hearts in order to see what that person is feeling and see what they need we have to cultivate the same sense we have to listen with our hearts so that we can actually engage people who are very different from us and situations that are very different from us the third is we have to have authenticity but flexibility of behavior I lived in India for a while and one of my projects I was a consultant uh I had a a team and it was all Indians and the client was all Indians and we had a kickoff lunch to start the project it was a nice Buffet spread of Indian food there was the food there were the plates there were the napkins there were the peppers there were the spices there was the bread there's no silverware so I sort of paused a minute looked around the room to see how this was happening and I noticed that people were setting up their PL a certain way they were using the bread to basically dip the food and eat with their hands so I did the same thing I set my plate up the same way I went and sat down I started eating with my hands didn't say anything no drama nothing six months later one of the team members from the client came up to me he said you know we were very worried about you when this project started I said oh really why he said because we didn't think you were going to be able to connect with us being an American and everybody else on the team being Indian and he said something happened and changed our mind I said what was it he said the first day you ate with your hands and you didn't say anything about it you didn't make a big deal out of it that ability to take a little bit of information and apply it in real time to have a little bit of flexibility of behavior Can Build enormous connection with someone else especially when you're new to a community another is that you have to have a tolerance for ambiguity now rounded to the nearest thousand how many how many times do you think that I've been asked what is a white guy doing running the center for civil and human rights it's in the tens of thousands now and when I first started with the job a lot of people a lot of times I would react a bit defensively I would say well where's this person coming from but very quickly I noticed that 99% of the time that question was actually asked from the very least curiosity and most often it was a positive so I would simply answer it and then would open a conversation someone would say here's my connection to the topic here's my family story here's what I think you should be doing and it became a positive exchange if we're open to the ambiguity that exists when we first enter another Community it will often open up a very intimate conversation quickly but if we're defensive if we shut it down if we try to make it about us we'll miss that opportunity the final one that we have to cultivate is one that's very hard to do and that's over overcoming the fear of accidental offense now let me just try to do my best and say I absolve you of all guilt of accidental offense starting today because if you're going to venture out if you're going to actually practice being a neighbor to different communities you're going to accidentally offend my favorite story comes from my own family my wife's family is originally from India my family is originally from Oklahoma and before we were married my father and I visited my fiance then parents house without my fiance we arrived we had pleasantries we drank tea and then we went to take my father and I went to take our bags upstairs where we were going to sleep my father grabbed his bag because he likes to show that he's still pretty spry as an older guy and carried it up the stairs and I grabbed mine and carried it up the stairs this caused a very fluxim phone call from my mother-in-law to be to my fiance and she said what is Doug doing disrespecting his father and my wife said what do you you mean and she said he didn't carry his father's bag up the stairs doesn't he know that that's what we do well this opened up a very interesting and ultimately an amazing conversation about the differences in Elders respect culture across our burgeoning family sometimes we have to venture out we will uh be we will accidentally offend but if we're open to it we will make the connections and we will overcome that very quickly you know when I think about this notion of a neighbor something happened very early on that makes this whole topic extremely personal to me I uh said earlier that I was from a rural town in Arkansas it was 1,00 people when I grew up there it's now a thriving Metropolis of 2,000 people I mean it's just grown exponentially and when I grew up there we used to have a joke that they there were two minority families in town the two Catholic families because there was no racial ethnic religious diversity really of any kind in my little town in Arkansas and so in one ways it was an idilic Community but in another way it was not the Beloved Community because it wasn't all inclusive it didn't allow everybody to be a part of it so that's where I was from and being from there I also was a huge fan of Arkansas college football as almost anyone is there the Roaring razor backs and when my brother went to college there he was older than I was he befriended one of the football cheerleaders a guy who lived on his Hall and he called up he said if you come to the football game Arthur will be able to get you on the footall football field well this was the greatest news that I had heard in my 5 years of life that I would be able to get onto the football field so we go to the University of Arkansas and I meet Arthur and he takes me on the football field and he is an incredible guy he is kind he is one of those people who connects with kids he explains to me everything about football this is a picture of that meeting I'm on the left Arthur was my hero he was the greatest guy I'd ever met so I convinced my parents and my brother to bring Arthur home to my little town to visit us well the return trip didn't go as well uh when Arthur moved around the community things were said people were a bit hostile it was not a great reception and Arthur's response to it was the same he had had to me he was kind he was loving he was accepting he was empathetic he visited our home base in a way that was giving even though people didn't want him to be there and that moment set me on a path to do my very best to try to build that empathy Within Myself for various communities it inspired me then it continues to inspire me now and it's something that I think is epitomized by a quote from someone who of course knows a lot about being a neighbor Fred Rogers Fred Rogers said love isn't a state of perfect caring it's it's an active noun like struggle to love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is right here and now that's exactly what author did when he visited our home he accepted everyone he encountered good bad or indifferent exactly who they were right then and right there this notion of Love Thy Neighbor is something that for me transformed me very early in life it's something that as I have studied the American Civil Rights movement and other social movements it shows itself to have a transformative power on society and is the only way that enemies can be reconciled and as we look across our community as we look across our world the problems strike me as being communal in nature whether it be the environment or economics and poverty or freedom and human rights they're all communal and I believe today that the only way we can build the capacity City individually and collectively to address our communal problems is by pursuing the Beloved Community by loving our neighbors I hope that we'll get started today thanks

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 44,676

Keywords: ted x, tedx, tedx talk, ted talks, tedx talks, TEDxAtlanta, ted talk, Atlanta, Unboundary, TEDx, ted, Community, Doug Shipman

Id: cP5PAul3H4E

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 20 2012