Speak: Heritage event in Levittown brings together diverse professionals 

Charles Thompson III says that he’s often met with surprise from patients.

“Oh, I didn’t expect to see someone like you.”

“Oh, OK, you’re the doctor.”

The surgeon, who is Black, says comments like this come his way daily.

“Usually, it’s very indirect,” he says of people’s response to encountering him in his professional role. The Huntington resident would like to see those reactions happen less frequently — so he’ll be speaking about the need to normalize Black excellence as one of 10 participants in a Ted Talk-like program in Levittown on July 27, called Speak: Heritage.

The director of the Mary Brennan INN Soup Kitchen in Hempstead, who is Haitian American, will talk about being embarrassed by his name as a child but growing to respect its significance. A Latina mother will discuss raising bicultural children. A Long Island dentist of Indian descent will recount losing her brother to oral cancer.

The event, during which each participant will have the microphone for up to 10 minutes, is part of a new program that will offer such events with different themes. A Speak event in Bellmore on Aug. 16 will focus on the theme of laughter and a planned event for Sept. 14 tentatively will have the theme of health, says George Andriopoulos of Farmingdale, one of the co-leaders of the new public speaking platform founded last year.

Dana Lopez of Valley Stream chose the heritage theme and is producer of the show. “The theme of heritage is so universal. You don’t have to be the same heritage as someone else to relate to their experience,” she says.

Meet four of the speakers:

Charles Thompson III, surgeon

“I want to normalize Black professionals so when the general public sees a Black person in a position of power or major influence or what they consider a great job — lawyer, doctor, corporate executive — it’s not a big surprise anymore,” says Thompson, 42, who does weight loss and general surgery on Long Island and is an assistant professor at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in Manhattan. “Society still has a lot of work to do to change the narrative of who we are.”

Thompson says he grew up in Washington, D.C., and North Carolina with a mother who has a Ph.D., with grandparents with doctorates, with access to good schools, as did his other Black friends. He attended the historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta, G.A. and Howard University in Washington, D.C. for his degrees. “We all came from a background of preaching academic excellence.”

He says these role models need to be presented more frequently to Black youth so that Black excellence is expected. "My story and our story needs to be told," he says. He says he wants to show that Black men can be successful in fields other than entertainment or sports, and that they shouldn’t buy into what he noted as stereotypes that all Black success stories involve overcoming adversity.

"[Barack] Obama was a two-time president of the United States. Obama is looked at as an exception to the rule. It should be looked at more like a normalized situation," he says. 

Jean Claude Victor Jr., director of the Mary Brennan INN Soup Kitchen

“I struggled growing up with my birth name. People making fun of my name because they didn’t know how to pronounce it. They didn’t know what gender I was, male or female,” says Victor, 46, who lives in Freeport. His first name, he explains, is correctly pronounced like "John" but with a French accent.

“I was embarrassed to say that I was Haitian. All the pictures and news about Haiti was always bad," he says. "That plays into your image in your head.”

But once he got to high school and understood more about what his parents went through to move from Haiti to the United States, his feelings changed, he says. “I started to grow up and let people know, ‘You’re pronouncing my name wrong,’ instead of not saying anything at all. It helped me to respect my name and led me to really grow my identity.”

Now, he doesn’t mind that people do American-ize his name, pronouncing it “Gene” instead; he even goes along with it. But he knows the significance of his heritage.

Incidentally, he also now has three children. Their names? DaQuan, who is an adult, Zefeniah, 14, and J-onQua, 13. He says they don't have the same issues he did. "Me and my wife taught them to respect their names and let everyone know to respect their names. If someone pronounces it wrong or spells it wrong, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt and correct them in a respectful way," he says.

Dorothy Santana, founder of Latina Moms Connect

“Mine is coming from the perspective of not feeling connected or welcome or belonging when I moved to Long Island as an adult,” says Santana, 53, who grew up in Brentwood, left the Island to study social work at Buffalo State College, and lived in Queens before moving to North Babylon when she was 36. She facilitates training for educators on Long Island about culturally responsive practices and has four children.

“Long Island has a long history of racism and segregation,” says Santana, who is Colombian American. She says some mothers would tell her they didn’t feel comfortable speaking Spanish to each other at their children’s baseball fields or soccer fields. She was disturbed when, she recalls, one of her sons, in kindergarten or first grade, said to her, “I wish my skin was pink.” He was one of the few Latino children in his classroom, she says. These experiences led her to launch Latina Moms Connect in 2014 to help keep families connected to their culture, she says. The group encourages social networking and runs events and dialogues where mothers share their experiences raising bicultural Latino children.

“I have to be real intentional about nurturing their pride for their culture and how they look. I want them to embrace it,” she says she thought then. Latina Moms Connect will celebrate its 10th anniversary in February.

Parul Dua Makkar, dentist

“I grew up in five different countries,” says Makkar, 44, who lives in Dix Hills and owns PDM Family Dental in Jericho. She was born in India, and has lived in Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Canada (where her parents still live in Calgary) and, finally, the United States, where she attended undergraduate and dental school in Oklahoma and met her husband, who is from Long Island.

So, home for Makkar has been where her family is. She will talk about losing her only sibling, her younger brother, who was a dentist in Canada, to oral cancer in March 2021. “Having lost my brother, I lost my essence of family. Within a year I also lost both last remaining grandparents in India.”

After her brother’s death, Makkar put together a book of her brother’s writings titled “Life Interrupted: Dr. Dua’s Survival Guide.” She says doing talks like the Speak event helps her cope with her grief. “I didn’t have a support village to protect me from grief,” she says. “It gives me a sense that I’m not alone.”

By Beth Whitehouse

beth.whitehouse@newsday.comBethWhitehouse1

Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.