antiracism – Mindful Mama

the tax of racism

Reading Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Evicted has left me feeling nauseous and discombobulated. Thanks to a recent reading of Palma Strand’s article “’Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall…’: Reflections on Fairness and Housing in the Omaha-Council Bluffs Region as well as viewing of the Open Sky Policy Institute’s Policy and Equity Webinars, I had recently become aware of the effects of 1930’s redlining practices on Omaha’s current situation via statistics like these:

Half as many Black households own homes as white households.
Due to middle class wealth being accumulated by home-equity, the wealth of Omaha whites is 20 times that of Blacks.
Due to our city custom of annexing private neighborhoods built by private developers, we have a severe lack of affordable housing in Western Omaha as well as a city-wide shortage. (There is affordable housing available for only 19% of households eligible for it).
Our city’s Western-most school district is 88% white with 6% of students receiving free or reduced lunch while our Eastern-most district is 29% white with 74% receiving free and reduced lunch.
Renters living in non-white census tracts are evicted at a rate of 41 per tract, per year compared to 17 for those living in white census tracts.
Most of these evictions are in properties with open code violations, meaning the renters are awaiting the landlord to fix a roof, toilet, hole in the wall, etc. (the average critical code case is open 672 days in Omaha).

I wasn’t prepared for the above stats to be made flesh and blood through the stories of those affected by federal, state and local policies in Evicted. To witness trauma upon trauma being compounded by a complex system of access and denial, I was left frustrated and dismayed. The people I met in Desmond’s work are from Milwaukee, but I am sure their stories echo those of Omaha’s most unfortunate renters: not calling the police on domestic violence due to fear of being evicted for “nuisance calls”, deciding between utilities, food or rent, taking sponge baths with boiled water for lack of a functioning shower, five school transfers during middle school alone due to evictions and moves, sleeping five to a bed-less room, having to take what’s available because there are twenty other families who would happily take the apartment with a hole in the roof and a busted out window…

Why aren’t landlords being held to the standard of making sure apartments are habitable? Why isn’t local, state and federal government doing something to address the problem of evictions for the short-term? And long-term, why isn’t there enough affordable housing to keep the market competitive? Desmond provides options to address the affordable housing crisis:

Provide legal counsel for all those going to eviction court. Studies have shown that evictions decrease up to 90% when legal counsel is provided. LB419, discussed last week in committee, addresses just this.
Create federal housing vouchers to subsidize renters so that no one pays more than 30% of their income on housing. (Some pay up to 70% of their minimum wage income on uninhabitable shelter.) This would require a statute making it illegal for a landlord to discriminate based upon income level. LB196, also discussed last week, addresses income discrimination.
Create more Affordable Housing. This will require brainpower, creativity and heartfelt intention.

I can already hear the complaints about subsidies, taxes and the need for hard work, but did you know that of the $190 billion the federal government spent in 2015 to help Americans buy or rent homes, the seven million households with incomes of more than $200,000 received more than the 50+ million households with incomes of less than 50k?

The rich are getting subsidies that far exceed those of the poor.

Of course they are, they have the means to lobby for their interests. They have access to health, wealth and education to keep the status quo, or to improve it in their favor. But is a growing divide between have and have-nots what we want as a nation? What does it mean to be American? Are our fates not entwined?

British- Nigerian author Nels Abbey says,

Racism is such a tax. It’s a burden on you. It’s a financial tax, it’s an emotional tax, it’s a spiritual tax, it’s a political tax.

I lobby to dump the energetic tax of racism and to increase our wealth taxes so that we as a united America can transform the structures skewed to advantage the already advantaged.

*photo credit to Philip Montgomery

grammar matters

Today’s contribution to Black history month (something we will celebrate and uplift until having a separate month isn’t needed) will focus on the education of white people. As I asserted in my latest blog, Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?, white people need some educating around race because it’s not something we’ve been required to study.

Another thing I pointed out in the blog is the need to have relationships with white people who may be further along the path toward creating racial equity who can help steer our way to growth and understanding. Luckily for me, I am in relationship with numerous kind souls who are more immersed than I in anti-racism work and who can gently point out when I may be committing micro-aggressions of which I am unaware,

such as capitalizing both Black and white.

I admit to being reluctant to the first suggestion. We all matter, I thought. (That should have been a heads up!)

When the second suggestion came, I thought this may really need to be considered, but I felt strong commitment to create white culture dedicated to creating an equitable world, and didn’t want to off-put potential learners by seeming to be anti-white.

Not one to believe in coincidences, the third suggestion really got my attention. It helped that it came with a link to more education.

Turns out this grammatical suggestion was put in motion by W.E.B. Du Bois back in 1926. Almost 100 years later, we are still working out how to respectfully acknowledge our Black brothers and sisters to show them that they are seen and heard and that they matter, that we see Black as a culture.

It also turns out that there is a history of capitalizing white among white supremacists, a group I’m not looking to imitate.

For now I’ll capitalize Black and leave white as is, and I’ll dream of a time when exerting energy thinking about the capitalization of a color is a thing of the past, a time when we are all more concerned with capitalizing American and when being American means automatic inclusion and equal access to resources.

Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?

Ever since my kids were little one of my favorite after school questions was “who did you sit with at lunch?” When my son Max went to high school I noticed that despite having Black friends, he never mentioned eating with them. When asked why, he said he didn’t know but that they all sat together. I was baffled. What had changed in high school? Was it because he was attending a private school? Was it a racist place? Had we made a mistake?

I mentioned my concern to a Black friend who had attended the same school as Max. He said it was the same in the 90’s and explained that it was due to shared experiences. Many of the Black kids took public transportation to school and came from non-parochial elementary schools. They felt more comfortable together. He didn’t seem concerned, so I let it go.

Flash forward to the first antiracist conversation group I hosted last summer. The discussion got heated when the topic of lunch room sorting surfaced. There was much surmising as so why some of us witnessed segregated seating in our various school experiences and some of us didn’t. We fumbled our way through dialogue about how much of it had to do with certain locations and ages being more racist than others. None of us felt like we could speak to what was going on, and there was much frustration.

Jump to today. I’ve just read the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum. She explains the role of personal identity development and how in adolescence most of us struggle with questions about who we are and how we fit into the world. For those of us who see our race as the standard, racial identity isn’t on our radar, but for those of us who are beginning to understand our race as perceived as a deviation of the norm, perhaps due to experiencing various micro and macro aggressions, seeking out peers who understand and can reflect understanding of our experience back to us is of vital importance, hence the separate cafeteria seating.

This theory also explains why students of different races may congregate readily in elementary cafeterias and may choose not to as they enter the stages of self- exploration and identity development in high school. In addition, it explains why not all Black students feel the need to self-sort, as adolescents vary in both experience and timing of identity development.

I’d like now to come back to the idea of white people not necessarily having to consider race as part of our personal identity development. Why would we? We see ourselves reflected back to us positively everywhere we look: on TV, in the movies and in leadership positions from the classroom to the capitol. We are the norm and we have been for as long as we can remember.

Though many white people don’t choose to reflect upon being white, I believe the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing BLM movements and resistance to these movements during the critical pause of the pandemic and under the exclusionary rhetoric of Donald Trump have caused many of us to feel the need to explore what it means to be white and our role in current events.

Like the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria, we too need to come together to share our experiences of racial development. We need to share our stories of coming into racial awareness, of the discomfort and the fuck-ups, of the guilt, fear and frustration. We need to gather with other people interested in developing white identity, one not based on assumed normalcy or felt superiority, but rather one based on reality, cognizant of the current system of racism set up for our advantage.

We need to gather with other white people who are further along in the process and acting as change-agents, who can accept where we are and compassionately offer guidance for us in noticing our blind spots and taking steps toward dismantling personal and cultural racism.

We need to strive toward techno-colored vision— toward appreciating the uniqueness of each person we encounter, regardless of race, while at the same time recognizing the role race plays in our all our experiences. We need to strive for equality for all, with focus on our own liberation from patterns of socialization that lead to the oppression of self and others.

We need to create a world in which school isn’t felt to be a racialized space, where Blacks aren’t feeling the need to segregate, a world in which asking “why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” is a question of the past.