A Conversation About Race in New Jersey

A friend of mine was interviewed about her views on race this past Sunday in the Herald News. It is insightful, provocative and informative. I am posting in full here.

Courting Disaster: An awakening to racism
Sunday, October 21, 2007 By TIM NORRIS

Nicole Mandarano says she felt different, not like the others in her high school and college graduating classes, not like anybody she knew.

Her sense of difference, at first, didn't involve race. With a master's degree in French from NYU, she wanted to make a difference, she says, in the world and back home in urban New Jersey. She started to volunteer at the Paterson YMCA in 1996 and signed on for the AmeriCorps VISTA program at the New Jersey Community Development Corp. in the city. That led to law school at the City University of New York, all the while working part-time for the Paterson Y as a grant writer and program developer.

"CUNY fosters the feeling that you can make the world a better place," she says, "so I became more idealistic about being a public-interest lawyer. I was ready to change the world."
Mandarano came back to Paterson as a law clerk, in 2005, for Judge Miguel de la Carrera in Passaic County Family Court. What she found there and in the criminal court next door, she says, changed the way she saw herself and everyone else. Some of the experiences weren't happy.

While she admired de la Carrera's knowledge and fairness and appreciated his counsel, and while she valued her co-workers, she came in naﶥ, she admits, about the inner workings of law enforcement and the court system. She saw in the parade of defendants a subtler variety of the racial and ethnic intolerance her own forebears had faced.

When her grandparents found their way from Bari, Italy, to Queens, she says, Italians often were still called "dagos" and "wops," slurs tossed as casually and as often as "kike" and "spic" and "nigger." "My parents' parents got the racial slurs," Mandarano says. "They were seen as, like, the bottom of the barrel. Now racism is more disguised, but for most ethnic groups, some version of that experience isn't far away."

While its mechanisms for law enforcement and justice bring in a majority of defendants of color, she says, racism is embedded elsewhere, in the wider American society and the assumptions that underlie it.

She admits that she had never felt the sting of race prejudice herself.

"I went to a public high school, Indian Hills in Oakland," she says. "It wasn't very diverse. It's crazy to me. We live so close to New York City, and we're in this almost completely white suburb. We're not even that far from Paterson. It's so easy to stay isolated, to be too comfortable."

New York presented a cultural rainbow. "Everybody came from diverse backgrounds," she says. "Everybody gave each other room." While Paterson shows similar diversity, racial and ethnic lines, she says, seem more sharply drawn. In Passaic County Court, she says, "it felt like I had stepped back in time or something.

"We're all aware of it, all aware that it's mostly people of color, people who are poor, who are in court. I couldn't help thinking, 'Kids in the suburbs are doing the same drugs, right? Dealing. Where are they? Prosecutors and juries look like this, defendants look like that.'

No chance

"Here I am watching person after person come in who doesn't really have a shot. What kind of schooling are they getting? What kinds of jobs are they getting? What kind of bias is out there already? Why would these kids want to trust ME if I were their lawyer? Can I, as a female who's white and grew up suburban, connect to them? I couldn't see what was going to change the system."

She needed a way, she says, to learn, to connect, to be honest.

At age 38, Mandarano works, now, for the Paterson YMCA, in a double – and doubly crucial – role: teacher and grant writer. Though she does much of her grant writing from home in Hoboken, she teaches classes every summer in the main building on Ward Street in downtown Paterson. She finds the Y, she says, a place of diversity and positive purpose, sheltering enough to invite honest exchanges.

"In the Y, like with the staff in the courthouse, my relationships seem different. Richer. People help me get through things, explain things, issues about inequity, race, class. A lot of people I work with come from Paterson, from all different backgrounds, and we don't rush to judge each other. We take time to get to know each other, talk about our dreams, find things in common. It feels great. Why wouldn't everyone want to do that?"

The reality of street life, though, also challenged some of Mandarano's idealism. Her most compelling revelations have come teaching teenagers about their constitutional rights and responsibilities in a summer class called Street Law.

"I've realized that I don't have a lot of answers," she says. "I feel embarrassed sometimes."
A key lesson involved an elusive force that can bind both individuals and groups: trust.

Listen up

The standard definition mentions "confidence in and reliance on good qualities, especially fairness, truth, honor or ability." For Mandarano, establishing it meant listening more than talking, and facing herself honestly. "I had to start by saying, 'I DON'T know what's going on with you,'" she says. "My approach was, 'You tell me. Make me understand. Nothing will offend me.'

"How do you respond when kids say, 'Why bother? They're going to screw me anyway.' I keep telling them the constitutional rights they have, we all have, and they say, 'Yeah, try saying that to a cop. Try saying that to a teacher.' There's a double standard, and I don't know what to say to that. If a cop stops me, I can say, 'Officer, why am I being detained?' and he or she won't beat the s--- out of me, or I'm not going to be stopped in the first place. I guess it made me kind of sick, hearing story after story. They're just profiled. A kid wears a certain kind of clothing or looks a certain way, and they're being stopped, being harassed, being frisked, or in school they're being talked-down-to and ignored. How would that make anyone feel?"

Doing the right thing

She hates the thought of being labeled another do-gooder from the suburbs. "I'm nobody's savior," she says. "I just try to do right by everybody. It's important to do something you care about ... but maybe I'm not being courageous enough. Maybe I need to talk more with my peers. Some of my peers I can have the discussion with, some I can't. They look at me like I'm being preachy, being holier-than-thou. I'm not saying that. I'm saying put our talents and skills where they matter. Don't just interact with the same people, upper middle class, intellectual elite. You're missing out. So much of our activity seems like avoidance: turn on the TV, turn on the computer. We hide from each other.

"It seems so simple to me. We're ALL immigrants. We forget that. In Paterson, you can experience that NOW, and it can be incredibly interesting and enriching. When I started working in Paterson, none of my friends were doing that. They were all college grads, you know. In '91 they were already working in insurance companies, getting married and having kids. By '97 they were corporate America, upper management. They were already into their careers, and here I was volunteering in Paterson and working with all different kinds of people and, you know, nervous and excited about it. And they were, like, 'You're WHERE?' Working in the courthouse, most of the law clerks were younger, and they'd say, "Paterson ... uh-uh! They didn't know the city. I said, 'Doesn't anybody want to try something new? Go to the city and everything's there. New ways of speaking and dressing and acting. New art, new music, new foods. I just want to know, want to learn."

Still conflicted

She is still, she says, conflicted about race. "Am I being honest with myself?" she says. "Am I really wrestling with this? Am I getting better? You know at the start that you're biased. It can be so ingrained in you. When I walk down the street in Hoboken and see a lot of preppy-looking whites, I feel a bias there. I have to start by admitting what I feel and think, and work at thinking through what it must be like to be black or Latino, to be a man or a woman, to be rich or poor.

"Being here in Paterson, though, feels great. I think that as much as I have these internal struggles, I feel really optimistic. I'm in a place where I get past the surface, past superficial differences. I feel more open, more tolerant. I get to meet people and I get to share a lot of great moments and talk about real needs. To me, that's exciting."

Reach Tim Norris at 973-569-7132 or norrist@northjersey.com.