Culturally Proficient Leadership: The Personal Journey Begins within

My first recollection of race was as a small child. I lived with my parents in a shotgun-style house that was located on the “other side” of the railroad tracks, behind a factory, in a neighborhood that was racially mixed. There were three groups we now call demographic groups—our labels were “colored people,” the Irish, and we who were from “mid-southern” states. The period was the late 1940s and early 1950s. The black men and the southern white men worked in one of the three factories in town. My recollection is the Irish families were all related. They operated the trash collection business in town.

We all lived in this largely unimproved neighborhood. Yes, we had running water and some indoor plumbing, but the toilet was an outhouse in the back yard. In fact, one of the summer rituals was for the neighborhood men each summer to dig a new hole and to move the toilet. The bathtub was a Wheeling tub that my parents would fill with warm water heated on the stove for us to use. I never regarded it as a hard life because it wasn't. That was our life. Our house was clean and neat and I assume that was the case for all the other families in our neighborhood.

The odd thing was that we did very little visiting with those who were not like us. My father was always clear about the mistreatment of Negroes in the larger society. Neither of my parents went beyond eighth grade in their formal education. When he retired, my father had worked [Page 142]forty years in a foundry. My mom worked primarily in the home, except for a few years that she worked in a department store when my sister and I were in high school. During the time we lived in this neighborhood, my father freely walked up and down the street and, due to his gregariousness, walked in and out of everyone's homes. In contrast, my mother visited with no one and was not about to visit in the home of a black person. As you can imagine, black people were not invited to our home either. Directly across the street was the Smith family, a black family of two parents and several children. Ralph Jr. was my age and was in my class at Irving Elementary School. However, my mother would not permit him to play in our yard and I was never allowed to cross the street to his house. As a result, my thinking about matters of race developed when I was quite young.

Living in a home with parents who had different perspectives on race was disquieting and informing. My father was well known, and appeared to be liked, by Mr. and Mrs. Smith, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Franklin who lived down the street. Hmmm, I just thought of it, there was no apparent segregation—black and white families were interspersed together on our street. I guess the social pattern was where separation was maintained, at least in my family. While my father spoke against issues of racism, my mother was less generous.

Gender roles in our family were fairly traditional for the time. My father worked in the factory and my mother was a homemaker who worked in the home. Mom did the cooking, house cleaning, and lots of sewing and crocheting as hobbies. My dad's hobbies were the traditional male roles of hunting and fishing. In the evenings, we read or listened to the radio (I was in sixth grade when we got our first television). Though the work roles were traditional, my parents never deferred to one another due to gender roles. My sister, who is two years younger than I, fulfilled traditional female roles in high school for the 1950s—cheerleader, drum major, and homecoming queen. It was not until I was in high school that mom ventured out and took sales clerk jobs in local stores.

Religion and church played interesting roles in my formative years. Though I did not attend church until I was ten years old, religion was always present in conversation and the music that entered our homes and family get-togethers. My two most vivid images of religion are in seeming contrast: (1) gospel songs were present in our family get-togethers and in our radio music; and, (2) most often the Bible was “quoted” when a threat was deemed necessary (e.g., “that” is a sin; it says so in the Bible!).

It was in this earliest stage of my development that I became aware of differently abled people. There were men returning from World War II and the Korean War who had been wounded and disabled. Additionally, there was a man who was deemed by many to be of very low IQ but harmless. He could be seen at every high school football and basketball game and was known by all in town. He seemed to know everyone, too. He was just there, one of the many and varied people in town.

Both my mother and father's families had migrated to Illinois when they were children from mid-southern states. My father's family migrated in the late 1920s from an area close to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. My mother's family had their roots in the Appalachian region of eastern Tennessee. Right after World War II the sun porch on the back of our house became the transitional home for many of mom's relatives who came to Kewanee in search of decent paying jobs. Some of the family stayed while others returned to Tennessee in ensuing years. This intercourse of family reconnected us with mom's aunts and uncles and facilitated most of our family vacations being with family in and around Kingsport, Tennessee. Our Tennessee family ranged from the very prosperous to some who were destitute. However, what I remember most are the hostile racial attitudes. Moreover, what I remember most vividly was my father's deft challenging of family members' attitudes. He was one of the few people who could do it and get away with it! The period was the mid to late 1950s. The modern civil rights movement was emerging. The Brown decision had rolled across the country like a veritable steamroller. In my community of marginalized, poor white people it raised all kinds of anger. I remember going to get my hair cut in Kewanee and having the barber say, “Well, if I have to cut ‘their’ hair, I have separate combs and brushes and I will burn them after they leave!”

Anyway, back to the Tennessee family. I remember my father being in a heated, but friendly debate (he was one of the few people in my life who could do both). Dad commented to a family member, “You are so prejudiced that you have labeled directions on the map to be east, west, south and up south!” Whatever heat he had stoked, he also caused to abate.

Gender roles in our extended family from Kentucky and Tennessee and the presence of religion were very similar to my experience in our hometown in Illinois. Men did men things and women did women things. Religion was comprised of things to fear, but gospel songs were uplifting. Formal religious training was largely absent. For that reason, my parents [Page 144]joined the First United Methodist Church. They thought it was time for my sister and me to be baptized and confirmed. I have wonderful recollections of the pastor at the time, Dr. Loyal M. Thompson, but the church experience was mostly social for me. I enjoyed the opportunity to be with other students my age and the history part of the Sunday school classes was usually interesting. I was aware that the kids in my school were of varying religions but it didn't seem to be an issue. However, adults could name the three Jewish families in town.

High school was essentially a blur for me. In fourth grade, my mom facilitated a move across town to get away from them and to a place where we had the toilet inside the house. I remember that being a good thing and have little recollection of missing the kids in the neighborhood. After all, I wasn't allowed to play with them, except at school as long as I remembered not to mention it at home. Oh yes, we did live in Tucson for most of my 8th grade year where I learned there were Mexicans, but I don't recall that being a divisive issue within my family. We did live next door to a family that included a boy about my age who had cerebral palsy. It was my first experience being near someone who needed full-time family care. My parents were quite friendly with his parents and my sister and I were taught not to fear his being different from us.

By high school, most of the black students had disappeared. There were two black students in my class and, though I knew them, there was virtually no contact.

[Page 145]My recollection of race was that it was invisible for me in high school. It was not part of my curriculum or my daily reality. My recollection of high school is somewhat idyllic—almost like Happy Days. I was not part of the in-group, but it was not a contentious experience either. I worked twenty to twenty-five hours (first as custodian's helper), then when I turned sixteen I became a stock boy (at the local A&P Food Store) and did well in school.

The high point for me was meeting Harry Babbitt. Dr. Babbitt was my freshman Spanish teacher. I ended up having him for three years of Spanish and one year of English. His contribution to my life was taking three other students and me on a driving tour of Mexico during Christmas, 1957. It was an experience that forever changed my life! I experienced a world that was different from anything I had ever experienced. We toured like middle class Mexicans, not Americans, visiting Mexico. We stayed in pleasant hotels where we practiced our Spanish. In Mexico City, I had my initial experience eating spaghetti with the accompaniment of a pasta spoon. We visited Chapultepec Palace and scaled the Pyramid of the Sun. We romped on the beach at Manzanillo—virtually alone on Christmas Day! We rode through the jungles on the way to Manzanillo and awoke one morning in my hammock to the cacophony of thousands of parrots. However, it was not all rosy as we also saw many examples of poverty that seemed more destitute than what we saw in the United States.

For me though, I saw another world. I saw a world of possibilities. I saw a world in which I wanted to be. Dr. Babbitt assumed that I was college material. I had no idea what that meant, but knew it was for me. I knew I was hungry for experiences that I could not see.

As a student, my awareness of gender roles was limited to the sports arena—boys were in interscholastic sports and girls participated in Girl's Athletic Association and as cheerleaders. Academically, girls and boys seemed to be well represented in science and mathematics and, more important, whom we recognized as the smartest kids. It seemed that boys and girls both went to college. Sexual orientation was a topic of sophomoric jokes.

Religion didn't appear to me to be an issue in my high school. However, it did occur in my home when my mother learned I was dating a Catholic girl. It was a muted objection that didn't last long, however I remember being stunned by the very raising of the issue. Over the years to ensue I was to learn that cross-cultural issues were often tested at the “dating age.” The other occurrence was when my grandmother referred to her physician as “that Jewish doctor.” It was never expressed in malevolence, only as a matter of fact as if it was part of his name. Christian physicians were not similarly identified.

When I walked across the stage for high school commencement, proverbially I had a one-way ticket out of Kewanee in my back pocket. At the time I thought I wanted to leave Kewanee behind. I now know that I wanted to leave bigotry behind.

Due to a kidney ailment, I missed much of the second semester of my senior year in high school and had to delay entry into college a year while I healed. However, unlike many of my peers who delayed entry into college and never attended, I was very clear that I was not staying home!

In Kewanee and Macomb of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was something that didn't seem to touch me. It was on television and in the newspapers. I was aware of the lunch counter sit-ins and my dad and I talked about the bigotry and racism in our country, but it was not part of my daily life. Macomb, Illinois, didn't seem to be touched by the issues either. That was because I was ignorant of the presence of the issues in my midst.

At the beginning of my junior year at Western Illinois University (WIU), many of us who had chosen to avoid the Greek life were confronted with the need to develop well-rounded resumés. Our advisors strongly urged that we have something in our resumés to demonstrate to prospective employers that we were well rounded. So, I pledged a service fraternity associated with the Boy Scouts of America—the Mu Nu chapter of Alpha Phi Omega. As a service fraternity, we had two distinctive features—we were forbidden to have a house and we had black members. In my second semester I met John Elliott. John and I were social science education majors. Though I knew John—we had several classes together in our first two years—I never had a reason to really know him. After all, he was a gifted athlete, was exceptionally handsome, and seemed academically talented and out of my league. However, he pledged APO in the class after me (for the same resumé building reason) and the development of my racial identity was about to move to another level. Part of this development occurred during our time at WIU and part was to resume a few years later.

[Page 147]I am not sure where the new phase of my identity development began. John was the most artfully well-spoken person I had known to this point in my life. He had a rapier wit that could cut a person to the quick and, at the same time, a charming persona that made (white) people thank him for kicking their butts. Intuitively, I knew he was right. We did our student teaching the same quarter, Winter 1964, and upon returning to Macomb in March 1964 chose to room together off campus. “The education of Randy” was to continue at the new level. We both applied for campus jobs. We were both employed in food service. I served dessert in the women's dorm. John scrubbed pots and pans. I did not see the disparity until John pointed it out to me. Duhhhhh!

One evening we were going to play basketball. John was an accomplished athlete. I have been accused of many things in my life, yet being an athlete is not among them. For some reason, John saw fit to talk to me before the game. His caution was that in the heat of competition, I might utter the “dreaded racial slur” that he had never heard from me. I recall his being humored by my naiveté. His caution was that it would not be a problem if the word slipped out while we were playing one on one, but that I should exercise extreme caution and not let it slip in the presence of his black friends. Even now, I wonder why John invested that time and energy in me. However, I never made the miscue.

My last quarter at WIU was the summer of 1964. To fill my unit requirements, I took a master's level seminar in order to graduate. The seminar was Constitutional Law. During one session, the instructor who doubled as the department chair came in waving the local newspaper. He announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday the president signed a piece of legislation that will forever change your lives, The Civil Rights Act of 1964.” He had no idea how prophetic he was to be about my life.

John and I graduated August 1, 1964. I had a contract to teach in Kankakee and, to my recollection, John was still looking for a teaching position. I was surprised on my first day in Kankakee to learn that John also landed a position in Kankakee. The subtlety that was lost on me was that John had a much better resumé than I, but he got his position only when school was about to open.

I was single and John had married his college sweetheart, Joann, and they had begun their family with John Jr. It was when my principal was assisting me to look for housing, and he took me to a street map to orient me to the district, when I was to understand the racial bifurcation of the district. He outlined for me where I should look for housing and where I should avoid looking. John and Joann lived in the area I was to avoid. They had a lovely apartment; it was just that they had few choices.

In my teaching, I was not aware of formalized tracking until I saw the subtlety. My ninth grade ancient history sections were monolithically white, while my social studies classes were overrepresented with low-income white and black students. The former were college bound and the latter were high school bound. The blatant racism of some of the teachers was incredible. What was more incredible was the complicity of those of us who stayed silent.

Almost as oblivious was my awareness of the special education class in our junior high school building. I knew nothing of the students because they had their own classroom, their own teacher, and were identified by the use of terms such as EMR and TMR. There was little or no contact between the students from that classroom and our students. Too often, the students with special needs were the objects of jokes from both the regular education students and we educators.

In the summer 1966, I began my master's degree in Teaching of History at the University of Illinois where I took eight units in Negro American history. It was that eight units that formally changed my life forever. In one of the courses, I read all of the published works of James Baldwin and his novel, Another Country, has become the metaphor for my life. Everything I learned was new! I already had one degree in U.S. History, but nothing I learned at the U of I was a repeat—not even an allusion! It was all new. I was learning the history of a different United States. This was one of my first lessons in multiple perspectives!

It is important to remember that by this time Cheney, Schwermer, and Goodman had been killed by a white mob in Mississippi amid the drive to register black voters throughout the South, that the Watts riots had been the first of several urban riots, and that secondary schools were experiencing racially-based uprisings. As I brought my new knowledge to my high school classes, I was shocked at the resistance from some students. In retrospect, I was not aware at how racial attitudes were so deeply ingrained in our society. My naiveté continued unchecked. I guess the other half of the naiveté was the roiling awareness of the development of my own racial identity—privilege and entitlement.

My two years in Hanford contributed to my racial identify in one fundamental way. I had my first contact beyond the black-white racial dynamic. In Hanford, I had my first adult contact with two racial identity issues—Mexican Americans as immigrants and as historical residents, and Portuguese primarily as immigrants. With the former, it was as if they replaced African Americans as being an underclass in the way they were regarded in the schools and community. While there were many Americans of Mexican decent who were part of the mainstream social and economic dynamics of the community, most were part of the field labor pool. In contrast were the Portuguese who to the untrained eye appeared to be Latino, and they were much more likely to assimilate in two to three generations than were the Mexican Americans. Furthermore, the Portuguese were treated by the white community as more mainstream/assimilated.

This dynamic of who was assimilated in the school-tracking scheme became an education in privilege and entitlement. Unlike the subtlety practiced in Kankakee, the Hanford educators held tracking to a high value. The school had four tracks. From bottom to top they were—Z, Y, X and Advanced Placement. The lowest track, Z, was highly populated with Mexican Americans whereas they were almost invisible in the Advanced Placement sections. My first year at the school, as an unknown, I was assigned to two sections of Z, two sections of Y, and one of X. In the spring, I was informed that since I had proven myself in the first year, I would not have the Z track the next year. I was to learn that if one had a high proportion of their load assigned to the Z track, you most likely were not valued and that you were being pressured to leave.

In February 1970, I received a phone call from John Elliott that was to unfold the next chapter of my life. Kankakee was being pressured to desegregate their schools. John had been appointed as Community Services

[Page 150]Director for the district and the superintendent asked him to find a white person with whom he could work. In late spring, I interviewed and received the appointment to serve as Advisory Specialist to the Superintendent on matters related to school desegregation. John and I agreed we knew nothing about desegregation, but we would learn. Learn we did.

The week my wife and I were leaving Hanford for our cross-country drive to Kankakee, I received a letter with no return address but with a Kankakee postmark. The message was comprised of cut out letters and the message warned me not to come to Kankakee. I would like to say that I was emboldened, but having seen how so many civil rights workers and others who supported integration efforts were treated, I was, in all candor, scared to death. I called John and told him of the letter and his response was I told you it wouldn't be easy. So I sucked it in, found a bit of resolve, and proceeded to Kankakee. I was never to hear about the letter again—in any form.

By the time I arrived, in mid-June 1970, John and the superintendent, Lee Grebner, had been working closely with representatives of the U.S. Office of Civil Rights to develop Kankakee's desegregation plan. John had cultivated deep, positive relationships with parents in the black and white communities to support the desegregation plan. The district had two high schools and two middle schools, so by moving the boundary lines the secondary schools could be desegregated relatively easily. There were eight elementary schools, one in the black community and seven in the white communities. The desegregation plan involved having the school in the black community and one in a white community turned into fourth and fifth grade centers and all other elementary schools were to be primary grade centers (i.e., Grades K-3). The result was that black kids were bused out of their communities in Grades K-3 and white students were bused into the two 4–5 grade centers, one of which was in the black community. In preparation for receiving children into Franklin School, centered in the black community, the district did an unprecedented face lifting to the school. (It is important to note that the black community supported the [Page 151]desegregation plan. The first year of the desegregation plan, 1970–71, vandalism at the school declined by 95 percent.) John and the mother's advisory group he formed implemented initial cross-town busing for desegregation without incident.

In the summer months of 1970 leading to the opening of school, I inherited the good planning that had been done by John and the superintendent. That summer we conducted two staff development activities. One series was led by Bea Young of the Illinois Commission on Human Relations (ICHR) and involved working with teachers to develop supplementary materials to the K-12 history and language arts materials that detailed the omissions, distortions, and fallacious assumptions in district text books. This activity provided me the opportunity to work with specialists provided by the ICHR and teachers from the district to develop supplementary materials for teacher use. My role during the year was to organize and deliver staff development sessions for teachers in appropriate use of the materials.

The second series of staff development sessions was with teacher leaders and administrators and was led by consultants from Ebony Management Associates. The sessions were comprised of a three week, five hour a day sensitivity session. The desired outcome was to develop us as a team in support of the desegregation effort.

These two staff development sessions were important to me personally and, I believe, to many other participants. However, I believe the sessions also served to galvanize resistance within school leadership and within the community. I was to learn that resistance to our work was latent in these early weeks and would surface later in the school year.

The fall of 1970 was surprisingly calm on the desegregation front. I spent much of my year working with school teams to learn how to use the companion materials. In retrospect, I am not certain they were widely used. However, there are anecdotal accounts that I recall vividly. One was an African American male elementary teacher who was so grateful for the materials. He confided in me that the information was mostly new to him. Another was a white female parent who was most disturbed by the materials. Her thinly veiled criticism was centered on the fact that “I” had capitalized “Black,” but not white. She was resistant to the perspective that the former was a proper noun and the latter was not. She had gone through one of the volumes and had underlined all the passages with which she disagreed. The interesting thing was that she could provide no evidence; just that since it was new information to her it must have been fictionalized.

The peace ended in late spring, 1971, when riots broke out at the high schools. The riot at Eastridge High School was most devastating because a white male student was stabbed and several students were injured in melees. The principal called John and me in to assist, but had to eventually call in the police to clear the halls. John and I called ICHR who linked us with consultants from the Chicago YMCA who specialized in teen conflict. We took the suspension list and had the black students [Page 152]identify the white ringleaders and the white students to identify the black ringleaders. We took them off-site and worked thought the conflict. In two days of heavy difficult confrontations the students began to realize they were not enemies. In fact, we uncovered the fact that the white students were goaded into action by a few of the white teachers.

If I have any clear recollection of my years in Kankakee it was the intractable racism of a few of the teachers. They were audacious enough to openly use racial slurs to describe black students and to publicly express doubt about the intellectual capability of black students. My companion recollection was that most of the rest of us conspired by our silence. It was this small group of teachers and administrators who were most surprised at my returning to Kankakee to work on the desegregation program. Though they knew of my friendship with John, they were surprised at my commitment to an antibiased curriculum and instruction program. I now had a forum from which to speak.

The upshot of the riots was that John and I prepared a report of our findings to deliver to the superintendent and board of education in June 1971. In the preceding April the community had elected a new member to the board. He was to prove himself to be deeply committed to undermining the desegregation efforts. The superintendent was aware that the small boardroom at the district office was not large enough for the large number of community members who would attend to hear our report, so the meeting was moved to the multipurpose room at Westridge High School. We sat on the front row facing members of the board. There were several hundred in attendance. In the minutes leading to the official beginning of the meeting, there was a hum among those in attendance. All of a sudden the room went quiet. About fifty state police in riot gear entered the room and assumed positions on the periphery of the room. I was to find out later that the superintendent was not involved in the decision and was as surprised as anyone else in the room. We were to learn later that the new board member, who was an executive in an international corporation that had a plant in Kankakee, had worked with an elementary principal to make the decision to involve the state troopers in our meeting. In a subsequent meeting, this board member, in collusion with other members, created the position of Executive Superintendent and successfully appointed the elementary principal into the position. The superintendent was shocked, as were the rest of us.

The next day, the new Executive Superintendent told me that he had to rely on John and me to continue our program. He told me that I had legitimacy in the black community that he wanted to support. Concurrent with these events I was developing an application for continued funding of our efforts. At the direction of my program officer, I created a needs assessment in which I documented disparities in the treatment of black and white students—retention in first and eighth grades, suspension and expulsion rates. At the end of the summer, the superintendent told me he would not submit the application, effectively ending my employment because my data made the district look bad!

[Page 153]During that year, November 1970 to be precise, I had attended the initial training of advisory specialists conducted by Jim Barnes and staff from the University of Hartford. It was at this training that I met Ray Terrell. Meeting Ray was to change my life forever in very constructive ways; we developed a very special friendship. During that school year he came to Kankakee to consult for me and I conducted a session for him at the Princeton City School District in suburban Cincinnati. During the spring, 1971, Ray had offered me a position with him, which I turned down as I was committed to Kankakee. I was relieved to find out in August the position was unfilled and by early September 1971, I was living in Cincinnati and was a member of Ray's desegregation team.

Ray wanted me to work with two primarily white communities—Heritage Hill and Springdale. I served as a community school director supervising programs that were consistent with community development efforts conceptualized by the Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan. In reality, the position provided me transparent cover to work with Ray on the desegregation team. I loved the work, the camaraderie, and working with Ray. It was in this year that I began my journey to understanding racism and developing my identity as a white male in this society.

Ray involved team members in readings, discussions, and conferences in which we plumbed our thoughts, feelings, and notions about race and class. I was able to draw on my academic work about Negro American History, the curricular materials we developed in Kankakee, and my deep resentment over what had happened in Kankakee. It was at this stage in my development that I made a powerful association. Even today I can't locate its genesis, whether Ray pushed me to the realization or if it was the confluence of so much stuff. My realization about what had happened in Kankakee was that I had the choice of walking away, licking my wounds, [Page 154]maintaining an air of self-righteousness, and living a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Or, I could stay engaged with the issues and do what I could to make life better for myself and others. I chose the latter.

I became fascinated with trying to understand white, institutional racism. I could identify racism. I could give examples of racism. I could not understand it. I read the Kerner Report. I studied Pat Bidol's curriculum Developing New Perspectives on Race. I pored over Abraham Citron's monograph The Rightness of Whiteness: The Malformation of the Mind of the White Child in the Suburban Ghetto. Robert Terry's For Whites Only became my companion. I was beginning to understand that knowing whiteness helped me understand why all of the information in my Negro American history courses was new. My insights transcended the personal knowledge of white culpability to a beginning awareness of the systemic nature of racism. Samuel Yette's The Choice helped me to see that white people always had the choice to deal with issues of racism, whereas for black people dealing with racism was/is a natural course of events.

During our year together in Princeton, I learned more about my white racial identity. For one thing, I became comfortable for the first time with my social class. For some reason, I had developed the desire to conceal this fact from others and myself. I vividly recall two sixth grade lessons: In the first, our teacher, for a lesson on nutrition, had us write down what we ate for our three meals. I was reluctant to include gravy in my description for fear that gravy was not eaten by others and would betray my lower class status. In the second experience, my teacher had graded me a straight “A” in all subjects for the first four grading periods. During the fifth grading period he visited our modest home after which he graded me a straight “B” in all subjects. His explanation to my father was that we were going into junior high school the next year and he wanted us to know it would be more difficult. At the end of the year, he added a course titled “Writing” to our grade report cards and entered a grade of “B” retroactively to all grading periods, effectively interrupting the straight “A” designation of the first four grading periods. It was interesting to learn that this only occurred for those of us from modest backgrounds. My peers from “nicer” homes continued with uninterrupted straight “A” grades. I was not unclear on my social class.

Now that I am thinking about it, as a sophomore at WIU, in my introductory sociology class, Dr. Jane Stull had us find our social class on a nine-level schema. Each of the three social classes was further subdivided into three groups. After searching for my parents' level of education and employment I was stunned to learn that I was in middle-lower class. I can still recall the mild shock and looking around at my classmates in embarrassment, hoping they didn't see my results. Though I had the distasteful experiences in my sixth grade class, it was this experience that made it a reality—I was lower class.

Irrespective of “getting in touch with my own social class,” I was learning in Princeton with Ray, Nancy, Eric, Tom, and Don about the reality that when we confront racism, all boats rise. One of the things that continues [Page 155]to perplex me today is how I was able to make that connection—either emotionally or intellectually! So many of my colleagues, it appeared to me, examined the same issues only to become defensive about disparity and chose to use that against black Americans. I assume it was my relationship with Ray and John that kept me from falling into that trap?

The most vivid recollection from my year in Princeton with Ray came at the end of the year. In August 1972, Ray had accepted a position with Texas A & M and I was moving into the district office to assume his staff development responsibilities. The school district had elected a new member to the school board. She had run for the school board representing the White Citizens of Sharonville on an anti-busing platform. To make their organization palpable, they changed the name to Princeton Parent Action Council. They greatly disliked the superintendent, Robert E. Lucas, because they thought he sold the district on the desegregation plan which included the development of a middle school in Sharonville that involved busing in of black children from Woodlawn.

At the request of Dr. Lucas and the new board member, I attended an evening meeting of the PPAC to provide a progress report on the desegregation plan. I was welcomed as an alternative to Dr. Lucas since he could not be trusted. I have two specific recollections of the evening. After my comments and update, I invited questions. In response to one of the questions, I commented that members of the organization were thought by many to be allies of the Ku Klux Klan. A man who sat impassively in the third row and wore mercury lens aviator-style sunglasses through the meeting (much like the guard in the movie, In the Heat of the Night), commented, “It is more than ‘thought to be!’” I can still feel the chill that ran through my body at his comment.

After they were through with me, my host came to the microphone and said that there would be a short refreshment intermission. It was during this time, the host announced, that I would leave and afterwards their business meeting would continue as a closed business meeting. The only door was at the other end of the room and I had to make my way through the crowd with no one making way for me. I had to weave around and through the group. What I recall is that these were my people. In another setting, they could have been relatives—close relatives. And they—like me, working class white people, communicated such antipathy for me. Of course, they didn't know me or my roots in nearby Kentucky. I was another white liberal trying to extend this social experiment with their children. It was a long walk to the door. It felt like a gauntlet, though no one commented or touched me. However, I was fully aware of how other similar activities had fared in both the north and south. Scared to death—you bet!

I proceeded to the district office where Lucas and Ray were waiting for me. They appeared to be relieved, as was I. However, as I recount my own feelings of the evening, I never doubted how this was adding to my racial identity. In some way, I saw the people in that hall that evening as much victims of the social/racial dynamics as were black Americans.

[Page 156]What I was able to recognize is that they could not see their complicity in their own underclassness. By making black people their enemies, they were accepting their own position within the society. They may have been poor, but, by god, they weren't black!

In my second year at Princeton, Ray had left to take a faculty position at Texas A & M. Nancy, Don, Eric, and Tom had been assigned to schools throughout the district. Superintendent Lucas elevated me to take a portion of Ray's work—staff development. It was an undistinguishable year. I continued my learning about racism, attending conferences, getting a divorce, and searching for meaning in my life. In retrospect, I can see where I was struggling with my own racial and social class identity, but it was to take several more years before it made sense to me.

During that year I had my initial sexual orientation experience. All of the teachers new to the district were required to take my several session course, “Developing New Perspective on Race.” The course started well and all who were supposed to be in attendance did so each week until about the sixth week when one of the members quit coming. After a few missed sessions, I called him to inquire about his absences. He asked for a private meeting to discuss his concerns with the course. We met at a local bar where he proceeded to tell me how much he enjoyed the course but his big fear was that our climate of openness might make him feel too comfortable and he might share with the group that he was gay. I was dumbfounded. Though I was well aware of issues of sexual orientation, I had never (knowingly) talked with a gay person. I was immediately aware of my feelings of uneasiness in his presence. The meeting ended amicably and he agreed to return to the course but would probably be reticent to be open. He conceded that if he revealed his sexual orientation that he would most likely be released from his contract. He was most likely correct.

I recall at the time being conflicted. Part of me was deeply bothered that people experienced the types of overt discrimination that my gay colleague described to me. I didn't want him to lose his job as I regarded him to be an excellent teacher. At the same time, I was fully aware of my feelings of avoidance. Later, I had occasion to raise my colleague's dilemma with Ray and Nancy and during the discussion I shared my feelings of avoidance. Ray and Nancy pushed me very hard and asked me, “What gives you the right to decide which equity issues you agree to support and which ones you don't? Isn't that an ultimate form of entitlement?” That heated discussion rings in my ears thirty years later. I was beginning to see the benefit of having cultural informants as a means to be able to see my own assumptions.

In late August 1973, I accepted a phone call from James Frasher at Georgia State University (GSU) that took me to the next stage of my personal development. As fortuitous as many stages of my life had been, I fell into an opportunity. Earlier in the year, I had made a presentation at the desegregation center at Kent State University. Georgia State had received an Education Professions Development Act (EPDA) grant to train

[Page 157]PhD candidates as change agents. In the trading of votes that members of the U. S. Senate had to do to support funding the EPDA, three positions had to go to residents of Ohio. The dean at GSU had a brother who was dean at Kent. It was the last minute and they needed nominations of people who could make the move in less than three weeks. The dean at Kent had, unknown to me, been in my audience. By mid-September I was a resident of Atlanta and enrolled in the PhD program at GSU.

To say the move to Georgia was fortuitous is a great understatement. After six years as a teacher and three highly eventful years as an administrator working with school desegregation, to have the opportunity to step out of reality and to reflect, learn, and assess was a luxury! I was one of the doctoral candidates who entered the program with a clear focus. I wanted to learn as much as possible about racism—its properties, how people were penalized, and how people benefited.

What I didn't know until getting to Atlanta was that Alonzo Crim had become superintendent, the first black superintendent of a major school district in the United States. I was fortunate to have my fieldwork placement with one of his five area superintendents, Alvin Dawson, who was also in the PhD program. Dr. Crim and Mr. Dawson provided me much support to continue my professional development work with their teachers and administrators.

The significant contribution to my racial identity was found in the work of Joel Kovel, A Psychohistory of White Racism. Kovel provided the conceptual framework for my dissertation and the basis for my personal evolution of identity. Kovel provided me with the words to understand [Page 158]racism at a systemic level. As a student of history, I could relate to Kovel's description of racism—the activity in history and culture in which races may be created, oppressed, and fantasied without the aid of bigots. That was it! The white folks of the Princeton Parent Action Council were, no doubt, bigots. Probably many were involved in acts too terrible to mention, but racism would persist without their presence.

In 1974, Ray had moved from Texas to Cal State, Los Angeles. After graduating from GSU, I moved to L. A. to work with Ray. We began a consulting agency, the Center for Cultural Training (CCT), which morphed three years later into Terrell, Lindsey, Trives and Associates (TLT). I also began that fall teaching adjunct at Cal State, Los Angeles. Over the next few years, my work on antiracism continued to evolve. My early success with CCT and TLT was due to contracts with agencies in support of Los Angeles and Inglewood's desegregation plans. My success as an adjunct at Cal State was attributed to the fact that I could “successfully” teach the diversity course that Ray had designed, Social and Political Forces Affecting Education. In time I was able to convince the department chair that I could teach the leadership and decision-making courses, too. He was an ally and was embarrassed that I had been pigeon holed into only one type of course. However, I was becoming aware of the uniqueness of having a white guy teach the course in a manner that communicated to and with students from every demographic group.

In our days at CCT, TLT, and Cal State Ray and I evolved a distinctive training style. In preparing to work with schools, we scripted who would say what. As an example, we decided it was a stronger voice for me to define and describe institutional racism. Our thinking was that session participants often viewed African Americans describing racism from a vested interest perspective, so when I took that role it was more difficult for participants to challenge my having a vested interest. Also, it was important to us that racism be viewed as a white problem that needed to be deconstructed by white people. Within the white problem paradigm, in working with groups we took great care to emphasize that the needed [Page 159]deconstruction involved all educators, irrespective of their cultural groups, because we are all players in the same system (that was constructed by white America).

Likewise, when describing the language and life styles of African American children and youth, Ray was viewed as being the stronger, better informed voice. While we, among the two of us, believed that we could be interchangeable on most topics, we planned our comments around what we viewed to be the needs of session participants.

When Ronald Reagan became president of the United States, I knew our days of having a successful firm that relied on federal grants had come to an end. I assumed a one-year faculty position in 1980, which later evolved into a tenure track appointment. When Ray became Dean of the School of Education, I took over the project director position with the three-state regional desegregation center, the Regional Assistance Center for Educational Equity (RACEE). For five years, I worked with colleagues to provide services to school districts in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. It was during this time period that I began to learn the commonalities among systems of oppression—sexism, ableism, and heterosexism. One of my new colleagues, Kikanza Nuri Robins, and Ray continued to push me to deal with my sexism and homophobia. It was a painful process and I wanted to stay tied to what I knew most and best-race and issues of racism. Kikanza and Ray would have none of it. They challenged me by asking what made me think that as an adherent to equity that I had the right to pick and choose my “isms.” That was a helpful and powerful learning that continues to unfold!

By this time, I had infused issues of equity into my courses and consulting, irrespective of the context. I was convinced that the systemic nature of oppression was they had to be dealt with both in context and separately. For our curriculum, that meant the diversity course and the infusion of equity throughout the curriculum. It was not an easy transition for my colleagues. There was resistance in the recasting of courses and in searches for faculty members.

Project Regional Assistance Center for Educational Equity (RACEE) provided resources and the vehicle to extend the work. It also provided the space for us to begin to conceptualize what was to become, ten years later, our work in cultural proficiency. I developed a regional profile known to school districts and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC). It appeared that I could get different forums to continue the work of equity. I experienced most of the work of school districts and agencies such as CCTC, California Teachers Association (CTA), Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), etc. as lip service. It drove me nuts but I kept focused on the fact that I had a choice—I could deal with the issues or I could walk away. Knowing that I could walk away was always the sobering part of systemic oppression for me. My colleagues who directly felt racism, sexism, or heterosexism could not walk away from it, for it was ever present in their lives. My Appalachian male identity was, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

It must have been about 1990 that Kikanza attended a session in Washington, DC, where she learned of Terry Cross's Cultural Competence work. In Kikanza's words, I knew I was opposed to systems of oppression; Cultural Competence gave me a framework in what I was “for.”

Cross's construct of cultural competence includes two bullets of information that he identified to be barriers—unawareness of the need to adapt, and a sense of entitlement. Those two phrases are the sum total of Cross's description of the barriers to cultural competence. More important, these two phrases became the springboard for my initial thinking/writing with Ray and Kikanza. The Five Essential Elements of Cultural Competence provided the framework for what can/should be. Cross had cast the elements as standards for policy/practice and value/behavior formulation. The barriers were the obstructions with which I was most informed and had the greatest passion.

It is in this latter part of my career that I began to see the connections with issues of ableness, faith, and social class in the same manner that I had developed an awareness of the oppression experienced by people due to their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and social class. Cross's identifying the unawareness of the need to adapt as one of the barriers to being effective in cross-cultural interactions continues to inform my growth and learning.

Yet, I struggled in the early writing. I had not learned to write well. Kikanza and Delores were patient, supportive, and helpful. My struggle wasn't just with the mechanics of writing. I am learning that so much of my existence had moved into being cerebral. One of the ways I have learned to cope with my personal issues of underclassness and revulsion over issues of racism, was to know so much that I overwhelmed opposing views with the sheer anti-intellectual nature of bias and discrimination. In the last fifteen years, I have learned to put a face on the issues—often my own issues of feeling that I don't fit in. I have consciously used this insight about myself to continue the work. It seems (to me) to be effective.

[Page 161]Cross's work has helped me to crystallize many learnings, in no apparent order:

• It is necessary to work on values/behaviors and policies/practices simultaneously.
• The continuum provides a perspective for dealing with values/behaviors and policies/practices.
• The inside-out approach, for individuals and organizations, is profound work.
• Systems most often don't do the good work unless goaded or otherwise forced to do so. Evidence is the current school reform efforts that utilize disaggregated data. The data have been available all this time. Why were/are schools resistant to the voices within that were pointing out disparities and unfairness.
• Facility with cultural proficiency works only in the context of doing the work of the organization; it can't become an end in itself.
• Confronting systems of oppression is a life-long process of personal self-examination and moving organizations.
• I have developed a historical context for this work.
• I made choices for equity, not the other paths that were present.
• The presence of significant people as cultural informants in my life has been the catalyst for my personal growth.