Fighting Institutionalized Racism by bobmassie2018

OUR COMMON FUTURE

Bold Leadership for

Fighting Institutionalized Racism in Massachusetts

Democrat for Governor

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed

IGNORANCE AND ACTION

How White Attitudes Harden Into Structures and Block Our Common Path to Justice Bob Massie August 2, 2018

Origins and Context: In early July 2018 Bob Massie met with a group of African-American clergy, including several leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign, to discuss the persistence of racism in Boston and beyond. The failure of the wider public to respond to the scathing Boston Globe series on race in December 2017 was reviewed intensely. Afterwards, the leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign invited Bob, who has had decades of experience writing about racism and the economy, to offer some reflections on this problem. Bob delivered this speech at St Mary’s Episcopal Church in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on August 2, 2018.

I. INTRODUCTION I thank the Poor People’s Campaign, the Rev. Edwin Johnson of St. Mary’s Church and the other organizations for inviting us here today to talk about the intersection of race and the economy. As one of many who cares passionately about justice, I offer my reflections with humility. It is an honor to be with so many leaders from the community and the church, who have been my friends and teachers. My own commitment began with my experience of exclusion as a child with an illness that took away my ability to walk at the age of four. I was in leg braces and a wheelchair until I was 12 so I learned at a very early how quickly a person could be judged and rejected based on their appearance. As I became a teenager, I learned that I was not alone in this experience and that the reflex of exclusion comes in many forms and harms many people.

My passion for justice extended into a deep engagement with the people living under apartheid in South Africa. To trace the origins and power this violent, militarized, and corporatized racism in that country, I made many trips over more than ten years to explore the depth of its prejudice. I visited sugar plantations and went to the bottom of a sweltering gold mine teeming with thousands of slave-wage migrant workers, I met with Desmond Tutu and other leaders in the liberation struggle, including Nelson Mandela, and I was an international 1

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed observer at the country’s first democratic elections. I will never forget being in the township of Langa near Cape Town under a full moon as the residents entered the streets, shouting and singing in celebration of their new democracy. This experience in South Africa led me back to America. In all that time over there, I realized that I had not needed to travel 9,000 miles to another continent to observe the crippling effects of institutionalized racism. There had always been plenty of evidence right here. a. The Failed Response to the Globe Series

As you know, beginning on December 10, 2017, The Boston Globe published a lengthy “Spotlight” series on race in Boston. For seven days the newspaper unleashed a string of challenging articles that focused on the reality of racism in Massachusetts – particularly in Boston.

I realized that I did not need to travel 9,000 miles to observe the crippling effects of institutionalized racism. There was plenty of evidence here in America.

The series zeroed in not on the complexity and diversity of experience among communities of color, but very specifically on the white-black divide, and I am also doing that here. Their accumulation of facts momentarily disturbed the complacency felt by many white people who could recognize racism as a slur or a Swastika but not in the depth and breadth of white supremacy’s enduring political, institutional, and economic force. But right from the beginning, there was a difference of reaction. To some, especially in the white community, it was a revelation of something new; to others a wearying confirmation of what they had known forever. The Globe series is only one of many publications that have confirmed the enduring reality of racism:

• “The Color of Wealth” study by the Federal Reserve of Boston, which announced that “the widening wealth gap in the United States is a worrisome sign that millions of families nationwide do not have enough in assets to offer better opportunities for future generations.”1

It also produced a statistic so shocking to white people that they actually repeated it to each other: “while white households have a median wealth of $247,500, black families had a median wealth of zero.”

1F ederal Reserve Bank of Boston, “The Color of Wealth in Boston: A Joint Publication with Duke University and The New School”. March 31, 2015 2

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed • Looking more broadly across the country, we have the study released last month by the Institute of Policy Studies called The Souls of Poor Folk, which put the crisis of poverty in context. “More than 40,600,000 Americans subsist below the poverty line; … [and] 140 million people [are] dealing with some combination of these crises every day,” they wrote. And “nearly half of our population cannot afford a $400 emergency, which presents a structural crisis of national proportion that ties poverty to things like healthcare and housing.” As they continued, “the devastation cuts across race, gender, age, and geography. It has carved a dangerous and deepening moral chasm in America and inflicts a tragic loss of purpose, even among the affluent.”

In short, we could climb to the moon on the stacked speeches, reports, studies, recommendations that have, for more than 50 years, said the same thing. Yet despite all of the research, all the knowledge, all of the effort, here’s what happened: NOTHING.

Some people were shocked by the Globe series, but the shock, as usual, faded. There were letters to the editor. There was a conversation among black and white business leaders in March. There are growing and praiseworthy efforts by specific corporations and through the Mayor’s Office and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, as well as the continuing struggle of so many community organizations who have been campaigning for economic and racial justice for decades. But today, we still have nothing that is likely to address the inequality of wages and wealth at the necessary scale.

II. WHITE IGNORANCE The failure to react to the Globe series belongs largely in the lap of the white community, particularly white leaders in politics and in our major institutions. Many members of that community are only now facing the true legacy of slavery, the lynchings, and murders, the endless perpetuation of violent domination over all communities of color. White communities still need to understand the meaning of the words in “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, which reminds us that: We have come over the way that with tears has been watered, We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed We have a long, long way to go to find the right story to teach our children about America, in its beauty, and in its dreadfulness.

Let’s be clear – most members of the white community in Massachusetts aggressively reject open white racism. We are revolted by the endless horrors like the Charlottesville attack, the Charleston church murders in 2015, and the cold-blooded police shootings that launched Black Lives Matter. But in addition to such open and visible racism, we must also must focus on unconscious racism. Here there are two schools of thought. One is that these failures of awareness are deliberate and culpable. Willful ignorance is when a person or a company “could have known something that instead you strove not to see.” The behavior of financial firms and mortgage lenders during the 2008 crisis – which wiped out half the wealth of African-American and Hispanic-American households – could be called willful ignorance.

The line of separation between intentional and unintentional ignorance can be hard to draw. We can ignore the baby crying five thousand miles from here, but when we find a crying baby on the doorstep, we know we must act.

The second approach is to view the failure as the result of ignorance and obliviousness. This is a persistent and convenient lack of awareness. Such ignorance is a silent, invisible, odorless infection of the soul that helps to maintain injustice, discrimination, and poverty.

And what happens when the baby is across town, in a neighborhood that we have never visited? Most people instinctively believe that this is someone else’s duty; they have just don’t have the room in their minds or hearts or lives to take this in. Because knowledge creates accountability and obligation, there is often a limit to what we want to know. a. Symptoms and Causes of White Obliviousness We see this confirmed in the lack of curiosity, the lack of responsibility, the lack of urgency, and the lack of commitment. There is also a disturbing lack of courage. The disturbing reality is that many members of the white community are deeply reluctant to talk about race out of 4

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed the fear of being blamed, or making a mistake, or offending someone, or discovering a new obligation that might require them to evolve and change.

These failures all come together into the awful and secret white acceptance – even expectation – of the inevitability of black failure. Too many leaders at all levels believe – perhaps deep in the back of their minds – black people have always been, and always will be, poor. Black poverty has been normalized. Let me give offer two thought experiments that illustrate this: b. The Slow-Motion Hurricane

First, we tend to react to things that happen quickly and dramatically, but not to things that happen slowly. Imagine if overnight most of Wellesley were destroyed by a hurricane. Homes suddenly become uninhabitable, people are displaced, schools are shut down, businesses collapse, jobs disappear, and disease spreads.

What would our response be? Our politicians would rush down to examine the damage and promise support. The legislature would meet in special session to appropriate new funds to rebuild. The newspapers would be filled with human interest stories; the Federal government would step up and act and, over time, the community would be brought back to life and health. An example of my own cluelessness is that I have always trusted, since I was a child, that the Federal government would immediately step in to help in such situations. But after witnessing the horror of the Superdome or of the Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina or the devastation and abandonment of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, I have learned that this is not true. But what if the same destruction happens slowly? What happens when homes slowly become uninhabitable, schools gradually shut down, businesses steadily collapse, jobs continuously disappear, and disease and addiction relentlessly spread? The condition then becomes familiar, even normal – and thus ignored. Our response is then slow, weak, or completely absent.

And it’s not just the speed, it is our sense of tribal and racial connection. Imagine how fast the white community would react to a photo of two-year old blond girl in a pink bow, in tears, being forced by a disaster out of her home forever. White leaders would likely invite those 5

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed children into their own homes; they would demand public action; they would open their own wallets to rebuild those broken lives. But tragically and cruelly, racism is so deep and contaminating that blackness itself can be a barrier to white compassion. We have seen this in the opioid crisis. Addiction and neglect ravaged communities of color for decades, and for much of that time, the response was punishment rather than treatment. Now that we are experiencing the devastating spread of the opioid epidemic into white communities in every corner of the state, we see new attention and urgency. That’s a good thing, but it shouldn’t have taken this long and we still have a long way to go.

III. HARDENING INTO CONCRETE Many years ago British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said: “We shape our buildings, and then they shape us.” In other words, we have an intention when we design a building. That intention, and that design then harden into a concrete structure, and the concrete structure perpetuates the behavior for which it was designed.

Tragically and cruelly, racism is so deep and contaminating that blackness itself can be a barrier to white compassion.

This is also true for ideas. Some of our laws and institutions were designed with racism – unintentional or deliberate – in mind, and once they are built they can immortalize that racism. Bias, discrimination, and structural not only remain, they become permanent. Racism gets embedded in our structures and our practices in a way that is unconscious and invisible to many white people. This unconscious racism shows up everywhere, all the time. We see it in the suspicions of white people when they observe black people in everyday circumstances.

• We saw that in Philadelphia when two black men were arrested for sitting in a Starbucks waiting for their friend. • We saw it in Cleveland in early July when a neighbor called the police because 12 year old Reggie Fields was cutting the lawn as part of his summer business.

• And just two days ago a black female student named Oumou Kanoute, a rising sophomore at Smith College in Northampton, was approached by a police officer in the common room of her school where she was just having lunch. Someone in the building had called the police because they thought she looked “out of place.” 6

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed We see also it in the unequal treatment of African-American children, in schools across America, who face suspension, expulsion, corporal punishment, and arrest at a much higher rate than white students do – something that contributes to the school-to-jail pipeline and other failures of our broken criminal justice system. Again, this is the essence of institutionalized racism, in which the biases of the past gradually stabilize into structures that perpetuate that racism even if – or especially if – the people who now maintain those structures are not aware of those origins. a. Rejecting the Claw Approach One way that many in the white community have tried to respond is by creating programs that rescue a few people from the larger crisis. Here I am thinking of all the programs that seek to identify youth of color who are given opportunities and are lifted out of poverty and on to some white Mt. Olympus to join the gods and enjoy a future different from the one towards which they had been headed.

This is many people’s story, including that of my good friend Deval Patrick. The problem is that from the white community’s standpoint these kinds of actions too often allow people to think that we are doing something serious and comprehensive about poverty and disadvantage.

Our instinct to rescue individuals rather than heal communities reminds me of what happens in the very white movie Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear is trapped in an arcade game full of small green three-eyed creatures. When he asks, “Who’s in charge here?” they tremble and point straight up. “The claw,” they say. Lightyear looks up and sees the claw-like device which a human can lower and select one of the creatures from the batch as a prize. “The claw chooses who is worthy,” they say with reverence, and they accept it when it descends to select just one of them for liberation.

The white community is inclined to use the “claw approach” to dealing with poverty. We drop a claw down into poor communities and rescue a few young people. This is good for those few, but it allows white leaders to avoid owning up to our common and deep responsibilities to every child.

We need to be asking ourselves: What will liberate everyone? What do we need to do, at what scale, so that black communities, and all communities of color, and indeed all poor people of all races are treated as strong communities with extraordinary people, fellow citizens – fellow humans – who have every right to the same opportunities, attention, resources, and respect that privilege has always assumed for itself. We don’t need more claws. We need the real things that create real wealth: education, investment, training, wages, ownership, capital, and justice. 7

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed

V. BOLD ACTION So what is to be done â&#x20AC;&#x201C; here, now? That is a conversation we must have together.

Whatever we must do we must 1) crack through unconscious white bias so that 2) we prevent the solidifying of that bias into systemic structures that maintain it. The problem in South Africa was not just racism, but racism that hardened into structural concrete that then separated people in every sphere â&#x20AC;&#x201C; education, housing, ownership, culture, medical care, and citizenship. A. Building New Attitudes Here are four things we must do to change attitudes, even if they are hidden and unconscious: 1. Admit and Address Obliviousness

First, we must address the reality of convenient white ignorance, in part through honest and difficult conversation. We have an opportunity created by the rising visibility of black culture and black leadership. This reached what seemed a critical moment with the election of Barack Obama. But because of these advances, many people in the white community have lulled themselves into believing we are, in fact, living in a post-racial world. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dangerous about this is that the more they believe that, the less awareness of privilege and responsibility for justice they tend to feel.

We must address the reality of convenient white ignorance, in part through honest and difficult conversation.

The irony is that the path to our unity as human beings lies in the explicit recognition of the diversity through which that humanity is expressed. Unity without honesty is impossible.

2. Fighting the Eternal Slander that Poor Deserve Their Poverty Second, we need to fight against a brutal human prejudice that goes back to the beginnings of human society. It is a major topic through both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. And this is the ancient slander that poor people deserve their poverty and sick people deserve their disease. 8

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed We see this view rejected throughout the Bible, particularly in the Book of Job. Job experiences enormous setbacks, losing his health, his wealth, and his family, and he is then attacked for this by his own so-called friends. You must have done something wrong for God to punish you this way, they tell him, hundreds of times. And he says no, I did nothing. And they continue to say, well, if you did nothing, then why are you poor and sick?

The insistence that all challenges can be overcome through individual effort ignores the reality of the actual conditions which so many individuals and communities face. It is wrong to ask why a person who has been thrown off an ocean liner in the middle of the sea is having trouble getting to shore by herself. Traces of this bias are reflected even the most well-intentioned white people, who in some ways cannot help thinking, well, I made it in my life, why can’t other people make it in theirs? 3. Create a Truth and Reconciliation Process in Massachusetts

Third, to fight the persistence of these attitudes, we should create a Truth and Reconciliation process for the Commonwealth. I have enduring connections to some of the people who created and implemented the original Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Massachusetts should pioneer a statewide discussion, held in thousands of venues, hosted by faith communities, schools, universities, labor unions, town meetings, and other organizations. The premise of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was that the most powerful and most enduring transformation – and the only way to combat both racist attitudes and racist structure – come when people could listen to each other’s true stories. Under the leadership of Archbishop Tutu, the leaders of the Commission transformed a completely legitimate but potentially disastrous desire for vengeance into the search for truth. They believed, as we must believe, that we can know the truth and the truth can set us free. 4. Widespread and Routine Anti-Bias Training

We must expand anti-bias training by many orders of magnitude. Just as police departments and Starbucks have put employees through anti-bias training as key to their jobs, we need to increase these practices in every school, corporation, and major institution throughout the state. Fear of difference is part of our genetics, and it can only be fought if we intensify our commitment to equality, inclusion, respect, and generosity.

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed The concept of welcoming the stranger, the person who is different, the widow, the oppressed worker, the displaced immigrant, is at the heart of the Biblical understanding of hospitality: “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” [Leviticus 19: 34] And the good news is that with the right leadership I believe many more people are ready to listen and to engage. The amount of and quality of diversity training is rising, and even Starbucks managed to produce a powerful eight-minute video that it not only showed to its 175,000 employees but also released online. B. Dismantling Institutionalized Racism Now let me move to how we address the hardening of structures, the dismantling of institutionalized racism, and the creation of bold action that will succeed at scale. a. Fight unjust laws and enforce penalties against discrimination

There are still many areas in which laws on the books remain unjust, or where there are just laws that are not being enforced. • Discrimination in lending is illegal but still common. • Discrimination in housing is illegal, but persons of color are routinely turned away.

Fighting injustice also means developing systems of accountability.

• Discrimination in employment is illegal, but experiments in which the exact same resume with different names – a “white” name and a “black” name has been sent to recruiters – and the resume with the “black” name is rejected at twice the rate.

Fighting injustice also means developing systems of accountability. We need to improve data gathering within cities and to encourage the practice of careful outside measurement.

We saw a strong example in the NAACP’s 2017 Mayor’s Report Card, entitled “Equity, Access, and Opportunity: The Walsh Administration’s Efforts and Results” which put the focus on economic development, education, public safety, and diversity in hiring – all essential to building prosperity.

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed b. Replace the claw with a Marshall Plan. The key to long-term wealth in any community – and especially communities of color – is making it possible for people to build wealth, which, more than anything, means creating opportunities for ownership. For generations, that pathway was denied as black labor was forced to create white wealth. Ownership of land, homes, businesses, and capital were denied to people of color. Even today there are more than 500 billionaires in the United States, but only three of them are black. The failure to create and transfer wealth inter-generationally has been one of the most enduring causes of inequality. And even when there is progress, it can be short-lived. And according to a vast study by Harvard, Stanford, and the census bureau last March, “black men consistently earn less than white men, regardless of whether they’re raised poor or rich.”

Over the last 40 years our productivity has gone up more than 80%, yet over the same period, our wages have been flat. As Thomas Picketty has shown conclusively, the rich keep getting richer because of the value of their passive investments – their stock, their real estate – has been growing much faster than wage increases. Without rising wages, people cannot afford to buy a home or a business. They especially cannot afford to do this if they are carrying tens of thousands in debt from trying to earn a college degree. Here I want to commend the work being done by leadership organizations, including:

• Eastern Bank, which has designed a creative and effective system for supporting minority business enterprises with investment, training, and support.

• Boston Mayor Marty Walsh created the position of Chief Resilience Officer led by Dr. Atyia Martin who boldly organized critical conversations about race across the city. Their important innovations included two major public events called "Boston Talks Race" in which the mayor and others spoke candidly about the challenges of persistent racial bias. • The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce has been working with companies in the area to build and strengthen minority recruitment. 11

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed â&#x20AC;˘ National organizations, such as the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, have been working tirelessly to promote small-scale capital investment in inner city small businesses. One study they conducted showed that if a small amount of capital were distributed across all the inner city businesses in order to give them each enough to hire one more person, it would wipe out unemployment in the United States.

These are all excellent ideas. The problem is, as their sponsors would be the first to say, is that they remain too small. They are mostly pilot projects. They are experiments that hope to lead the way. But without the strong and enduring support of our largely white political, community, and corporate leaders around the state, we will remain in Pilot Project Purgatory forever. Instead, we need to act at scale. We need to imagine, design, and implement a Marshall Plan for American Poverty. We have done this before, during the Great Depression. We did not do this during the Great Recession, and as a result, the economy recovered for the people at the top; it still has not fully recovered for the people in the middle and at the bottom, and some are continuing to sink. c. Build the Local Economy

Our economic and political leadership is focused on a model of wealth building that is 30 years out of date. Though the Globe series identified fundamental distortion in the market in its scathing description of how the developers at Seaport failed to consider or to contribute to black economic empowerment, it was not willing or able to go past that single example to the deeper ways in which our current economic leaders neglect black poverty.

We must make fundamental investments to improve education, expand public transportation, break the grip of our broken utilities, and transition to health care for all.

We should not be giving enormous tax breaks to huge companies like General Electric and Amazon. We need to embrace tools like a Public Infrastructure Bank or a strategy in which major â&#x20AC;&#x153;anchor institutionsâ&#x20AC;? boost the community by buying local products and local services.

We need to make fundamental investments to improve education, expand public transportation, break the grip of our broken utilities, and transition to universal health care.

Rather than perpetuating a trickle-down notion of wealth creation, we must create and support local capital, local development, local ownership, and local control.

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed This has been the key to many community economic development efforts – but such organizations need more power and resources to strengthen local development. This is the pathway to creating a just and sustainable economy that will deliver, as we vow in the Pledge of Allegiance, “liberty and justice for all.” d. Embrace the Poor People’s Campaign as a Universal Moral Imperative

Finally, we need to come together – black and white – to embrace the Poor People’s Campaign as a moral imperative for the Commonwealth. In the 1960s, concern about the persistence of poverty rose and transcended technical questions about policy and economics to take its proper place as a fundamental moral problem facing the United States, a betrayal of the core values of the nation. No one spoke about this more forcefully than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – though many in the white community couldn’t hear it then, and can’t hear it now. Following the leadership of so many across this nation, including the Rev. Dr. William Barber of North Carolina, and many faith and political leaders here in Boston, have relaunched the Poor People’s Campaign, designed to raise the attention and the urgency around poverty. The Poor People’s Campaign is reminding us of the full cost of “deepening poverty, ecological devastation, systemic racism, and an economy harnessed to seemingly endless war.”

In conclusion, I want to thank you all again for coming. I look forward to your comments and to whatever actions and discussions will follow. And I invite and challenge all of us – particularly members We must break the cycle in which of the white community who are ready to address racism hardens into structure, these fundamental questions of justice and to face structure creates segregation, the truth. Persistent denial will lead to eventual destruction. segregation creates ignorance, We can address white ignorance, fight the eternal slander, create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and make anti-bias training universal.

and ignorance comes all the way back around to reinforce racism.

We can remove unjust laws, replace the Claw with a Marshall Plan, build the local economy, and embrace the moral imperative of the Poor People’s campaign. Most of you are already involved in this struggle. All of you have experiences, ideas, and talents necessary to our success. We, together, are already demonstrating the curiosity, responsibility, urgency, commitment, and courage and we could do so much more.

Our Common Future: Institutionalized Racism and Action Needed In his time Jesus of Nazareth talked about people whose “eyes that could not see, and ears that could not hear” – and we face that still today.

The Globe wrote what many did not want to read. The Poor People’s Campaign is telling us what we do not want to hear.

Now we must move from words to deeds. We must break the cycle in which racism hardens into structure, structure creates segregation, segregation creates ignorance, and ignorance comes all the way back around to reinforce racism. This cycle must end but it will only do so when we deliberately, explicitly, and consciously act to break it down. Only by such a commitment, will we be able to move. Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of liberty; Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song – full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song – full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. Thank you very much.