Terri Houston, 60
Democrat / Faculty and advisor and consultant for the Center for Leadership Development / Chicago, IL
"I have been blue all my life, and come from a blue family and live in a blue state and a blue city and and what do I know? If that's my reality, have I allowed myself to go beyond that."
"I've been asking some hard questions. I've been walking up to random people who don't look like me... and I say, 'Hey, you want to sit for lunch and you want to talk?' and they do, and they do."
"What's giving me hope, ironically, is the fact that we are so divided. I think that's paradoxical... We're so ostracized, we're so excluded, we're so far apart that people are going to yearn for spaces to come together."
"I'm a chief diversity officer. I've done that at lots of prestigious universities and who would have thought that DEI is a taboo word, a bad word or a scary word? And I had to swallow a big pill in realizing, you know what, maybe we've created... not intentionally, but in our intent to be inclusive, we've made it more exclusive."
"In 2016 I was living in North Carolina. My neighborhood is somewhat diverse, but during that election time, I was seeing just Trump signs everywhere. I would take my walks, I'd walk past a certain house and I'd look away and or see someone, and they'd come out, they'd look at me like 'Who is she?' and I'm this black girl walking... And that was my judgment of them, or maybe theirs of me. And it hit me how we are judging each other from a distance. So I found this beautiful Native American prayer that talked about why we should come together and why our ancestors used trees and the environment and the grass and the animals and the sun and the dirt to remind us that we are of these things. That's what unifies us. And I decided to send that prayer and invite people to come for a campfire in my backyard. And I swear I went and passed out flyers, and everybody: the Trumpsters and the different... I mean, I had no clue. I did not think one person would come... Everyone showed, no one identified... and everyone who came said: Thank you so much. And I was crying. I was a mess."
Jane Raucher, 79
Democrat / Licensed marriage and family therapist / Montgomery County, Maryland
"I see the capacity for growth and change all the time in my work and in my personal life.
We actually we know how to build stronger relationships. We know how to build cooperation. We know how to build hope and inspiration. Fortunately, those things are known... nd when we understand people's experiences, everything just makes so much more sense.
"Steve and I met online... And he shared stories about how he manages 1300 bus drivers, and how he dealt with situations of people wanting special treatment because they thought that their child, coming from an upper class neighborhood, somehow deserved not to have to walk as far as they thought they should. I heard... his spirit of caring for the needs for everybody and not trying to promote elitist preferences over non elitist preferences."
"I forget whether it was the first or the second date, but I shared with him some learning I had about how we all have the same basic human needs, and that those were all positive motivations. And initially, he sort of disagreed and had a different way of looking at it. But when I shared how I saw it, because it was something I'd studied a lot, he paused and said ' Yes, I guess I can see that now.' And it was like 'Whoa. He actually listened to what I said,' and he was willing to rethink a perspective that he hadn't considered before. And I thought: 'He's a keeper!'"
Steve Raucher, 83
Republican / Retired school administrator / Montgomery County, Maryland
"This country is bigger than its politics. It's got something called the people."
Maxim Schrogin, 77
Democrat / Retired real estate syndicator / Berkeley, California
"We Berkeley people are elitist and entitled. We have all of our degrees in college, and we know everything. And then when Trump got elected... We wanted to teach them how wrong they were. Well, it turned out that that was incorrect, that there are legitimate, intelligent, unprejudiced people who vote for Trump or lean that way. And so I've learned to be less arrogant and elitist and self righteous. And that has expanded my life."
"My first job was to talk to anybody who believed in God, because I fundamentally don't, and my life has expanded being able to use religious terms, forgiveness, redemption, all that stuff, right? The second task was to talk to anybody who voted for Trump. I don't know what's next."
"I'm a naturally, let's say, inquisitive, but it's worse than that. I'm sort of a contrarian, and I'm attracted to anybody or anything that is different from me. I'm curious about that person. So I travel a lot in order to experience different realities and different cultures, because I believe that there are 8 million, 8 billion truths on the planet. Each of us has his own perspective."
Carolyn Peterson, 43
Leans blue / Professor, Cincinnati, Ohio
“I am working to try to understand how to respect intellectual diversity in my classroom.. How do you create a space where opposing viewpoints and like, real plurality is actually cultivated in a room?... Everybody's so triggered all the time. Everyone's so threatened. Everyone is so upset, everyone is so at a level 10 emotion, that it's almost impossible to have an authentic conversation with multiple viewpoints.”
“It's really important to me that my students understand that they don't have to agree with me to get a good grade in my class, and that viewpoints that oppose what I believe are still okay... How do you actually do that? What does the process look like? What does the structure look like?”
"The problem isn't just with our political process. It's not just with a two party system. It's not just with the toxicity in the media. It's what goes on inside of me. It's the thoughts that I have about people that I perceive as being my opponent for holding oppositional views like stereotyping and generalizations that aren't necessarily entirely true and like just reducing people's complexity and their humanity."
"Once you get to the villain victim place, it's like really difficult to have constructive, healing conversations."
