# Posted 10:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

RACE STUDY GROUP: Over the past year, I'd had conversations with a few friends about racial divisions in Washington and some of the other cities in the East Coast in which we'd lived, and in the end we agreed on the need to have a broader, rigorous, pragmatic conversation about race and racial integration in the United States (and, to some extent, Britain). For myself I have nothing in the least authoritative or new to say on the subject, but it's one I've been wrestling with personally since living in Washington, D.C., and I'm awfully interested to take part in a searching conversation on the subject with friends whose idealism and intellect I respect. So we've decided to begin a race study group, under the working title Hands Across Our City. You're very welcome to join us.

Our thought is at first to run our forum as a series of electronic seminar-style conversations, where different members lead different discussions on racial division and integration from the perspective of academic or professional disciplines in which they have backgrounds (urban studies, law, economics, literature, different species of policy, and so forth). In the longer term, we've already spoken about the possibility of some subset of us perhaps working to start an ngo, to find ways at the civil society level to counteract racial division in the cities we live in.

It might also turn out that we'd have insights gained together in this conversation that we might want to carry over into writing, perhaps in the form of a magazine article or series of op-ed pieces laying out proposals for combating racial division at different policy and, perhaps more significantly, community levels. We might even turn out to be sufficiently ambitious as to collaborate together in writing an edited volume, looking at racial integration from the perspective of different academic and policy disciplines, and perhaps developing proposals and insights in greater depth.

As a first step toward getting this conversation going, we've set up some links to some of the better academic, policy, and journalistic writing on racial integration, and a growing online library of conference papers and other research. We'd love to hear from you if you have ideas you'd like to share, or if you'd like to come be part of our project. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion