A Talk Given at the Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church January 19, 2014 by Dick Prouty

The Future of Race: A Sequel

Just about five years ago I gave a sermon in this church on the topic of race and my personal experience of learning what racial identity is all about. Recently Charles Nazarian asked me if I would like to give that sermon again with perhaps some new thoughts and learnings. I agreed and here we are.

Now, five years later, we have learned that the level of in our country is deeper than many of us wanted to believe in the wake of the historic election of Barak Obama. We now know now that many people cannot stand the idea that a black man is president of our country. We have learned that “driving while black”, or “walking home while black”, as Travon Martin was doing, can be lethal if you run into the wrong people.

Five years ago, in February of 2008, many of my friends and I were marveling at the election of Barak Obama and the seeming impossibility of that event. I spoke of my emotional reaction to that event, and my optimism with what it foretold.

When the 2008 results came in, I was watching the election with some friends in my living room. It was a quite literally a major emotional event in our lives. Whooping and high fives, and yes, lots of wet eyes. Grown men in their sixties tearing up at an election result….pretty amazing! Tears of joy and much more, at least for me. I had deep feelings that were difficult to understand, and that sort of surprised me. These feelings were connected to the promise of a future, that my wife, Doris, had given me many years ago, as we were preparing to wed in 1968.

I grew up of a farm in a white rural suburb of 3000 people in the fifties, the tenth generation descendent of one Richard Prouty, who came to this country around 1660 from southern England, to seek his fortune. Norwell, a small rural town on the south shore of MA had few people of color, and those that were there had mostly been there for ever, as very minor parts of the landscape. I didn’t think much about race, or racial issues or read much about it. College was a pretty similar racial environment. But I did have two pretty close Nigerian friends, and I began to read and think much more deeply about issues of race, as I took a lot of history and sociology courses.

After college, to avoid the draft and the growing Vietnam war, I joined VISTA( the domestic Peace Corps). I ended up stationed in the middle of the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a large all black neighborhood. I lived on 65A Madison Street, a 15 block or so walk from the A train subway. The tenements lining the streets to the subway were inhabited by who were often on the streets in significant numbers. In 1966, two years after the first race riot in Harlem, the streets were often tense. I learned how to walk looking as if I belonged there…..to ‘keep cool’ and seem to know where I was going and why, a difficult but necessary task in order to avoid being confronted by the gaggles of young black men out on the street. I began to know the fear of being the “other”, of being the outsider, in a way that I never had experienced, and a feeling that still only a small minority of white people ever really experience.

In that first year, I have a memory of a defining moment as to my understanding of how African-Americans experienced the world in 1966. I was watching a show from the series, “I Spy”, in which a young Bill Cosby co-starred as a private investigator. As I watched this show over the weeks of that first summer in Brooklyn, and looked at all the other shows on the network TV, I began to see the US as most of the inhabitants of Madison Street saw it: there were not ANY 1 people of color in this TV world of 1966. It was as if they did not exist. Only one of them, Bill Cosby, was really given any regular visibility.

When the full import of this isolation of African Americans from any TV shows or from the lives of the dominant group, my group, the group that ran all the institutions and corporations the country, I was stunned. It somehow just hit me emotionally one night, and I remember the hackles on the back of my neck rising, as I contemplated what that collective isolation and rejection feels like.

In the middle of that first year in VISTA, I met Doris Richardson, an “indigenous VISTA volunteer”, who had grown up in Queensbridge, the first public housing project in the city of New York, right under the 59th Street Bridge. Doris was African-American, stunning and we fell for each other right away. In less than a year we had moved in together, living in a Lower East Side two room apartment, with a loft that Doris built.

There were lots of cultural learnings that occurred in that first year of dating Doris, but one sticks out. Once, during a first visit to the Richardson family house on a weekend, I was having a meal with about 10 other Richardson family members, including Doris’ mother, Ila, and her father, James. We heard some fairly loud gunshots that were obviously fairly close by. Nobody said much and continued eating and talking. I remember asking, “shouldn’t we see…what had happened and maybe call the ?” Everyone looked at me as if I were a bit crazy. Call the police….”you must be crazy.” And, everyone resumed normal conversation.

Later Doris explained that you almost never called the cops, you were just asking for trouble..they didn’t really protect black people and they just might shoot you instead, if you were crazy enough to call them.

Race relations were tense in the New York City of the late sixties. I was held up a knife point one evening with another white VISTA volunteer, by three black teenagers. We gave them our cash and they left. We went up to my apartment and called the police. Within a few minutes, the police were there and we got in the police car to search for the perpetrators. Within a few minutes we found them and the police ran down one of the young men. They proceeded to put him, handcuffed, spread eagle out on the hood of the car, and pistol whip him for several minutes, minutes that seemed like hours to me sitting there helplessly in the patrol car. They kept yelling at him, asking where were the others, and calling him the N word.

I was having a hard time believing all this. When we got back to the station, they took the scared young man upstairs for more interrogation. I had already decided that I couldn’t and wouldn’t press charges…..and I did not do so, despite their protestations. They were upset with me, but I was sick to my stomach thinking of what would happen to those young men, if I identified them. I never found out what happened to the young man who went upstairs.

As the end of my VISTA service approached, I was in a big dilemma. Was I going to leave Doris, and go my way, on to law school, or business school? Or was I going to stay with Doris and make a commitment to her… a commitment to us?

It was a pivotal time in US history. The Vietnam war was heating up big time, and there were many protests. The war seemed insane to me. I marched on the Pentagon with some friends I had met in Europe.

And there was the issue of the kids we both hoped to have. I was afraid of the conventional wisdom of the time that “mixed race” kids belonged to no one group, and always had difficult identity issues. Doris’s answer was that: “Dick…. get over it; it’s an advantage to be from a mixed background. Look at me, I’m at least half white myself. You can see all sides more easily in social situations and understand the viewpoints of all better…. it really is an advantage.” As she spoke these words, I could see that they worked for her, and I wanted to believe her….I was madly in love with her.

We were married in a small family ceremony on April 6,1968, two days after Martin Luther King had been shot, and a day after Doris’s 21st birthday. We took a cheap flight to Puerto Rico and had a great week, driving all around the Island,

2 and staying with my old college roommate, who himself had married a local Latina woman he had met in the Peace Corps in Panama.

Marrying Doris was a huge leap for me, similar to the leap, I later thought, that the first Richard Prouty must have made as he left alone, for the new land in 1660. For Doris, it seemed an ordinary and very natural thing to do….. “No big deal.”

We returned from Puerto Rico to my family farm home, an old Cape Cod house on a farm in Norwell, and moved in with my father…as I tried to figure out what to do with my life now. Doris won over my father quickly and my grandmother who lived with my father. I painted houses for money and Doris worked in the garden with my father. The strawberries, tomatoes and asparagus she and Dad grew and harvested were terrific. I ended up deciding to get a Masters degree, and try teaching high school. I needed to work with ‘my people” and address racism.

That summer of ‘68, living at home I had a strange unsettling dream….I was looking in mirror and my face slowly changed to one with black skin and more African features, although recognizably me. I up sweating and afraid. As I thought about what all this meant, I knew the privilege of being white was somewhat under siege in my soul…. And probably needed to be…..if I was to understand it and deal with it openly….In my reading of the psychologists, I liked Carl Jung the best and as I put this dream in a Jungian context, it helped me understand that this fear and anxiety were all parts of me, normal parts really, and that this dream was really a call for continuing to work on integration of my identity, a lifelong quest.

At Antioch, where I got my Master’s degree, I majored in African American History and did a thesis paper on WEB Dubois. I ended up getting a teaching position in Manchester and we moved to Manchester first and then two years later, to Lanesville. I taught senior psychology and sociology and used The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a reading to help my students examine the issues of their own ethnic and racial identity and the relative privilege they had, in the US of the 1970’s.

We had our first child, Ila Sahai in October, 1969, a month after I had started teaching in Manchester. She was a beautiful baby, very light skinned with blond curly hair. One day that following spring, Doris was walking the carriage with Ila in it in downtown Manchester. Some ladies were walking beside her, and noticed baby Ila, and how beautiful she was. One said: “oh what a beautiful child….Whose baby is that?...assuming Doris must be a nannie, as she was a lot darker than the baby. Doris said in her best Manchester accent: “oh daarling…this baby is myyy baby!”

But the racial incident that really put a bit of a scare in me for a good while happened in mid-October of 1972. It was the McGovern-Nixon election period and Governor Wallace was running as a third party candidate. I was building a boat in Riverdale with my new good friend, Jim Schoel, to use with kids, we hoped, in a sailing program.

One evening about 10PM in that October of 1972, we were awakened to fire engines and looked outside. There was a cross burning on the front lawn and some people we walking up to look at it, and see what was happening. We both went outside and I spoke to the fireman who asked what was going on. I said I didn’t know. I looked at the burning cross, about four feet high, and noticed there was a Wallace sticker wrapped around the base of the cross. I got the chills and just froze up. Doris went up to some in the crowd and started talking about how stupid this all was. I couldn’t talk to anyone. We went inside after the fire trucks went away and went back to bed. I decided that I wasn’t going to call the police and neither, of course, was Doris. I had adopted different cultural behavior, not the behavior of a dominant majority person, assuming police protection as a matter of right. ….. I didn’t sleep very much that night.

And then soon, we got a series of “nigger go away” telephone calls every so often for a few weeks. It was an older woman’s voice. We later learned who did it, and through people in the neighborhood, we let this family, an older woman and her lobsterman son, know that we knew who did the burning cross deed. The calls stopped then. And we, through the strength of Doris’s personality, got to be friends with a lot of the persons in the neighborhood who had walked up to see what was up on that fiery night.

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I’ve been emphasizing the stories that really let you see how the experience of being married to an African-American has allowed a privileged white person like me to see a lot of things in a very different light.

The white majority obviously desperately needed help. They needed to see that their own isolation and perceptions of other groups was a very limiting factor, and they needed to see how the racism of institutions was affecting people of color. And much of my teaching career and curricula work at Manchester, and in my roles at Project Advantage, have been designed around these major assumptions and goals.

But, there were many good stories, as well. And good stories about how our children, given the wise advice of Doris about their bi-racial advantage, were able to navigate their childhood.

The most personal and illuminating to me was how well Doris and my father got along. Within a few months, it seemed, they were best friends, and he was showing her how to grow tomatoes the best way and how to cook all his favorite dishes, that he had learned from his mother. My father developed colon cancer in 1974, and died in his bedroom in Norwell three years later, in Doris’s tender loving care. It was the same bedroom where his father, mother, grandparents and great grand parents had died.

So why was my father so open to Doris? And, why were the rest of my Prouty cousins, who gather every Thanksgiving, also so very warm to Doris. Upon reflection, I do think that a big part of my families acceptance of Doris and my marriage was the Unitarian and Universalist background of my father and the Prouty family and cousins and their families. We have been south shore Unitarians and Universalists for hundreds of years now. The dignity of every person was a real thing to my father, part of his very core.

Our children, Ila and Seth, never had any severe racial incidents growing up. Sure, there were the odd name calling incidents at Plum Cove elementary school, and there were the occasional knock down fights that each had as a result of that. But by and large, they learned the good social skills of their parents, could negotiate tricky situations well, and always tried to understand any hateful comment as coming from a point of weakness or vulnerability from the person speaking them. They knew that they were of both African, and European descent, and proud of both of those lines. And, they have grown up as healthy successful adults that make Doris and I both very proud. Doris is in North Carolina today, with our daughter Ila as we await our first grandson, after three wonderful granddaughters.

All of which brings us full circle to that Presidential election night in November of 2008, when my filled up and joyous emotional state was very real. I thought the days of the concept of race were very short indeed. But from 2014 viewpoint, my sermon in 2008 seems more than a bit naïve, at least from the point of a timeline.

Here is what I have come to believe after the last five years about the future of race:

Racial prejudice is stubborn and a persistent meme that will not go away easily. Teachable moments like the Travon Martin incident last year are going to continue to happen for some time.

Class divides are a huge and growing part of the problem. We must address this growing gap between the top 1-2% and the rest of the population. Did you know that in our own Gloucester @50% of our students are eligible for free and reduced lunch rates? But addressing that gap is really not on the educational or city agenda. 40 more service jobs at the hotel are not going to do it, folks.

Another huge problem is the mass jailing of our young males of color; over one third of all black males are behind bars now. This happens mostly through the discriminating way our drug laws are enforced.

But I do have a belief bordering on certainty that the future of race is the same as I thought five years ago. It may take considerably more time, probably multiple decades, but I do believe, as Martin Luther King famously predicted, that we will get to the promised land where the color of a person’s skin will not matter. 4

Yes, education is a big part of the answer, and a real policy to address the issue of class differences in education would make it so much easier. The new Mayor of New York, Bill DeBlasio, is on the right track, I believe, and I wish him success.

The future of race is that the whole concept of race will eventually disappear into being a curious artifact of history. Michelle and Barak and their children, all coming from a genetic mixture of European and African genetic streams, will seem just like you and like me.

And so those tears of mine in 2008 were about many harsh memories and impressions in my nervous system being released and beginning to evaporate. The promise of Doris about our children and their future was now going big screen in a world-wide way.

The rest of the world, by and large, is very hungry for this dream of racial and ethnic unity. People who come from a multitude of backgrounds will become more and more in demand because of their ability to bridge the differences between groups and communicate across the lines of separation.

Finally I do believe our Unitarian Universalist faith is a significant part of the answer. If Unitarian Universalism grows, as we want it to, it will lead the way to a world where the meme of racial stereotypes and phobia have less and less power.

As our faith tells us, in our hearts, we are one with each other and the universe, and we all know it at the deepest parts of our selves. This land is your land, this land is my land, this land is our land!

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