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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 2.
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Find the video here: https://youtu.be/ManK6ya-D_I
Heidi Burgess (00:00:00): Just the record button and we're going, so just wanna start with an introduction again, I'm Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability, and I'm working with, uh, Grande Lum and Bill Froehlich on the second iteration of the Civil Rights Oral History Project, where we've been talking with, uh, former Community Relations Service conciliators. And today I'm doing my second interview with P Diane Schneider, who was a conciliation specialist and acting regional director of Region 10, uh, which was on, is still, uh, and was at the time on the west coast. And when we left off our last interview, I was asking P Diane, how she knew who to talk to when she came into a community at the beginning of, uh, an intervention. And you had made the comment that the correct people to talk to were not always the obvious people to talk to, um, that the people that were making the most noise, the highest profile, weren't always the best people to start with. So I wanted to follow up on that a little bit more and find out how you decided, who were the best people to talk to. And what order you talked to people in. Did you go to authorities first or the aggrieved parties first, or what did you do?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:01:51): >Okay. And, and I guess if it was me, I would say let's back up just a little bit before we get to that stage. Um, and we, back when I was first working with the Community Relations Service, we weren't so restricted in our ability to do continuing outreach to communities, which was a way that we could kind of prepare the ground for a time when we might have to come in for some issue that had emerged that needed to be dealt with right away, because it's so much easier if somebody in the community knows you and, uh, has an idea—and because we talked about the fact that, you know, it's really hard to just go into a community and say, hi, I'm from the federal government, I'm here to help you. And everybody laughs and we hope they laugh—And instead of, you know, some other things they could be doing.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:02:50): >Um, and so I, I think, and there were so many things that I learned from Bob Lamb when I, uh, was working under his, uh, under his supervision since he was one of the old original folks that, uh, came in on the ground level and said, you know, look, this is the way things will work. And they don't always, and they usually don't work the way that they print them in a book. They print them in a book so that they look nice, but that's not the way things actually work. If what you want is to get some results. And the results, aren't the things that you can count on the list and do the bean counting and those kinds of things. I think we talked about bean counting before. And I put on my hat, my public administration hat and said, you know, uh, I certainly was able to confirm that with a degree in my master's of public administration after I had already worked for different government agencies for many years before that.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:04:02): >So I know, you know, government likes to, uh, put things down on paper and put numbers and people don't respond, uh, in a numeric fashion because they're human beings and they work differently. So, um, if I had an idea about a community, which I tried to, as we tried to maintain, do outreach to the degree possible. And—when it wasn't—when we weren't able to physically go out and shake hands and get to know people or do a little brief presentation of what CRS was to make sure that somebody had an idea who we were then, because things started getting restricted. Then there were some options via the internet, not as much as they are today, of course, as we didn't have Zoom at all. Although eventually about the time, right after the time that, uh, the uprising occurred down in Los Angeles, after the Rodney King incidents.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:05:07): >And we eventually started getting cell phones, which made it a whole lot easier instead of stopping off at every rest stop in the community and using the public pay phone to call with our little credit card. So, uh, there are ways to continue to communicate with communities. We tried to do outreach to any kind of organization that existed that we knew had some of the similar concerns that CRS had, uh, racial conflict and racial conflict resolution and concerns about bias and discrimination and, uh, how that can cause disruptions and ... other kinds of behavior in the communities.
Heidi Burgess (00:06:01): >What, what sort of organizations are you talking about there?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:06:05): >... For instance, here, we had a fellow who had—this is kind of a long story too—but we had a fellow who had been a priest.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:06:20): >Bill Wassmuth had been a priest over in uh, Idaho. And this was during the time when the, uh, Aryan nations had set up a ... post over there and started bringing in people. Uh, and ... you got a lot of national publicity and they did a lot of things that created concerns in communities, especially, uh, communities of color and other minority communities. And so, Bill Wassmuth, as a priest started speaking out at his parish, and there came a time when somehow a bomb got placed at the rectory of the parish, and this did not deter Bill Wassmuth at all. In fact, he decided at some point that he was going to retire from the priesthood and he came to Seattle and managed to ... form an organization. My mind is going blank the moment at how it was called, but, to respond to and prevent something parallel to what CRS was set up to do to, respond to incidents of bias and hate, discrimination and manage to get some cooperation from groups in Montana, which wasn't in our—Montana and Wyoming, I think, and, uh, Oregon and Washington and Idaho.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:08:14): >And I can't remember what other groups—but people that were also—and had formed groups that were interested in those kinds of issues. And, um, to this day, there is an organization now in Oregon that kind of continues that work. But for quite some time, Bill Wassmuth had set up an office here in Seattle. And we worked closely with that organization that had a lot of people that had similar concerns that were kind of eyes in the community and monitoring incidents and could let us know about when tensions were rising or when issues were rising that might, uh, create dissension or difficulties that perhaps the communities could use some kind of assistance or resources or information, uh, depending on what the situation was. And of course, that didn't mean we go in with our galoshes and start stomping around saying, you know, "we're here to help you," because that, uh, isn't usually received by any community very well.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:09:33): >And it gave us an idea of some of the people who we could either talk to because, uh, they could be parties in issues, or they knew who in the community were the people that were the movers, shakers, uh, and troublemakers. And even the troublemakers could be very useful to the community when, uh, there were disagreements and nobody seemed to be moving in any direction. There were times when somebody just needed to have a louder voice, not because they themselves wanted to do the negotiating, et cetera, but because at least the attention then could be returned to what the issue was instead of sitting like fermenting underneath the surface and, uh, due to erupt any time that some incident occurred, which we see that frequently happening, where tensions are boiling under the surface. And then when an incident occurs, you have all kinds of responses, most of which, if they aren't planned, uh, are not productive to resolving what the underlying issues are.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:10:50): >In fact, sometimes they don't even focus specifically on the underlying issues instead of—they kind of tend to focus on whatever got the, the publicity. And sometimes even the publicity doesn't go in a productive direction. So when we started ... if we weren't able to actually physically go into the community, then this is some of the ways that—we, of course we would be in communication with, uh, different minority commissions, uh, NAACP, uh, other organizations that existed, like I say, might have, parallel concerns and could get to know us as an organization, as an agency, and could either vouch for us or not, depending on what their opinion was of the kind of services that we were able to offer or, uh, advice, et cetera. Uh, this helped us tremendously when it came to doing the assessment, which I think I've said in the past quite often can be more valuable. And I even heard that in one of the, uh, conferences that I went to about mediation was quite often, the assessment itself is more valuable than an actual mediation or than an actual written document, uh, doing the official resolution, which may or may not resolve things, 'cause the assessment itself can clarify a lot of what the actual issues are and what the focus perhaps should, uh, best be.
Heidi Burgess (00:12:46): >Talk more about that. Talk me through how you do an assessment and who you work with.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:12:52): >Well, sometimes, ... the preferred way for me, and for a lot of the original conciliators I think too, is to, like they say, "boots on the ground," uh, go to a community, uh, see first who wants to talk to you about issues. Sometimes you can talk to media people, but you have to be very careful 'cause you don't wanna do the publicity thing. Right. But there are people who, because of their concerns about some of the issues that, uh, CRS addresses, uh, don't mind talking without publicity about the background of the issues about concerns about possible emergent issues and quite often, media people do a lot of investigation and of course CRS doesn't "investigate" 'cause it's prohibited from investigating, but they're in the assessment stage. It's important to have a lot of information and a lot of input because what people's perceptions are aren't necessarily what's actually fact, but it certainly can play a big role in conflicts and uh, perceptions of the possibility of resolution or uh, finding ways to come together about disagreements or miscommunication kinds of things.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:14:42): >Um, and certainly we, we did a lot of what they, what we used to call and I guess I've heard in other places called "shuttle diplomacy," which means you go and you talk to one group and listen and you do a lot more listening than other stuff and see what their perspective is, what their issues are. What's really bothering them. And sometimes that, isn't the first thing that they're talking about. Sometimes it's, uh, easier to talk in groups where people feel pretty free to speak out and other times it's apparent that there are a few individuals that would really like to talk, uh, in private about some of their concerns. So you take in a lot of information that you have to evaluate and see what appears to be a possibility. Are there people not aware of resources that are available of, uh, options that they might have?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:15:56): >Are there people who have expectations that probably they'll not reasonably be able to carry out? Um, so all of these things are factors that have to be kind of evaluated and talked out with the different parties about what exactly would be. Uh, and of course, and I know you talked about a BATNA in the past and of course say, okay, if nothing is done, what is gonna happen? What do you think is gonna happen? If, if something isn't done? And some people get very worried about that. And especially if they see that tensions might be continuing to rise and some things have already happened that are very difficult for the communities to accept. And which gives a little impetus to motivating some kind of movement toward looking at what are the really real underlying issues that—if they could be addressed somehow—could create a movement or a willingness to do some movements.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:17:26): >Uh, like I say, it isn't like jumping in like the storm troopers and saying, okay, we're here to clean everything up and it's all gonna be fine and we'll be leaving, which, uh, sometimes we were kind of pushed to do that kind of thing by the agency. And depending on how strong our local leadership was, as far as CRS, the better we were able to go in and plant some seeds and uh, to offer some suggestions and things that might take root and might take a little longer and make it look like we weren't being very effective. 'Cause there are things you can't measure, you can't measure what kinds of uprisings didn't occur. You can't measure what kind of, uh, Molotov Cocktails didn't get thrown through windows because somebody found out that there were other kinds of ways within the system to address, uh, concerns.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:18:32): >So if you can't prove a negative, uh, then you might look like you're not doing anything, but ... you can't prove that what might have happened or what probably, or likely would've happened or what's happening in other communities when these kinds of steps aren't, aren't being taken. I know that may sound a little bit vague, but since every community is different and every conciliator is a little different, has different approaches and some approaches work well in some communities and some approaches work well in other kinds of communities. That's why when CRS was first created, I think I mentioned this before—people that were, were brought onto the agency were very, very different in personality and background and knowledge, different kinds of skills, to the point where sometimes some of us couldn't get along <laugh> very well personally. But when it came to different kinds of issues, you always knew who you could call up and get some ideas about a situation. If it was something that was and something that you weren't accustomed to, to dealing with. And I, you know, I suppose I could be really specific and go into detail, but I'd probably have to be giving a lecture for several days to a class someplace to talk about those kinds of little things. It would, it would probably be too detailed for something like this. I'm sure. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (00:20:18): >Well, let me ask couple of questions. One is, uh, if you needed some help in an area that you didn't have expertise, uh, was that mostly done by calling somebody or did you bring people in? How much movement between regions was there? If, if going up your alley, if somebody needed a translator that they didn't have or um, if somebody needed an expert in, I don't know, um, education conflicts and your region didn't have anybody who did a lot of work in education, you were mostly doing work with police. I suspect you did both. I just wasn't coming up with something esoteric enough, but did people actually travel between regions to provide expertise when it was needed?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:21:15): >People traveled between regions all the time. And I recall at one time I always sent back to, uh, Cambridge. I was sent back to the East Coast out of our Boston office. Because in uh, Rhode Island, uh, there was an issue relating to, uh, language access in the courts. And so for some reason I was picked as the person to talk about language access. And so I got sent back to Providence ... to talk to a group of not only interpreters, but people that because of their language skills wanted to be, uh, interpreters. And then I got a chance to participate in ... a conference related to that very issue with—in fact, at one time I talked to all the judges in Rhode Island, which sounds really great, except Rhode Island isn't—
Heidi Burgess (00:22:39): >Probably aren't very many.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:22:40): ><laugh> —isn't a real large state <laugh>, but ... I was taken down to talk to the court administrator in, uh, Providence and, and talking about language access. And he was saying things like, well, you know, we don't really use interpreters for like things like arraignments. We have some staff that are bilingual and ... we can bring in staff or something. But we don't really, you know, do a lot. And what they didn't have is any kind of a language access plan at all. And this was shortly after the Negron decision, but, uh, still, it was, it was a little early—nationally, I think, but Europe was way ahead of us.
Heidi Burgess (00:23:37): >Remind me what the Negron decision was.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:23:39): >Well, this was a federal, uh, decision and it had to be—it had do with constitutional issues of ... the right to, well— 1) is the right to be present in court if you're charged. The issue is if you're physically present, but you're in a hermetically closed case. And so you can be seen, but you can't hear what's going on and you don't know what's going on. Are you physically present or not? You're not physically present because you don't have the right to, uh, consult with your attorney, you can't help your attorney present a defense. Uh, there's no way of knowing for sure if you understand fully the nature of the charges against you and—I don't have to teach you the constitution, I'm sure—but you know what, what's the, uh, rights guaranteed by the constitution are.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:24:52): >And we were forgetting some of those things, um, when we just presented, uh, and assumed that well, uh, the attorneys can handle that, right? They don't need any, they don't need to be bothered by this defendant here. The attorneys can just fight it out themselves. Well, that's not what the constitution says. Of course. And it's interesting. Uh, I was there with, uh, some of the representatives of that community that were talking about issues. So language access, and when the court administrators started talking like that, then I just asked some questions. I wasn't trying to tell them what they had to do because who am I, you know, coming in from the federal government? And I said, well, what about the right of the accused to fully understand the nature of the charges against them and the right of the accused person to consult with the attorney and to develop a defense? And suddenly it's like things started clicking in his mind.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:26:21): >And before we got through with the discussion, 'cause I, I try not to be as forceful as I probably am with you, 'cause I figure I'm talking to someone that knows what she's talking about. <laugh> uh, before we got through, he was backpedaling completely and was talking about, yeah, we do need to set up a language access plan here and make sure that we have people that are able to make sure that they convey exactly what the charges are against this person and, and make sure that they're able to converse with their attorney, et cetera, et cetera. So when we got out of that interview, people were slapping me on the back and saying, how did you manage to do that? And all that kind of stuff. And I'm going, oh, I'm not your, uh, left wing liberalist. I'm just a constitutionalist at heart.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:27:17): >You know, I'm just talking about the U.S Constitution. I wouldn't be promoting all of these political things, you know, 'cause that's not what we, what we do. Uh, 'cause there, there are times when, you know, no matter what you feel in your heart, there are some things that it's not good for you to just go out waving flags, 'cause it doesn't convince anybody of anything. And of course, in my profession now as a court interpreter, then of course we're as close to invisible as we can possibly be. And we certainly can't be out there expressing opinions, although we're expressing everybody else's opinions for them. <Laugh> But our own opinions, we kind of have to keep to ourselves except in our private life behind closed doors, you know? <laugh>.
Heidi Burgess (00:28:11): >And now in this interview you can share.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:28:15): >Yeah. So, but uh, yeah, that's how I have ended up going to a lot of these different places that I've gone to.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:28:25): >Uh, sometimes just because of the fact that there are some generic, uh, abilities that we all have trained for. And there are others that maybe we might have a little extra knowledge about. So depending on different issues, then different conciliators can be invited or deployed to areas to address certain kinds of things. And when it takes the—for example, if we have, uh, planned, uh, major demonstrations, well, most conciliators have received a lot of training in that and we have brochures. I shouldn't say we anymore. Should I? Since I'm no longer with CRS. There are brochures that talk about, uh, training of March Marshals and about planning for safe, uh, demonstrations, et cetera. Well, not only—I mean you can't just hand out brochures and figure that people know what to do. It requires doing a little orientation to the planners and maybe doing some of this shuttle diplomacy between, uh, authorities and the people that are planning the demonstrations and talking about appropriate coordination.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:29:53): >And in my region one time I remember there was a big, uh, and I can't remember, I think it was ... the May Day protest that has kind of occurs now every year, uh, regarding immigration reform. And there was one down in Oregon that they were planning and it was pretty big and things were pretty well organized. And uh, we did the best we could about getting a few March Marshals trained, et cetera. But there were families that were showing up and they were wanting to take their kids on the March and all these kind of things, which was fine except, uh, of course there was also gonna be media. And there was a time when I had to point some things out to families, 'cause some of them were giving their little kids, these U.S flags, which is great, except kids get tired and they don't remember what you have to do with the U.S flag, especially if there's media present and some of them, the flags were—they were dragging them in the dirt.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:31:01): >And I said, you know, if the media comes and they take a picture of this flag dragging on the ground, you know, they could make that mean a lot of things that you probably don't mean to convey as your message when you're talking about immigration reform. In fact, it could really be a spark for some confrontations that nobody really intends or wants. So sometimes we just have to keep our eyes open with the idea that maybe people don't realize what are the kinds of things that could be sparks and that could create difficult—and they don't even realize it until somebody comes (and says), "you know, this, this could create that, and I don't know if that's something that would be to your benefit or to the community's benefit."
Heidi Burgess (00:31:56): >Most of those parents would never have thought of.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:32:00): >Yeah.
Heidi Burgess (00:32:01): >Were they shocked when you pointed that out?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:32:04): >No, they were kind of like, oh really? <laugh> Yeah. You have no idea what the media can do with some of these awkward pictures. Yeah. Which don't necessarily reflect the whole tenor of what was going on and yet, right.
Heidi Burgess (00:32:21): >It was a two year old.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:32:23): >Some of these things that, uh, don't reflect still create more of a splash in the media than just things that look normal.
Heidi Burgess (00:32:34): >Right.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:32:36): >And that's, unless you have a little experience with what media has done and of course we turned in or at least I did because of partly because of Bob Lamb, my mentor <laugh> you turn into a media freak and that's why to this day I frequently wake up at four o'clock in the morning 'cause that's when the morning news come on and I, I'm not even out of bed and I'm watching the morning news to see what's going on. Even though I don't have to respond usually to what's going on in the media, it's just ingrained in me now where I have to listen to the media and see what's going on.
Heidi Burgess (00:33:17): >Enough to drive you crazy.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:33:18): >I've been ruined forever. Now, I guess. <Laugh>
Heidi Burgess (00:33:23): >Let me go all the way back to the beginning for just a minute. You implied, I thought when I was listening to you, that you used to be able to, when you, in the early days you were able to do a lot of outreach and certainly your explanation of how that was valuable was very clear. I gather as time wore on you were able to do less and less of that. Is that correct? And was that a budget concern or was there programmatic change or what happened?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:33:55): >There, uh, supposedly were some budget, uh, concerns, but I don't think it was limited to budget concerns, because we were always able to keep within our budget and there were a lot of things we could do without incurring a lot of cost. But there were some pressures from headquarters. Most of which our regional director, Bob Lamb was excellent at deflating <laugh> and kind of managing to get things done. In spite of, uh, I don't know if headquarters was, was afraid that we would be out running around, uh, hanging out instead of doing our job or what the concerns were. B think there was probably just the idea that we can't just have these people running around loose, uh, having fun on the government's dime, uh, because, uh, there are times when people in headquarters maybe didn't have field experience or directors that were hired, didn't quite understand, uh, although Gil Pompa certainly did.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:35:24): >And he was there for several, uh, several, several administrations. But we had a series of different directors who, some of whom saw being with CRS as a possible stepping stone to something more important, <laugh> um, or who thought that the way to get a better name was to become involved more politically instead of threading your way through, which is a little harder to thread your way through like Gil Pompa did. And weren't able to convey that there's a real difference between the kinds of conflict resolution that CRS was designed to, to carry out, very distinct from formal table mediation of parties that, uh, have clear, uh, demands and expectations and are able to sit down at a table and negotiate. 'Cause the populations that we addressed were very frequently, uh, a big power difference, a big knowledge difference ... different ability to communicate on each other's level.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:37:06): >And so that was, that was why, uh, it was difficult for people at certain levels to understand what it means to be working in that milieu. And sometimes even to people that have been active in some unique communities, still don't always understand that there are some other unique differences in other communities. And that's why I sometimes—I'm kind of vague about those differences because it can be cultural, they can be cultural and linguistic, they can be racial, uh, whatever race is. And, um, I even wrote a poem about that and it ended up getting published by Nicholas Kristof in, uh, New York Times about, "I don't see race," well to you say, I don't see race. Uh, you missed the point. I see. Uh, 'cause what you see before me today is what I am today, you know <laugh>. Anyway.
Heidi Burgess (00:38:16): >Do you still have that? Could you share that?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:38:18): >I could!' I'll have to look it up on my computer 'cause somebody else asked me for it. I just was at a national conference. I'm still on the Minority Justice Commission with the state of Washington. I think I mentioned that. So they shipped me off to North Dakota a couple of weeks ago and they had a, a presentation there which was wonderful. And it talked about that very issue, you know of what is race anyway? Well, I guess it's 90% cultural, you know.
Heidi Burgess (00:38:50): >That's something that we talked about in sociology classes to no end.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:38:55): >Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, but I'd be happy to share that I have it on this computer. I was looking for it on my cell phone to share it with her. And she said, well, when you get back, well you send it to me. And I've just, since I got back, I've been running to court and I've been having all of these other issues. And I finally found my last receipt that I have to send in for my trip to North Dakota 'cause you know, the bills will be coming in, and have to pay for them. <Laugh> but I'll be happy to, to share ... the poem.
Heidi Burgess (00:39:28): >I'd love to see that.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:39:29): >Yeah. I, it was quite a few years ago that I wrote it, but unfortunately it's still is very current.
Heidi Burgess (00:39:37): >Yeah. Well the nature of race isn't gonna change.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:39:40): >It doesn't seem to, I can't tell you how many people I've talked to over the years and we say things like I thought we had that problem resolved 20 years ago. Yeah. Well it's emerged again. Yeah. It's still emerging. It just is under the surface, but it's still emerging and it's—human nature has not really changed that much. It just expresses itself in different ways. So right. I could go on about that forever too. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (00:40:18): >So you just made a distinction that surprised me a little bit. Maybe 'cause I misinterpreted you, maybe not, but you said that the folks in—the directors—folks in Washington didn't always see the difference between what you did at CRS and regular table mediation. And in some of our past interviews we've had, conciliators tell us that they did two different things. They did what they called street mediation and then they also did table mediation.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:40:58): >Mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Heidi Burgess (00:40:59): >And what I heard you saying is, we at CRS, never do table mediation because there's all these issues of power differentials and language differentials and resources and all that.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:41:14): >I did not use the word never.
Heidi Burgess (00:41:17): >Okay.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:41:19): >And I would not say that we could not do that. And in fact, as I said, I have done, uh, table mediation, although, uh, it frequently, it doesn't mean exactly the same thing that it does in which your classical table mediation is. It frequently is a little different, but if you're mediating between an official commission or an agency or an organization and a government entity, then those are bodies, which are used to that kind of interaction. Right. And they deal with that kind of system and they know the system, so it's not unbelievable that they would be able to sit down and have their list of demands and uh, know what resources and what alternatives that they have. But quite often, those are the organizations that don't necessarily present the concerns that CRS was originally created to address, which are the concerns in the community of uprisings or violence or response to violence because of not really thinking they had the power or reources or, or knowledge about how to address issues out of pure frustration, not, not knowing.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:43:06): >So that's why I was distinguishing that I wasn't saying that we don't ever do that. I was just saying quite often, if you didn't have knowledge about these communities, uh, and how there is a lot of lack of knowledge or, uh, perception of how you proceed, then that's where the frustration boils up. And instead of filing litigation or filing, uh, a request for mediation, then there's this boiling up of concerns. And without being able to focus on—look, what is our goal here, really? What is the real issue? Is this gonna help that? It might not, but if, if the purpose is to get some publicity—okay—but once you get the publicity, what is it that's the issue here that needs to be resolved? 'Cause you get the publicity and everybody gets concerned and then it goes away and you haven't got any resolution to, what's gonna boil back up again. If you don't look at what that kind of thing is. And besides—are there other ways that this might be able to be approached? Not that you shouldn't have a demonstration or a protest, but what are you gonna back it up with? So, uh, sometimes it has, and I mentioned this before, I think this new field of organization development, which they didn't call it that back when I, you know, us dinosaurs went to school, but uh, they developed a word for that.
Heidi Burgess (00:45:01): >Yeah. Um, and it's very useful and I was listening to what you were saying and assuming that that's the kind of conversation that you'd have with people in the community, the aggrieved people in the community is trying to help them think through what their goals are. We in the conflict resolution field would call it sorting through their interests and trying to figure out how they're gonna achieve their interests as opposed to their positions. They're not using those terms, but that's essentially what I heard you talking about.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:45:36): >Yeah. 'Course I'm from the country and I always talk plain anyway, you know, ... but I do some style flexing too. And I used to say, well, you know, I come from the country, but I've learned how to survive in the big city as well. And, and it's, it's important to be able to adapt to where you're at and so that wherever you're presenting yourself, you're talking on the same level so that you can have a communication.
Heidi Burgess (00:46:08): >Right. And what it sounds like you're doing when you have that communication with the—what I would call the lower power groups, often the people of color—is it strikes me that you're empowering them to enable them to more effectively. If they decide to sit at a table, they'll be more ready and able to represent themselves and their interests at a table. Once they've had those conversations with you, is, is that fair or not?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:46:47): >Yeah. I call it planting seeds.
Heidi Burgess (00:46:50): >Okay.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:46:50): >But, uh, but yeah, what, the way you said it sounds very erudite to me, it sounds wonderful. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (00:46:59): >Okay. Well, um, whatever it wasn't meaning it to be erudite.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:47:05): ><laugh>
Heidi Burgess (00:47:07): >One more thing. And then I want to get on through some of the questions that we had because we're bringing up all these fascinating things that maybe weren't on the list. Um, I guess I was naive. I never really focused on the degree to which conciliators and presumably regional directors would have conflicts with Washington and the director. Um, how much were you constrained by orders that came down from Washington and how much were you able to just kind of dance around them and do what needed to be done?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:47:55): >Uh, while we still had Bob Lamb as the regional director, uh, and I didn't realize how much he was able to protect us until he was actually gone, but he deflected a lot <laugh> and managed to encourage us to do some of the things that to us appeared to be most effective for communities. Some of which were really not seen as, uh, productive by headquarters because they didn't help count beans very well.
Heidi Burgess (00:48:45): >And was that a matter of his skill or was it a matter of his reputation? I've heard about, I, we never did interview Bob, but I've heard about him from many people and I could have the impression that directors would be, would be told, "oh, don't cross Bob Lamb."
P. Diane Schneiders (00:49:07): >There, there were many things that, um, helped him. One was, he knew everybody in the world. And I don't mean only people that agreed with his position. And he would talk to anybody in the world and, throughout his life he had done a lot of outreach, not just with CRS. He had a career before CRS, almost every, conciliator had a long career before they started with CRS because otherwise, what would you bring with you when you came to CRS? If you didn't have any background? Um, he also had a very bombastic personality at times. Not that he couldn't style flex, which he certainly could. In fact, uh, one time <laugh> he had me go meet him for coffee and there, he was sitting down with a media person who was, had a very big reputation for being a ultra conservative commentator <laugh>. And there he was carrying on a conversation with this, this person and wanted me to meet him. And of course I knew exactly who the person was, 'cause he was, well—
Heidi Burgess (00:50:38): >I don't suppose you're talking about Rush Limbaugh?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:50:40): >No we weren't. But Rush Limbaugh was a whole other animal <laugh>. But he had connections, he knew people in, in political groups, he knew people in Congress. He knew, uh, people in a lot of these national organizations. Um, partly because of how many years he'd been on this earth and partly because of the different, uh, places he had been and the organizations he had been involved with. And partly because he was a natural outreach person. And, uh, that was one of the things that helped me a lot, 'cause I was never as much of an outreach person. I was happy to meet people and listen to them. My basic talent has always been in listening more than in outreach. And he would practically push me. I think if he had a pin, he would've pricked me from behind and always said, "go out there and talk to this person and talk to this person." And so that was probably, uh, uh, good for me too, because I was not one to make waves, I was more one to see, well let me hear what's going on and maybe just see if there's something I could suggest. Not Bob. He would stomp in, you know, and here's Bob. So here's what we're gonna talk about <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (00:52:25): >So, so what happened? How did you deal with Washington once he was gone?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:52:31): >Uh, well, it was very interesting because, uh, we were right in the middle—and I think I mentioned this before—we were right when, when he left us, um, we were right in the middle of a remodeling project in the office and we were also right in the middle of hiring a new conciliator and uh, of course I knew that we had to remain in, uh, budget. And fortunately at that time, Sandy Blair was our, uh, administrative assistant that was before she, uh, became a, uh, conciliation specialist. And so she, uh, made sure by keeping track of the budget that we stayed within budget. And of course then we had one or two other regional directors that were wanting to find, uh, errors. Here are these people that know nothing that are out there trying to run Region 10 after Bob Lamb is gone.
Heidi Burgess (00:53:45): >Even the regional directors didn't have adequate background? I thought that was just a problem in Washington.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:53:53): >No, I'm talking about regional directors thinking that we—now that Bob Lamb was gone—that we know nothing in Region 10. And of course we wanted to mind all of our Ps and Qs and show that no, we actually were competent and we could stay within budget. And we could, in spite of the fact that of course budgets were starting to get restricted, uh, somewhat at that time. But, uh, which is part of the reason that we were, uh, remodeling. But, um, we, we could try to keep doing some outreach to the degree possible, although I wasn't able to, to go around with as much political force as maybe Bob could to make sure that I could protect our people to go out and do certain kinds of, of outreach, uh, that really was crucial to be able to carry out the quality of service that we were capable of giving. Um, but that's, I guess another, another whole story. So yeah, I think that, uh, once he was, he was gone, it was a lot more difficult and we did have some changes in directors.
Heidi Burgess (00:55:30): >Well, you said you were acting for a while, right?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:55:34): >I was acting regional director. Yeah. Right.
Heidi Burgess (00:55:38): >For what you said nine months?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:55:40): >Nine months. Yeah. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (00:55:43): >And then the person that was brought in after you, ... was that when the problem started with directors not thinking that the conciliators had the necessary expertise to do the job?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:56:03): >I'm talking about national directors and headquarters staff.
Heidi Burgess (00:56:09): >Okay. Oh, okay.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:56:10): >Uh, but most of the regional directors had some sort of background.
Heidi Burgess (00:56:18): >Okay.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:56:18): >At least in one ethnic group.
Heidi Burgess (00:56:23): >Okay.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:56:25): >Uh, and, and when I started with the agency, Bob Lamb was very, very focused on the African-American experience. And with reason. He had a lot of background in that. He had a lot of experience in that, a lot of knowledge in that. And, uh, he focused a great deal on that. Um, there were other issues in the community, not only African-Americans experience issues. And he did have, uh, some sensitivity to Native American issues, uh, as well. Um, there were some things that I began bringing up and some of them took me a year or so before I convinced him <laugh> that. But he was open to, to reason and to learn. I mean, he, he could listen to, like I say to, he would talk to anybody, even people that didn't always agree with him. Sometimes he could learn things and sometimes the other person could, could learn things. I learned a lot from him.
Heidi Burgess (00:57:46): >Great. Great. Let me start going down some of our general questions that we haven't covered. I think we've touched on most of them, but I wanna give you a chance to, um, talk more about some of them, the first one, asks, uh, what kind of roadblocks would you encounter in your efforts to work with the parties effectively? I've heard about the roadblocks of the directors not wanting you to do the job the right way. Were there other roadblocks that you ran into fairly often that you needed to figure out a workaround for?
P. Diane Schneiders (00:58:32): >Um, well, quite often, uh, if you, if you couldn't be on site, it was harder to work with parties because people feel like they can take your measure a little easier if they can see you in person and hear you and kind of decide, is this person for real or are they just giving me some kind of a line and they're not gonna follow up on it. So, yeah.
P. Diane Schneiders (00:59:17): >Uh, remember what happened to the native people? They had government people come all the time and they sign these treaties and then these treaties are like, might be useful for toilet paper and that's about it. You know? So those were issues where being able to find a way to not be too obnoxious while trying to get communities to understand that it wasn't our intention to either investigate, which reminds me at one point, I showed up at what had been a church fire of an African-American church and talked with the pastor about the issues that occurred. And it didn't look to us like it was an issue that could fall within, uh, CRS mandate. We were still looking at it a little bit, but it wasn't long after that, that the FBI came to our office and was talking to Bob Lamb about wanting to talk to me about what I had seen down there and what had been going on and who the people were, et cetera.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:00:36): >And Bob Lamb said, well, you know, with the mandate, we don't, uh, investigate and we work confidentially and we don't certainly don't, uh, give information to the FBI or any other agency. Oh, well, they were just furious about that. And they were gonna see about that. And I said, Bob, don't worry. If they wanna take me into custody, I'll just sit there and tell you, get this worked out well, <laugh> he knew the former, uh, director of the Seattle area for the FBI who happened to be working back in Washington DC at the time. And he called him up and said, you're gonna have to call your guys off. They realize what the mandate of CRS is and here they are coming down to our office, thinking that we're gonna give them information and we're a confidential agency and we don't do that kind of thing.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:01:30): >And certainly we wouldn't have any effectiveness if we're out blabbing to other agencies about things that we might have experienced, uh, when we are out doing our confidential work. Well, we didn't hear from them again <laugh> but there were, there was a lot of, um, lack of understanding from some of the other agencies that we were not at their beck and call. Uh, the person who—after I was regional director acting—the person who was chosen over me as regional director for the agency had never worked, uh, for CRS before. And didn't apparently understand exactly what the agency was. In fact, when they put up a new sign, she had them put up "Community Relations Services." Not realizing that this is a service of the—this isn't "services for community relations." And they put a sign up on the agency— on the building, that said "Community Relations Services," and people at reception downstairs, were sending people to talk to us about community relations issues, not realizing,
P. Diane Schneiders (01:02:58): >And I think that this person that succeeded me, didn't understand that this was supposed to be called the race relations service and President Johnson at the time knew he'd never get that through Congress if it was called "Race Relations Service."
Heidi Burgess (01:03:16): >That's an interesting story. I'd never heard that one.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:03:19): >Yeah. Well, it's, uh, a lot of the stories that Bob Lamb told me, I think didn't, well, I know Ozell Sutton knew about that very well, too. He and Ozell knew all of those kinds of stories. Uh, but the definition of, and the mandate of what CRS did back then—that was before the added specifically, uh, religion and, uh, uh, uh, LBGT you know, those kinds of issues into the, uh, mandate of CRS—but the original CRS mandate specifically, uh, talked about race, color and national origin.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:04:10): >And so it had nothing to do with providing, uh, community relations for the U.S government. Right. And so this was a way of getting this past— 'cause Johnson knew about Congress. He knew it wouldn't go through Congress, if you called it "race." And he was a good old Texas boy, he knew how to <laugh> deal. And he was a wheeler-dealer too. So he knew that you had to name it something that could go through and that you could kind of finesse. And so he knew how to finesse it. So it went through and it's called "the Community Relations Service," just like the U.S Marshals Service. Um, but that did, that was one of the obstacles that came up is that people looking for a service like CRS, didn't always recognize it unless we somehow managed to go out and explain that this is what the agency does. And it's only named this, uh, incidentally, because the real purpose of, and function of the agency, the service is this, which is another reason why it was so important for us to be able to do outreach to the degree, uh, possible.
Heidi Burgess (01:05:49): >I can see that. So this blends nicely into the next question, which we've talked about a lot already, too, which is the media, and you've got this narrow path that you have to walk with the media.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:06:04): >Mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Heidi Burgess (01:06:06): >That it really benefits the agency if people know about it and what it does. And the media can also incredibly impede the agency from being successful when it runs stories that escalate things, as opposed to deescalate things.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:06:27): >Mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Heidi Burgess (01:06:28): >What was your policy? How did you work with the media to walk this fine line?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:06:35): >Well, to the degree possible, we didn't talk on the record with the media.
Heidi Burgess (01:06:49): >Talk about that line—"to the degree possible" a little bit.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:06:53): >Well, there were people in the media who would talk to us and give us history of things and had concerns about things and, uh, understand that we did our best work when we didn't have media splash, because quite often a media splash would even escalate something that was simmering, uh, which would not help us to do our job at all. Uh, there was one time when I was going to meet with some people that had a educational conflict issue. And when I showed up a, uh, local, very assertive TV media person showed up and she was wanting to interview me about what we were going to be doing. And, uh, naturally I couldn't just say no comment because that would look rude, especially since they frequently, uh, submit what they, uh, think may be of interest, they'll submit that to some place like CNN, et cetera.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:08:13): >In fact, I did show up on CNN and one of my colleagues in the East Coast said, oh, I saw you on CNN! <Laugh> I said, yeah, thanks a lot. But the only thing that they filmed me saying was that in the work that we do, uh, it would not, uh, facilitate any kind of work or resolution if we did that in the bright lights of the media. So they saw me saying, you know—and I'm not known for being a, uh, public speaker necessarily either. Well, I can do a presentation on hate crimes. I can do a presentation to police. I can do a presentation to interpreters, but doing a presentation for the general public about, uh, something that we do in confidence is not something that I'm well schooled at.
Heidi Burgess (01:09:18): >Right. Probably shouldn't be.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:09:19): >And we, uh, we, we try to avoid making a lot of public pronouncements, but on the other hand, we can't just, uh, shove off the, the media because, um, that would not look, look good either.
Heidi Burgess (01:09:38): >Did you ever, in your outreach efforts, reach out—when you weren't responding to a particular case, but you were just reaching out to the community—did you ever reach out to the media to explain what CRS did and why media coverage wasn't necessarily helpful and try to get them to understand if you show up on a case that they shouldn't be tracking you down and putting microphones in your face?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:10:09): >Oh, it wouldn't be my place to reach out to the media for that specific purpose. Although, uh, we would often share our annual reports. In fact, I was sent back to Washington DC. Uh, I think it was one year after the 9/11 attacks I was sent back to Washington DC for a couple of months. And I edited an annual report that we were going to submit. That was the one I mentioned before, where there was somebody had included in their annual report for one region about something that had happened. And it was a legal term. And our director at the time was an attorney. And we had an attorney on staff back there and neither of them understood what I was saying. And I said, you can't, you can't use this word. We have to edit this word and use something else.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:11:06): >We can't use this word. That's a legal term. And it means something officially. Which kind of surprised me a little bit that here I am a public administration person trying to convince a legal person that this lawyer, lawyer, that this word can't be used here, because it sounds like it makes it sound like something legal happened, which didn't happen. It was something different that happened. <laugh> and we can use another word and we can explain that issue without using a, a legal terminology, which it doesn't mean <laugh>, it's like that old joke about, I think that word you used does not mean what you think it means.
Heidi Burgess (01:11:55): >All right. Um, the next question is, um, what your goals were when you went into a volatile situation. Was your primary goal just to calm things down and to do something short term, or were you all often thinking in terms of long term that we want to calm things down and get the community in a position where it can prevent such things from happening in the future? So I'm, I'm trying to figure out what your timeframe was, or did it vary from case to case?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:12:41): >Well, of course it would depend on the assessment, but my father and my brother both spent time as firefighters and firefighters spend a lot of time doing preventive kinds of things. They don't spend most of their time actually fighting fires. And if I would go into a community, I would go in with the intention of seeing what is it that's causing this unrest, this conflict, this rising of tensions, because if you don't see why something is smoldering, then you won't understand why it could burst into flame at some point. And once you do that, especially if you've already seen some flames there and say, okay, it's good. If there's a way to extinguish the flames, but, but you're not doing what needs to be done. If you don't plant a few seeds here, uh, offer a few resources, uh, give some information, uh, maybe some brochures, maybe some, uh, consultation, uh, depending completely on what the assessment is, because sometimes there's readily available tools to address things.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:14:03): >And people have no idea that they even exist. And I still find that to this day with many different kinds of things. And nowadays of course we have YouTube and we have all these other resources. You don't even have to go to the library <laugh>. But still, uh, you have to know what it is that might help, so you can know what to search for. And, uh, I think my skills in that area have probably been honed extensively over the years. Thank goodness. And so I'm quite often still able somebody comes up and says, "I can't find out about this!" And so, and I don't know whether it's it's, uh, terminology that helps me, or whether it's just, I have a strange way of thinking about things because of all these different kinds of experiences that I've had, but I seem to find it, uh, easier than some people to search, uh, for certain resource issues or ways that things can be done and thought, well, here, we've got an example of this.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:15:15): >In fact, we've got five examples of this, and let's take a look at these examples and just for, for your own curiosity. ... But certainly my goal was never to, oh, let's just put a damper on this and go away.
Heidi Burgess (01:15:37): >Let's just put out the fire and leave.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:15:40): >I can't see that as being hopeful because then the pressure could just build back up and it could be worse to me, to my way of thinking. And of course you can't always leave a fully formed structure in place when you leave because, uh, that's not realistic, but if you can plant some seeds and offer some suggestions and provide some, uh, resource kinds of things and remain available in case someone wants to consult about something or needs more information, sometimes it helped that at a later date, someone would contact me and say, "you know, you came and did this and this and this. And I have a question about this here, and is there some way we could do this?" And which gives us another chance to build on whatever it was that was done before and, or fill it out or say, you know, there's another option to that. Besides this, if this isn't working for you, there are other approaches that can be done. You don't have to be stuck in this one. If that isn't the one that's gonna be effective for you. So flexibility is very important.
Heidi Burgess (01:17:11): >And you've seen lots of different ways of doing things also is very helpful.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:17:17): >Yeah. And it's another reason to say, you know, you can't just go in and say, "I'm from the government. I know the best way to solve your problem." You go, "What problem are you talking about?" Say, "oh, well we've got to do our assessment first to make sure we're defining the problem correctly, because maybe it's just, maybe this is not what the real problem is. This is just something that has surfaced, but the actual underlying problem is this here."
Heidi Burgess (01:17:41): >Right. When you talk about giving people resources, did CRS produce any resources? Did you have handbooks or brochures or any sorts of things that you produced that you could hand out that would tell folks how to set up a community relations, um, office in a community or how to improve relations between police and citizens, or I don't know. Did you spend any time creating paper documents that then you could hand out?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:18:25): >I spent, uh, quite a bit of time, uh, saving some of these things that we had developed plus collecting some of the things that had been developed from other, um, uh, offices. And, uh, I think that's my fax machine, which doesn't answer. So I think it only goes three times and then it'll disappear. Sorry about that.
Heidi Burgess (01:18:51): >That's okay. My phone has made noise three times too.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:18:55): >But anyway, um, unfortunately the, when I left the agency, the person who remained as regional director made me throw out everything over 10 years old. And I, I begged not to, but I, and there are some things that I have with me at home in my files, because I could not throw them out that are potentially models. And if I'm ever called to, uh, assist or provide or offer, then I, I may have some resources here that I can either offer, or I can look up again because I remember, uh, where they were, et cetera. But, uh, yeah, there were—there was a lot of historical and structural, uh, resource material that, uh, really broke my heart to have to, to throw out. And some of them were things that Bob Lamb had been saving for specific reasons, for historical reasons, too. So, uh, but they're still—for example, we had, uh, a couple of different, uh, papers, and I think I may have the sources here someplace about—one is, if a hate crime or a bias incident occurs, and if your organization wants to gather that information or to assist people from the community in reporting, or complaining about, or determining, is this something that should be reported somewhere then, uh, we had a checklist of how to go down and determine what that is.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:20:46): >Also there was a presentation on for communities about hate crimes that, uh, Tim Johnson had developed, which is a PowerPoint kind of thing. And it could be modified to some degree, depending on who you were talking to, whether it was a civilian community group, or if it was law enforcement, et cetera. But we also had, how to form a group, call it a human relations group or a community relations group without calling it a race—'cause it isn't just race. It isn't just race. It's actually comprises more, actually always did, really. ore than just, just race.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:21:41): >So in some ways maybe community relations sort of fit, but it didn't. 'Cause it didn't really focus on, on what that was. And I developed, uh, materials for police training, of dealing with incidents where you're investigating and some of—not all of—the parties speak English and where you can erroneously assume that the person who doesn't speak English is the suspect because the people that speak English are saying that, when actually, uh, the evidence doesn't necessarily point to that. And how can you deal with that kind of an incident when you don't know what's going on? And we did some participatory types of, um, training incidents, uh, related to that. Um, there are a lot of those kinds of things, but then also, uh, there was a—because of school desegregation, there were some issues that came up with schools and there was a great booklet. And I think it's still online with CRS, about how schools can assess, uh, the racial situation in the schools and how to address that. I think... I think it's still online—I may, some place in my folders here 'cause I'm full of all kinds of papers, some of which I haven't been able to, to find the time to sort, because seems like I'm always running, doing these other, other things, which may in some ways be good for me and may in some ways not be productive <laugh> But, okay, I'm a pack rat.
Heidi Burgess (01:23:43): ><laugh>
P. Diane Schneiders (01:23:44): >I admit, I'm a pack rat. My house looks like a library too.
Heidi Burgess (01:23:49): >This project was actually born 26 or 27 years ago when Dick Salem, I don't know if you remember Dick.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:24:00): >I had met him. Yeah.
Heidi Burgess (01:24:01): >Came to us all upset because headquarters was remodeling and they were throwing out all this stuff, and would we take it? And he wanted us at the conflict research consortium to take, I don't know, a truckload of documents that we probably couldn't have taken anyway, 'cause I don't know if they were classified, but I don't think they were something that could have been—
P. Diane Schneiders (01:24:31): >Nothing was classified with, with CRS, but, uh, it might have been confidential, but nothing was classified.
Heidi Burgess (01:24:39): >I don't know whether we really could have taken it or not, but we talked to Dick for a long time, and decided that we didn't have what it would—we could store it, but we didn't have anything like the manpower that was needed to go through this stuff and do—he wanted to do research on it. And I, we came up with the idea of interviewing old time conciliators instead, because what he was really afraid of was all the knowledge being lost.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:25:11): >Um, I'm still afraid of that.
Heidi Burgess (01:25:13): >Yeah.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:25:14): >And soon, one of these days, all of my stuff is gonna get thrown away. Maybe. <Laugh>
Heidi Burgess (01:25:20): >We had the heartbreaking, uh, experience when we moved out of the University of Colorado, finding out that nobody wanted the old books. That's why my bookshelves look the way they do is that we would've donated those books if somebody had wanted them, but nobody wanted them. And I said, well, I'm not gonna throw them away.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:25:43): >I've got about seven times what you have on your screen in my house. My house looks like a library.
Heidi Burgess (01:25:50): >Yeah.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:25:51): ><laugh>
Heidi Burgess (01:25:53): >So our poor kids, when we go, they're gonna have a lot of books. Um, next question is one that really interests me. And I don't know whether you stopped working at CRS before this change really happened or whether you were seeing it or not. But it strikes me that between the time when we did the interviews, the first round with Dick, which was 25 years ago. Um, and now there has been a very significant change in the nature of the civil rights movement and my image of Black Lives Matter and BLM supporters is there's much less interest in negotiation and mediation than there was 25, 30 years ago, and much more interest in using power tactics to try to attain change. And I'm wondering how that affects—if my image is correct, A), and B), if it is, how that affects what CRS does. Did you, when you were still with CRS, did you see any changes in attitudes over the years about how "justice," as it's defined by low power groups, was sought?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:27:23): >That's kind of a hard question. And, uh, because of Bob Lamb, I think our region was a little different in its focus than some of the other regions in that, uh, Bob didn't focus as much on this structured mediation kind of thing, because he did not see that as something which helped to provide the seeds for, um, for ongoing resolution and eventual structural change. Black Lives Matter, as I understand it—and of course that kind of came up after I was gone. Not that I haven't been following it—as I understand, it's not an organized movement per se. It's that many groups have kind of used that as an anthem.
Heidi Burgess (01:28:26): >Right.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:28:27): >Uh, and certainly with reason. Uh, but, uh, each of those groups that use that as an anthem is not necessarily cohesive with other groups and have, uh, maybe similar issues. But to me, uh, it doesn't seem that it would change the way that I would address things since I would back in the ... assessment stage of, okay, who are the real people that you can work with with the community to like—back in the old days, quite often, like Bob Lamb would say, well in the Black community, then you go to the churches. Well, that worked for a while, but there's a lot of people in the community who don't fit into that category anymore about that's where they go to for their activism ideas or for their, uh, other kinds of concerns. And so sometimes then they're going to, um, NAACP, except now that's maybe not the organization because they think that's too "old school," et cetera.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:29:54): >So then there's another group. So you have to keep following who are the people that really are putting energy into this and what is it that they're, uh, concerned about and does what they say they want? Is that what they really want? Or is that a way that they're getting attention for something else that maybe they haven't exactly defined yet. And maybe by talking with some of the folks—and other folks in the community—it can be defined a little closer as to what are the things that are sparking the unrest, or the difficulties, or the obstacles, that are occurring in the community that keep people from feeling like things are gonna be progressing well. And obviously you find inequality every place. So where can it be addressed, uh, where people feel like it's, it's the biggest obstacle, it's the biggest issue. It's something that causes distress. Then how can we see where that's coming from, and find ways, even if it's brick by brick, you know, step by step, to find ways to overcome those kinds of obstacles?
Heidi Burgess (01:31:29): >That leads to a really interesting follow on question. If the inequality is defined as the root cause of whatever unrest, what sort of suggestions would you make to groups about how to start addressing that effectively?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:31:51): >Well, I'd have to define what it is first and the group has to define that. 'Cause we don't know what—as far as, what do they think is inequality. So like Bob Lamb said, it doesn't have to be an actual fact. What is the perception of the community? 'Cause you have to deal with perception. And if, if the perception is there, then where did it come from? What's causing that perception? Is there something that could be addressed that would help that perception? Or is there something else that maybe nobody realizes that's leading to that perception and if that's the case, then what exactly is it? It goes back to assessment again.
Heidi Burgess (01:32:50): >Yeah. The thing that strikes me as so difficult though, is that you would likely often find that it goes back to fundamental structural problems like redlining that has kept Black communities from being able to build up wealth over generations and that inability to build wealth then affects the inability to get good education, to get good jobs, um, to have power in all sorts of different domains. And it's just so big that it seems like it's really hard to give an individual or an organization a sense that yeah, I can do something effective to address that. 'Cause it's so huge. And, and the structure is so deeply rooted.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:33:53): >How do you build a wall?
Heidi Burgess (01:33:54): >Brick by brick.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:33:54): >How do you build a brick wall?
Heidi Burgess (01:33:58): >Yeah.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:33:59): >If you don't build a brick wall. If you don't put any bricks down, you won't have a wall. If you put a brick down and somebody else puts a brick down and somebody sees you putting a brick down and they bring a brick, and somebody else sees a brick and they bring a brick.
Heidi Burgess (01:34:23): >All right.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:34:23): >Bob used to always say, "there was a great man once that said, uh, 'Walk together, children, and we shall overcome.'"
Heidi Burgess (01:34:39): >All right. I like that. Um, the next question sort of goes on from the one about the nature of civil rights and it's looking at political polarization, which of course is off the wall now, but it's been that way for, to a lesser extent for a long time. Did that affect CRS? I'm sure that there were impacts of going from democratic to republican, to democratic, to republican administrations, presidents change, Congress changes. How does that impact CRS?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:35:25): >Well, when our national directors were able to keep us out of the fray, and maintain our impartiality—not neutrality. Impartiality.
Heidi Burgess (01:35:46): >And explain, explain how you see that difference.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:35:51): >Neutrality is something that goes with the wind, doesn't matter. Impartiality means you don't take sides, but you do have standards.
Heidi Burgess (01:36:03): >Okay.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:36:04): >So just like me now as an interpreter and I'm, I'm an impartial interpreter. I don't take sides between the parties, but I do have ethical standards that I have to, uh, maintain and CRS has standards that it has to maintain, but we have had directors that have become rather involved in political parties. And uh, someone told of me once and I can't remember if it was Bob or if it was somebody else that it was interesting that even though we thought that the democratic party was maybe more amenable to the work of CRS, quite often, we found that maybe because we had more publicity about racial tensions, that we had more ability to increase staff during republican administrations than we during democratic.
Heidi Burgess (01:37:15): >Oh, that's interesting. I thought it was the opposite.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:37:19): >That's what we would think would be logical. So, uh, it's, it's— <laugh>, I don't know whether that's oxymoronic or, or what, but, uh, you can't always tell by which administration is in—and you know, you have one executive office that's in one party and then you have Congress that's in another, depending on how the balance goes. And so it depends on a lot of different factors and you just can't fall into a hole and, or come to the attention as, as we did in Region 10, when my coworker started talking to the media in Alaska and ended up with complicating our <laugh> reporting procedures. Things can, can happen and they can happen favorably and they can happen not so favorably. There was a time when, uh, we had, uh, Janet Reno as the attorney general and there was an incidence which occurred in the south, which involved, uh, uh, gay rights issues. And she decided to send some CRS people down to deal with the, uh, conflict, which at that time had not been added to the CRS mandate. And there was a lot of discussion about whether that was an appropriate thing for the attorney general to be doing. Um, but we had already been dealing with hate crimes against Jewish people. Are Jews a race? You know?
Heidi Burgess (01:39:25): >Yeah. I was actually thinking about that. When you pointed out the [Sheppard-] Byrd Act changed, the focus, it expanded the focus of CRS. And my mind immediately went and said, well, Dick Salem working in Skokie with the KKK and the Jews was way before that.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:39:45): >Exactly.
Heidi Burgess (01:39:47): >And then I thought, okay, but you could argue national origin.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:39:54): >So where, where did Jews come from?
Heidi Burgess (01:39:56): >Yeah. Well...
P. Diane Schneiders (01:39:58): ><Laugh> You got— Sephardic people were kicked out of Spain, you know?
Heidi Burgess (01:40:05): >Yeah, but I did wonder how did that one get pulled off? And I don't remember that we talked to Dick about it at the time. I'll have to go back and read Grande Lum's chapter on it in his book. Maybe he talks about that, but that's interesting.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:40:23): >No, that, well, that was, that's an issue is that we knew what CRS was created to do. And we didn't have to be so strict with our definition because what is race anyway?
Heidi Burgess (01:40:39): >Right.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:40:41): >You know, I mean, what is race? Can you define what race is? Well, we just, I just came back from this conference and we were talking about, you know, what is, what is race anyway? What is national origin, anyway? You know? Uh— what about the U.S? Which is a mosaic or maybe a salad. Oh, can you tell me why, what my national origin is? Well, eventually, it's like the tree of life, you know? <laugh> so if you're gonna be talking about race, color or national origin, then that should give you options to define it. If I see it, I know what it is when I see it. <laugh> Where have I heard that phrase before?
Heidi Burgess (01:41:46): >... L B G T and that rubric, but that was added anyway. So doesn't matter.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:41:51): >Well, it was added, so yeah, so we didn't have to define it in. Right. But they were already working with religion and, and then after 9/11, of course, we had these issues with, um, Middle Easterners and Muslims and even Sikh people because—
Heidi Burgess (01:42:15): >'Cause people couldn't tell the difference.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:42:17): >People assumed, you know, if you're wearing a turban, then obviously you must be one of those guys. Right. And I, I tell many Sikh people who have no idea. I say, you know, the first superhero that little girls had before we had any other superhero, the first superhero that little girls had was a Sikh. "What?" I said, yeah, have you never heard of 'Little Orphan Annie?' Daddy Warbucks hired a Sikh, a "traditional" Sikh, with the sword and the turban <laugh> to protect Little Orphan Annie, because they were known always as being protectors.
Heidi Burgess (01:43:03): >Wow. I didn't know that.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:43:05): >If you look up—and his name was Punjab, well, Punjabi is the language that the Sikh people have to speak. His name was Punjab and Daddy Warbucks was always, of course, traveling around the world and doing all of these things, and Little Orphan Annie needed someone to protect her and Punjab had magical powers. He could actually levitate, he had a magic cape that if he found, for example, people doing bad things, menacing Little Orphan Annie, he could put the cape around them and it would take them to another dimension where they were terrified because it was like being placed on the Mars or something. And so when he would bring them back, they would be so chastised. They would go running away. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (01:43:58): >That's wonderful. I didn't know that.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:43:59): >And most Sikhs don't know that. And so they're surprised when I tell them, but if you look at, at, uh, old drawings of, of Punjab, then he has a traditional large sword because the religion of course is you, you carry a sword, meaning you're a defender. So a lot of Sikhs will carry a little tiny symbolic sword. Cause they have to have their articles of faith. You know, the five articles of faith, one of which is the uncut hair, of course, and the beard, even women don't cut their beard. So that's why you can see from a time you, you have seen, uh, Sikh women, maybe not wearing a turban, but have quite a lot of facial hair that they haven't removed because after all that's, uh, natural. So ... and we did some presentations, as you might imagine, which also educated some of us about, uh, uh, Sikh people and, uh, the beliefs and, and traditions. But I think it's always funny when I educate the Sikhs about their, their superhero that they're not aware of. So there's 1, 7/11 that I go to where there's a Sikh that who works there. Usually he's not always on duty and every time I go, he <laugh> now has learned that when he goes, and he's gonna say hello to me just as I say hello to him, because I know that's the way that, uh, that they greet people.
Heidi Burgess (01:45:58): >Nice. All right. Let me see if we can squeeze in one more question here. Um, have there been changes in policing in the last few years or again, when you were at CRS that affected your work?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:46:20): >Um...
P. Diane Schneiders (01:46:23): >Well, what Bob Lamb would've said is that because of our work and because of his work, uh, there has been more focus on community-oriented policing, which as Bob Lamb would say was originated by Sir Robert Peel, uh, after whom the "Bobbies" in England are named because he is the one who said, look, the police are the community. The community is the police. It's only that police are paid full time to do what is the responsibility of every citizen. And then Bob would go on to say, it's not this thin blue line of police officers, uh, checking out all of these community potential suspects. It's actually the police and the community, making sure that the community is protected and that the community is able to confront disruptions or, or bad things that are happening in the community. And the community supports the police and the police support the communities.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:47:37): >So there are some communities that, uh, have taken community-oriented policing very seriously. Um, it depends a lot on their recruitment practices. And, and we've talked about that in some police communities, uh, and some of the, uh, police chiefs and, and other, uh, police personnel have taken that very seriously. Uh, there are some who have not, uh, adopted that at all, but it does make a difference between police-community relationships. Um, 'cause if police alienate a certain portion of the community, it makes it very difficult then for the police to carry out investigations or be able to enforce certain things, if they don't get the community behind them to support them, it's, it's just not as, as effective.
Heidi Burgess (01:48:42): >So was CRS able to help police departments, institute, community-oriented, policing more than they had? Is that one of the things you tried to do?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:48:58): >Uh, they did. And, uh, there is, uh, a publication that, uh, was put out by CRS that really deals very effectively with a community-oriented policing orientation. And I, uh, gave that out to several police departments and some of them were very appreciative and had made a lot of comments about that. And of course, uh, it's not something you can do from one day to the next for—one of the reasons is you have such things as personnel practices and you have people that have been longterm employees and they've been oriented a certain way. And then when you have new recruits come on, then who is it that they're gonna be riding around with and get their field experience, which may be, you know, how people in the field like me, for instance, if somebody comes and works with me and I say, okay, these are what the organization says now, this is what we really wanna do. So here are some practical ways that you can get that done. Uh, not all of them are listed in the organization. <laugh>, you know, so it depends a whole lot on continuing orientation and you know, how can we work together and what is the way that we can most effectively do our job? And certainly the last thing we want in the world is to be alienated from the community that we are here to protect and serve.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:50:38): >And I say that as, uh, my, my brother was a police chief for many years <laugh> so I'm not alienated from policing.
Heidi Burgess (01:50:49): ><laugh>. Okay. Um, and you were up in the Northwest, um, what's your impression of the relationship between the police and the community in Portland? Did they have any sort of community-oriented policing before the uprisings of what was it? 2021.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:51:14): >They did, uh, they were progressing quite nicely. Oh. And very effectively for quite some time and had a lot of meetings with the communities. Uh, things were, were going really pretty well at the time that I left, uh, CRS. Uh, and, and I went as frequently as I could to, to Portland and, and I attended some of those meetings. Uh, and, and I, I know that because of budget cuts, et cetera, there were things that, uh, weren't being done by CRS. And, uh, and there are things that I really can't speak to since I wasn't with the agency anymore. So, uh, the only thing that I would see was some results or things that I probably would've done that didn't appear to be being done anymore. So I have no idea about why that was except I, I know what some of the obstacles were in our trying to do things that we knew needed to be done and, uh, trying to overcome the resistance to allowing us to do it.
Heidi Burgess (01:52:45): >Yeah. And of course the situation now is so volatile that it makes doing anything effective a lot harder, I would imagine.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:52:56): >Yeah. I think at this point, uh, it would have to be—if I were with CRS again, and if I had, uh, the resources to do it, I think I would start, neighborhood by neighborhood. And, uh, after an assessment, I would see which neighborhood might be most responsive to a community-oriented policing orientation. And I would look at who are the personnel and the department that are assigned to certain neighborhoods, and how are they seen by the community, and what are the things that can be done in the community to organize around community concerns and, uh, responses. So it takes a hands on approach. And like I said before, a lot of it has to do with, you have to look a person in the eye and see whether they seem legit and seem like if they're really concerned about what your concerns are, if they wanna listen. And, uh, if they're really willing to work, or if they're willing to blame the community for everything that's going wrong, <laugh> without listening or without offering what maybe the community would like to hear.
Heidi Burgess (01:54:38): >And then what do you do if you come to the assessment that this person really isn't gonna care about, what the community's gonna do, and isn't interested in what CRS has to offer? Do you just walk away?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:54:52): >What person are you talking about?
Heidi Burgess (01:54:55): >Well, I'm assuming that we're talking about police leadership, but maybe you weren't, maybe you were talking about somebody else. Um,
P. Diane Schneiders (01:55:05): >Well, I was talking about, if you start at the neighborhood, then you're not talking necessarily about the actual police chief.
Heidi Burgess (01:55:20): >Or are there precinct leaders or..?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:55:24): >Cause you, you have the way that you send out your personnel, then they're assigned to different sectors of a, say a city.
Heidi Burgess (01:55:34): >Okay.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:55:34): >Certain sectors of a city, certain neighborhoods, tend to have certain demographics. So depending on how effectively you can deploy your personnel to communities where they fit in and can interact amicably and understand that community, it can make a big difference about how well then they can communicate and receive communications.
Heidi Burgess (01:56:12): >Right.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:56:13): >Cause that's the bottom line there. If I'm concerned about, uh, protecting and serving, then one is, I wanna know if there's issues that the community needs to be protected from and what kind of service do they think that they need. And once I hear all of that, then I can see where this might be helpful. But if I go in and say, look, I'm here to protect and serve. And so I hear that this and this, and this is happening and this is what I wanna do. And the community's going, I don't think so.
Heidi Burgess (01:56:56): >Yeah.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:56:57): >Then that's not going to help. And that's not community-oriented policing.
Heidi Burgess (01:57:04): >Right.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:57:06): >That's police-oriented communities. <laugh>
Heidi Burgess (01:57:10): >Probably not actually.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:57:12): >Yeah. Yeah.
Heidi Burgess (01:57:16): >It's trouble.
P. Diane Schneiders (01:57:16): >You have to start—just like the old saying "all politics is local," well, policing is local too.
Heidi Burgess (01:57:24): >Okay. Good answer. All right. This brings us to about exactly two hours actually. Uh, we've got a little more to cover. Are you willing to do this one more time?
P. Diane Schneiders (01:57:38): >Oh, sure. You can tell that. I like to hear the sound of my own voice. All right.
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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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