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2009


TEAM effort to honor three Westporters

Source: Westport News

Date: October 21, 2009

Westport’s officialcommittee on multiculturalism and diversity will present “Diversity Trailblazer”Awards from the Town of Westport to three lifelong pioneers in the pursuit ofrights for everyone.

Ann Sheffer and BillScheffler will host the ceremony and celebratory reception at their home at 17Stony Point Road in Westport on Sunday, Oct. 18 from 3 to 5 pm, with the awardsscheduled for presentation at 4 pm. Historical perspectives on Westport and thelives of the honorees will be presented by Woody Klein and Dan Woog.  The event is free and open to thepublic, who should R.S.V.P. by Oct. 16 to or203-227-9671.

“Weinvite the entire community to join us as we celebrate the lifelong impact ofthree people who have been transformational in shaping the reality andreputation of Westport for diversity.” said TEAM Westport Committee ChairmanHarold Bailey, Jr.  “Thanks ingreat part to their efforts, Westport today is a more welcoming community forall people.”

In her 68 years as abusinesswoman and citizen of Westport, Venora Ellis challenged traditional socialmores and shattered racial barriers by action and example. For much of herlast 40 years in Westport, she and her late husband Leroy were also instrumentalin attracting a number of citizens of color to live in Westport.

Joan Schine is beinghonored for the lasting impact of her challenging and ultimately successfulstruggle to establish Project Concern in Westport.  Combined with her subsequent work on improving children’seducation, she has helped transform our community and the lives of Connecticut’schildren.

Using his art, writing andfilm-making, Tracy Sugarman has helped alter the attitude and understanding ofmillions of Americans toward race and diversity.  Through his personal engagement as a lecturer and role modelin our schools, he has had a profound impact on our children.

TEAM Westport  - the acronym stands for “TogetherEffectively Achieving Multiculturalism” - was launched as the first selectman’staskforce on diversity in 2003 with a mission of “achieving and celebrating amore welcoming multicultural community”. The Representative Town Meeting (RTM)made TEAM Westport the town's official committee on multiculturalism anddiversity in 2005.


Police Chief Reflects on Cambridge Incident

by Frank Luongo

Source: Westport News

Date: September 25, 2009

Editor's note: To avoid inhibiting the free flow of ideas at the TEAM/Library conversations, the Westport News has agreed not to identify the sources of the comments made in the group discussions.

Participants in a conversation at the Westport Public Library last Thursday about the confrontation earlier in the summer between Harvard Professor Henry Lewis Gates and Cambridge Police Department Sgt. James Crowley saw the incident as something much larger than a law enforcement issue.

Co-sponsored by TEAM, the town's official multiculturalism and diversity committee, and the library's Community Relations Office, the conversation was the fifth in a series over the past year on questions having to do with ethnicity, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation.

Westport Police Chief Alfred Fiore, in comments prior to the audience breaking down into discussion groups, spoke about policies and practices on the force that would make it unlikely, he said, that a similar confrontation would happen in Westport.

Were such an event to take place in town, according to Fiore, it would threaten to sever the bond between the public and the police force.

"We are in the customer service business," said Fiore. "We need to work together. We rely on public trust and cooperation to get the job done."

Fiore said that the encounter would have been a "non-event "in Westport because his officers are trained to"de-escalate" such potential confrontations and supervisors are on scene to make sure this takes place.

"If cops fly off the handle, chaos ensues. We're in a world of hurt if the cop panics," said Fiore.

Asked about racial profiling, Fiore explained that it is prohibited by state statutes and mitigated against by meticulous record keeping and reporting.

"Even a traffic stop requires a perception [by the officer] of ethnicity, gender and race. Tabulated ratios are prepared for each municipality," Fiore said, adding that Westport's police stops are "consistently male or female caucasians."

After Fiore spoke, one group moved the discussion from police policies and practices to focus on what they perceived as pent-up rage in the country that is rooted in many different factors, but is finding an outlet in bashing President Barack Obama with racial slurs in words and pictures.

Members of this group said it was time to recognize that the election of Obama did not mean that America had entered a post-racial era. They generally praised former President Jimmy Carter's pointing to the racial anger welling up in the health care debate.

Others said that the issue of class should not be ignored in the Gates-Crowley confrontation. There was speculation that the police sergeant was reacting to what he perceived as arrogance on the professor's part.

In opening remarks, TEAM Chairman Harold Bailey said that the incident was a measure of the distance society has come from the days when black parents taught their sons to protect themselves by responding to the police with unquestioning deference.

One discussion group wrestled with what they saw as the baffling complexity of human encounters. They asked, "How can we know what is really in a person's soul?"

That same group lamented the statistical lack of diversity in Westport, pointing to the fact that 95 percent of town residents are white, one percent African-American, two percent hispanic and three percent Asian.

A participant in that group said he felt sorry for Westport children because they grow up with a lack of contact with people that they will have to live and work with as adults.

That recognition was seen by some as one of the possible good results of the Cambridge confrontation. "We're coming together as a community to do some soul-searching about the narratives in which we live, trying to understand who we are."



Police set to join in community conversation

Cambridge incident is backdrop for discussion

By Frank Luongo

 

Source: Westport News

Date: August 7, 2009

Westport Chief of PoliceChief Alfred Fiore will participate, along with other members of the force, in a community conversation on law-enforcement encounters, such as the recent racially charged confrontation that led to the arrest of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for disorderly conduct at his home in Cambridge, Mass.

Harold Bailey, the chairman of TEAM, the town's multiculturalism committee, announced at a meeting of the committee on Tuesday that the event is scheduled for Sept. 17 in the Westport Public Library.

At the meeting, during a discussion of his department's policies, practices and training, with reference to the Cambridge incident, Fiore accepted an invitation from Bailey to take part in the conversation. This will be the fifth in a series, co-sponsored byTEAM and the library, on issues related to ethnicity, gender, race and sexuality.

Fiore said that he was in no position to make a judgment about the arrest of Gates by Sgt. James Crowley, but he did note that what he called "contempt for cop" is not a chargeable offense, unless it poses a risk of physical harm to the police.

According to Fiore, either a sergeant or a lieutenant would be dispatched to the scene of such a confrontation in Westport and would be expected to step back and defuse the tension.

"This would be a crisis intervention and mediation to de-escalate the tension, keeping it down on both sides," he said. "Newer cops might need more attention. Sometimes they think it's necessary to arrest people who are boisterous. When both sides have raised the tension level the de-escalation is more difficult."

TEAM member Steven Daniels described himself as "outraged" at first by the behavior of the police in Cambridge, especially the attempt to get Gates to step outside his home. But that changed for him, as he learned more about the incident.

He said that the police thought there might have been an accomplice still inside the house and thought they had to investigate that possibility.

"It's what I would have wanted the officers to do. Make sure that no one else was in the house," Daniels said. "Gates should have complied. But the arrest for shouting and using insulting language was wrong. Cooler heads would have prevented it. Both were wrong."

Bailey said that the fact that Gates was in his own home should have made all the difference for thepolice in asking him to step outside.

"I can understand his reluctance. He might have even been wondering whether he really was dealing with a police officer," Bailey said.

TEAM member Nicholas Rudd said that the two sides in the Cambridge confrontation were "living out different narratives, looking at things through different lenses," one raising his voice against the perceived injustice of racial profiling, the other intent on following procedures to make sure everything is in good order.

There was broad agreement at the TEAM meeting that more contact with the community would help police officers understand the different narratives that can become the context for confrontation, but there was also broad recognition that this would be a difficult task in Westport, given manpower limitations on the force and the fact that most officers live outside the community, due in large part to the lack of affordable housing.

 

Letter to the Editor

Source: Westport News

Date: July 7, 2009

To the Editor:

We are grateful for Westport News’ continuing coverage of TEAM Westport, the town multiculturalism committee, especially your willingness to avoid inhibiting the discussion by reporting attributions.  At the same time, we must take issue with the front-page headline in your July 2, 2009 issue (“TEAM likes Sotomayor as Supreme Court pick”).

TEAM Westport (the acronym stands for Together Effectively Achieving Multiculturalism) is non-partisan and neither takes nor encourages specific political stands in presenting its activities.  This includes the latest community conversation in our series Conversations on Race and Politics, which was co-sponsored by the Westport Public Library.

Your reporter accurately described the conversation’s participants reaching a consensus on the conversation’s topic, “Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice: GoodNomination or Bad?”  But that was their consensus and not the product of TEAM Westport.  The headline is misleading and could lead your reading public to believe that TEAM Westport has a political agenda, which it does not.

Our mission, accepted by the Representative Town Meeting when they voted us an official town committee,is “to achieve and celebrate a more welcoming multicultural community.”  As your reporter noted, there were comments toward the end of the conversation about Westport and multicultural issues here.  We hope the insights that participants gained will impact the attitudes and behavior of all people in our community.

Sincerely,

Harold Bailey Jr.

Chair, TEAM Westport

 



TEAM likes Sotomayor as Supreme Court pick


by Frank Luongo

Source: Westport News
Date: July 2, 2009

Judge Sonia Sotomayor is the right choice for the Supreme Court, not only because of the breadth and depth of her judicial experience, but also because of the new perspective she would bring to the high court as its first Hispanic and third female jurist.

That was the consensus reached Tuesday in the McManus Room of the Westport Public Library by 35 participants in a community conversation, which was co-sponsored by the library and TEAM Westport, the town's multiculturalism committee.

It was the fourth in a series of discussions devoted to issues involving ethnicity, gender, race and sexuality, and the participants, far from being defensive about extolling the personal qualities of the Supreme Court nominee, vigorously asserted their value for the judicial process.

After receiving a primer on the history of the Supreme Court from Stephane Kirven, a Weston resident who teaches in the criminal justice program at Sacred Heart University, the participants formed four small groups to discuss topics proposed by members of the audience.

Kirven said that it was under the leadership of Chief Justice John Marshall from 1801 to 1836 that the judiciary began to take its shape as an equal to the executive and legislative branches, beginning with a ruling in 1803 that created a precedent for the power of the court to review the constitutionality of federal legislation.

One group picked up on the fact that, for the first 180 years of its history, the Supreme Court was limited to the personal experience of the white, male and Protestant dominant class, while Sotomayor would bring to the court the experience of someone who has risen through the ranks.

That discussion group thought it important that Sotomayor's experience of inhabiting alien territory as a student at Princeton University would help her deal empathetically with immigration cases and controversies.

As a woman, according to one participant in the discussion, Sotomayor would have displayed empathy in the recent Supreme Court decision against a school district's use of a strip-search on a female student suspected of hiding a prescription drug in her clothing.

There was a dissenting voice on that point, which expressed a concern that empathy might lead to a wrong approach to decision-making, a leaning toward making emotion-based judgments.  

Another group concluded that the judicial temperament demonstrated by Sotomayor's 300 opinions as an appellate court judge indicated that she would exercise judicial restraint in her rulings and not be a "raging" liberal activist, as her conservative opponents predict.

In the recent New Haven firefighters' case, where Sotomayor supported the rejection of a claim that white firefighters were being discriminated against, it was noted that Sotomayor was applying standing law to the matter of the disparate racial and ethnic impact of employment tests, while it was the 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court on Monday that charted a new course for deciding on the merits of such tests.

Seen as unlikely to change the balance between the so-called conservative and liberal blocs on the court, Sotomayor was seen as a balance to the personal history of Justice Clarence Thomas, who also came out of an underclass, but in a very different place from Sotomayor on the issue of affirmative action for minorities, according to one of the discussion groups.

It was noted during the group discussions that Sotomayor would be the sixth Catholic to hold a seat on the present court, but the consensus was that her religious affiliation would have little impact on the right of privacy in reproductive discussions.

Near the end of the evening, the audience reassembled to summarize the small-group discussions and to apply the issues discussed to the towns of Westport and Weston.

One member of the audience said that Sotomayor's tenure on the court would help provide an antidote for anti-Hispanic sentiment in Westport, especially the derogatory comments made by high school students about service-workers in town.

Harold Bailey, chairman of the TEAM committee, expressed the hope that there would be further conversations on such issues in the future.  TEAM is an acronym for Together Effectively Achieving Multiculturalism.

Editor's Note: To avoid inhibiting the free exchange of ideas at the TEAM meeting, the Westport News agreed not to identify the sources of the comments made in the small-group discussions.

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