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P. Diane Schneider was a Conciliation Specialist and Acting Regional Director of Region 10 of the Community Relations Service from 1987-2008.
There are 3 parts of this interview and a summary: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 and The Summary This is Part 1.
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Heidi Burgess (00:00:02): All right, so hello. My name is Heidi Burgess and I'm with Beyond Intractability and I'm with today P. Diane Schneider, who is a former conciliation specialist and for a while, an acting regional director of Region 10 of the Community Relations Service. And I wanna thank Diane very much or P. Diane very much for taking the time to talk with me today and look forward to—
P. Diane Schneider (00:00:32): Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.
Heidi Burgess (00:00:33): —learning from you. So the first question I have is about your background. What did you do before you came to CRS?
P. Diane Schneider (00:00:46): Oh, I suppose the question would be what didn't you do? Um, <laugh>
P. Diane Schneider (00:00:51): I, uh, came from a family that traveled a lot, uh, in the country and well, and in Mexico as, as well. And so, uh, by the time I was old enough to drive, I was already fully competent in plotting a route on these paper maps that us old folk used to use before we had GPSs and all those kinds of things. Uh, and we moved, uh, quite a bit. So I went to a number of schools. I almost lost track of how many I had been to. Um, I, uh, got my, finally got my undergrad at the University of Washington in, uh, Seattle, Washington. And then I, I went to work for the state of Washington, uh, for a number of years and I left state service and went to live in Greece for a while and taught English as a foreign language.
P. Diane Schneider (00:01:56): And had the opportunity to do a little touring around, uh, Europe, after hitchhiking across Canada, which in those days didn't seem as dangerous as it does these days ... I had a chance to go to Turkey a couple of times. Um, there came a time when the Greek military regime under which I was living at the time was gonna be overthrown. And so they started blaming foreign teachers. They had a lot of student uprisings at that time and people were disappearing off the street and some of their prominent people eventually reappeared and the non prominent people often did not reappear and I was not prominent. So, uh, I decided that was the time to leave. And I took a, um, train to Spain, which was the only other country where I spoke the language.
P. Diane Schneider (00:03:09): And, uh, there are, uh, financial restrictions and there were at that time about going between countries because they, they had separate, uh, separate coin in those days. So you didn't ... yes, it was before the European Union. So, um, I had managed to ... and the way the culture is in Greece and everything, they have a saying everything is prohibited, but everything can be arranged <laugh>. So I managed to get some money taken out of the country, um, so that I could have something when I left. And then I had, I bought a plane ticket, but instead of taking the plane, then I took a train to Spain. And then when I was finally able to, uh, make arrangements to leave Spain, and I could turn in my plane ticket that I had got and use it as credit for the trip back to the U.S.
P. Diane Schneider (00:04:22): Then I came back to the U.S and went back to work in state service. Uh, and I worked in several different areas of state service, including, uh, public assistance, child protective services, adult protective services. Uh, I worked in the state mental hospital for a, a period of time. And then I went to work for the Department of Corrections where I worked for a number of years. I can't remember exactly how many years it was. I think they gave me credit for 20 years when I wasn't actually there that whole time. Part of the time I was in Europe <laugh> and, and, um, I was rather active with the labor union, the Washington State, uh, Federation of State Employees, which was affiliated of course, with the American Federation of State Municipal and County Employees, which was of course the union for which Dr. King went to Memphis, uh, in support of the sanitation workers of, uh, Memphis back in those days.
P. Diane Schneider (00:05:35): Um, what can I say then? Uh, as I was the only Spanish speaking, uh, corrections officer, I worked in probation and parole at first, I started out doing pre-sentence investigations that I would, uh, submit to the court before a person, uh, who had been convicted of a felony crime was sentenced. And this also, uh, included sometimes insanity, acquittals that were supervised. Um, and so I was, I was somewhat active with my union and there I was a shop steward and I, uh, uh, did a lot of different kinds of things supporting, uh, union activities. There was a time when, uh, we had the, uh, the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba. Ah, yes. And, uh, a lot of the in fact CRS was active in, uh, resettling. They had a special unit in CRS at that time that was active in resettling, uh, people from the Mariel Boatlift after they were screened and they got a chance to, to leave where they had been held.
P. Diane Schneider (00:07:05): So we had a number of them who came, uh, and were resettled in the state of Washington. And some of them, uh, for various reasons ran a foul of the law. Uh, some, because they had those kinds of problems when they were in Cuba. And some, because changing cultures often creates some kinds of difficulties adjusting or adapting or understanding how to fit in and in a different culture. So they started, and at that time, the Department of Corrections didn't have any procedure for dealing with people who didn't have English capability. And so it ended up that since they found out that I spoke Spanish and I was pretty much the only one in Western Washington, there were certainly people in Eastern Washington that spoke some Spanish. Then they started out having me go around and interpret for other probation and parole officers who were supervising these Mariel Cubans.
P. Diane Schneider (00:08:24): And I, I, of course had said a number of times I thought that was very inefficient, that they would do it that way, because that would take my time away from my caseload, which I still had to carry and go and interpret for another probation and parole officer these days, they aren't called probation and parole officers anymore. 'Cause they've changed the state, uh, uh, structure of, of how these felony convictions are handled. They had what they called the Sentencing Reform Act. Uh, anyway, uh, there were those who thought maybe that I was attempting to get all of the Mariel Cubans on my caseload because of favoritism. And so of course that was very suspicious that I would want to do something like that. But, um, they, to some degree they, uh, decided that might be a more efficient way of doing things, but there, there were issues, uh, regarding the state's ability to comply with federal laws, 'cause there were federal laws about people getting equal access to services, et cetera.
P. Diane Schneider (00:09:45): And there were not really the kind of services that, uh, were needed for limited English speaking people in correctional facilities, for example. And uh, I wrote up a big bunch of paper about that. Uh, probably still have it someplace in my stacks and stacks. I'm kind of a, uh, saver of things. <Laugh> but uh, I ended up getting kind of selected by some of my colleagues that had some of the same concerns at, uh, putting together a presentation at the Washington Correctional Association. Uh, and I wanted to call it, um, working with—and at that time I was talking about Hispanic offenders, but of course language access wasn't just limited to people spoke Spanish, but that seemed to be what was the most frequent thing that we encountered in those days.
Heidi Burgess (00:10:51): What year are we talking about now, approximately?
P. Diane Schneider (00:10:55): Oh, we're talking well, we're talking about uh, 1987, '88, '89. You know, those back in those days.
Heidi Burgess (00:11:10): I'm just really surprised that they didn't have any more translation ability at that point, but go ahead.
P. Diane Schneider (00:11:21): Well, right now I, I serve on a, the Washington State coalition for language access as a board member. And I can tell you <laugh> that we have a long ways to go though. Washington, Washington state has been very progressive in some of these areas, but we have a long ways to go. A lot of people don't understand the issues or the concepts and uh, well we, we have a long ways to go in in many areas. We, we, all we can do is just keep working. One of my first supervisors at CRS who was, uh, very unique character, he always used to tell me, you know, working for the Community Relations Service is not a job. It's more of a sacred trust. And he really believed that from the very beginning. And, and, uh, it was his belief that people shouldn't be hired to the agency if they didn't have that kind of a concept in their mind, uh, not, you know, bean counting or, or specific rules about, you know, sometimes people think mediation is a, an office job where you bring people into the office and one side states their problems and issues and the other one states theirs, and then you work these people together and they come up with a document and that solves things, uh, which looks good on paper, but we have a whole lot of Native people in this country who have long memories and they remember a lot of papers that they were given.
P. Diane Schneider (00:13:13): And, uh, I think I saw on television the other day, they had a, a statue. They were showing that's in that museum down in Arkansas that was done by the, uh, Walton lady. It had a, a statue <laugh>, uh, of, um, who was it? Some, I think military person. And it had all of these treaties, uh, stuck all over him. <laugh> These unfulfilled, uh, treaties. So I know I'm getting off the point, but you probably find that a lot in CRS people.
Heidi Burgess (00:13:57): That's okay. I was the one who sent you off. So it's my fault. Let's, let's go back to, you were working with Washington state, you were translating for the immigrant Cubans, who you got on your caseload and then...
P. Diane Schneider (00:14:16): And then for other, other correctional officers, for their caseloads.
P. Diane Schneider (00:14:22): And, and, uh, I didn't have only Cubans. I also had other Spanish speaking people because we had had increasingly, uh, encountered, uh, you know, the Hispanic community was growing in the state of Washington. When I first came to the state of Washington, there were the, most of the "brown people" that I saw were either Filipinos or, or they're Native Americans. But, um, the population grew. A lot of the migrant workers would settle out and then their kids would grow up and, and, uh, go to school and wanna stay. So that was a whole other thing. But anyway, so I was with the Department of Corrections and I was, uh, kind of assessing how things were. And I kind of got selected by, uh, some of my colleagues, like I said, to present something at the Washington Correctional Association, because they kept complaining that all of the presentations always seemed to be solely White. And I agreed with them, everything we had seen seemed to be very, really White.
P. Diane Schneider (00:15:31): And so I made a proposal after kind of being encouraged to do it. I made a proposal to set up a panel discussion and I wanted to call it, um, "Working with the Hispanic offender: Are we looking for lawsuits?" And of course there had started to be a few, um, kinds of litigation in the state of Washington about, uh, discriminatory treatment of people of color. And so I kind of insisted, uh, that we would call it "Working with the Hispanic offender: Are we looking for lawsuits?" And, uh, I was gonna get a, uh, Hispanic origin judge who worked in, uh, the county where I was working and a federally certified court interpreter who was originally from Venezuela. And, uh, trying to remember who I was getting, I must be getting old after all these years <laugh>, or maybe had so many other adventures, but as I started to, um, reach out to people the way that since we didn't have as much access to social media and things like they do these days, I started sending out letters to different people, kind of saying, this is what we're doing.
P. Diane Schneider (00:17:01): This is what we're planning on. These are the kinds of issues maybe that, uh, just to see who would be interested and any kind of input that people might wanna have, uh, on what kinds of things should be presented at this panel. And during this time then, um, Therma Carranza, who was a conciliation specialist at Region 10, uh, somehow got a hold of some of the communication that was going on. And so she got a hold of me and said, uh, would you need some help? And I'm what kind of help could you give me? <laugh> she said, well, for example, uh, that you're doing all of this communication about this presentation that's gonna be, uh, done, which sounds very interesting. Uh, she said, how about some assistance with postage for these things that you're sending out to get, uh, input from people? Well, sure, of course that would be very helpful.
P. Diane Schneider (00:18:09): <laugh> so she started out, uh, helping me with that, and that was the first contact that I had with, with CRS. And, uh, at the time I was also, uh, volunteering at, um, a local, uh, bilingual newspaper, which was probably the first one really that, uh, began being published in the state of Washington. They called it "La Voz," uh, and they focused a lot on educational issues just because that was, uh, the interest of one of the people there. Uh, but it was published by an organization called the Concilio for the Spanish-speaking. And, um, during this time, uh, they also sponsored things like, uh, Fiesta Patrias, which was a celebration originally of the Mexican day of independence in September, but also included a lot of other Spanish speaking countries that had their independence days during the fall, because there, there are quite a number that do so it, wasn't only restricted to say Mexican-Americans and descendants of, of Mexicans. And that was always a pretty big event where they brought in entertainment, et cetera. And then there came the time when Cesar Chavez decided he was going to renew his ... farm worker boycott. And, um, so this time it was gonna be lettuce, I believe. And it was because of the, uh, working conditions of, of farm workers.
P. Diane Schneider (00:20:12): So he came to Seattle and was gonna announce. And, uh, in fact, Lori Matsukawa who worked for a television station in Seattle and just recently retired. She was one of the ones who did a pretty good coverage of what Cesar Chavez was doing. And he even mentioned at the time that he was very impressed by the, her ability to cover, uh, what the real issues were not kind of the fluff that sometimes he would find. And so they put me in charge of handling the press conference for the Concilio for the Spanish-speaking. And, um, that was something I had never done before, was to do a press conference, but everything seemed to work out pretty well. And I was very impressed at his ability to do things I didn't think I could ever do, which was you get some pretty tough questions sometimes when you're a famous person doing some controversial things.
P. Diane Schneider (00:21:24): And not only could he hear these very tough questions, but he would have very reasoned and calm answers to those kinds of questions that were being made and backed them up with statistics. He was very knowledgeable about everything that he was talking about, and it's very impressive to see people who don't let anything get under their skin because they know this will have an impact on the impression that they're giving and, and what their, their goals are. That was very impressive. I had another, uh, person that impressed me about that much, and that was the first African-American Supreme Court justice in the state of Washington, who actually was the son of a Cuban immigrant. And, uh, but nobody knew it at the time. I guess he had been a commentator on, uh, television, but he also had been a law professor and of course, a superior court judge before he went to the Supreme Court.
P. Diane Schneider (00:22:34): And, um, the way that I got, uh, involved in a group that I still serve on was when I was working for CRS and my then boss, Bob Lamb got me appointed to the, uh, Washington State Minority and Justice commission to represent CRS there. And, um, Justice, Charles Z. Smith was the initiator of the minority injustice commission he's now passed on. But, um, he, he was a man who I could, I would, I have. And I have said a number of times you could wake him up at three o'clock in the morning and he could give you a calm, reasoned and impassioned discussion of any subject that you bring up. <laugh>. So I only wish I had 1/10th of either of those fellows' talents, then I would, I would be far far ahead. So what's your next question?
Heidi Burgess (00:23:49): <laugh> uh, well, we're, you still haven't come to CRS as far as I'm following.
P. Diane Schneider (00:23:57): Oh, okay. Yeah, that was what I had forgot to mention. As I was doing this, I was doing this organization of this panel and I had, uh, I had, um, been contacted by Thelma who was trying to see what kind of support that CRS could give so that we could get this panel together. And in fact, uh, she had suggested it might be good if we could get, um, Toney Anaya, the governor of, uh, New Mexico who had at one time been the attorney general in that state to come and talk. New Mexico is constitutionally a bilingual state. Most constitutions don't have that in their constitution.
P. Diane Schneider (00:24:51): And so, um, while we were coming up on this conference and putting, getting everything arranged, getting all of the people etc., Uh, Thelma was killed in a domestic violence incident.
Heidi Burgess (00:25:11): Oh.
P. Diane Schneider (00:25:13): And so, uh, it was, it was a little difficult for me emotionally to even go ahead with this thing. But in fact, they called me from the Concilio Bob Lamb had said, well, they better get someone from Concilio to call me to tell me about Thelma, because it wouldn't have been the same. If somebody that didn't really know me had called and said, oh, by the way, it was Thelma. That was <laugh>. But anyway, uh, so we, we made it through and in fact, I ended up escorting Toney Anaya to the airport and he was a little displeased 'cause I wanted to make sure he got to the plane on time. And he's the kind of guy that thought he could just show up at the door as they were closing it. And they would still let him in and these days that would never happen.
P. Diane Schneider (00:26:11): But back in those days, uh, I'm sure they did. But anyway, he was, he was a little perturbed that he had to leave earlier than what he had hoped to 'cause he was interested in the conference too. He did come and speak on the panel as well as they, he was able to give a keynote, uh, speech also to the Washington Correctional Association. And so we were pleased that we were able to add a little bit of color to the Washington Correctional Association and also to raise issues that of course were growing. So I had mentioned to one of our district administrators, I think it was that, you know, these issues are coming up and they're gonna cause problems. And I was told that the need has not been demonstrated that we need to respond to these kind of issues. And I had, so I contacted a task force in New York that had been dealing with this and they came up with this big thick volume. And in fact they were able to send it to me for free and ... I still have it as I think I have two volumes now. It talked about a lot of different cultural and linguistic, uh, aspects of Hispanic offenders and people incarcerated, uh, who speak Spanish or who come from a, uh, Hispanic culture, which of course, depending on which Hispanic culture we're talking about, um, there are some significant differences too.
P. Diane Schneider (00:27:54): So during this time, uh, for some reason the boss Bob Lamb decided that might be interesting to look at me for a potential conciliator since I guess Thelma had at one point recommended that they consider me when they were gonna hire somebody. And so it ended up that I ended up leaving the Department of Cirrections where they were so happy to see me leave. They sent me personal letters from the director and several other people thanking me for all of my contributions. <laugh> because they were so happy for me to leave, I think. But, anyway, I went to CRS and found out how little I knew. It was 1987. '87, '88. So Bob Lamb ended up getting me hired as a temporary employee for a year. And he was one who finagled things. And I, I kind of worried 'cause I was hoping that they weren't just hiring me above somebody else that might be better qualified. And in fact, I even did some inquiries back at personnel back in Washington, DC. And they were saying, no, your qualifications were far and above those of any of the other candidates <laugh>.
Heidi Burgess (00:29:41): There weren't too many people trained in mediation at that point!
P. Diane Schneider (00:29:45): Yeah. But that's a whole other issue. But while I was going to the Department of Corrections, uh, working, I was taking night school at Seattle University. So I could get my master's degree in public administration. Um, not because of trying to go to CRS necessarily, but just because I knew that, uh, that there was the possibility that I could do something a little more significant than just trying to make trouble for people in the Department of Corrections. So by the time that, uh, I got recruited to go to—oh, and I also, with another one of my then-colleagues who worked for the Department of Corrections who came from Chile, she was not a conciliation specialist, but she worked in, uh, administration. We both were, uh, funded by the state of Washington to go down to the Institute of Court Interpretation at Tucson University of Arizona and go through their, uh, intensive course that they offered at that time. And those are the same people that developed the federal, the court interpretation, uh, certification, which they did at one time in, uh, Spanish. And then they had, uh, Haitian Creole. And I can't remember at this point how many languages they did at that time. I haven't been able to keep up on that. There's so many balls in the air, you know, you never get 'em all up at the same time. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (00:31:36): So you came on as a temporary for one year and then obviously you became permanent. And how long did you stay there?
P. Diane Schneider (00:31:48): 20 years.
Heidi Burgess (00:31:49): Okay. And so starting in '88. So you left 2008.
P. Diane Schneider (00:31:56): I did leave 2008. The end of 2008.
Heidi Burgess (00:32:01): Okay. And in there were you acting regional?
P. Diane Schneider (00:32:07): Uh, Bob Lamb, uh, passed away at one point. And so he had designated me to, and I was the highest ranking. Uh conciliator there at the time. Um, he, he had always designated me to take over whenever he was not well or not able to, uh, be there. And he had had some, he was undergoing some treatment and different kinds of things, but he was still on the job when he passed away. So we were right in the middle of a remodeling project in the, uh, office and a couple of other kinds of things. Oh. And then we were hiring an, a new conciliator too. So there were a whole bunch of things that had to be done. And, uh, also participating in the regional director meetings and keeping us within budget. And I had quite a lot of help from the, uh, administrative assistant Sandra Blair who had been working at another federal agency and had at some point, got, uh, hired into CRS as administrative assistant. And she eventually was, uh, promoted by Bob to a beginning conciliation specialist position.
P. Diane Schneider (00:33:41): So anyway, uh, at, so at that time then I was when he passed away, then, uh, in fact he, that morning he had called me 'cause he was getting released from the hospital. And he had said to be sure that I take care of things for him, but that was not an understanding that he wouldn't be with us. It was an understanding that as usual I would be taking care of things for him. And, but that, that was a whole education. Just working with Bob Lamb. I could talk for hours about <laugh> those, those experiences.
Heidi Burgess (00:34:27): Just give me a few things that were most notable about working with him as opposed to other people. Why does he stick out so much?
P. Diane Schneider (00:34:40): Well, um, he called himself the biggest, blackest man you ever saw, which wasn't literally true, but his father was a follower of, uh, Marcus Garvey and Bob lamb had, uh, worked as, uh, police officer in Atlantic City, New Jersey years, uh, before, and had done a lot of activist kinds of things, uh, relating of course to African-American issues and uh, especially dealing with, uh, personnel and why it was that certain people got, uh, Palm assignments and certain other people didn't. And it always seemed to be related to the color line that the people that got the worst assignments were the people of color. And uh, so he did a lot of talking about ways that they were able to address those kinds of problems both directly and indirectly.
Heidi Burgess (00:35:54): Hang on just one second, there's a garbage truck. That's making an frontal amount of noise. I wanna go close the window. So it's not overwhelming you.
P. Diane Schneider (00:36:02): I'll be, oh, I don't hear it at all. Thank goodness, but <laugh>,
Heidi Burgess (00:36:14): Hopefully it won't show, show up on the tape, but we'll see. It was really noisy. Okay.
P. Diane Schneider (00:36:20): Oh hopefully not anyway. Um, but he many times, uh, said to me, no government knowingly will pay its employees to foment revolutions. Now the key words here he said is knowingly
Heidi Burgess (00:36:48): <laugh>.
P. Diane Schneider (00:36:50): And of course, you know, the, the way that, that the description that he gave of how they managed to form an organization of Black police officers was they had to couch it as forming a "Police Benevolence Association" where they would be collecting toys for tots. And then if they would get because of this, uh, charitable effort that they were making, they could get the mayor to come in and say, what a wonderful thing it was that this organization was doing. And they could also get other officers of color to join, who were afraid to join because they were afraid that they might have some opposition or there might be some suspicion against them by joining an organization that might have other kinds of motives. So he was, he was quite an, a planner and an organizer, and he was aware of a lot of subtleties that many people aren't aware of or don't have to be because they don't have to consider, uh, the ways that you can get things done if you don't have any official power.
Heidi Burgess (00:38:22): So what I'm hearing in my words is he really knew how to work the system.
P. Diane Schneider (00:38:27): He knew how to work a system, even if there wasn't a system. He could create his own system. If there's no system, he would create his own system and he would work that system.
Heidi Burgess (00:38:41): And were you able to pick up some of these skills by working with him?
P. Diane Schneider (00:38:47): Oh yeah. He practically beat it into me. Well, he had a, a very, very strong personality and there were times when, when it was in intolerable to even work for him, of course. But, uh, and there were times when he, he would never apologize for some of the things he did or said, but he got to where he would call me into his office and he would say, could you do an old man, a favor? <laugh> I said, what can I do for you, Bob? He said, I want you to go down to this, uh, sandwich place there on Columbia Way and get me, he would order a egg salad sandwich with onions chopped because he didn't have full use of his teeth and chopped olives. Oh. And get something for yourself too. <laugh> so that was, that was his way of apologizing when he'd been particularly hard on us or on me, 'cause sometimes I was the one that felt his wrath more because I was the one kind of doing some of the, or, or not living quite up to his expectations of what I ought to be doing. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (00:40:10): How many conciliators were there in the office? Uh, during the time when you were there with him, were you the only one, or were there lots?
P. Diane Schneider (00:40:19): When I started, uh, to "replace" Thelma—which, nobody could replace Thelma, of course—Um, there was Gill Hirabayashi, who was related to Gordon Hirabayashi, who was, uh, one of the fellows that's pretty famous because he had refused to go to the internment camps during World War II. Oh. Uh, there was uh, Robert Hughes.
Heidi Burgess (00:40:53): Oh, okay.
P. Diane Schneider (00:40:54): Who had been, uh, had, was a Baptist minister and was also had been in a human rights organization down in, I believe it was Alabama. And then there was, uh, John Mathis, um, who was, uh, I can't remember what he had done before, but he often referred to, uh, having been in the military and being in a helicopter crash, which made him really nervous when he would fly. I remember I took a flight with him one time. Uh, we were going someplace and that might have been one of the times when I was starting out. And so I was accompanying other conciliators to see how they operated and the cowling on one of the engines of the plane started, I think it may have popped a rivet or something 'cause it started rattling really loudly. And he started talking loudly and I was afraid he was gonna get everybody in the plane upset because he was saying, well, they have a right to know, to know if they're gonna die. And I just said, oh, no, <laugh> gosh, poor guy. But anyway, um, so there was John and uh, and there was, and of course Sandy had not yet become a conciliator. She, Bob had later, uh, promoted her to got her promoted to, to conciliator after. Uh, and I can't remember who left first.
Heidi Burgess (00:42:44): So it sounds like in the early days there, about four or five of you.
P. Diane Schneider (00:42:52): Yeah.
Heidi Burgess (00:42:53): Okay. Let me skip forward to the next question, which is gonna, uh, encompass a lot. Uh, we'd like to get you to think of one of your more notable, more interesting cases and just talk me through it from the point where you found out there was a situation to how you gained entry, how you decided, how to handle it, what to do, how you exited, just talk us through the whole thing.
P. Diane Schneider (00:43:25): Oh boy, there's so many, uh, one of them that had kind of popped to mind when I first heard of that question was that, uh, my former colleague at the Department of Corrections who had gone with me to the interpreter training in, um, Arizona, you know how the world is very small, I had helped her to get a job in the capital city of Olympia, Washington, where they were forming a new unit of—that was something I always used to say, whenever I leave the Department of Corrections, since they weren't paying me anything extra to be giving them this extra service, I said, it's gonna be like those people that used to stand out on the streets and hand out cigarettes and then suddenly they weren't handing 'em out anymore and people had to go and buy them. I said, it's gonna be like that when suddenly they won't be getting ... they'll figure out what kind of service that they've been getting because they won't be getting it anymore and they're gonna have to do something about it.
P. Diane Schneider (00:44:33): So one of the things that happened after I was gone is that, uh, Anita, I, uh, was supporting her in getting her into a position in the state of Washington that with this new unit, which by the way, doesn't exist anymore, but did for a while, they called it L I S T and I can't remember it was language interpretation and translation unit or something, but what they did was not only they could coordinate some of the translations of some of the documents that, uh, the state used. And that way there could be more consistency of some of the translations, because if the department was using certain forms all over the department, then it would be good. If, if each agency didn't make their own translations and without knowing what the quality of them were and without them being consistent. So it just seemed logical that such a unit should be created.
P. Diane Schneider (00:45:43): So not only did they serve to, to contract, but also to review, they had people who spoke several different languages that would review translations. And, and, uh, so I got her into that. Well, one of the people that was working in the, um, that unit was, uh, one of the Southeast Asians. And I can't remember which person it was exactly had told her about a police incident that had occurred in Lacey, which is right next to Olympia Washington, where a Cambodian elder had been, was driving in the rain. And he was pulled over by the police and he's pulled into this parking lot of, uh, some store and the police officer went up and, uh, I don't even know what, what the infraction was that he had committed, but the police officer then was demanding that he show him his license, et cetera. And apparently the fellow didn't understand what the officer was saying.
P. Diane Schneider (00:47:03): So the officer opened the door and grabbed a whole of the guy and was pulling him out of the vehicle when he still had his seatbelt on and put him down on the ground and it was raining. So here's this elder that's put down on the ground. And so then they got back up and they put him in the back of the car. And since they couldn't communicate with him and figure out who he was or whether this was his vehicle or whatever, they went through the vehicle, I guess, and found his address. So then they drove him over to his address, parked the police vehicle with him in the back, at that address and went in and knocked on the door, talked to his wife who also didn't speak English, but she had been chewing beetle nuts. And so she had some red liquid coming out of her mouth. So naturally, uh, this meant at this person they had in the vehicle must be a wife beater. And so they were, there was a lot of mix up in this whole situation. Well, I was called down because of the person in, in Anita's unit that knew about it, 'cause they were gonna have a meeting.
P. Diane Schneider (00:48:32): Uh, there was a, a Cambodian priest who was gonna gather together some of the people that were concerned about, uh, this treatment of this elder that they had in their community and wanted to know what they could do about it, et cetera. So since I got had this connection to the community, I went down and listened to what the story was. And of course, you know, I might have some of the details mixed up from back then. It's been so long ago. But, uh, once I heard about all of that, then that was right about the time that Bob passed away and we were gonna have a, uh, services for him and he was gonna have a, a police service because, uh, since he was a former police captain, first Black police captain in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
P. Diane Schneider (00:49:35): So one of our other colleagues from Colorado was gonna come to the services. Well, I went to pick her up and asked her if she would like to accompany me down to this trip that I had to make down to Lacey to talk about this issue with the police captain, that I had set up an appointment, talk to a police captain about the issue. So Silke Hansen, she came with me and said, I thought I was just coming to a funeral <laugh> I said, well, Bob says that there's no such thing as vacation, even when you're on vacation <laugh>. So anyway, the two of us went down and talked to this police captain and uh, about the, the concerns in the community and the lack of communication, et cetera. And so we, and, and he was very receptive. It was so good to, to know that there was, uh, and of course we weren't being aggressive or anything. So it wasn't like somebody coming in with signs and yelling, et cetera.
Heidi Burgess (00:50:58): Did CRS, as an office or you personally, have any relationship with him before, from earlier?
P. Diane Schneider (00:51:07): No, I had not. I had not, no. Um, there were, we had a lot of problems with partly with budget and with being allowed to do outreach, even though that was originally, and I could go back, you know, to describe all of those things philosophically, but originally we knew that to do the kinds of non table formal mediation kind of things that people traditionally think mediation is we had to have some kind of links to the communities in order to be able to, uh, resolve issues where the aggrieved parties don't feel that they have any standing to be able to go knock on a door of a mediator and say, we have these issues, and we've got a list here, and we'd like to mediate this with this other person. Well, that doesn't happen in many communities. People don't even know there is such a thing as mediation, or if there is, they think it has something about going to court and the mediators there, you have to go to see a mediator before you can get divorced or something.
P. Diane Schneider (00:52:21): Right. So that's a whole different thing than what CRS was created to do, which was to resolve difficulties and disagreements and disputes and tensions, et cetera. So he was very open. Thank goodness to that. And uh, he said, you know, we've been having difficulty interacting and getting any kind of communication with a lot of our Southeast Asian communities. And we have Vietnamese, we have Cambodian,. Uh, uh, and so we were talking about some of the kinds of things that have been done and other communities between police and, uh, communities. And some of them are like, offer educational presentations like you do to your general community that speaks English well, have some interpreters there and have them interpret, uh, safety issues, protection issues, uh, a lot of different kinds of bureaucratic issues that people don't understand very well, no matter how well they speak English, that's why they offer these kinds of educational seminars.
P. Diane Schneider (00:53:43): So, um, that sounded like a possibility. And of course, I went back and was talking to some of the individuals that might be interested in offering some interpretation. If the police would wanna set up these different things, uh, educational, uh, kind of series, which they did. And, uh, by working this out, we came to sort of a formal agreement. We did have a written written document and we had a ceremony and everybody signed it. Although they're going, "you can't really make us do this, can you?" No, this is something that everybody is agreeing to because everybody will like it and it will make things better for people. And it will help us to avoid having the kinds of things that happened where people felt very aggrieved because of the treatment of an elder who himself had no idea what they were talking about. And, and there, in the meantime, there was a way to resolve the issue of the elder who probably shouldn't have been driving because apparently he had cataracts that he wasn't aware of and wasn't able to see as well. So who knows what it, whether he ran a stop sign or who knows what?
Heidi Burgess (00:55:15): So how did that part of the case get resolved?
P. Diane Schneider (00:55:19): Well, it got resolved by the police and the community coming together to say, yes, we will work together and we will have a gathering and we will have food 'cause you have to have food, right? <laugh> and we will have these presentations and we will have different people from the community will interpret for our different presenters that are gonna present these topics of interest. And so we had them and uh, they were very successful and they started a dialogue between the, the police and the community. And they were also were very grateful for the fact that a lot of the community became aware of how to deal with certain procedures, procedural things, and how to keep themselves safer in, uh, by taking some proactive kinds of steps and a lot of different things that, uh, are helpful to any community so that, that they can feel like they're better integrated into their community and they know what resources are available when they need them.
Heidi Burgess (00:56:26): I'm wondering if there was anything that went the other way, where the police looked at changing their procedures when they were dealing with somebody who was not an English speaker, either managed to get interpreters somehow or be better at sign language or who knows. It seems like that there was a need for learning on the police side too.
P. Diane Schneider (00:56:54): Well, I'm not exactly sure ifI understand your question. I'm sorry.
Heidi Burgess (00:57:00): That's okay. I'm just thinking that if the police had figured out that this guy didn't speak English, um, maybe they wouldn't have been as rough on him. Maybe they wouldn't have immediately assumed that he was a wife beater because his wife was eating candy. It sounds like there was what we now call racial profiling going on.
P. Diane Schneider (00:57:26): That is what it sounds like. And that's what the community perceived. And that's why the, uh, police captain was very receptive to finding other ways of getting. And, and I think that, that these presentations did give police a better perspective of how to interact with people that you don't. So yeah, I think it was mutually beneficial. It wasn't just that the police are going, oh yeah. This way we'll educate our community, but it was also, yeah, no, at least we can have a relationship with communities that we've felt were so locked out, that we couldn't get gain entry really to, because one of the issues was that people in, in the Southeast Asian communities were being victimized by people of their own communities who would, uh, threaten them, uh, that they couldn't talk to police or the officials. And of course, then they're going to, what kinda resources do we have?
P. Diane Schneider (00:58:39): We can't even talk to anybody or we don't even know how to talk to anybody or ... how can we deal with this? So that was one of the issues that was talked about in some of the presentations too, were that people need to feel safer in their communities. And there's ways of responding when these kinds of issues are coming up in communities and how they're, how they're handled because—and by seeing this, I think the police were also taking a look at well. Yeah. You know, if we could get people to understand that, and then maybe we could take a look here at how, how we're dealing with those kinds of issues.
Heidi Burgess (00:59:24): So did they then do any sort of process on the police end about looking at how they dealt with those issues?
P. Diane Schneider (00:59:32): They did. And, and it was all started by these informational presentations.
Heidi Burgess (00:59:40): Okay. And then what was the document that got signed?
P. Diane Schneider (00:59:45): It was just an agreement between the police and the community to, uh—keeping in mind the issue that had brought these tensions to a surface with this feeling that an elder had been mistreated, uh, the community and the police, uh, would agree to present, to meet together and to talk about and to present, uh, information from each community and from the police about different topics that they were, uh, bringing up.
Heidi Burgess (01:00:31): Okay. So this was an agreement that led to the conference that you're talking about
P. Diane Schneider (01:00:38): It led to the presentations there at the police department and led to the meal. Of course, 'cause you have to have food when you have these kinds of things. Otherwise people have a different impression of what they're doing. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (01:00:55): Right.
P. Diane Schneider (01:00:56): So this was, this was to be the start of, a series of–and police organizations all over the country are doing a series of informational presentations to communities. So the important part is that they consider what community they're presenting their information to and are they, uh, interacting with that community so that the community can feel that they can communicate what their issues are and, and that the police can then present what they are trying to deal with as well.
Heidi Burgess (01:01:38): Did you do any follow up on this, like a year or two later to see if there had been any changes?
P. Diane Schneider (01:01:46): I did.
P. Diane Schneider (01:01:49): Um, unfortunately the captain's wife had been suffering from MS. And so he left the job sooner than we thought that maybe he would, and there, there was some, uh, effort to kind of continue, uh, having some interactions. I think that the number of public presentations fell off quite a lot, partly because of funding issues. And partly because this unit that my coworker, former coworker worked in that was also disbanded by the state. So the state no longer has a coordinating <laugh> office that looks that coordinates and, looks at the quality of, of translations of, of state forms. And so I guess some of it has to do it the economy.
Heidi Burgess (01:03:01): So how long ago did this happen and how, when was this organization disbanded? Is this a long time ago or recently?
P. Diane Schneider (01:03:15): Well, it wasn't a, it wasn't an organization. It was an agreement between the community, different parts of the community.
Heidi Burgess (01:03:23): Right. Okay.
P. Diane Schneider (01:03:23): Different Southeast Asian groups and the Lacey–
Heidi Burgess (01:03:28): So I guess I'm trying to find out how long did the agreement last?
P. Diane Schneider (01:03:37): Well, I got invited down over a couple of years, uh, to occasional celebrations. And so it appeared that I don't know about a fixed number of continuing outreach kind of programming kinds of things, but at least we feel that there was a, a lessening in the tensions between the Southeast Asian communities and the municipality of Lacey, Washington.
Heidi Burgess (01:04:22): Okay. Well, I would count that as a success. Would you?
P. Diane Schneider (01:04:28): I would call it—for several reasons. Number one is that we were able to make some inroads into a community that we hadn't been working with before, except for the fact that I just happened to have someone who was associating with them. But it, that, that sets it up for if something comes up in the future, somebody will probably remember that there was something of value that CRS could offer when there was a disagreement or, or a misunderstanding or a protest or something.
Heidi Burgess (01:05:11): Okay. And you said a minute ago, there were several reasons. That's one. Were you thinking of other things too? Or is that the primary one?
P. Diane Schneider (01:05:23): Uh, can you ask again, I'm not quite sure.
Heidi Burgess (01:05:26): Well, a minute ago I asked you if you would consider that a success and I, I interpreted your answer to be yes. For several reasons. So one reason is that they learned about CRS. You've got inroads there. Now they'll maybe call you when something else happens. So that's one.
P. Diane Schneider (01:05:45): And one was, they got an apology, uh, for the treatment of the elder, because they hadn't realized. And the community also, uh, took some responsibility for making sure that he didn't drive anymore until he was able to get what he, uh, needed. Okay. Uh, as far as whether he needed medical treatment or whether he was just at a point where he shouldn't be driving anymore. And so, uh, they decided that they would see to it that this would not become an issue because it was obviously not to them, obviously not something that he had done on purpose to violate traffic laws. But that he wasn't aware. And then he also wasn't aware, but they were, I think the police learned that you don't take someone in a community and stick 'em in the back of your police car and then park them out in front of their house for the whole neighborhood to see them in the back of a police car.
Heidi Burgess (01:06:47): Yeah. That's, that was a really strange part of the story and led me to conclude that it was racial profiling. Although, I mean, it seems—
P. Diane Schneider (01:06:56): That's what everybody thought it was. Yeah.
Heidi Burgess (01:06:59): —It seems an odd thing to do almost regardless. Why would they take him home unless they decided he needed to get home and let him go in his house and see his wife. It seems odd.
P. Diane Schneider (01:07:11): They said what they were trying to do was to determine since they had the address that the car was registered to, to determine if there was anybody at his home that spoke English or that could, uh, talk with him because apparently they didn't have any procedure for, uh, determining—and this is something that they also learned as who they could call if they needed to get, uh, interpretation, if there's something they couldn't understand. But, uh, yeah, that their reasoning supposedly was that if he wasn't in any condition to drive, then they could find out who he was and what, you know, maybe somebody at his home could speak English and then they could talk to them and make sure that, that they didn't have a dangerous driver out on the streets or something, or maybe they wanted someone to go pick up his car. And so he wouldn't have to have it towed. I don't know.
Heidi Burgess (01:08:14): Oh, okay. I I'd be willing to hear that and say, okay, that makes sense. But would've been nice if they would've done it a little bit differently.
P. Diane Schneider (01:08:24): Makes sense. Yeah. There's, uh, it is when you have somebody who's obviously under arrest because they're sitting in the backseat of a police car and the police go up to the front door that, that doesn't quite look like we're here to help this fellow. Uh, it kind of looks like something else to the community. Yeah.
Heidi Burgess (01:08:44): Yeah. I think they should have helped him into his house, but anyway. Okay. So we, we made when we were doing interviews 20 years ago, I don't know whether, uh, Bill explained to you, but we, uh, my husband and I, and Dick Salem, I don't know if you remember Dick Salem.
P. Diane Schneider (01:09:06): Yeah. Only, only slightly, but yes.
Heidi Burgess (01:09:10): Um, he started, uh, what we called then the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project with us about 20 years ago. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and we had a list of questions then, and we talked to about 20 people, including Bob Hughes. So I knew who you were talking about then. Um, and we talked to Silke back then. Um, and I think based on the early interviews, we came up with a distinction of what we call the difference between table oriented processes and street oriented processes. Now what you describe was kind of halfway in between, right? Cause it started with a problem on the street doesn't sound like there was any sort of massive protest. And then it ended up being community presentations, which is bigger than negotiating around a table. So it's kind of in the middle. And my list of questions says if the first case that you talked about was street oriented, ask you if you've done any table oriented or vice versa. And I'm not sure which way to go for a second case, but was there either, did you do a fair amount of pretty traditional table mediation between groups and/or did you manage street protests quite a bit? What was the typical kind of, I know there is no such thing as typical, but what was a frequent kind of case other than this one that's kind of this middle ground?
P. Diane Schneider (01:10:57): Well, the typical cases that CRS was created to address were not those table mediation kinds of things, uh, because there was already the option of people going to a mediator and saying, these are, this is my list of my demands, et cetera. CRS was created because there are communities where people have felt that they haven't had access. They haven't had input, they haven't been taken seriously. They've don't know that they have options. And if you feel that you have no recourse and no options, then how do you respond? Some people respond violently. Some people respond by withdrawing completely. Um, so what we did and what Bob encouraged quite a lot, and it wasn't so much of what maybe the government wanted, 'cause it's a little harder. And now that I have my master's in public administration, I can speak from that too. <laugh> it's not that easy to measure and count what things are done.
P. Diane Schneider (01:12:24): And of course, I, I knew that very well since I'd already worked for government for many years before I went back and got my master's degree, uh, governments really like to have things counted and yeah, so that they can put in black and white, we accomplished this specific thing, right? Uh, humankind isn't that way and society isn't that way. And the people that we focused on were not the kind of people that generally would go in with their list of demands to a mediation office. And you know, like I said before, uh, just look at all of the people that we had difficulty getting—people hate to see the feds coming. They go, "You're from the federal government and you're here to help us?" <Laugh> This is what we, we knew. We always had to overcome that meeting with any community. And of course we also had to overcome the impression that the feds are here to investigate us. And of course we were specifically not to investigate. We were specifically with little publicity, which some of our directors didn't seem to understand because that's got us in a lot of trouble too. We specifically were there to assess what the situation was and what was causing the tension and what was causing the mistrust or the rise in tensions. And I'm sure you've already talked to somebody about the, the two route tension measurement, et cetera.
Heidi Burgess (01:14:09): We actually have a write-up on that from Silke, but I guess it came from Gil Pompa originally.
P. Diane Schneider (01:14:19): I, uh, possibly—and Gil Pompa was of course the consummate director, because he was able to navigate through all these different administrations and avoid getting us embroiled into politics and into some of the difficulties that happened later during my term. Thelma had introduced me to Gil, but before I came on with the agency, he had passed away.
Heidi Burgess (01:14:49): Oh.
P. Diane Schneider (01:14:50): So, but I was, I was at a image conference I guess, and Thelma was there. And so she of course had to take me over to meet Gil Pompa. I was duly impressed, but I didn't realize until later what a cartoonist he was. And I still have some of his cartoons.
Heidi Burgess (01:15:13): I didn't know that.
P. Diane Schneider (01:15:14): Some of which, uh, he drew of Bob Lamb because Bob lamb was a very large character in many ways. And one of the cartoons I have is of, uh, in fact I have several, but one of them was Bob lamb talking about—because of starting to work with machines and computers and things—talking about, you know, where do you find whatever it is. And I I'll have to look that up and see if I could find that that cartoon. But of course there were, he was also known for salty language on occasion, but like I say, he was a very large personality in many ways. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (01:16:07): So how did he and your office as a whole deal with the fact that there's all these underrepresented communities who don't know how to successfully interact with the police, local government, state governments, how, what did you do on a I'm thinking routine basis, but I know nothing's routine, but you say that CRS wasn't designed to do table mediations. What was it designed to do? And how did you bridge that gap between the, um, less represented communities and the establishment?
P. Diane Schneider (01:16:58): Well, during Bob Lamb's tenure, we were encouraged to do outreach into communities, especially any community that knew there might be, uh, tensions or that might occur in the future because, uh, one of the things that we were all supposed to do assiduously, and I'm still a news media, uh, uh, fanatic, I guess you would say is we would review all kinds of news media. I still, almost every—Bob used to do this and I thought it was crazy—I get up, I, I wake up probably about four o'clock in the morning, turn on the first news that comes on and I'm watching or listening to the news while I'm still in bed. And when I'm getting up and when I'm in the car, driving someplace, I'm listening to, to news and then monitoring a lot of the minority, uh, press as well.
P. Diane Schneider (01:18:02): We don't have as much paper press anymore, but we would go out to do outreach and we would go to a community on any kind of small eruption, small conflict, small question, and we would go out and while we were there, then we would talk about some of the other things that we can offer. And, uh, what, uh, issues are that sometimes come up in communities and some of the things that we've done in the past, maybe we would hand out a few of our annual reports and some of the different kinds of, of folders that talk about other kinds of specific things. Um, a number of times we helped to negotiate protest marches, 'cause people would feel like at least that they're getting their concerns addressed and the media is gonna cover a march. And if you can get it arranged and permitted and make sure that the police and the city fathers, and everybody knows that this is gonna happen and it's all been consulted with and it's not gonna be any violence.
P. Diane Schneider (01:19:24): And we've got their march marshals trained to deal with any kind of skirmishes that people try to bring up. Um, we, we did that with a number of kind of things. There was, um, series of, uh, "We, the People" marches that were started up in Alaska, uh, after a Supreme Court decision came down saying that, uh, there's no "Indian country" in Alaska. And that these native villages that are subsistence villages basically would still have to pay taxes. Uh, and they were saying things like, what are we gonna do, pay them in caribou or salmon or something? What, how are we going to do that? If we don't even use money here for that. Although Alaska now sends out money to every citizen, so they have some money. So now they can pay this money, but, um, they wanted to have a series of marches, but they wanted their biggest march in, uh, uh, Anchorage.
P. Diane Schneider (01:20:39): And so I was assigned to help set that up. And, uh, now if the Native American–uh, um, that's terrible, my mind goes blank because of all these things, I'm trying to remember, um–legal organization that, uh, represents some Native American and, and treaty issues. Uh, their local office was wanting to kind of co-sponsor this, this march. And it was, it was a protest march and it was about, uh, issues of taxation and basic, I think it was sort of taxation without representation kind of thing. So they wanted to do this March through, uh, Anchorage and Anchorage is used to getting big major groups of people showing up because of the Iditarod. Even when there's not any snow in Anchorage, per se, that's where they officially start. Even if the sled can't they'll even bring in fake snow, just so they can start there, even if there's not any real snow in Anchorage.
P. Diane Schneider (01:21:55): So they're used to dealing with large crowds. So we talked to, um, the mayor who thought that would be fine to do that. And he would be happy to come down and meet the marchers as they come by and greet them or something and, and the marchers could drive. So then we talked to the police and they wanted to kinda because of traffic concerns, I suppose. Well, they don't seem to have those traffic concerns when the Iditarod happens. But since it was the Native people that were marching, they decided, well, we can't have 'em going in front of the courthouse. And in front of the federal building, that just doesn't seem right. Why don't we just send them up this back street here that, you know, along where all the taverns are and everything, and then they won't be interfering with <laugh> the, uh, traffic of course, that, that didn't sit very well.
P. Diane Schneider (01:22:55): We eventually got it negotiated to where they were going to be marching past the courthouse, and past the city hall, and past the federal building. And then they were gonna end up over in a large park in town where then they could have the rest of their gathering and their ceremonies and different things that they wanted to, to do there. Um, it was interesting during, uh, that march that, uh, because of the fact we were marching down the same area where they had the Iditarod, there was a, a sign that was leaning up against one of the walls there that said race crossing, which was usually put in the streets. So they make sure that people knew that you have to wait, 'cause people were going across. So somebody picked it up and carried it <laugh> carried the sign that said race crossing, which I'm not sure if they got that in the media or not.
P. Diane Schneider (01:23:58): But unfortunately, uh, one of the people on my team that had been brought in from California whose name we won't mention, uh, even though I was the team leader, he decided that when one of the reporters came up and started asking him questions, he was ready to give her an interview and he gave her an interview. And so then it was published in the newspaper there that, uh, this march had occurred and that CRS had been involved. And it turned out that at that time, Senator Ted Stevens, uh, read about it and he was on the, uh, funding committee.
P. Diane Schneider (01:24:48): Uh, so he had a fit about how dare a federal agency come into the state of Alaska without notifying him <laugh>. And he was gonna put on this, any appropriations for CRS that, uh, notification would have to be made to the Congresspeople before CRS could go in and do any of their confidential and nonpublic kind of things. And our funding would depend on because he was on the appropriations committee. So, uh, what could you do? That created a whole extra mess for us. One of which was that, uh, whenever we were gonna, whenever we would send the mandatory notification to a local Congressperson, and then we were gonna meet with people, we would get word from the Congressperson that the Congressperson wanted to meet in our private meetings, which that wouldn't work at all. And not only that, then we would end up with, I ended up one time. I was gonna do a mediation for a school issue down in here in the state of Washington. And one of our very assertive media people showed up and she was gonna sit in on the mediation, which of course that's, can't be done either.
P. Diane Schneider (01:26:40): And I think I ended up showing up on CNN for just a short statement, 'cause somebody, one of my colleagues from back on the east coast said they saw me on CNN saying something about, if, if we did these kinds of mediations out in a public, then we wouldn't be able to make, come to an effective kind of resolution or something like that. <laugh> because I wasn't looking to give an interview either.
Heidi Burgess (01:27:13): Right.
P. Diane Schneider (01:27:14): So that, that created, uh, a lot of difficulty. Although it was technically, uh, only related to that year's appropriation, then the agency ended up doing it continually. I assume they're still doing it. They continued to do it.
Heidi Burgess (01:27:38): So it became standard protocol, wherever you went in anywhere you had to notice notify the Congresspeople whose district it was?
P. Diane Schneider (01:27:50): That's true. And it was really not, not, not productive.
Heidi Burgess (01:27:56): <laugh>. I would not think so. Yeah. So how many, how, how often did they then have to explain to the Congresspeople why they shouldn't sit in on the meetings? Was that a one time problem, or was it frequent?
P. Diane Schneider (01:28:11): It was an occasional problem. A lot of times they would just get the notice and would ignore it. But if there was a Congress person that had an axe to grind, then that would give them, uh, incentive then to try to—there was one I remember in Oregon that actually heard that we were gonna have a meeting. So she decided she would sponsor a meeting <laugh> and then, so all of the people that were gonna be at this meeting were actually at where she was. Right. But so if we wanted to meet with them, that's where they would be.
Heidi Burgess (01:28:50): Okay. Then your whole agenda's co-opted of course.
P. Diane Schneider (01:28:53): Yeah. So we had to, we would have to then set up something later on at a different time, in a different place. And it was different. Some of the, some of the parties, not all of the parties there and certainly not with the media present and all those other kinds of things.
Heidi Burgess (01:29:13): So you surprised me a few minutes ago, still on this media topic, you said that some of the directors apparently really like to play to the media and that caused problems. Did I misinterpret what you said or is that correct?
P. Diane Schneider (01:29:31): Uh, some would like to play to the media and then some would like to play to Congress to certain parts of Congress.
Heidi Burgess (01:29:41): Well, they probably have to play to Congress if they wanna get funding, I would assume.
P. Diane Schneider (01:29:49): Um, well, it's a different thing to write a good report for Congress and present your report. So yeah, but it's not productive to be partisan. Cause if you do that, then you end up putting the agency in jeopardy because of the fact that if you're partisans and the next, uh, administration is going to say, oh, oh, this, this agency is, is partisan.
Heidi Burgess (01:30:32): Yep. I see that.
P. Diane Schneider (01:30:34): So there, there's, there's a whole difference in how you report on the successes of your agency and the challenges. And, and there are some things that shouldn't be hidden or swept under the rug. And there's some things that should be promoted more as to the effectiveness of the agency. Gil Pompa did that so well.
Heidi Burgess (01:31:02): So how does this may be a better question for Grande Lum who I'm talking to tomorrow, but we're on this topic. Um, how does a director or even a regional director or conceivably even a conciliator who's looking at the press, how do you walk that thin line? And one of the problems that CRS has, as I understand it is, you take a low profile so that very people are aware that the agency exists and they don't know what the agency does. So it comes to time for decisions to be made, funding decisions, to be made. And the Congress people are saying, who are they? What do they do? Um, so you need some publicity, but obviously publicity can completely torpedo whatever you're doing. So what are the kinds of things you said Gil Pompa was great at highlighting the things that need to be highlighted and, and hiding the things that need to hid. How do you walk that line?
P. Diane Schneider (01:32:17): Well, of course I was not with the agency during the time of Gil Pompa but if you talk to Richard Gutierrez I'm sure he has a lot to say about those issues. Uh, but you can walk that line. If you have enough funding that you can print out the folders and documents that you have on your annual reports. And I was sent back to DC one year for a couple of months during the summer, and I edited, uh, the annual report for that year. And there were a few things in there that I had to reword. In fact, I went to the then director at the time, I said, you know, you can't use this word in the annual report <laugh> and even though she was an attorney, you know that, I mean, I've got a little experience in the courts too. So, uh, I know that there's some words you can't use in a report about something that you accomplished when that wasn't specifically what you accomplished or a community, you know, didn't accomplish this or because it was, there's a different word that will work quite well, but you can't use a word that means something different.
P. Diane Schneider (01:33:47): We, we got a lot of complaints from headquarters about words that we weren't using properly, supposedly, and yet they would send out memos <laugh>. They would do serious, uh, wrong words. <laugh> so, uh, it was almost laughable. I think we probably needed a little better quality of, of proof readers or editors or something. Of course, I'd been working with this newspaper with Concilio. So, uh, plus I had in the Department of Corrections, had a supervisor that was very, very strict about, uh, the way one, uh, drafts something in a written document. And she was actually a U.S Immigrant who had learned English as a second language, but she was very proper in which helps a lot when you're doing some kind of official documents then, and of course now I'm gonna, I'm a certified court interpreter. And so of course, just like the lawyers that quibble over small meanings of words, I do that all the time when I'm trying to figure out what word we're gonna use, that's not gonna give the wrong impression. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (01:35:19): We used to do, uh, trainings with simultaneous translations going on. And I listened to some of the translations, uh, that were in French and I do French and I just, I rolled my eyes 'cause I knew that the translation that was happening wasn't wasn't up to snuff, but what can you do?
P. Diane Schneider (01:35:44): Well, we've got a brand new ... manual out for these certified court interpreters here in this state, which might be a good model for, for other states too.
Heidi Burgess (01:35:58): What, what did CRS do about interpreting? Did you always have people who were able to speak the language that you were working with or did you hire interpreters? How did you handle that?
P. Diane Schneider (01:36:12): CRS did a poor job of handling that, uh, CRS had published some booklets translated into Spanish that were in such poor Spanish that I redid them.
Heidi Burgess (01:36:26): Wow.
P. Diane Schneider (01:36:27): Uh, and, and I didn't just rest on my own Laurels and say, I'm the person, you know, I had them reviewed also to make sure that they ... were correct. And of course they never decided to actually publish the ones that I redid.
Heidi Burgess (01:36:45): Oh.
P. Diane Schneider (01:36:45): Even though I pointed out, you know, uh, the one I particularly remember as one was in blue, was in English and one was in green and had to do with police Hispanic relationships. And I thought, you know, this is in some communities, it would be considered an insult <laugh>. But, uh, that was one area where it took me, uh, year and a half to convince Bob Lamb, that language access was a national origin issue. So it would fall under CRS dispute resolution.
Heidi Burgess (01:37:29): Huh.
P. Diane Schneider (01:37:29): Because he was so focused and he, when he was so embedded and so concerned about the very real, real issue of these African-American, uh, issues that, you know, that are so historic and so embedded in our society, um, there hasn't been a lot of attention given to, uh, these other issues, which also have caused a lot of hurt. So, like I say, I've said it many times before we have a long ways to go yet.
Heidi Burgess (01:38:09): It didn't even occur to me that that wouldn't be considered in CRS as perview. I know one of the things that Silke talked to us a lot about was her work in the Rodney King situation down in LA, where she was actually working with the Korean community.
P. Diane Schneider (01:38:31): I was there too. I was, I was down there.
Heidi Burgess (01:38:33): Okay. So obviously, um, the Koreans had language, access problems and Silke and, and you, I gather were heavily involved in that. So was that a rarity for CRS to get involved with groups that were left out on account of language?
P. Diane Schneider (01:38:58): Um, if there was a conflict then CRS would get involved just because someone speaks a different language. That's another factor that you have to take into your assessment of the situation, but, um, Koreans are considered a different race.
Heidi Burgess (01:39:22): Okay. And just like if there's a, if there were a language problem and the people would be all White, would that would CRS consider that would be out of its domain?
P. Diane Schneider (01:39:36): Depends on CRS and depends on the director. And it depends on the individual regional directors.
Heidi Burgess (01:39:42): Okay.
P. Diane Schneider (01:39:43): Um, and there was a time when the Irish were not considered white.
Heidi Burgess (01:39:49): Right.
P. Diane Schneider (01:39:50): And now they're considered white. There was a time when, uh, uh—
Heidi Burgess (01:39:57): Italians.
P. Diane Schneider (01:39:57): I think Italians were not considered white and now mostly considered white. But, uh, sometimes we forget that many of these countries have people of different racial backgrounds, different ethnicities as well. So what is an Italian or what is an Irish.
Heidi Burgess (01:40:25): <laugh>? I would imagine that we might be looking at this soon because Ukrainians, um, are, I assume mostly White and we're likely gonna be getting a lot of Ukrainians here who probably don't speak English.
P. Diane Schneider (01:40:42): And there, there are some cultural differences of course, with the Ukrainians as well.
Heidi Burgess (01:40:52): That'll be interesting to how that one goes. Um, let's see. How are we?
P. Diane Schneider (01:40:58): Well, we got involved sometimes with religious issues when those, that wasn't part of the CRS mandate and the way we did that was because after 9/11, of course, they started, uh, having eight crimes against Sikhs and against, uh, Muslims and against anybody with a turban, so there was that issue as well.
Heidi Burgess (01:41:25): That's true. And I assume the CRS was actively involved in those,
P. Diane Schneider (01:41:33): Uh, in many cases it was. And there were some Jewish issues too, where, you know, I mean, technically is CRS supposed to be involved in that if they didn't have religion?
Heidi Burgess (01:41:48): That's true. I didn't even think of that. There was Dick [Salem's], KKK marching on Skokie mm-hmm <affirmative> was all white mm-hmm <affirmative> hadn't thought about that.
P. Diane Schneider (01:41:59): Yeah.
Heidi Burgess (01:42:02): Yep.
P. Diane Schneider (01:42:03): So, yeah. And, and of course, scientists will tell you, well, there isn't any such thing as race actually, and human beings and say, well, yeah, we have a lot of ethnic differences, but—
Heidi Burgess (01:42:18): We manage to divide people in all sorts of ways.
P. Diane Schneider (01:42:22): Well, human beings have survived because they have adapted to different circumstances culturally and physically and socially and even politically.
Heidi Burgess (01:42:35): Right. We've got a few minutes left. Let me go back to, when you were saying that with Bob, you were doing a lot of outreach into communities where some you'd see something in the paper that happened, that was little and you thought that tensions might be growing. So you'd do an outreach to a community. Who would you generally reach out to first? Would it be the minority community or would it be the officials?
P. Diane Schneider (01:43:07): Um, usually it ended up being the minority community, however, uh, depending on how we learned about it, or depending on what the media might have said or something, then we might make a different, uh, decision. But quite often the, uh, minority community was happy to hear from us. If we were there after we got over the, you know, from the federal government, we are to help you in <laugh> once we gained entry into that community. And, and we, we had a procedure that we developed on how to determine who the community persons would be, that one should communicate with.
Heidi Burgess (01:44:08): Tell me about that procedure.
P. Diane Schneider (01:44:11): Well, for one thing, uh, quite often the people that are that speaking out the most loudly are not necessarily speaking for the community. And so we had to see depending on the community, what kind of organizations or communities or activities happen in that community. So you're assessing—in fact, I went to a, uh, training session that CRS, let me go to down in Arizona, and it talked about mediation per se. And they had the opinion, which I agreed with them, that the assessment itself is more valuable than the actual resolution. Because once you have the entire assessment there, then sometimes you don't even have to take action because you make sure that all the parties are aware of all the options open to the other parties and to themselves when sometimes the reason for the disagreement or the power play is because one of the parties assumes the other party has no options.
P. Diane Schneider (01:45:28): And maybe one of the parties has no idea that they have any options. So sometimes it's a matter of informational gathering and distributing, of course, because CRS, when it had the capacity to do so always had literature and had, uh, information about how certain things work and how certain things could be done. There's a new field that they call organization development and they were just kind of coming through with that when I was going to, uh, to Seattle U with my master's degree. But of course it, it wasn't a field at that time that they were offering or, or probably I wouldn't have necessarily gone to that anyway, 'cause I was kind of at the time thinking corrections and, and police and those kinds of things. But, um, that community development is closer to what CRS does most effectively or did most effectively back when they weren't focusing on trying to hire recent law school graduates as good mediators to come and fix the problems and then join CRS with federal mediations because after all, they're all mediators, you know, which it's like forgiving all of these differences that have to be dealt with that really don't lend themselves to that kind of, uh, of a process.
Heidi Burgess (01:47:11): Is that what's going on now?
P. Diane Schneider (01:47:15): I couldn't really tell you what's going on now. Um, I'm still doing a lot of the things that I was doing when I was working for CRS because that's what Bob Lamb told me I had to do. <laugh> and uh, I did to some degree keep, uh, in touch with CRS, but because of the, well, let's say bean counters and those kinds of things that were happening, it sounded to me like it was more and more difficult for CRS to do what it was originally created to do. And more trying to focus on coming up with numbers that would look good to, I don't know, Congress or whoever.
P. Diane Schneider (01:48:09): Numbers don't solve problems.
Heidi Burgess (01:48:13): They can create them though.
P. Diane Schneider (01:48:15): They can. Yeah. Statistics.
Heidi Burgess (01:48:21): So, so when you did an assessment, uh, did you make that assessment public to both sides or was that something confidential to CRS?
P. Diane Schneider (01:48:33): We would be happy to uh, share some information that maybe the other side needed to know, but obviously we couldn't turn out the whole assessment over to either side because that was a CRS product.
Heidi Burgess (01:48:51): What about by doing confidentiality issues?
P. Diane Schneider (01:48:54): Confidentiality, of course there were confidentiality issues and there were some things that wouldn't be productive to share that maybe it was important for us to know, but there were things that wouldn't be productive to share to either party just because that could make the conflict worse instead of help to find a middle ground, a way to solve things.
Heidi Burgess (01:49:24): It sounds like there is utility in making sure that both sides know what each other's options are.
P. Diane Schneider (01:49:31): That's true.
Heidi Burgess (01:49:32): 'Cause that's going to show what the BATNAs are.
P. Diane Schneider (01:49:36): That's true. Exactly.
Heidi Burgess (01:49:40): Um, did most of your cases come as a result of your outreach and then a minority community or a police chief or school superintendent or whatever, an official come to you and say, "Hey, we need CRS's help." Or was it more CRS going in and saying, "Hey, I think you guys need our help."
P. Diane Schneider (01:50:08): Well, that would not be politic to go in and say, I think you think you guys need CRS help. In order to gain entry, we had to be a lot more subtle than that. And we tended to go into communities where at least there was, there was something, some potential of tension, some, uh, disagreement, some kind of dispute, and sometimes we just go in on the reporting of a hate crime. Not that that was directly CRS, except for the fact that whenever a hate crime is committed, there's a whole community out there thinking, you know, that could have been me. That could have been me and what's gonna be done about it. And what's, you know, are we vulnerable now or are we at risk now or what's gonna happen now? So those are the kind of situations where a person could go.
P. Diane Schneider (01:51:18): And of course you could talk to the victim of the hate crime and you could talk to the police about how they dealing with it or how they resolving it. And you can talk to churches about, you know, what kind of support that they can provide. But then you can also talk to interested community members that are talking about—you know, aren't there some—and Bob Hughes did a lot of that too, coming up with lists about, well, how, what can a community do to prepare itself, to respond when this kind of a thing happens? And how can we show that we're we're together on this and that we're not supporting this kind of activity in our community, our community doesn't represent that. That was a good model that he, he developed, uh, when, of course it took him forever to tell it, but <laugh>, I think that was just to wear people down a little bit. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (01:52:24): All right. Um, I think this seems like a good stopping point.
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Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project Phase 2 As a public service, Beyond Intractability hosts this site in conjunction with the earlier Phase I of the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project. IRB statement for Phase II interviews “Research conducted pursuant to Ohio State University Office of Responsible Research Practices IRB protocol 2021E0493.” |
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Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project Phase 2 As a public service, Beyond Intractability hosts this site in conjunction with the earlier Phase I of the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project. IRB statement for Phase II interviews “Research conducted pursuant to Ohio State University Office of Responsible Research Practices IRB protocol 2021E0493.” |
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