The year 2012 marks the fortieth anniversary of my Puerto Rican mother and Irish-Italian father's unusual wedding. They met and married in an experimental community called Synanon, where I was born. Synanon was the founding model of the therapeutic community, but those who remember it are more likely to recall its tragic retreat into a cultish enclave in northern California. What few people know, however, is that Synanon committed itself to a program of racial integration throughout the 1960's and 70's. While it belongs to a bygone era of social experimentation, its deliberate effort to foster a racially inclusive society is worth remembering, especially at a moment in American history when the rhetoric of post-racialism masks ever-deepening racial inequality.
Chuck Dederich, a charismatic recovered alcoholic, started Synanon in southern California in 1958 to lift drug users out of addiction and despair. Not long after, Dederich began to envision its mission more broadly. Synanon, he proclaimed, would promote "a lifestyle that makes possible the kind of communication between people that must exist if we are to prevent this planet from turning into uninhabitable ghettos." In the 60's and early 70's it grew rapidly in size and prominence, with locations throughout the US, including Puerto Rico.
Synanon members, who came from every racial, religious and class background imaginable, lived and worked side by side. They also came together in "the game," a form of no-holds-barred group encounter therapy that was the focal point of Synanon's rehabilitation regime. At once intimate and confrontational, the game allowed people from all walks of life, and especially whites and blacks, to encounter each other in ways that would have been unimaginable elsewhere.
In 1963, at a time when interracial marriage was still outlawed in some American states, Dederich married Betty Coleman, a former heroin addict who had quit drugs in Synanon. Chuck told Betty that he believed "it would be good for Synanon to have, right at the top of the pyramid, an integrated marriage." Years after they wed, Betty recalled that Synanon's commitment to racial integration was the "common cause" they used "to bridge the gap, because there was no other way for us to get together."
Dederich, a portly white man with a salt-and-pepper goatee, and Betty, a visionary black woman with graceful eyes, cast a striking image, but more than that they set an example for others to follow.
Indeed, a decade later my parents were one of 75 couples that tied the knot in a mass wedding on Synanon's sprawling ranch at Walker Creek. If you look closely at the sea of faces in their 1972 wedding photos there is one thing that stands out: many of the couples were interracial.
As a result, I grew up surrounded by white, black and multi-racial kids. Because everything from toys and clothes to showers and mealtimes were shared, a sense of equality structured my relationships with my peers. Even as a child I was aware that many things weren't ideal about Synanon and its ever-changing philosophies and dictums, but my early years in a multi-racial community, where mixed marriages and multi-racial identities were normalized, have shaped me for the better in ways I will probably never fully understand.
It was only after I left Synanon that I realized what an unusually integrated community it was. Even at the young age of eight, I quickly sensed how racially divided my new landscapes were. Not only were people of different races not living together in the same houses, they weren't living in the same neighborhoods.
While a new Pew Research Center study on interracial marriage in the U.S. shows that mixed marriages have reached an all-time high of 8.4 percent, and more Americans than ever before view intermarriage positively, these encouraging statistics should not lull us into believing that the project of racial integration in America has succeeded. The persistence of racial segregation and inequality in the country poses a significant barrier to the kind of cross-racial communication and understanding our society so desperately needs if we are to create supportive, encouraging environments not just for mixed-race families, but for all people.
Here is where I draw a valuable lesson from my early years in Synanon: creating a racially integrated society has to be a conscious choice. It requires acknowledging the racial divides that still mark our country in profound ways and a willingness to "bridge the gap," to borrow Betty's words, by forming interracial solidarities. Whether on the playground, in the classroom, in places of worship or in the home, we must seek out and seize opportunities to build a more racially inclusive society.
Not unlike other social experiments of its time, Synanon lost its way by the late 70's. While its unfortunate transformation into an isolated cult-like community cast a dark shadow over its clinical innovations, its downfall has altogether obscured its pioneering role in fostering racial integration. When I look back at my parents' wedding photos and pictures from my early childhood, I see a history that ought to be restored to its proper place in the annals of America's long and still unfinished road to racial equality and inclusivity.
Carina Ray, assistant professor of African history at Fordham University, is the author of the forthcoming book, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonial Rule in Ghana.
A version of this article was first published in the Point Reyes Light on March 15, 2012.
I have struggled alot of my life trying understand Synanon and my parents life within it. Your story helped shed a little more life on my parent and my own beginning. My parents are Janet and Robert Best if you want to ask your parents if they knew each other.
Thank you so much!
Robert Best IV
Thanks so much for your comments. I'm glad that you found the article helpful in shedding a little light on your early life. There is lots of information out there on Synanon and a number of websites run by former Synanon members, including a facebook group and the synanon.org site -- if you're interested in reconnecting or just learning more.
And please greet your mother for me, and thank her for sharing the article with you.
All the best,
Carina
Thank you.
In short, black America rejected white involvement with the civil rights era and began to see all whites as the enemy. This has had terrible consequences for race relations in America. And the divide has never been healed.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Nonviolent_Coordinating_Committee#Change_in_strategy_and_dissolution
"Many within the organization [SNCC] had grown skeptical about the tactics of nonviolence. After the Democratic convention of 1964, the group began to split into two factions – one favoring a continuation of nonviolent, integration-oriented redress of grievances within the existing political system, and the other moving towards Black Power and revolutionary ideologies. In 1965 the white members were expelled."
You have a bad habit of responding so low in a thread that I don't have a reply button to respond back. If you want me to respond, do what I do----clip the part you want to respond to, past it to a comment as a quote from me, then respond to it, but post it as a response to one of my comments that are higher up the thread.
Great article ! Yours is a message that must find it's voice across the land. The notion that we're living in a "post racial" society is false, and as a consequence allowed the rise of white nationalist movements to be swept under the rug.
Many of our children and grandchildren are multi racial, multi ethnic, multi cultural and multi lingual. They are the face of today's youth, and the world's future rests in their hands. It's a beautiful evolution of the human species.......embrace them !