Getting to the Truths About Race

Speakers: Maureen Walker and Christina Robb, moderated by WGBH Radio Host Callie Crossley
Date and Time: December 1, 2011
Location: Collins Cinema, Wellesley College

Thank you to everyone who attended this event. Video of the evening's discussion is available (see below to watch).Copies of the working paper from which the presenters read are also available here.

Award-winning journalists Christina Robb and Callie Crossley and psychologist-scholar Maureen Walker, Ph.D. discussed The Help and relationships between African American and white women. This special colloquium was free and open to the public.

About the presenters:

Callie Crossley is the Host/Executive Editor of “The Callie Crossley Show”, a live daily call in radio program, airing on WGBH Radio, 89.7.  She is a public speaker and television and radio commentator for national and local programs. She is also a regular contributor on National Public Radio’s The Takeaway, and Fox 25 Boston TV’s Morning Show, and she often guests on CNN’s Reliable Sources, and the PBS News Hour. Crossley appears weekly on WGBH-TV’s Beat the Press, a media criticism program which examines local and national media coverage, and Basic Black, a public affairs show focusing on current events and cultural issues concerning black communities. Ms. Crossley was a producer for Eyes On the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, the critically acclaimed documentary series, which earned her an Oscar nomination and major film and journalism awards, including the Gold Baton of the DuPont-Columbia Award, considered the Pulitzer Prize of broadcast journalism.

A former producer for ABC News 20/20, Ms. Crossley is also Program Manager for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, guests lecturing at colleges and universities about media literacy, media and politics, and the intersection of race, gender and media.

Ms. Crossley has been awarded two Harvard Fellowships-- a Nieman Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is a graduate of Wellesley College, and holds an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Pine Manor College and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Cambridge College.

Maureen Walker, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist with an independent practice in Cambridge, MA.  She is Director of Program Development at the Jean Baker Miller Institute of the Wellesley centers for Women at Wellesley College as well as associate director in MBA program at Harvard Business School.  The author of several articles, textbook chapters and working papers in the Stone Center Works in Progress Series, Dr. Walker is also co-editor of two books: How Connections Heal and The Complexity of Connection.

Christina Robb was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in the suburbs of New York City and Albany, NY. Educated at Stanford University and at Somerville College of Oxford University, Robb turned from medieval studies to journalism after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy broke the heart of her generation. 

Robb was for more than two decades a cultural reporter and book critic for The Boston Globe and spent most of her Globe career writing for the paper's Sunday magazine. There, as early as 1979, she wrote articles about some of the dazzlingly creative women psychologists who were revolutionizing psychology by paying attention to relationships.

She continued to cover these groups and was surprised and moved by the intense involvement these stories evoked. In calls and letters, readers would describe how her article about this new psychology of relationships made them feel empowered or well-enough equipped with new skills to call parents or sisters or brothers or old but long-disconnected friends after years of silence or separation, to restart a foundering marriage or love relationship, or to break off a destructive one, encouraged by the people who supported and believed them.

The first readers of Robb's new book about this relational revolution in psychology, This Changes Everything, reported that it moved them enough to make them cry, or brought on especially vivid dreams that helped them reintegrate old hurts with new healing, or otherwise made them feel more alive and hopeful.

Robb was also one of five Globe reporters who wrote "War and Peace in the Nuclear Age," a special supplement that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1983; her contribution to the section was about political resistance to nuclear arms. In 1992, when her two daughters were both in elementary school, Robb left The Globe and spent a year at the Bunting Institute of Harvard University, where she began her research for This Changes Everything.

She spent the years that followed shadowing experimenters, interviewing psychologists and their former clients, investigating critics, and reading an expanding literature of equal, mutual, empathic, growth-fostering, healing and re-connecting relationships - while spending enough time at home to be fully involved with fostering growth in her own family. Her children are now grown up, and she lives near Boston with her husband, who is an Episcopal priest and seminary professor, and with a dog and a rabbit by a stream in the woods. She is now at work on her next books.