Ethnic relations: Beyond law and virtue

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith, 2016 -  For me, discovering other cultures began as early as ninth grade, taking one of only two anthropology courses taught in American high schools at the time. Our teacher, Howard Platt, was a tall, bald, bespectacled Quaker. It was a wonderful world that he laid before us. Not the stultifying world of our parents, the monochromatic world of our neighborhood, the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of endless options, a world in which people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary variety of ways. Mr. Platt's subliminal message of cultural diversity was simultaneously a message of freedom. You were not a prisoner of your culture; you could always go live with the Eskimos, the Indians or the Arabs.

 What we learned that year was strikingly different from what we were learning elsewhere. The world around us, in so many ways, was teaching us to define our place by a process of exclusion, secured by the assumption that we were smarter, whiter, and/or faster than someone else.

 About the same time I had become a drummer and a vigorous student of jazz and its musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Ella Fitzgerald and Fats Waller.  Such characters became cultural role models and helped me start my Quaker school’s first jazz band. They were not honored by my school, parents, or other white adults around me, but they nonetheless became covert pals who helped me enjoy the often tough times of a teenager.

 When I got to Harvard in the 1950s, I found I had been far from alone. Many of my friends, also musicians, were big fans of black jazz and in our beat era rebellion against the conventional found in its players alternative souls and attitudes to admire and emulate. I still remember Miles Davis in a large auditorium playing with his back to the audience and thinking,  yeah, that’s how I feel sometimes. And, coincidentally, to back it all up, the best book I read in college was Martin Luther King’s Stride Towards Freedom, which was not on any course list.

 Further, out of twenty anthropology majors at Harvard, five of us had been students of Howard Platt, who knew how to welcome his students to cultural diversity in a way that today whole towns and institutions – from police departments to universities – have yet to discover. It was not a moral, legal or political discovery, but simply a better way to live and think about others.  

 After college I moved back to my birthplace of Washington, DC, where blacks would be in the majority for fifty years and many lived close to whites. This is something that is generally ignored in talking about ethnic relations. The proximity of cultures makes a large difference simply because, while a community may be segregated, its people are not strangers… Another advantage of cultural proximity is that it damages clichés. It may even break formal cultural rules. Washington’s black madam, Odessa Madre, was a classic example.

 At her peak in the 1940s, Madre was earning about $100,000 a year, and had at least six bawdy houses, bookmaking operations, and a headquarters known as the Club Madre. Among its performers were Moms Mabley, Count Basie and Nat King Cole.

 By 1980, Madre had been picked up 30 times on 57 charges over a 48 year span, seven of them spent in a federal prison.

Madre grew up in a mixed neighborhood of blacks and Irish, the latter heavily populating the DC police force and, in the end, often looking out for their childhood friend. "Negroes and Irishmen got along real well," Madre told the Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy. "They would fight amongst themselves, but we wouldn't fight each other. If somebody outside Cowtown came to fight the Irish, the Negroes would chunk bricks at them. We were like a big happy family."

Writes Milloy: "Thus began a long and prosperous relationship with members of the Metropolitan Police Department.”

 Once, while in the offices of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where I was handling the media for director Marion Barry, the national SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael came from out of town and announced that we whites were no longer welcomed in the civil rights movement. But only a couple of years later I found myself working with blacks and whites to form a third party on behalf of DC statehood just as some years earlier a similar coalition – even including black and white middle class homeowners -  had joined in a successful fight against freeways.

 The longer you lived in DC the more you realized that nothing about its black community was simple. Some 15% were Catholic matched only by New Orleans. Blacks included some of the wealthiest and some of the poorest residents,  including folks whose great great grandparents had lived there as free blacks and some who had only recently arrived from further South.

 There were  also numerous variations in the white community. Those who hated blacks had mostly peacefully moved to the suburbs in large numbers. During the decade of the 1950s the percentage of whites declined by a third.  By 1980 in the nation’s capital just 28% were non-latino whites. During this same period the number of blacks had doubled. Today, whites are back in the majority.

 A 2011 study reported by the Washington Post found that blacks and whites both understood how class could surpass ethnicity. And there was the story of a white guy driving past a black Post reporter mowing his lawn on upper 16^th Street. “What do you get for a lawn?” the white guy yelled out of his car. Replied the black guy, “I get to sleep with the lady of the house.”

 Washington – save for the 1968 riots – managed somehow to handle it all better than many other places are doing today…..  And  the city, for all its other changes, has had, over a half century, nothing but black mayors.

 This complex story was one strong reason I lived in Washington so long and so well. As an independent minded guy, I was complex too and found the city a good place to be your own thing. Further, complexity is an extremely useful foe of clichés.

 My gut rule for dealing with others became twofold: respect and humor. And the payback for me in DC was friendship and  learning lots of new things. Ethnic fairness wasn’t just the law and the right thing to do, it was pleasant, interesting and fun.

 Such factors have gotten lost in our obsession with procedures and rules as the solutions for all our problems.  Law and documents only carry you so far.  And in the best communities you’ll find them hardly mentioned because there are no legal contracts that provide for a happy living.

 This is why for decades I argued for getting police out of their cars into neighborhoods, schools that introduce students to cultural variety as well as mathematical values, a government that made it easier for us all to get along, as well as media and institutions that addressed multi-culturalism not just for its problems but for its vigorous assets.

 I’d seen it and lived it long enough to know it could happen. But the first step was to start talking about it