Being a public panelist

When college-age men put on their nice cargo pants and tuck in their button-ups, they're either going to a job interview or owning up to a problem.\nYesterday, our Editor in Chief Josh Sanburn and columnist Warren Christopher Freiberg wore their cargos and button-ups to a panel sponsored by the Ashton and Wright Quad Community Educators.\nThe panel addressed Freiberg's column about Black History Month being racist. You may have heard about it -- he questioned why Black History Month is necessary. He said Black History Month could be seen as divisive rather than uniting.\nIronically, his column did two things -- it proved why Black History Month is necessary, and it united a group of people to talk about it in room A201 of the combined Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center/Theatre and Drama Center.\nSome IDS staff thought Freiberg's column wasn't a racist one; it was more of a misguided attempt at utopian desire: In a perfect world, Black History Month wouldn't have to exist. Surely people would understand such a vision, right?\nPart of the problem is that the rest of the world doesn't wear Freiberg's prescription for rose-colored glasses. The other part of the problem is that Freiberg never bothered to take his glasses off and see the world the way everyone else does.\nWhen the parties involved in a discussion have a lot at stake, emotion can overrun the proceedings. Many people in the audience had great things to say in defense of Black History Month and poked more than a few factual holes in Freiberg's arguments.\nIt was the fire behind their words that caused Freiberg, at first, to put up his defenses and speak out of reaction instead of understanding.\nWe, as disseminators of news have to be brave enough to just sit and listen when our readers have something to say. We publish a newspaper five days a week to make our points. When the public holds a forum to talk about their points, we newspeople need to be quiet and listen instead of indignantly defending our work. If we feel the need to continue to argue the semantics of our published work, we obviously didn't do a good enough job explaining ourselves in the first place.\nI hope that fact got through in the last half of the panel. After the rhetoric cooled down a bit and the fires quenched, everyone seemed more receptive to what was being said. Freiberg stopped talking about himself and listened to the public, and the public toned down the cat calls whenever Freiberg spoke.\nThese are the beginnings of the Golden Bridge.\nThe Golden Bridge is a principal concept in the books "Getting to Yes" and "Getting Past No," a series of negotiating guides by Roger Fisher and William Ury, respectively. The idea behind the Golden Bridge is getting your opposition to come over the bridge and see your side of things instead of staying on their own side and yelling at you from across the river of difference.\nThe trick is, you have to give your opposition a damn good reason to want to walk over to you. Successful negotiators reframe an oppositional situation as a mutually beneficial one. For example, instead of saying, "you did it all wrong," say, "let's see if we can do this better."\nThe keyword in the bridging phrase is "we."\nWe here at the IDS may be the ones publishing the paper, but we're not the only ones who read it, or are affected by it. To build a Golden Bridge, we have to remember that it's not just about us.\nIt's about ALL of us.