By Scott Brinton
Here’s my latest liherald.com column:
Until recently, I had never thought deeply how radical my parents were when I was a child. I’m not sure they realized it at the time.
In 1972, when I was 5, they put me on a big yellow school bus whose primary route wound through Gordon Heights, in Suffolk County, a nearly all-Black neighborhood that was developed by Louis Fife in the 1920s. I was one of a handful of white children on the route. Two years later, my younger brother joined me on the bus.
Growing up in the tiny country hamlet of Yaphank, a nearly all-white community, I had no notion of the frighteningly seismic socio-political events that were breaking out across the country at the time, including an anti-desegregation movement that swept the nation, roiling cities from Boston to Los Angeles and too many points in between, including the Village of Malverne.
“This place was a virtual war zone in the late 1960s and early ’70s, where you had people standing in picket lines ready to kill each other over issues of integration,” then Malverne Schools Superintendent James Hunderfund told the Herald in 2019. “There was a sense of separatism, and that was prevalent in other places, but it was rampant here.”
In Boston alone, 40 anti-desegregation riots and protests broke out between 1974, the year I turned 7, and 1988, when I was a junior and senior in college. Much of the sound and fury was stirred by a group called Restore Our Alienated Rights, or ROAR, led by its chair, Louise Day Hicks, who claimed she was defending white neighborhoods by pushing back against court-ordered desegregation school busing plans.
Yet my parents put me on that bus, appearing unworried, as if there were nothing out of the ordinary in this seemingly simple act of parenthood. All these years later, I’m happy and proud they did. It is why, in large part, I grew up to be an antiracist, one who works to eliminate racism in American society through words and actions.
I came to this realization when I recently read Ibram X. Kendi’s immeasurably hopeful book, “How to Be an Antiracist” (One World, 2019). In this compact 238-page text, which is one part instruction manual on how to live a life free of racial prejudice and one part personal remembrance and reflection, Kendi, 38, a journalist and university professor, dissects, point by point, the many and varied forms of bigotry while laying out his vision for a socially just society in which all people, regardless of skin color, can achieve equality and happiness.
For the full column, click here.
