Diversity or Division?

Doug Glanville is a former professional baseball player who grew up in Teaneck (his parents still live here) and played most of his nine-year career with the Philadelphia Phillies. Since retiring, he has written a number of erudite columns for The New York Times called "Heading Home", most of which have some connection to baseball with a greater commentary on society as a whole.

A few days ago, my Google News Alert notified of an article Glanville had written, and I initially assumed that the mention of Teaneck would be a passing reference, of the sort "Glanville, who grew up in Teaneck, N.J..." and that the article would be about baseball and little more. The article I read, "The World in One Game" covered the recent World Baseball Classic, with Glanville commenting on how baseball has benefited from the influx of cultures around the world, as players from all nations and races are integrated into the sport. He contrasted the changes in baseball with his experiences growing up here, in Teaneck:

Part of the reason this experience is so moving to me is that I hail from a small town (Teaneck, N.J.) and this particular tone — people from all walks of life working together — was set for me from the time I went to kindergarten. Teaneck is known for having the first high school in the United States to voluntarily integrate its student body, in 1965. But more importantly, they took that fact and improved on it.

So I grew up in a community committed to learning how to communicate across cultural and religious lines. Cottage parties would fill up a neighbor’s basement to discuss Jewish and African-American relations, meet-up groups would form to decide how to celebrate various cultures at the high school, dialogues and community sessions were constantly challenging people to learn outside the box. The town decided that it was stronger as a cohesive unit than as a scapegoating machine that fell upon the ease and comfort of stereotyping. It took control of its destiny and found a way.

My baseball team in high school was ethnically diverse. Unfortunately, it was not uncommon for us, when traveling to some nearby towns, to hear from opposing fans exactly how uncomfortable our smorgasbord of cultures made them feel. Once, one of my teammates got tired of verbal abuse from a spectator who had gone on for an entire game, and yelled back at the offender. After the game, this fan’s husband (who happened to be dressed in business attire) waited near our bus and kicked one of our players in the chest. He capped that off with some racially inappropriate comments.

But the entire team banded together and stood firmly behind our teammate in support. It wasn’t because he was black, or our captain for that matter — he was our teammate. That moment demonstrated how it’s possible to avoid making decisions based on the side of the tracks you live on or what box you check to describe your race in a questionnaire.

After I left Teaneck High School, I didn’t see quite that kind of commitment — people working together to make diversity a strength — until I put on that major league uniform. I still believe it is the best lesson baseball can give us.

Glanville, born in 1970, grew up in a Teaneck that was still basking in the afterglow of its role as the first community to voluntarily integrate its schools, an effort documented in the feel-good story Triumph in a White Suburb written in 1968 by township resident Reginald G. Damerell.

The Teaneck that Glanville described most certainly existed, but did not survive unscathed. I moved with my family to Teaneck a couple of years after Glanville had graduated from Teaneck High School, and while I knew few of the details of the 1965 integration, I certainly knew about the aftermath of the shooting death of Phillip Pannell and the bitter protests that ensued.

Once I became more involved in Teaneck affairs, I saw many people who were still carrying on the vestiges of the earlier work in building bridges between Teaneck's diverse communities. But I also saw those who believed that a divisive approach would better allow them to pursue their own objectives. After all, a bridge that took many years to build can be taken down in seconds with a few sticks of dynamite. This is best (or worst) seen in how our recent elections have been marred with shameless appeals to ethnic particularism.

The 2006 elections featured this type of rhetoric in email sent by people who know far better, pushing Orthodox voters by insisting that "[i]t would be in our common best interest to get these guys elected", solely based on what the writer acknowledged as a rumor that "[t]here are candidates running who would be happy to take down the eruv." An effort by the Advisory Board on Community Relations to address these divisive campaign tactics was rejected by the Township Council for consideration at a Council workshop meeting shortly after the new members took office.

I am still nauseated by the May 2008 issue of The Jewish Voice and Opinion that I found doing some Passover cleaning, with the front page blaring the unattributed claim that "[t]he perception of many residents is that one group of candidates will be 'good for the Jews' because they are also beneficial for the township as a whole, while another will threaten the wellbeing of the Jewish community by dividing the town and targeting the Orthodox."

While I am equally bothered by unaddressed remarks about the "gas chamber", what offends me about the statements cited above is that they are intended to represent me as a member of Teaneck's Orthodox community as part of a divide and conquer strategy.

In participating in the Teaneck Community Project (also known as the "Visioning Process"), the hundreds of participants were asked to list Teaneck's greatest assets and its greatest causes for concern. Diversity came up at or near the top of both lists.

While Teaneck, its municipal government and its public schools all face genuine issues, it is clear that there are no uniquely Black or White, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim or Christian, or Hispanic or Asian solutions to Teaneck problems. With a school board election just over two weeks away and a municipal election in just over a year, I sincerely hope that there will be candidates seeking Teaneck solutions to Teaneck's problems. Maybe Doug Glanville's vision of Teaneck still exists, after all these years.

Alan Sohn