OVERCOMING HATE THROUGH DIALOGUE: Confronting Prejudice, Racism, and Bigotry with Understanding―and Coffee

Ozlem Cekic

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How a TED Talk Speaker Learned to Successfully Confront Bigotry, Prejudice, and Racism:

Özlem Cecik continuously receives racist, sexist, hate-filled emails and messages. The abuse started in 2007, when Özlem was first elected to the Danish Parliament. Özlem was the first elected Parliamentarian of Middle Eastern descent in Denmark.

At first, Özlem simply deleted the hate filled emails she was receiving. However, this didn’t stop the anxiety or her fear for her children’s safety.  And the emails kept coming.  Finally, after eight months of intensive harassment by one neo-Nazi in particular, Özlem chose another strategy. Instead of allowing fear to rule her life, Özlem decided to seek out her haters and engage them in conversation. She called these meetings ’Coffee Dialogues.’

See Ozlem explain in more detail at her New York City Ted Talk - which has garnered nearly 2 million views. Ozlem appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 2020.

In OVERCOMING HATE THROUGH DIALOGUE, Özlem Cecik reports on some of her most remarkable meetings with her abusers. She visits people with extreme attitudes towards other communities, like the ultra-right Kim, who’d happily kill his Muslim neighbours if only he had a gun. She gains entry to the Islamist Hizbut-Tahrirs mosque, where the imam preaches against democracy and homosexuality. Özlem meets the salafist Mahmut who has killed five policemen and is ready to lay down his life for Islam. Özlem meets the evangelical priest Henrik who opposes gays and whose belief in scripture is as fanatical as any imam’s. She ultimately travels to Israel and the occupied territories to witness the conflict for herself – the same conflict that plays out between Muslims and Jews across the world.

Özlem is honest about her own doubts, fears and prejudices; and she probes the origins of anger, frustration, and hate that can envelop anyone in the world today.

Ultimately, throughout the book, Özlem tries to address the questions:

  • Can conversations break down prejudice and forge understanding?

  • Is it naive to believe that ordinary people have nothing in common with extremists?

  • And what happens when we stop talking to each other?

“Özlem Sara Cekic was one of the first women with a muslim-immigrant background to be elected to the Danish parliament. Eventually, she started a program called #DialogueCoffee, where she met with people who sent her hate mail, working to find a common language and develop tools for building bridges. She just published her new book about her work, Overcoming Hate Through Dialogue. During such a divisive year, she is advocating for dialogue as well as common ground.” ―Andrew Zuckerman, At a Distance Podcast

“Cekic is a former member of the Danish parliament and a Muslim immigrant from Turkey. While in office, she was routinely inundated with racist and xenophobic hate mail. Initially, she simply ignored or deleted those messages, but in a recent TED Talk, Cekic describes her decision to not only reply to one of her frequent harassers, but to ask if he would have her over to his house for a cup of coffee. Crazier still, the harasser obliged. The coffee meeting was surprisingly pleasant. They had a dialogue without vitriol, found some common ground, maybe even connected a little. Soon, Cekic did this hundreds of times. This, Coster-Waldau believes, is the only way forward. ‘We have to talk. We especially have to talk to the ones we disagree with.’” ―Rich Monahan's interview of Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, actor on Game of Thrones, in Esquire Magazine

“I think that it is so fine and inspiring that [Cekic uses] dialogue and conversation as a means of sorting the problem. It expresses both enormous insight and a deeply democratic outlook. [She is] an example for many to follow.” ―Mette Frederiksen, Prime Minister of Denmark

Özlem Cekic was born in Turkey in 1976. She lived in Finland for two years while her parents worked as caretakers/cleaners at the Turkish Embassy in Helsinki, and later moved to Denmark.

Özlem served in the Danish parliament from 2007 to 2015 as one of the first female politicians with a Muslim immigrant background. Since 2015, Özlem has been giving talks internationally on how to build bridges between ethnic minorities, companies, organizations, and local governments. She devised the dialogue coffee concept, based on the belief that what binds us together is far greater than what separates us.

In 2018, Özlem became only the second Dane in history to give a TED-Talk, which was about her experiences with Dialogue Coffee. At present, the talk has been viewed over 1.3 million times.

Learn more about her groundbreaking work at http://dialoguecoffee.org.