My Lifelong Mentor on Race Relations

I was editing a cooking video for the blog and it seemed more like a slog. That's because like many other Americans right now, my mind was on other matters, particularly the racial tensions that we're experiencing. This morning, while meditating, the man in the above photo floated into my thoughts. His name is Michael B. Preston, and he mentored me in college and beyond.

Professor Preston was a political scientist at the University of Southern California. He passed away in 2014, at age 80, from pancreatic cancer, but he'd already left a deep imprint on my life. We came to know each other after I became his workstudy assistant in 1988. Several times a week, I reported to his windowless suite of offices, which he jokingly called "the ghetto", and quietly pored through a stack of books on urban politics, black politics, machine politics, and race relations. Occasionally I ran errands, but mostly I read the books then wrote abstracts for his review. (In academia, that's called doing a literature review.) Though I officially majored in business finance and minored in Chinese language and culture, I received extra coursework in civil rights.

He soon became chair of the political science department and we had to "move upstairs" as he said. I became his part-time secretary with a desk near a window. There was less reading of books and more mundane stuff like photocopying, typing up letters of recommendation, and taking phone calls.

Diversity All Around

In the department headquarters, he taught me the politics of work. Dr. Preston was one of the few black faculty members at USC, and he strategically built relationships that crossed color and power lines, with faculty, staff, and students. He regularly checked in with a network of prominent black political scientists across the nation. They worked to understand race relations in the world while managing race relations within their spheres of influence.

From his wearisome looks, pensive cigarette smoking, and "fair-to-middling" responses to perfunctory questions about how he was doing, I sensed that he shouldered a lot. He was an influential black scholar in a somewhat conservative, conventional institution in one of the most diverse parts of Los Angeles. He often felt "pressurized". Folks like Dr. Preston and his cohorts, all successful in their fields, assumed extra responsibility for shepherding the future of their communities.

However, Dr. Preston saw the humor and irony in what went on around him. Recounting a phone call to Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga, an Africana studies professor, potent activist, and creator of the Kwaanza holiday who was stirring the pot a lot, Dr. Preston said something along these lines: I called Karenga the other day and his mother picked up the phone. I respectfully asked for Maulana and she paused before responding, "Oh, you mean Ron?" (Karenga's birth name was Ron.)

The department office manager and other staff were also black Americans, so during my two years working for Dr. Preston, I became comfortable with a diverse workplace. I was their subordinate, and the ladies looked after me. I mastered professional office conduct while picking up some sass from Veronica Pete and Gerlonda "Jody" Battles (when Jody flashed her temper, haughty faculty members wilted).

Growing up, my family didn't interact with black people. There were few of them in the relatively white town of San Clemente where we lived. But in the political science department, black Americans defined much of my work life.

Keep It Real, Stay Focused

Years later, after I completed my master's degree, Dr. Preston offered me a gig at the Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies where he was serving as director. It was the mid 1990s, after the Rodney King Riots, and we talked openly about race. He also shared some of his personal story.

Dr. Preston grew up in Tyler, a city in eastern Texas, under Jim Crow Laws. There were many restrictions. For example, black people weren't allowed in the movie theaters until around 11pm. When you went, he said, you still had to sit in the upper reaches of the theater because you were black.

Later on, he saw footage of Hank Aaron playing baseball in California. In the stands were people of different races just being natural together and enjoying the ballgame. The free mingling of people from varying backgrounds partly seeded his move to California, he said.

He and his wife Mary relocated to Oakland where he taught junior high while attending graduate school at Berkeley. On the weekends, they'd drive to Los Angeles to check out favorite jazz clubs. "Along the way, we'd stop and pick cotton to make extra money," he told me.

All those experiences (and others) explain why he launched the first black politics class at USC, recruited minority and female scholars, groomed minority graduate students for success, and worked with minority student athletes. He welcomed and boosted people wherever he met them.

On the occasions when we he took me to lunch at the USC faculty dining hall, he'd scan the room, nod and smile, then conduct a little business with the powers that be.

"Keep your eyes on the prize," he'd say, referring to an influential folk song during the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Movement.

Building Bridges Everywhere

One day he proclaimed to me in his charming southern drawl, "On-DRAY-ah, Asians need to figure out their intra-ethnic problems before we can deal with inter-ethnic issues." He and his colleagues had been examining spatial demographics to map population shifts and to understand race relations developing in Los Angeles. They had identified that Asians had issues with Asians.

That sounds like a no brainer but few people discussed race issues in that framework back then (or now). It seemed like airing the dirty laundry. If anything, you talked about it with another Asians.

Our conversation underscored that as humans, we're a big mess and that makes race relations a tangle of issues. You can't resolve them overnight. But you have to think about them, make an effort, and play the long game to build coalitions.

When I told him I was getting married, he took my white fiance and I out for a meal. He looked at us and said, "Marriages between people of different races can help to resolve racism in this country."

Despite all his experiences, Dr. Preston remained hopeful and always a bit romantic. He attended our wedding in 1996 and we took the photo at the top of this post.

I chatted and hung out with him a few times after the wedding and our move to Northern California. I miss Dr. Preston. His mentorship will last forever.