Horizons can be broadened in Newport Beach

Some weeks ago, in the aftermath of the long public City Council

session of recrimination and support of Newport Beach City Councilman

Dick Nichols, I wrote in this space that the most rational and

intelligent comments on that emotionally charged night were made by

an African American man who concluded: “This is not a healthy place

for me. I don’t feel comfortable living in Newport Beach, but I’m not

leaving.”

I suggested that it would be instructive for our City Council

members to know why he found Newport Beach unhealthy, and offered to

help in that effort by asking him to call me when the city clerk

didn’t have his name. That call -- along with several others from

people who know him -- came promptly, and I would like here to

introduce him to the Newport Beach City Council.

His name is Jess Craig, and he is vice president for student

services at Orange Coast College. He and his wife, Maddy -- who is on

the English faculty at Irvine Valley College -- have lived in Newport

Coast for the past two years. He has a master’s in human relations

from the University of Oklahoma, and has served in college

administration in Los Angeles and Orange County for the past 30

years.

“I felt the council took a courageous stand on the Nichols’ issue

and said so,” Craig told me. “It was also heartening to me to see the

compassion that was expressed. But I was appalled to hear the venom

and racial hostility that came out of so many local people who

embraced what Nichols was saying. It was almost a mirror image of the

racist examples I used in my dissertation on human relations.”

So, over coffee one recent day, I asked Craig and his wife -- who

is white -- how the Nichols episode translated into their discomfort

with Newport Beach.

“We lived at Crystal Cove for several years,” Craig said, “with

every possible kind of human mix. We were embraced there, along with

everyone else. When we all had to leave Crystal Cove, it was a bit of

a culture shock to us to move into Newport Beach, where the lack of

diversity was almost total.”

They made a strong point up front, however, of stressing how well

they have been accepted in their Newport Coast neighborhood, but said

it doesn’t carry over nearly as well into Newport Beach.

There was, for example, the tennis club that Maddy explored first.

She got a quite different reception when she reappeared with her

husband. “They looked at us as if we were from Pluto,” she said.

There are too many restaurants where they are left to wait while

later comers are seated. Tradesmen who encounter Jess and ask if the

man of the house is around. Visitors who are startled when Maddy

introduces Jess as “my husband.” A constant and repeated sense of

being inspected disapprovingly in public places around town.

“We encounter prejudice here all the time,” Craig said, “but it’s

not our issue. It’s their issue. I feel sorry for them. Where there

is no diversity, people live in a vacuum. It’s sad and unfortunate,

but we can’t let this dictate our lives.”

Shortly after he spoke to the City Council, Craig visited the

Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and came home so deeply moved that

he wrote a letter to Nichols saying, in part: “In an effort to

promote tolerance, sensitivity and the understanding of the power of

words, I would like to personally invite you to visit the Museum of

Tolerance ... with me. I sincerely hope you will accept my invitation

to more fully discover the rewards of diversity.”

He sent copies of this letter to all the council members. That was

five weeks ago. So far, there has been no response. In the same

letter, he encouraged the Newport Beach council to deal frontally

with local racism by forming a human relations committee with the

help of the Orange County Human Relations Commission. As noted in an

earlier column, I offered the same suggestion to City Manager Homer

Bludau, who told me that the city had no need for such a committee.

Meanwhile, a network TV soap opera is using Newport Beach as the

locale for an orgy of mindless rich people, and the state board of

the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization, in a show of

support for its local members after Nichols’ remarks, held its annual

meeting in Newport Beach because, according to its spokesman, it is

“one of the most controversial communities in California today.”

So how, I asked Craig, can a human relations committee do anything

about such perceptions?

“First of all,” he said, “it could be used as a resource. The

Nichols matter could have been played out in such a committee, with a

recommendation to the City Council for action. And it could always be

used as a mechanism to promote diversity. Even if economics limit

those who can live in Newport Beach, the residents still have to get

along with other people.

“We can’t change prejudice or legislate feelings,” he said, “but

we can attempt to enlighten those who carry prejudice -- to show them

that differences among people are minor, and that we must stop

focusing on those differences and concentrate on the ways we are

alike.

“In Newport Beach, too often, we have no clue about the magnitude

of difficulties in the world while we worry about people sitting on

the grass or palm trees blocking our view,” Craig said. “We have

everything one could want here except enough of the ability to have

compassion for those less fortunate -- and that has put us into the

national news.

“Unless this community starts dealing with racism and prejudice

against people who are non-white, it is going to get worse,” he said.

“It’s time to acknowledge this and turn it around, and the formation

of a human relations committee would be a first step in that

direction.”

If that ever happens, I have a great idea for the guy who should

be put in charge.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.