ConverZations that Matter Series Takes on Healing and Historical Trauma

CIIS Public Programs began a new series this academic year called ConverZations that Matter, hosted by Belvie Rooks. The series’ subtitle tells part of its story: Navigating the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Gender in the 21st Century and Beyond. In its first year, ConverZations That Matter has already tackled difficult issues about the process of healing historical traumas.

“One aim of ConverZations That Matter is to attempt to bridge the historic divides of race, class, ethnicity, and gender,” explains Rooks. “We’re hoping to weave a deeper dialogue of awareness across those divides.” Rooks attributes some of her faith in dialogue to a conference she helped organize in Bali in 2004 that included a moving address by Nobel Peace Prize honoree Bishop Desmond Tutu. “One of the things he shared about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa is that deep listening can powerfully transform people.”

Rooks’s personal desire to focus on healing historical traumas came from an experience she had while she and her husband were visiting a former slave dungeon in West Africa. “I was overwhelmed by a sense of despair and rage,” she recalls. “But not long after that I met Thomas DeWolf, author of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. He also had a powerful and painful transformational experience while visiting a West African slave dungeon. It made me think about what we could do together to explore the wounds we still carried about our different but connected relationships to slavery.” DeWolf shared the podium with Rooks in one of the series’ early events on Slavery’s Legacy: What Would Healing Look Like?

ConverZations That Matter’s inaugural event was a discussion with Princeton Professor Cornel West, who spoke to an overflow audience of nearly 1,000 at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco in September 2010.

“Cornel West’s talk about his life stories—with his insights on race and the need for justice and healing in the United States—was a truly magical event,” enthuses Monique LeSarre, a doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program. “These conversations have the potential not merely to cover over the wounds of historical trauma, but to clean them out, and to begin the process of healing.”

CIIS Dean of Students and Director of Diversity Shirley Strong helped start the series. She feels that it meets an important need, at CIIS, and beyond. “I’ve been looking for a means to engage our community in a larger discussion on these issues in a way that is compassionate,” Strong explains. “I hope the series will allow all of us to push our growing edge.” Strong hopes that the emphasis in the series on healing will speak both to students in the counseling programs and to those in the healing professions. “I’d like to extend an invitation,” she says, “to the larger CIIS community, including alums, to attend ConverZations That Matter, and to use the series as a resource.”