Larry Lundgren writes: “Lyle Bourne, Joan Carmody Theve, and I began first grade in Rumford, Rhode Island, together, graduated from East Providence High School in 1949 together, and graduated from Brown/Pembroke in 1953. Now, I have moved from Linköping, Sweden, to Gothenburg, where I look out my window at a magnificent forest named Delsjöskogen. It is where I run every morning. The single best experience in Sweden was 21 years at the Red Cross, where every week I and colleagues met high school students who came to the country as asylum seekers. The biggest group came from the Horn of Africa. In 2013, I read a New York Times OpEd by former U.S. Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt, to get Americans to discuss ending classification by fictional “race,” as proposed by Prewitt but never again discussed seriously in the Times. Not one of the Somali-born students had any idea that if he or she were to move to America they would be assigned to a “race.” In Sweden, they learned that we all are Homo sapiens. I learned from BAM that at least some Brown medical students have taken the first steps to end the use of “race” in American medicine. Norman James and Alvin Gerstein ’54, please write to me—Google and you will find me.”
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Class of 1953