How Hosting A Dinner Can Heal
Before falling asleep on November, 8th, 2016, I fell into what I can only describe as an election depression. Shocked at the night’s outcome, I also felt embarrassed and out of touch for not seeing it coming. Obviously, there was a lot I was not seeing.
The next day, I got an email from my friend Justine Lee.
Subject: i kind of want to host a dinner
_
or something
with trump voters and non-trump voters
and have prompts or starting points that lead to something delightful and real.
The email was small but the thrill it gave me was yuge. I immediately responded with a jubilant “YES.” This is what I needed. A chance to see more, hear more, and learn more about people with whom I shared a country, but not a political philosophy. As a woman of color, I felt hurt by the election results, but did not want to fall into a dark place of believing that all who had elected Trump were my enemies.
As the news cycle progressed, I struggled to stay hopeful. I saw stories about hate crimes in neighborhoods where I had grown up and felt safe, appointments of unqualified people to positions of power, and conflicts of interest between our new president’s business ties and the environment. On Twitter there were internet trolls boasting they had “memed” Trump into the White House, and white supremacists celebrating.
Alongside my growing fears, our email thread grew too: we brainstormed with friends on how to create and mediate the best atmosphere for all perspectives to be heard, shared educational links, and worked out the logistics of our first dinner. This thread became our lifeline through the storm of dark headlines.
We found hope in stories like a father and daughter talking over their political differences. We found motivation in Van Jones’ work, to “start talking to each other, not just about each other.” We found encouragement and urgency in the words of Pope Francis:
“Wars start inside our hearts. When I am not able to open myself to others, to respect others, to talk to others, to dialogue with others, that is how wars begin.”
So we started to gather our first dinner group. Not a group of like-minded individuals, but a group of people with different lives and opinions. We asked them to come together so that we could Make America Dinner Again. We hoped this name would appeal to both those who felt inspired by Trump’s message, and to those who wished to subvert it.
We got Local Kitchen & Winery to allow us use of their private room two days before the Inauguration; gathered questions from the group; and put together a schedule that would allow for guests to get to know each other as people, dig into political issues together, engage one-on-one, and find common ground.
We began dinner by welcoming our guests and setting the tone:
We’re not going to heal the nation tonight, nor are we going to have a heated debate. The goal is to share perspectives, and in doing so, sometimes there will be disagreement. And that’s okay. Sometimes too, there will be things we come together on.
You know the feeling you get when you read the comments section of a political post? The kind of comments where people use caps-lock to scream their disapproval, call each other profane names, and invalidate each other’s experiences? For me the feeling moves from irritation, to rage, to an utter loss of hope in humanity.
At our dinner table were guests who voted for Trump, Johnson, and Clinton. There were registered Republicans, Democrats, Green Party members, and Independents. There were multiple perspectives present, but seeing them together in-person gave me the opposite feeling of a comments section. People passed pizza, poured water for each other, agreed, and disagreed. They talked about things that were real and important in their lives. They listened with respect.
I realized that with all the divisive rhetoric we’d been hearing from our politicians and most vocal extremists, I had been craving nuance — and our guests, with their honesty and courage, brought that to the table.
At the end, we asked that everyone take a minute of quiet to write their hopes for the country on sticky notes. When we looked at them together, we saw many shared hopes, even though we had different ideas on how to get there. There were hopes for less division, less incarceration, and more jobs; hopes for a less contentious 2020 election, and a more empathic society.
This is why Justine and I wanted to host a dinner. Even through the polarization in our country, when people come together to listen and share respectfully, we can find those commonalities that make us great—not only as Americans, but as human beings. We didn’t solve everything in one night, but we found common ground. We saw proof that despite political differences, we support each other and have each other’s backs in more ways than one.
After getting coverage on NPR, Justine and I have had a pleasantly busy inbox. We’ve mainly received three kinds of contact:
- Those who are working on projects that stem from a similar mission
- Media inquiries (no Ira Glass yet)
- People around the country who want to host their own MADA (Make America Dinner Again)
We are inspired by the first, humbled by the second, and excited by the third. In putting together MADA, we knew that one dinner could not heal a nation. But with the energy of others who are hungry for dialogue instead of debate, we hope to see more and more of these conversations happening.
We’d like to encourage anyone out there who is interested in hosting to reach out to us at makeamericadinner@gmail.com. We can help you get started and answer any questions. For those who want written guidance, we have a downloadable guide on our website.
We can’t tell you exactly how your dinner will go, but we can tell you this: Even before the dinner happened, Justine and I felt a powerful shift within ourselves. Right after the election, hearing about someone who voted differently from ourselves might have stirred an internal Why? How could you?! But by actively seeking to include different viewpoints over dinner, we felt so excited when someone outside of our bubbles contacted us. The internal dialogue changed to Yes! I can’t wait to learn about who you are, and what has shaped your opinions. This shift was genuine, uplifting, and for us as hosts, healing.
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