My Long Journey

I retired in 2013 into a life of outdoor recreation and adventure. I liked it. So more than once I have asked myself how did I get myself into a position where I’m traveling all over the country, searching out stories that are not uplifting, and writing and filming in an attempt to bring to light the long history of racism in this country – the thing that won’t go away -  and to answer the oft-asked question, “Why aren’t Black Americans further ahead?” 

I used to be race neutral. I was born and raised on a small dairy farm in an all-white town in NH, and went to school in an all-white school, and as far as I knew, in an all-white state. I used to say that I didn’t really know I was Black. But I must have. I remember as a kid trying to wash the dark whatever it was off my face. Later I straightened my hair and never risked dating white girls.

I was aware of the occasional overt racism. I wasn’t aware of the nuanced variety. I didn’t understand Black America’s frequent references to slavery that had ended so long ago. And I didn’t see the institutionalized racism imbedded in the foundation that America was built on.  That awareness would come later. America had a fictionalized, rhetorical story about itself, and I bought into it. All men are created equal. My Dad and I installed a flagpole and flew the American flag every day. I was proud of the flag. 

“I believe that our flag is more than just cloth and ink. It is a universally recognized symbol that stands for liberty and freedom.”

John Thune

My older brother, Rick, was light skinned – more olive then Black.  But without me around he could ‘pass’ as something other than Black. Maybe not white exactly, but...something. So he hated having me around. He was the first person to ever call me a nigger. 

In 1964 Rick was accepted into Princeton University. None of us realized that Princeton was the Ivy League school of choice for southern gentry. Rick graduated, but never talked much about his years at Princeton. I recall how he once bitterly told me how sick he got of his classmates telling him how white his teeth looked. A remarkably ignorant remark that I myself had heard often. He told me about a couple of fistfights he got into where it sounded like he was angry enough to kill, and I slowly realized that race had been a factor for him at Princeton.  But I never knew what his experience there was like. But I did know that he was different – quieter, moodier – when he got home compared to when he went away. 

A couple years after graduation - in a rage over a something only he understood - he took his life. As I mopped up his blood I wondered...was this about race? 

Semper Fi! Yeah....whatever. It was during my four years in the Marines where I really started to become aware of race. I had no choice. The Marine Corps in the 60’s and 70’s was a rotten place. Many southerners and inner city Blacks. In the middle was me. More accustomed to a white culture. Not white enough for the southerners and definitely too ‘oreo’ for the inner city Blacks. I vividly recall the joy and celebrations when Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King was murdered and the taunts directed at me. “What you gonna do now, nigger?”

Vietnam was a whole entire ‘nother step up. I had altercations almost everyday from one side or another and came to fear for my life.  I was issued a .38 caliber revolver. I have no idea what I was supposed to do with that dainty little pea shooter. I was way more comfortable with my .50 caliber machine gun. But my last two months or so in Vietnam I slept with it under my pillow. I told myself that I’d shoot anybody who I sensed approached me at night.

Back in the states I tried college. Didn’t like it. So I went to work trying to find a career and eventually settled into an unrewarding corporate life in Information Technology. I was still considered race-neutral. But not really. My years in the Marines and the trouble and hostility and danger I had encountered with my fellow Black Marines had etched a place in my mind. But so had my encounters with racists. I’d begun to think about race in America and that was new for me. 

During those years I was not personally confronted with overt racism. But white America was slowly and subtly gaining ground lost during the Civil Rights era and the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act. When I paid attention I could detect a troubling hint of racism coming from the white house and from congress. Nixon made his share of out and out racist remarks, referring to Blacks living like dogs…The law mandating that distribution of 5 grams of crack cocaine – the Black drug - receive a minimum of five years in prison, vs 500 hundred grams of the same drug in its powdered form – cocaine, the white drug – eliciting the same minimum sentence…the war on drugs which Nixon operative John Ehrlichman revealed: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or (to be) Black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

On average African Americans served virtually as much time in prison for non-violent drug offenses as whites did for violent crimes. We went from the Land of the Free to the Land of the African-American Incarcerated as the prison population grew exploded. To this day the state with the highest rate of incarceration for white men is still lower than the state with the lowest rate of incarceration for Black men. I began to see how thoroughly and successfully politicians were using race as a wedge to stir and divide the American people in order to gin up votes. I wondered if we might solve, or at least move the needle on racial justice if politicians weren’t so busy dividing us.

“Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to the national political scene. I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.”

Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s Vice President, who resigned in disgrace in 1973 after pleading ‘no contest’ to a charge of federal income tax evasion.

I witnessed the sad, 15-year drive to make Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday. It should have been a no-brainer. But I saw the white protest and angry, senseless arguments against having a day that honored a Black man and the lame excuses. “It’ll impact national productivity!” I noted that a prominent senator from Arizona voted against the holiday, and later, in a tight race against an African American, became ‘woke’, realized his mistake, and apologized.  

In 2000 I kayaked the Grand Canyon and this might be where I ‘came out’ and had maybe my first deep discussions about race. There were a bunch of wealthy, liberal, middle-aged, white men who in their discussions believed that racism was largely over and the playing field had become level. Proof positive in their minds was the plethora of Black athletes. Hell…the plethora of Black athletes exist because for those talented enough, or delusional enough to think they are talented enough, that’s one of the few ways to dream of getting out of the ghetto...precisely because the playing field is not level. 

I knew that from the dawn of time that in poll after poll, from the Jim Crow era forward, that white people had declared that the playing field was level. I believe that I had some impact on the discussions. But I noticed in the Grand Canyon, as I’ve observed since, that white people seem to be just completely unable and uncomfortable having a discussion about race. More often then not they try to make it about ‘class’, or anything other than race. I started to learn that it was going to be difficult to change something that so many turned a blind and ignorant eye to and believed didn’t exist.  

Around that same time I took my young son to Washington DC to see some of the monuments and museums. We took a tour of the capitol building. The last stop was the rotunda under the dome. The senator’s aid pointed up to the mural painted on the underside of the rotunda 180 feet above our head and proudly proclaimed that this gigantic mural was an elegant display of the entire history of the United States. There were all kinds of people on the mural: George Washington, of course, appearing very God-like. Pioneers. Chinese building the rail road. Noble Native Americans. But high above our heads on a 4,664 square foot mural, in this building built by forced Black labor, there was not one depiction of an African American. Not one. Once again African Americans were erased from the history of the United States.

I took note that the words ‘Kent State’ where in 1970 National Guardsmen shot and killed four white students, wounding nine others, became a nationally recognized, two-word short cut to define and entire era. But the Orangeburg Massacre where South Carolina Highway Patrol Officers killed four Black University of South Carolina students and wounded twenty-seven others in 1968 hardly received a mention. 

I learned that our national anthem - written by a man who owned slaves while he was eulogizing freedom and was so committed to the cause that he tried to hang a man whose only crime was being in possession of abolitionist literature - pays homage to slavery if you sing it all the way to the third verse. That’s the song my country chose to honor and define itself.

It vaguely bothered me that so many of our heroic founding fathers owned and terrorized human beings that looked like me. But there seemed something even more damning that my country would select not only a slave owner to grace the twenty dollar bill, not only a slave trader, but a man who paid extra for the return of his runaway slaves if they’d been whipped. Whipped up to 300 times. Our hero… our future president… paid extra for the return of a corpse! I took notice when Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin placed on hold the change from Andrew Jackson’s image to that of an actual American hero, Harriet Tubman. And I took notice again when our president went out of his way to praise Jackson. Calling him a great and well-loved American. 

I took note of our selected and distorted teaching of history when I realized that I knew about George Washington’s cherry tree a long time before I knew that ‘The father of our country’ was a slave owner. 

The things I noticed politicians doing to ‘stir and divide’ stacked up. When Ronald Reagan announced his first run for the presidency from the state fair in Philadelphia MS, was it because it was the spot where three civil rights workers had been so brutally murdered sixteen years earlier? Or did the fair just have really good acoustics? And when during his announcement he emphasized ‘states rights’, the post Civil War myth of the cause of the war....who was he speaking to? Lee Atwater, senior political consultant to Reagan and later to George H.W. Bush clarified that:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.”

As we moved into the Tea Party era, race took on a new and frightening significance.  All protest to the contrary, those of us who are Black had no confusion at all about what was meant by the phrase, “Take the country back”. 

When Trayvon Martin was killed by a wannabe cop, Black and white Americans banded together to say Black Lives Matter too! But even that plea for simple justice and respect was usurped by police and supported by those who chant ‘Law and Order’. Leading the chant were two of the most racist law enforcement chiefs in American history – Joe Arpaio and David Clarke. Coming so soon after the Black Lives Matter founding, Blue Lives Matter was clearly an eye-rolling, code-talking façade, masquerading as something good and wholesome and American when in reality it was just one more subtlety disguised, racist rebuke rolled up with the ultimate insult, Black Lies Matter. If we ask not to be wantonly killed, we’re dismissed as liars. 

A very good friend of mine, a ranking federal law enforcement officer – as kind and fair and honest as I could ask a person to be, but naïve, displays a Blue Lives Matter plate on the required rear of his Arizona truck, and a custom Blue Lives Matter on the front. It’s hard for me to look at. So subtle has racism become that it can be disguised as patriotism or law and order and unknowingly perpetuated by good and decent people. 

And again, with increasing dismay, I took note and wondered, “What can I do?” Because I don’t believe that this is who we, as Americans, are. I thought about Doctor Martin Luther King’s simple request: “All we ask From America is to be true to what you wrote down.” When Beyonce presented Colin Kaepernick with Sports Illustrated’s Muhammad Ali Legacy Award, she said, “It’s been said that racism is so American that when we protest racism, some assume we’re protesting America”…so hardened is racism into the concrete foundation of America. 

I questioned how we as a country and we as a race had gotten to where we are today. So for years I read. I studied. I didn’t know that redlining and housing discrimination were official government policies, and not just whims of racist bankers...that my government intentionally created ghettos, and then turned them into slums.  That Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and VA benefits were all originally denied to most Black Americans. I hadn’t connected how such an uneven playing field in the recent past, or all the myths over the true cause of the Civil War had contributed to where we are today. Not only was this country built on a foundation of racism, but then we’d lied about it. And as I began to understand I thought, “If I haven’t known, how can I expect other people to?” 

I slowly had the realization that if white people didn’t know how deeply institutionalized racism was rooted against Black Americans, then their only logical conclusion had to be that Black Americans were stupid and lazy. Lacking personal responsibility. A description of us that is often just below the surface. Or on the surface. That we choose to live in dangerous, sub-standard housing. That we choose the jobs on the bottom rung of the jobs ladder. That we choose poor, dangerous, underfunded  schools for our children. That we choose incarceration.  Those are not what we choose. Those are what we reluctantly endure. I myself have been guilty of sometimes thinking it was a choice. 

And then in 2015 and 2016 racism seemed to explode onto the American landscape! And I pondered what, if anything, I might do to help close the great divide.  I wondered...if words could so thoroughly divide this country, could words help heal? At that time, I’d been on the board of High Country News magazine for 9 years. So I approached Paul Larmer, the HCN Executive Director, and after a long discussion, I decided to write. To track down stories all over the west. Stories of where Black Americans worked hard to create their piece of the Great American Dream. And where they had been thwarted by entrenched, systemic, institutionalized racism. Not the KKK variety that ends life. The business and government variety that alters life. Makes it harder. More difficult. Less pleasant. Two steps forward. One step back. 

My dream is of a place and time when America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.

Abraham Lincoln

As I’ve traveled and talked to folks in pursuit of Civil Conversations, I’ve learned much. I’ve been inspired and awestruck by the hard work of those from several generations or more in the past. I still cannot imagine walking to Nicodemus, to a flat plain, and having the fortitude to envision a home, a farm, a family, a town, a life. I am struck by those early pioneers reliance on faith in their God. And on each other. Their endeavor and success required not only strong backs and a strong fortitude, but also a stunning work ethic and unwavering integrity. I wished that all Black Americans could experience Nicodemus. I wonder what a third generation inner city Black knows of his or her heritage? Of how proud they would be to know of things they’ll never learn in school.  They, like I, would be inspired. 

In Denver’s Five Points, where I am still wandering around, the lessons are similar. Hard work. Foresight. Integrity. Faith in God and neighbors. Vision. In Denver I am surprised to find early pioneers, being only a generation or two away from slavery, often with such high levels of education and entrepreneurship. Clearly, once these folks were free, they pursued opportunity  - the classic American Dream - with a vengeance. In Denver, some citizens found unique ways to help their community. Some started banks that would make loans to their neighbors. Others started real estate firms. Or created decent, low-income housing opportunities. I am surprised at the stunning vitality of the Black so-called ghetto. The jazz greats who came from New Orleans and New York, but despite their fame and even adoration, could only stay and eat in Five Points. 

And in Portland, despite the racism and housing discrimination, I found what I found in Denver and Nicodemus. Hard work. Faith. Education. Hope. Vision. Vitality. 

I was looking for institutionalized, racist pushback and I found it. I’ve been surprised at the breadth and depth of organized, sanctioned, coordinated, long-term, structural racism. At the effort to “keep us in our place”.  How the past has affected the present. We like to think that as a country we’ve made more progress than we actually have. 

I wonder what Nicodemus would be today if the railroad and the highway would not have by-passed it in favor of a barely existing white town. What would the Albina district of Portland have become if it had not been for redlining, bulldozers, and gentrification? Would the African American population of wealthy and exclusive Marin County CA be higher than a paltry 2.8% if the county was a welcoming as they like to say they are? For that matter, where would African Americans on the whole be if we’d been allowed to live in those first, government supported suburbs, instead of being forced into projects and then abandoned altogether? If we’d had access to good jobs...quality education? Where would we be if at every turn in the hard work to grab our share of the good life if we hadn’t constantly been racing into a headwind, while our fellow Americans were not? And how do we tear down that wall so that we so we can race forward? And how many problems would we quickly solve if we weren’t so enmeshed in race? 

I am reminded of the last verse of the famed African American poet Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again”.

“O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath —

America will be!”

And I’m also reminded of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther Kings’ simple plea. “All we ask (of America) is be true to what you wrote down.” That’s it. Be true, America, to what you wrote down. 

So here I am, working to give my fellow Americans the tools to have Civil Conversations across The Great Divide. I’ve been doing this in one form or another for a long time. As Assistant Director of Outdoor Programs at Dartmouth College I took on the challenge of trying to bring Black students into the many outdoor activities that Dartmouth offered. 

While at Dartmouth I also worked directly with Bob Stanton, Director of the National Park Service to understand the lack of minority visitors and employees in National Parks – especially natural parks  - and to develop ways to change that imbalance. 

After leaving Dartmouth I continued to work with students to create programs, opportunities, and most importantly, a mind-set for minority students to feel both comfortable with going outdoors and to receive the “social permission” from their peers to engage in activities that had been promoted forever as “white” activities reflecting “white values”. 

Over the course of many years I wrote about the lack of diversity in outdoor pursuits. I gradually began to see the lack of minorities, especially the lack of Black Americans, as a symptom of the larger issue of the disease of American racism. I continued to write. I’ve been published in major outlets across the west. I also began to film. 

And then in May, 2020, George Floyd was slowly and excruciatingly murdered in Minneapolis by a white police officer and my fledgling Civil Conversations project exploded. I’ve been sought out and asked to write more, to engage in discussions with police departments, to podcast, to engage in social media, to co-lead a task force looking into the good, the bad, and the ugly – if any exist - of our local law enforcement departments. And most importantly to take The Civil Conversations Project to a bigger, more expansive level. 

In this time of such national hatred, what could possibly be more important?