Sam Smith
If you want to scare
the establishment, get people together who it doesn't think belong
together. If you are students having a problem with your principal don't
just go to his or her office with the usual troublemakers; walk in with
some of the smartest kids, some jocks, a few punks, blacks, whites,
latinos, and, best of all, the kids who never seems to be interested in
doing anything at all. Once when we were fighting freeways in
Washington, I looked up on a platform and there was the Grovesnor
Chapman, the chair of the white elite Georgetown Citizens Association,
and Reginald Booker head of a black militant organization called Niggers
Inc., and I said to myself, we are going to win. And we did.
My
old friend, the late Chuck Stone, really knew how to get along with
other people. When he was columnist and senior editor of the
Philadelphia Daily News, 75 homicide suspects surrendered to him
personally rather than take their chances with the Philadelphia police
department. Black journalist Stone also negotiated the end of five
hostage crises, once at gun point. "I learned how to listen," he said.
Stone believed in building what he calls "the reciprocity of civility."
His advice for getting along with other Americans: treat them like a
member of your family.
Show everyone respect and you'll walk
comfortably among every class, subculture and ethnicity in this land.
Don't show respect and you'll live a lonely life.
Part of that
respect is towards yourself. Don't apologize for who you are. Don't be
afraid to argue with someone just because they are of a different
ethnicity. Arguing with someone is a form of respect too, because it
means you really care about what they think. But bear in mind that in a
community, your view is just an opinion and not a rule.
If you
are a member of an ethnic or other minority, remember that as an
activist your role is to provide solutions to problems and not merely to
be a symptom of them. To be a survivor and not a victim.
During
the civil rights movement, black leaders spoke not only to those of
their own culture but to many whites, especially young whites like
myself. The most influential book I read in college was Martin Luther
King's 'Stride Toward Freedom' and it wasn't on any required reading
list. Cesar Chavez had a similar cross-cultural appeal. But then as
African Americans became more successful in politics there was a
understandable but unfortunate tendency to retreat to a constituency you
knew you could rely upon. And so black leaders became much less
influential in the white community.
It's an important lesson for any young black or latino activist.
Don't
let your story be ghettoized; instead take that story and find the
universal in it, and use that story to move those who don't look like
you but can understand the story because you made it theirs, too. The
greatest ethnic success stories in America have come when a minority
learned to lead the majority, as the Irish and Jews often did in the
past century.
I hear over and over that blacks and latinos can't
work together politically, but I can almost promise you that the next
great ethnic leader in this country is going to be someone who ignores
that cliché and creates a black-latino coalition which, after all, will
represent thirty percent of the people in this land.
