"Racism happens here every day," said Leslie Dominguez Santos, human rights coordinator for Barnstable County.
Lower Cape residents gathered at the Federated Church of Orleans for a panel about racism on Cape Cod on Sunday, August 18.
The panel—hosted by the church’s Interfaith Justice Committee and Am HaYam Cape Cod Havurah—featured Cape and Islands District Attorney Rob Galibois, Orleans Police Chief Scott MacDonald, Human rights coordinator for Barnstable County Leslie Dominguez Santos and Leo Blandford, director of health equity and community impact for Outer Cape Health Services.
Santos shared some data from her work, which includes doing intakes of incidents of discrimination across Barnstable County.
“Every year, the majority of our intakes are related to race-based occurrences,” she said. “Every single intake I have received this summer has been related to a racial bias incident.”
Santos said that while the number of intakes her department receives is small, it still indicates a trend of racism on the Cape.
“A recurring trend that we see is across all of these areas—schools, housing, employment, policing, health care, all of them—racial bias incidents continue to occur,” Santos said.
Galibois spoke about the number of racist incidents his department has had to deal with since he took office less than two years ago, including one that happened last summer—two white teenagers allegedly attempted to drown a Black teenager at Goose Pond in Chatham while using racial slurs.
“I was at an event and I was asked, ‘What's something that you've experienced so far that you didn't necessarily expect when you were coming into office?’" Galibois recalled at the panel. “And I could answer that question quite quickly: the volume of hate incidents.”
Galibois said he was particularly concerned about the number of racist incidents happening in schools. He said he is seeking funding to hire social workers to help school districts across the region deal with these issues.
MacDonald shared his own personal reckoning with race and policing. He recalled being part of an initiative back in 2021 called Conversations With Police, which was started by the Nauset Interfaith Association.
At the panel, he described to an audience how his outlook on issues with race and policing changed as a result of being part of this group.
"I came into this with, I'm going to defend the cops. I've been doing this 34 years, I have never worked with a racist cop,” MacDonald said. “A person of color would tell a story, something that happened to them, and I'd say, ‘No, you were driving uninspected, that's why you were stopped.’ Boy did I learn a lot over the next several months."
MacDonald said by learning to listen instead of getting defensive right away, he was able to see things from a different perspective.
Blandford spoke about the racial disparities he sees in his work in the health sector on Cape Cod.
“If we look at our Indigenous population, they are dying at the fastest rate in Barnstable County than any other racial/ethnic demographic,” he said.
Chatham Police Chief Michael Anderson and NAACP Cape Cod president Lynn Rhodes attended the event as well. The panel was moderated by Jeff Spalter, a member of the Interfaith Justice Committee.
