No. 5 - On Conflict and Peace - Priya Parker
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Back in early December, after a contentious election and in the midst of the strangest holiday season, I had the privilege of speaking to Priya Parker, an expert in conflict resolution who has worked on peace processes in the Arab world and with everyone from the Museum of Modern Art to the Obama Administration. Her work helps us take a deeper look into how we can meaningfully connect and come together.
The author of The Art of Gathering, the host of the New York Times podcast Together, Apart, and my dear friend, Priya helps people have complicated conversations about how we come together and the reasons we find ourselves coming apart. She guides people through moments of tension and transition, and it was my great, great honor to talk about how the art of gathering can inspire our work and improve our lives.
SULEIKA
Priya! Welcome! It's been a long time since we've seen each other in person. How are you holding up?
PRIYA
I'm okay. Like each of you, I'm “Covid good” for three weeks or four weeks—and then I crash. Sometimes it's because of an event, and sometimes it's totally unexplainable. I crawl into bed and refuel, and then I come back. We're nine months into this thing, and I’ve found that at times I need to psychologically exit and then choose to re-enter.
SULEIKA
In addition to “Covid good,” we might need to coin a new term: “Covid bedridden.” That’s when the existential dread creeps in and it’s difficult to get out of bed.
PRIYA
Absolutely. I'm a big napper. My Indian family naps a lot. In India, people leave the office, go home and eat lunch as a family, and maybe there's an hour nap, and then you go back to work. Somehow that's traced its way over. My Iowan and South Dakotan side is like, “This is not the Protestant work ethic.” But I pick and choose based on what serves.
SULEIKA
So speaking of your Iowan and Indian halves, I want to start by quoting this little passage from The Art of Gathering that resonated so deeply with me, being half-Swiss, half-Tunisian. You write, “I strive to help people experience a sense of belonging. This probably has something to do with the fact that I have spent my own life trying to figure out where and to whom I belong.” Tell us a bit about your background and about that search for belonging.
PRIYA
My parents met at Iowa State, and they were each other’s source of adventure. My mother is an anthropologist, and my father is a hydrologist. I was born in Zimbabwe, because it was the closest good hospital to where they were living in Botswana that would accept an interracial couple. They were footloose, and fancy free, they created their own world wherever they went—whether in the Maldives, or Indonesia, or the Hague. It was just the three of us.
We eventually moved back to the States and ended up in Virginia. Within a year, they separated, and within two years, they divorced, and within three years, they had each remarried other people who, in many ways, reflected the worldview or culture they originally came from. I was their only child, and every two weeks, I would go back and forth between these two homes. I'd leave my mother and stepfather's home—this Indian, British, Buddhist, theosophist, New Age, incense-filled, Landmark Forum-y, vegetarian, democratic, liberal family—and travel 1.4 miles to my father and stepmother's house, which was, and still is, a white, evangelical Christian, American, twice-a-week-church-going, meat-eating, Republican, conservative, Trump-voting family. And I was a part of both. And I was also apart from both.
Many years later, my husband pointed out that if I was in one family's home, and somebody sneezed, I'd say “Bless you.” If I was in the other one’s home, and somebody sneezed, I'd say, “God bless you.” I didn't even hear it.
I have always been interested in how we form community, how we create belonging and separation, and I became a conflict resolution facilitator in part to sort out my own crap—and beauty—the whole disaster. I had a very intimate knowledge that there are many ways to be, and many are inherited, and many are invented. I think that's true of almost every gathering or community we're a part of, if we just look a little more closely.
SULEIKA
I'm curious about what your gatherings looked like growing up, and if you have a first memory of a gathering in which you were aware of its limitations or how it could be done differently.
PRIYA
As I left and I went to college, as I found my own voice, as I decided my own spiritual beliefs, I became very interested in this question of, “How do we create gatherings where we can connect meaningfully with each other without all having to be the same?” That's the core of my work.
In my childhood, the most memorable gatherings—the ones that made me feel really alive—tended to be either invented or had very strong cultures with very specific rules. Team sports were a very strong part of my upbringing, and softball in particular. It's a sport where it was all women, and we were allowed to use our bodies in ways that weren't always appropriate outside of that space. We could jeer, we could hiss, we could make fun of the other team. And it was a very powerful experience to pitch, to catch, to literally call the shots, to know that I could own the direction of a game based on a set of rules that we all agreed on.
But also, I would go and visit India every summer. Once, when I happened to be visiting, my uncle, who is a businessman, hit a certain number with his company—honestly I don’t even know what it was or what it represented. And he gathered the whole family and came into the living room with about fifteen envelopes. “There's no way I could have done it without each of you,” he said. He went around and told each of us one way we specifically had helped him be a better man and a better leader and a better businessman. After that, he handed us an envelope of cash, different amounts by generations. For me, it was maybe the equivalent of $20.
The thing was, he could have kept it within his business. But by gathering this extended family, he made it a tribal moment. But he did it in a way where he saw who we were, and he expanded the definition of success. I was very interested; I've never seen that done in the US.
SULEIKA
I read about your time at the University of Virginia as an undergraduate and your work in “sustained dialogue,” this technique that you learned to facilitate conversations—often, tense or complex conversations. Can you explain to us what sustained dialogue is and how it works?
PRIYA
When I got to UVA, the first question many people would ask me was, “What are you?” I didn't understand the question at first—like, “I'm a first year” or “I'm a woman.” I quickly learned that it was a racially coded question, and that the answer people wanted was, “I'm biracial. I'm half white American, and I'm half Indian.”
It upset me—not so much the question itself, but that this was the first question. This must be a really important data point in this context for so many people to ask it. Then I started noticing that black parties would be broken up, and white fraternity parties would not be. I noticed racist graffiti on walls. But more than that, there was a silent tension that was very jarring.
So I learned about a process called sustained dialogue through my mother, and I asked the founder of it, a diplomat who had worked on the Camp David Accords, to help me take this process and try it at UVA. We wrote a letter to the campus community on September 10, 2001, that we were launching this thing. And then of course, 9/11 happened the next day. And it was an outpouring into sustained dialogue. We set up groups, where students could sign up, and every two weeks, twelve students from different races, committed to meeting over the course of a year, to see if they could change their relationships, then do an action project that would begin to change the community.
This process transformed me. It helped me understand my racial identity. It helped me understand that I'm conflict averse. Things start heating up, and my palms get sweaty, and my heart starts beating, and I want to flee. I learned that went back to my childhood. When my parents announced that they were separating, everybody was shocked, because they never fought. They suffered from unhealthy peace, not from unhealthy conflict.
SULEIKA
I love that term “unhealthy peace.” We're in a moment where we're seeing a lot of unhealthy conflict and unhealthy peace. Even within my own life, I find myself toggling between those two, trying to figure out how to have those difficult conversations. We have a question about that from a community member, Paula. She writes, “I wonder about the anger and emotional content of many who disagree politically today. How can we lower the temperature to start a conversation between people who can't even seem to agree on reality? Do you have any suggestions for building a bridge with them? Or is it just impossible?”
PRIYA
I think it's one of the most important questions for our country. There is a structural and a political answer. When you have this much inequality across society, it's very difficult to not be angry with whatever is around you. And so to me, some of this anger is actually symptomatic of systemic failures. Reaching out to a neighbor or an act of kindness is not going to actually resolve the deeper structural issues we have as a country.
But as a conflict resolution facilitator, one of the things that I try to do in any circle is, rather than trying to make everybody the same, is to complicate the individual.
What do I mean by that? I'll give an example. I was working with a group in the Middle East that was trying to reimagine a city, and they brought together people with very different religious beliefs, classes, and access to power.
The night before we started, I hosted a dinner, using a format I invented called “Fifteen Toasts.” In Fifteen Toasts you choose a theme that's relevant to the group. In a political context, it could be conflict or grappling or trust. You invite everybody in the room to share a story about that thing that no one around the table has heard. The only other rule is that the last person has to sing their toast. This moves the night along. That evening, it was risk.
At one point in the night, a very senior leader, who was wearing his traditional, governmental garb—which even in his own context, but particularly in a cross cultural context is intimidating. And he shared the story about how when he was eighteen years old, he realized that he wanted to meet a woman, but he didn't know how. Halfway through, he started giggling. We turned to him, and I remember thinking, “Where is this going? What he said was, “I wanted to meet a woman, and so I had to take a risk. I had to tell my sisters.”
In that moment, he had multiple identities. He was a powerful political and religious official, and he also was a young man in search of love. It didn't disappear all of the other elements, but it complicated him. And the eighteen-year-old in each of us, pursuing love, admitting to somebody that you don't know how to do something, had empathy for him.
It's not that it changes everything. But part of the beauty of interpersonal relations is not trying to mush everybody together and to stamp out the difference. It’s actually to show that we all have paradoxes within us.
This excerpt from our Studio Visit with Priya Parker on December 10, 2020, has been edited for clarity and brevity.