Seeing Conflicts Play Out on Multiple Levels
We engaged with a short video text recently in class where the author of the text argues that when we want to more effectively respond to what we see as a racist comment or action it is important to avoid falling into the familiar trap of framing our response as a claim about ‘who you are,’ that is, calling the offender a racist. 

Instead, we are more likely to be able to hold that person accountable if we frame our response around the ‘what you said or did’ conversation.  Check out the video (below) for more, but one core reason is that when we allow an offender to reframe the conflict as a ‘who you are’ conversation it makes it too easy for them to dodge the issue entirely and escape accountability.

In the short article below from today’s Akron Beacon Journal you can see exactly this dynamic.  Pasted below is the full text of the ABJ article with my comments in italics. 

We can draw several lessons from thinking about the competing stories in this conflict.

First, the lessons we cannot draw:  we cannot conclude which disputant is right and who is wrong in this particular conflict on the basis of this news story. 

Second, we can conclude that the analytical tools discussed above appear helpful in decoding what might be deeper conflicts, hidden in plain sight, behind or beneath the presenting conflict here. 

Third, we cannot conclude much about these deeper conflicts,  however, on the basis of this news story.  We cannot conclude that either disputant did not did not have a hidden agenda, only that thinking along these lines is likely a good way to remain alert to understanding conflict management and politics.  We also cannot conclude anything about the nature of potentially deeper conflicts here, the positions either disputant might hold on deeper conflicts, or how we might normatively evaluate those positions.

Fourth, local politics is a rich source of data we can use to see politics and conflict management more clearly, because it is less scripted and less insulated and less able to insulate actors from face2face public scrutiny.  Anyway, take a look at this article.

The controversy surrounding a scuffle between Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic and Councilman Russel Neal Jr. is continuing, with the mayor taking the unusual step of writing a letter to the community Friday with his account of what happened.

Here we see the mayor seeking either to ‘expand the scope of the conflict,’ by writing a letter designed to publicize it to draw the attention of additional audiences he expects will not turn their (our) attention to this conflict…that is, be mobilized…and impact the outcome in his favor.  Or to reverse a publicization process started with a facebook post. 

We cannot know what is the mayor’s heart, but we should be attentive to the political dynamics revealed here about our struggle to publicize some conflicts (amplify these and put them on the agenda) and privatize other conflicts (mute these, keep them off the agenda).

We can see (below) that the mayor’s letter is also a response to an anonymous effort to expand the scope, when a random facebook user put a post about this conflict on the FB page of a local community group. 

Since we all know that there are countless posting like this daily, this one might have struck a nerve (we cannot know for sure—but a good question to ask).  Did the FB post mobilize some new audiences (or create fear in the mayor’s office that it might mobilize some) such that it sparked an official response (since such responses are extremely rare—an official response to a random, now deleted, FB post)?

Plusquellic said he decided to write the letter, available on Ohio.com, because of suggestions by some in the community that the shoving match between him and Neal following a Dec. 16 council meeting was racially motivated.

Plusquellic was particularly upset about a post on the Facebook page of a local community group, Stand Up Ohio-Akron. The post, which later was removed, was made by someone else to the group’s page.

Here we see that the FB post is likely only one source of ‘suggestions by the community’ that the incident might be about race, but the mayor’s efforts to expand the scope and reframe the conflict want us to focus only on this one source from FB. 

This is a good question to ask:  is the FB post an outlier (as the mayor suggests) or is it one voice speaking for many?  We cannot know based on this one news story, but understanding this conflict requires is to ask (and find out).

It featured a photograph of Plusquellic and the words: “He be like, ‘Russ, why would I give them a job?’ ” which appears to be a reference to the push for the city to hire more minorities. At the bottom, in red letters, the post said, “I don’t even like n-----!”

“Because of the efforts of some unscrupulous people in our community who have tried to take political advantage by not telling the truth and who have tried to make this a racial issue, I need to set the record straight,” Plusquellic wrote in his two-page letter. “You deserve to know the truth.”

Neal, however, said Friday that Plusquellic’s letter, which gives a lengthy description of what the mayor says happened in the confrontation, is erroneous. He said the mayor wrote the letter to “promote his agenda.”

“This right here is slander,” Neal said after reading a copy of the letter provided to him by the newspaper. “This is a lie.”

Here we see that in terms of the narrow, presenting, conflict the mayor’s account in this unusual public letter appears to be inconsistent with the account from the other disputant.  We know that this is not uncommon and likely involves two competing perspectives on the same incident.

Think for a minute.  If a mayor chooses to take the unusual step of writing a public letter like this, would he not also choose to frame that letter in a way that would be likely to secure agreement from the other disputant…if the goal was to de-escalate this conflict?

We can imagine a letter that says “The council member and I are both passionate public servants and it is entirely common for people like us to sometimes disagree.  In the heat of one such disagreement our shared passion for doing the right thing for Akron voters got the best of us.  I am sorry for my part in creating this misunderstanding and look forward to working collaboratively with the council member in the future to improve the lives of everyone in Akron, black and white, male and female, rich and poor.”

But this is not the type of letter we see…is it possible that the mayor might be seeing this conflict as an opportunity, using this presenting conflict to advance an agenda, that is, to win in a struggle over a deeper conflict?  Is it possible that, while the mayor is posturing to appear to want to de-escalate this conflict, he actually wants to keep it going for some reason?

Keep in mind, asking these questions in no way requires us to suggest this is about corruption or slander; we want to learn to see this is a time-tested political strategy…to use conflicts….

…to take what non-elites see as a problem (the presenting conflict) and use it to play for a rule change, pressure opponents, mobilize supporters, or re-align public opinion in a way that will help one disputant win a larger fight over, for instance (as suggested in this story—but we cannot know if this is accurate or not based only on this story), pressuring council members into supporting the mayor’s policy agenda.

Blaming each other

Plusquellic’s account of the scuffle in the letter mirrors the account he gave the Beacon Journal after the incident. He and Neal then and now blame the other for the first shove.

Council President Garry Moneypenny, who witnessed the episode, said he wasn’t sure who shoved whom first. Neither man was injured nor filed a police report.

The incident prompted a group of African-American ministers and community leaders to attend the Jan. 13 council meeting and urge Plusquellic and council members to control their tempers.

Important people, all of whom know both disputants well, do not lightly abandon a relaxing evening at home to show up as a group to a city council meeting.  While we cannot know what this means we now know to ask:  does the mobilization of this larger audience (expanding the scope of the conflict from the disputants, to the council, to now this larger audience) benefit either disputant?  How might we expect the addition of this new audience to impact the outcome of the conflict?

Plusquellic, who has been with the city for 40 years, said in his letter that he has never before had a physical confrontation with a council member and has gotten along with “70 of 79” of the council members with whom he has served.

Is this really relevant? Are we persuaded by someone charged with robbery when they tell us that they have not robbed anyone before?  Since it does not appear to be directly relevant, we need to ask:  why introduce this into the story?  How might this contribute to reframing the conflict…and who might benefit if this framing comes to dominate our conversations?

“I’m almost 65 and have had two back operations, four knee surgeries, one elbow surgery, one leg surgery, and a double bypass heart surgery,” he wrote. “The idea that I would initiate a physical confrontation with a council person is absurd and, in this case, fabricated by persons trying to make political gains by falsely adding racial remarks.”

Here we see the mayor attempting to place the incident in a context…because contexts give meaning to actions.  He is suggesting a context that would lead a non-attentive reader to think ‘it is just common sense that the mayor would not start the fight.’ 

An attentive reader, however, also knows that this mayor has a long history of being a bully with a temper problem…which suggests that the mayor’s version of the context is designed to redirect our attention. 

This does not mean one disputant is right and the other wrong.  But once we learn to see the struggle over narrowing or expanding, framing and reframing, conflicts we become able to ask better questions.

Plusquellic concluded his letter by saying he has agreed to meet with Neal, but Neal has not responded.

“He has the chance to do the right thing, stop encouraging the politicalization of this and (different than some others in the community) speak the truth before others mislead our citizens,” the mayor wrote.

Neal said he told WAKR (AM-1590) host Ray Horner on his Dec. 19 show that he wanted to meet with the mayor.

“If this happened the way the mayor said, I would be charged with assault,” Neal said on the show. “I know, and the mayor knows, what happened. He and I have to have the opportunity to speak one on one.”

Asked if he thought the incident had anything to do with race, Neal said Friday: “I don’t know what it has to do with. I don’t know what his hang-ups are.

“All I’m trying to do is do my job,” Neal said. “I’m sorry he feels it has to go this way.”

Here we see the other disputant is not (yet, not here) advancing an alternative account as much as expressing confusion over what he sees as the mayor going public…publicizing…with what he sees as an inaccurate account (and ‘with an agenda’ suggests the other disputant believes that this account is not randomly or accidentally inaccurate but inaccurate by design). 

We cannot, on the basis of this story alone, determine the veracity of either account.  But we can learn to ask questions designed to get us that information.

Reactions mixed

Here we see one outcome of a struggle over scope and salience when we do not see that struggle in the more complex way outlined here: confusion.  And we can see here that sometimes elites benefit from confusion among average voters.  We cannot know which of the two disputants (or both) benefit from confusion, but we do want to be attentive to this strategic dimension to political conflict.

We will recall from our video text (below) that once the accused is able to wrap himself in the ‘who you are’ conversation what follows is a lot of confusion—that helps the accused escape accountability.  (Remember the part about the Bermuda triangle that ends with ‘we blame hip hop’ and move on like nothing happened?)

The assertion that the incident between Plusquellic and Neal had to do with race was fueled by the Facebook post on the Stand Up Ohio-Akron page.

Stand Up Ohio-Akron took down the post at the request of several prominent Akron leaders, including Planning Director Marco Sommerville, the former longtime president of the Akron City Council. He spoke with a member of Stand Up for Ohio-Akron at the same council meeting in which black pastors and community leaders urged Plusquellic and council members to try to get along.

“I didn’t think it was funny,” Sommerville said of the post. “I thought it was wrong.”

Stand Up Ohio is a statewide, community-based group pushing for such reforms as making the hiring policies for felons more lenient.

Damareo Cooper of Stand Up Ohio-Akron said he thinks the reaction to the Facebook post has been “kind of extreme.” He said he thought it was “hilarious” and viewed it as a local political meme. He said his group took down the post after seeing the reaction to it.

“I think somebody put it up there being funny,” he said.

Cooper, whose group supports increased job opportunities for minorities, thinks Akron needs to have a conversation about race, but not based on one Facebook post.

Moneypenny said race had nothing to do with the shoving incident between Plusquellic and Neal. He said Neal and a few other African-American council members have talked about how the “culture of council needs to change,” but this had to do with an allegiance (or lack of one) to Plusquellic among council members.

“If any of council feel there’s a race issue, they surely have not brought it to my attention,” he said.

Sommerville, who is black, said Plusquellic has been supportive of providing opportunities for African-Americans during his career, including by having them in his Cabinet, choosing a black fire chief and a black police chief, and pushing for more minority hires in the safety forces.

“He has talked the talk and walked the walk,” Sommerville said. “No way is the mayor a racist.”

Here we see an ally of the mayor grasping onto the dodge-ability provided by framing this as a ‘who he is’ conversation…just as our text lead us to would expect.

The original FB post, using mock dialogue, suggested that the mayor was doing something—opposing job creation for blacks.  It did, however, also open the door to the accused using the ‘who he is’ conversation to weasel out of accountability by also saying he does not like blacks.

We do not have enough information to conclude if the mayor is dodging accountability or not, but we can see multiple ways that using the concepts and ideas in our text we become able to ask new and deeper and more analytical questions, which empower us to see presenting and meta (deeper) conflicts and the common strategies driving elite use of conflicts…often (as DFW says) hidden in plain sight.