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 racism 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 African Americans 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 police?” 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.