Sam Smith - My life has led me to regard multiculturalism as an asset to be enjoyed, and not, in the manner of much of the media and those involved in its struggles, as only a problem to be solved.
We do this with lots of issues, in part due to a press that prefers telling us about bad happenings rather then satisfying resolutions. This isn't to say that there aren't plenty of problems remaining, only that we might move to more resolutions faster if we were a little more positive about the things we do right.
In trying to sort out why I approach this differently than many, I was reminded of being one of six children, each of them different. I have, for example, a sister who has voted for Trump in the past but no longer and a brother, now passed, who married a Puerto Rican woman and added four young Puerto Ricans to my family company.
My parents also had a black cook who called us her 'white children' and given the amount of time I spent in the kitchen it was a fair description.
But perhaps most important in my youth was that in ninth grade I took what was then one of two high school anthropology courses in the country. Our teacher was great at introducing us to other cultures and he was aided by the fact that as ninth graders we weren't all that fond of our own.
I went on to major in anthropology at Harvard, among the less than one percent of the college who had chosen that approach - and half of them from my high school. These choices were weren't moral, rather that learning about others was more interesting than, say, economics.
A few years after graduation I met a fellow in Washington named Marion Barry. We were both in our 20s and he was looking for a white guy who could handle the press. He had just organized the largest local protest movement in the city's history - a bus boycott - and I had participated and written about it. The typical twenty something doesn't get over 100,000 people to stop doing something for a day so I gladly took on Marion's assignment.
We hit it off and remained allies even after the day Stokley Carmichael walked into SNCC headquarters and said that we whites were no longer welcomed in the civil rights movement. Barry would later describe me as one of the first whites who would have anything to do with him. I backed him when he ran for school board and in his first two mayoral bids.
In time I saw less and less of him. We had lunch one day but I told him some things he didn't want to hear and he later told a reporter, "Sam's a cynical cat." In 1986 I told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "He's basically done to ethnicity what Ronald Reagan has done to patriotism. He's turned it into a personal preserve." About that same time Marion told a reporter doing a story on me that "Sam and I go back a long way, and over the years he's become more radical, and I've become more conservative."
A few years later Barry was charged with three felony counts of perjury and 10 counts of drug possession and briefly was in jail.
You don't jump to simple ethnic conclusions when you have an experience like that. Once , Marion, at a public dinner, ran into my wife and asked, "Where's that sonofabitch?" But when he saw me we hugged because despite all our differences we both knew we were still kin in a too tough world. I'd just lucked out better.
We were living in a city that was nearly half black by the mid-20th century and 71% by 1970. It became known as "Chocolate City" yet, contrary to the national assumption, it was a pleasant place for a white to live.
Thus my experience, from childhood to grown up, included living and working with people of a different culture. It made life more interesting and helped develop the skill of associating with those of a different ethnicity or gender.
We need to do a much better job of introducing others to multiculturalism. And one thing that makes it much easier is not classes on morality and language but repeated good experiences. We don't just need rules….we need friends and good times.
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