Son of biracial couple seeing success

PANAMA CITY — Being in the arena of the elites is the tip of the iceberg. Success in Casimir Peters’ story starts with being exposed to a little bit of everything.

“We tried to put things in our children’s lives to make them universal citizens,” said Cecile Scoon, Peters’ mother. “Even though (with) traditions in small towns, people want you to pick one thing: ‘you’re a baseball player’; (but) that’s not how it’s done at the top schools.”

That one statement resounds throughout the life of the biracial 23-year-old Casimir Peters’, who is the booking and briefing coordinator for Shaun Donovan, United States secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Peters’ job entails managing correspondence at Donovan’s office and lining up the secretary’s schedule. He has previously worked for the office of First Lady Michelle Obama.

Pictures of a younger Peters, signed by former presidents and other top officials, are framed and propped up on a bookcase at his parents’ law office, Peters & Scoon, on East Eighth Street, off Harrison Avenue. The photos accompanied by stories told by Scoon and his father Alvin Peters illustrate an excellent musician, talented athlete and a scholar.

His parents, Peters said, regularly led him into conversations at dinner time about current events and took him to functions that would eventually lead to him introduce himself and engage in conversations with others.

“They wanted me to really try to relate to a lot of people,” Peters said. “Part of that’s growing up in the South, but part of that’s my racial identity … and being able to interact with two different groups in a meaningful, positive way and finding the commonality verses finding the difference.

“And if there is a difference,” he added, “negotiating that difference without compromising who you are.”

He’d face being considered “different” while attending area schools. As an advanced student, his peers — both black and white — would label him as white, he said. It was mainly a stereotype associated with being smart.

“Sometimes that would manifest itself in conversations with my parents and my sisters,” Peters said. “How does our family respond to constant criticism and critique on our racial identity?”

Alvin Peters, his father, offered creative techniques to his children when dealing with being singled out.

He said one time when his son said he was called a “cracker” by some African-American basketball players at the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreational Center he played ball with, Alvin Peters responded: “ ‘tell them you’re not a cracker; you’re a ‘wheat cracker.’ ”

The light joke crumbled the crass label when the teenage Peters repeated it back to his fellow basketball players, his dad said.

“We did our part to inoculate him from some of the negative stereotypes and destructiveness that is often common in African-American culture,” he added.

Kwanzaa celebrations, black art, being exposed to successful minorities and immersed into Caribbean and African-American culture became a new, dependable social outlet for Casimir Peters once he hit college at Davidson College in North Carolina — where he moved into leadership by interning for the president of the college.

Through his experiences, he has learned being black in leadership requires being more polished, he said. However, his goal is to level out the playing field.

“Part of my narrative is that I have two parents who are lawyers who have done well and have the education to invest in myself. I would like that to be a lesser part of the story in the future,” he added. “I’m still finding a way to do that. I think HUD provides me that opportunity. How you can use infrastructure and how federal, state and local government can work together to combat poverty and try to make opportunity as equal as possible.”

If he could inspire with a message the African-American community, he said he’d say: “Be intentional. Be proud of who you are and you will be proud of who you become.”

Peters is the eldest of three siblings. He graduated with honors from Bay High in 2008 and in 2012 from Davidson College with a bachelor’s degree in political science.