Efforts aimed at promoting multiculturalism in the classroom are often pedestrian and ineffectual. When instructors do succeed at facilitating honest discourse, they frequently fail to anticipate the great deal of pain, frustration and anger that is invoked. Rather than sustain a false sense of community, we argue that a dialogic, multicultural community can only be achieved by fostering breach of mainstream norms. Using cultural anthropologist Victor Turner's notion of social drama as a theoretical framework, we document the intense conflict that erupted in our classroom when students were pressed to engage one another regarding issues of race. In order to both acknowledge and make public our students' emotional responses to the dialogue, we implemented a 'recursive loop', a pedagogical strategy designed to provide immediate feedback and enable students to come to a richer understanding of how their experiences of race are inextricably linked. By analyzing the students' discourse, we demonstrate how these voices do not occur in a vacuum; to the contrary, they are articulated in response to one another and to grand narratives used to make years of oppression appear invisible. Ultimately, we contend that White Identity Transformation is necessary for a multicultural community and that such transformation is facilitated, ironically enough, by conflict.