hello and welcome to pathways i'm jenny hard turn your host and tonight excited because i was part of the march in to see and we all met together and a friend of mine said hey i've got somebody you should interview on your show it's a show it's a show it's an organization called not in our town and it's about racism and bullying and bigotry in princeton and i said wow i wouldn't think that would happen in princeton but let me check it out and tonight we're going to go do that going to check out the people who started not in our town so let's go to him having moved to princeton a year ago i was really excited that such an amazing organization like not in our town was right around the corner from my house linda up and a co president of not in our town welcomed me warmly into her home and not only was she willing to do the interview there but she had prepared an amazing pork delicious food next thing i knew in walked larry sproule of not in our town we embraced we ate and then we discussed the difficult topic of racism thank you so much for you are the president i'm the co chair co chair along with larry sproles who we're going to talk to in just a minute and then i guess i guess at the start off with what is the mission statement of not in our town what would you how would you define well formally our  mission statement is speaking truth about every day racism i see it also as bringing awareness particularly to white people about what racism is what the consequences are the fact that it is still alive and well and that there are people who are experiencing racism every single day they might be micro aggressions things that people might think you could just brush off but it's been shown in studies that the experience of those micro aggressions looks like the acid drip of racism on a daily basis over and over and over again really affects people it affects their mental health it affects their physical health it affects their long jetty i believe strongly in a just society and it just makes me very upset and angry to think that there are people who still hundreds of years are still experiencing to that that name not in our town yeah i mean it's kind of like you know if you have to do another town that your business but it's not going to happen here well actually one of our five quite sure one of our founders myriad a tailor always kind of regretted that we took it but it was really in reference to another organization that grew up in montana in billings montana where they were experiencing a number of of of outbreaks racism of anti immigrant behavior and to semitism a variety of things that people are being hidden around across the community and community members got together because they would not i want that to happen i mean it kind of reminds me when i awareness it is how do i work like how does the we're going to sion ok work well we have monthly events to begin with we have something called continuing conversation on race and white privilege which came out of a four part series that was held at the princeton public library and i have to give our kudos to the princeton public library which is a strong partner for us and we hold our continuing conversations there as well we felt that we wanted  training session for white people to become aware of the world in which they're living the privilege that they they carry that most white people are unaware of and that other people cannot exp comparison i've heard is that fish don't know that they're swimming in the ocean and why people don't really realize that they have a race or that that race brings them privilege so ok so from the training session people want to continue talking and we writing session is that something that's the that was and that was a number of years ago that was at the library that's correct because i just went to an event last night i believe really me right in addition to our monthly conversations we also  other events for example this fall we had what turned into was originally a five part series but it was turned into a six part series it was their lives thing with her acting benjamin she was our main presenter in the fall ok and we were talking about the skills that people need to be it to a work well to live well in a diversified society last night we had howard dr howard stevenson from the university of pennsylvania school of education who works on racial literacy but in a slightly different way he sees that the kinds of micro aggressions that particularly african american boys experience on a regular basis is not going to just go away yes it would be nice that why people change their attitudes and their behaviors and that is something that not in our town likes to work on but he knows that it's not going away any time soon as like a practical guide for what you say oh right  it's cold out and the black mother saying to her son as he's going out don't run keep your hands in view it was a laundry list of all the things that that child had to be aware of to come home a life now what your personal experience you know do you have kids that are also involved in this program or do you have had you had an experience of brought you into the graham do you have kind of what was the motivating attribute that made you feel like you wanted to be a part of this because you're the president and this is a big commitment well it is and american our two oldest sons his sons from his first marriage are jewish african american and then we adopted two children michael's was born in the dominican republic and there's a bob racial child born in indiana so it was definitely part of our every day law it was as something that you intended to do was it something that you did because these were the kids who came up when you were saying i want to boy or girl i mean like did you purposely say we too so it was not something that was going to be so the irony i met here an african american i'm not and neither is my husband your husband's not there but you were looking for similarities because of his kids well it have it had to fit in with that yeah again we didn't specifically go looking it's just when it went that direction was like that's perfectly fine with us and now it just on a personal level you're raising kids in this community what would your husband who is white say to his when he was in high school and listen my kids were not angels but he said he could not walk from one end of nassau street to the other without being followed by a pool so there was that awareness that s i know that there were things that they experience there's a lot of stuff that they wouldn't talk to freely oh yeah because they were kids yet and we're not your son tell you everything i'm just saying was it because you were white i don't think so  organisation work but one of the one of the things happen if someone were looking at the show today wants to join or want to be part of it how would you describe it works we have a board and that's the really the only formal part of the organization we are a five zero one three c organization and we have these regular monthly kind of continuing conversations on race and white privilege held at the public library and that's a really good place to start for one thing it gives people the chance to tell their stories and one of the things we think is very important and one thing that howard stevenson pointed out yesterday is that for people to gain an understanding they need to learn to listen and they need to be able to tell their story they need to be heard and they need to listen so we feel that the continuing conversation offers people that opportunity because this is we will gather in together to have a conversation and there are some office look at me for that every month there is some kind of focus but let me tell you whatever the present ation is once people are in their circles and they're talking to the very people have their stories and they do want to talk so that's a really the place where many many of the people come to our organization start but we have other things like the special racial literacy that we did in the fall and then again the the howard stevenson we brought a traveling photography exhibit from the wisconsin historical society that was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of freedom summer that was a couple of years ago and we had it brought to to princeton it was housed first in the middle school it was housed at the carl fields center at the university at the friends school and at the art center and we had school groups coming the african american art worker and i that but more importantly the plight of the african americans facing racism and yes is reducing weight i would say so although what you're saying is really interesting because i think it's also important to celebrate culture yeah and one of our board members surely setterfield who's very well known in the community in is our historian of the african american community was instrumental in getting the the neighborhood declared a historical district is part of a historical society that's been founded that it's going to help mark the places in town that are important for princeton african american history one of the things that happened with one of the school groups when we were taking them through this exhibit i which read them a passage from james baldwin who my go to guy you can go to anything in james baldwin and it'll be immediately relevant of what's going on today and he talked about the time when during world war two he was in new jersey and he came into princeton and how he couldn't be served be known i love the idea of truth and reconciliation we can't what was it that i heard from james baldwin we can't change what we won't face we have to face what we want to change  and we have to face the history of this town paul robeson himself the famous native son of princeton said that princeton was the northernmost southern town oh yeah i was the lead ism and all the university and you know and and racism now when you said you mean i'm interested in the fact that you had a very you know african american daughter and american son and you're a white woman and your husband's white so did you when you faced i mean let me tell you let me go right into it yeah thank you i was clueless ok and i thought and this is i don't think it's not like you can all band together and say this is happening to us it's really happening to them and not to you it is although we did make some connections sometimes through adoption groups or other families of mixed race families sometimes we were able to make those connections what connections with other families who might face similar so both to understand how to  deal with but you still had a difference right i mean your kids were treated differently because of the skin color of their skin than you and your husband oh definitely but so this is again one of the problems i mean i know people who have adopted trans racially white people have adopted trans racially who are really much better educated about it than i was going in and i have to say that i probably was very lazy and i was depending on my husband who i thought all well he is he  so for example it just living in princeton i looked around and it seems like a diverse place there are people from latin america there's a strong african american community there people come from all over the world's nice diverse was thinking about all my granddad but always some of them going in town that the full you know don't do this don't do that well if your grandfather is there you know how to act and everything and what did he mean we all was it about being african american or was it about just being living with your grandparents and then your parents what were your mother and father doing when they got here my dad came here and got a job picking potatoes out of grammar that's how we could do what year was ready oh my god i came here fifty eight fifty eight fifty eight so he got a job my mom people give them like fruit and snacks and juices things like that so you kind of really understanding right you come from the south yes you come from a place where you had to go out the back door you had to wait you were disrespected already when you got here and then you the war the war in iraq and then i come to find that they were then and promoting peace but they were everywhere as the rain or shine you could set your clock by the lady that really got me thinking i'm like that and then when i got to meet one of them the wind and i'm definitely did it because there were some that didn't for whatever reason but you know those are things you can see you can tell when you're making a difference when you do days like that they don't things like that and then they started working like i said i work with kids in a community should be respected regardless of who you are white black what the document whatever and that's what at the not sound that's what i know not that outdoes yeah i mean do you feel that racism exists between different cultures or do you feel it's primarily a white person's well just speaking for myself as a black person i think i was paraphrasing thing like on a daily basis every day things like something happened to me where i really have a person you know was  really racist or were that person just that way so let's talk about not in our town this is an organization that you're busy running what do you see five years down the road what do you hope to see not in our town so one of the reasons i became a founder and in that town is because i grew up in a family my father was a justice act activist so i always thought about issues of justice were things that you needed to do something about my father moved from north carolina to philadelphia in one thousand twenty seven the reason he came he saw a lynchings and was very afraid so he was very very afraid of white people so in addition to all the other influences i had in my life one of the three things that i constantly heard around the table be careful book out white people are natural friend so that i i absorbed all of this when i had the chance to meet with barbara and to meet with other people about the interfaith anti racism organization in princeton i grabbed at it i had always been committed i had always been fascinated and very very involved in anti racism efforts i grew up in philadelphia in the suburbs of philadelphia but my parents were not philadelphians my father came from a german speaking family pennsylvania my mother came from tidewater virginia and told me she actually taught me as a young person by a large black people who are lazy they were very smart and i just needed to be aware of that has i grew up working with white people around issues of race and racism and integration and segregation has been a part of all of the all of my experiences maybe in the past  thirty or forty years as an educator it did as a retired educated it surprises me that i came to that based on what my childhood was however as a person really proud to see  and i worked very hard to believe that i had to love people anyway and i don't know a better way to say that i feel very strongly that the work of anti racism is mostly the work that white people have to do after i finish college added became an educator i started meeting people in my work and in my job there were white people who i felt were just or in my place had understood what i was the work that i was doing for and with children and african american people as well so i started  going toward these kind of groups that really cared about kids and were really racial a piece of this happened to do that much of my career started in the sixty's when the civil rights struggle was going on and both white and black african american people had to make decisions about how far on the bridge about going to go or am or i'm going to stay back white people have to learn about white privilege about the assumptions that they have made the cultural beliefs that they've grown up with usually very softly and under the radar of most cultural by day activities of the culture of racism and different separation is collapsing around us and one of the things that also come to think about white folks who hold or did their privilege for so long they're rather like the southern white people that my father is interacted with they were afraid they don't have  information but they know how to use power and that piece of it hasn't changed but i just think they're going to become like that this was and i just i may not see it in my time but i absolutely believe it's going to happen