Mary Webb Method To The Madness

Berkeley filmmaker, novelist, playwright and teacher, Mary Webb, discusses her latest short film Living Room Revolution: The Race Dialogues which shows how the power of listening can tackle stereotypes and build community.
Transcript:
Announcer:This is Method to The Madness, a biweekly Public Affair Show on KALX Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Today, host, Ojig Yeretsian, is speaking with Mary Webb. She's a novelist, playwright, teacher, filmmaker, trailblazer and peace builder. Her latest short film is Living Room Revolution: The Race Dialogues.
Ojig Yeretsian:Hi, Mary. Before we launch into the film, can you please tell us what inspired you to create a dialog group in the first?
Mary Webb:In the first place, it was a film and it was called Long Night's Journey into Day, not to be confused with Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. It was two Berkeley women, Deborah Hoffman and Francis Reid who made this film. I saw it alone. It wasn't as if I was chatting with my friends afterwards.
I was thinking and thinking it was a film about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. I thought we used to pick at them because we thought we were ahead. Now, it seems as if they're ahead. A lot of people on the radio were talking about people should talk about race and they don't do it. I thought, "Well, I know some people. I have a living room. Why don't I do it?"
Ojig Yeretsian:Did you ever think in those days that whatever you created would move forward 18 years?
Mary Webb:We've started the 20th. I didn't think about it one way or another. I'm not a big think about the future person. Let's deal with what we're doing right now.
Ojig Yeretsian:You just had your 72nd meeting. What do you think it is about this dialogue group that sets it apart from other conversations?
Mary Webb:That's a great question. It's an attempt to get people from very different kinds of backgrounds to communicate with each other on a deep level about one of the worst problems in our society, namely racism. People have to say why they're there at the beginning. A lot of people say, "I'm here to listen and learn." That's kind of beautiful. I think that's true. We share food as they say in Africa first. Everybody brings food, no money exchanges hands. We have a topic each time. We have two moderators to keep us in check mildly. We go at it.
Over the years, relationships have developed between people who would never have met had they not come to my house for this event. That's a wonderful thing too.
Ojig Yeretsian:As a society, we're so entrenched in our particular set of viewpoints and polarized. Why are stereotypes and racism so hard to talk about and why is it so important to talk about these things?
Mary Webb:That's a big question. For certain African-Americans, for example, they would not particularly want to talk about what they really felt in front of white people or after all the perpetrators in terms of a group. Some white people are maybe carrying a lot of white guilt and they would think they didn't want to talk about that. But people, in general, if you can get them into talking as they eat and as they make personal contacts, I think do want to go deeper.
I was aware when I started this that I was probably going to give up a lot of my social life if I did this because it would be work to get it going. But it is a social life, and it's a social life on a much deeper level. I can remember going to parties when I was 19 and saying, "Why don't people discuss serious things at parties?" Everybody would say, "Oh yes." Then, they'd go back to what they were doing. And I'd say, "Well, why don't you do it now?" This was not a popular thing to say. I was a troublemaker even then.
Ojig Yeretsian:How do you create or ensure safety in this environment? What makes this environment so special?
Mary Webb:The moderators do that. We go around the room at the beginning and the moderators ask each person to say why they're there. We get a li