Sam Smith – One of the ways I’ve survived as an independently minded guy is that from an early age I learned that others weren’t like me and I figured out how to get along with them anyway. It wasn’t really a choice I made because I started with four sisters and one brother and from an early age none of us thought or talked about the same things the same way.
I had, for example, one sister who voted for Donald Trump and a brother who married a Puerto Rican gal and had four Puerto Rican children, including a son who went into sports coverage and became a media pal of his uncle.
The one thing we all had in common was our parents who, virtuous as they were in their life’s work, tended to leave us to an English nannie, who helped me into journalism by listening to Edward R. Murrow every night, and a black cook who openly argued that it was she, and not my mother, who had raised me.
In fact, it was really friends of, and workers for, my parents who had the greatest influence on my growing up.
In any case it was all unpredictable. For example, I early became a jazz musician but when my father died, found myself helping to run the classical music radio station he had started in Philadelphia. And as a youthful journalist I learned early on not to argue with those you interviewed or openly disagreed with. I had chosen a career working with folk who were different.
I also learned much more about all this when in ninth grade at my Quaker school I took a course in anthropology - then one of two such high school courses in the country. So powerful it was, I went on to major in anthropology at Harvard College – one of six students in this major at the time, and three them graduates of my high school.
In short, I had given priority to learning about a world that was different than me, yet with which I could live in comfort.
I credit my ninth grade anthropology teacher – Mr. Platt – for much of these wise moves, which led me to realize that the world had over 300 million gals and guys and I was only one of them.
And it made it easy for me to move to work in Washington DC, which 12 years after I got there was 71% black.
DC got little praise or note for its blackness (now down to about 43%) but it was remarkable nonetheless and created a dramatically different culture, one in which, for example, two guys – a white named Sam Smith and a black named Marion Barry –could work together on civil rights issues in their 20s.
I’ve come to realize that it was not just DC that was ignored. The whole published history of the civil rights movement gives little attention to the good side of the story: how blacks and whites were able to actually get along. We are trained in the results of evil but much less in how a better society can be shared without common culture or skin color.
My siblings, my parents and our black cook had taught me early on that folks are different. More than 40 years living in DC confirmed this. In all this time, though, I hardly ever had a mean personal ethnic related experience. My skin color didn’t matter. My involvement in issues and with our neighbors did.
Sixteen years ago my wife and I moved fulltime to Maine where I had spent many summer vacations since the late 1940s. In both places, I came to realize that what you did and said had much more importance than what you looked like. I was free to be myself as long as I treated others with fairness and respect.
In short, I had benefited from those early years when I discovered that how you talked, smiled, sympathized and shared with others mattered far more than just the color of your skin.
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