Year of Awareness Building ’18 – December & January Recap

In December and January, more than 200 concerned citizens participated in the half-day Groundwater Training and/or the two-day Racial Equity Workshop: Phase I. We were joined by representatives of the following organizations:

Thank you to all participants, for your engagement and commitment towards reaching a shared understanding of racial inequality. Special thanks to the Cleveland Public Library, to Case Western University and to the Greater Cleveland Partnership for their support.

SAVE THE DATE

Film Screening: From Something to Nothing: The Art of Rap
Date: Wednesday, February 21
Time: 7:00PM
Location: Rock Hall Foster Theater

Wealth Building in NE Ohio’s Communities of Color
Date: February 22
Time: 8:30 am – 2:00 pm
Location: Cleveland State University – Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs

February REI Film Screening: I Am Not Your Negro
Date: February 23rd
Time: 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Location: Cleveland Neighborhood Progress

One Community Reads
Date: March 15th
Time: 7:00pm
Location: Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square

Black History Month events

Neighborhood Workshops on Health, Community & Climate Action
Through the Resilient Cleveland initiative CNP is partnering with the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability to host a series of neighborhood climate workshops.
These engagement events have been a great space to hear resident concerns, connect residents to shared resources and create solutions to common challenges. The workshops are one strategy for engagement with the Cleveland Climate Action plan to ensure resident voice is included in the planning process. The next two neighborhood workshops are Saturday February 17th and Tuesday February 20th.

Workshop #5: Old Brooklyn
Date: Sat., Feb. 17, 2018
Time: 10:30am-12:30pm
Location: South Brooklyn Branch Library 4303 Pearl Rd. Cleveland, OH 44109

Workshop #6: Buckeye-Larchmere
Date: Tues., Feb. 20, 2018
Time: 5:30pm-7:30pm
Location: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, DAL Chapter 2820 East 116th St. Cleveland, OH 44120

WHAT WE READ

Color of Law – by Richard Rothstein
The New York Times
“One of the great strengths of Rothstein’s account is the sheer weight of evidence he marshals. A research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, he quite simply demolishes the notion that government played a minor role in creating the racial ghettos that plague our suburbs and inner cities. Going back to the late 19th century, he uncovers a policy of de jure segregation in virtually every presidential administration, including those we normally describe as liberal on domestic issues.”
Link to the book

Integrating The Inner City
by Mark L. Joseph and Robert J Chaskin – CWRU
Integrating the Inner City: The Promise and Peril of Mixed-Income Public Housing Transformation examines Chicago’s Plan for Transformation, a public- private venture to transform high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments, the largest-scale such effort in the U.S. Chaskin and Joseph find that while considerable progress has been made in dramatically transforming the complexes physically, the social environment in the new developments is generally characterized by the continued exclusion and marginalization of the low-income residents, which illuminates the challenges and limitations of mixed-income communities as a solution to urban poverty.
Link to the book

2018’s States with the Most Racial Progress
Richie Bernardo – Wallet Hub
In order to determine the most racially integrated states and those that have achieved the most racial progress over time, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across three key dimensions: 1) Employment & Wealth, 2) Education & Civic Engagement and 3) Health.
This study evaluates those dimensions using 23 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest level of racial integration and progress.
This analysis compares only blacks and whites in light of racial tensions in recent years that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and the observance of the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Restoring the American Dream- Mobility from Poverty
David Ellwood, Nisha G. Patel – US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and staffed and supported by the Urban Institute, the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty was tasked with answering one big, bold question: What Would It Take to Dramatically Increase Mobility from Poverty? Specifically, the Partnership was asked to generate ideas for investment by philanthropy and the public sector that could really make a difference.

How Smart, Targeted Infrastructure Investment Can Pave the Way for an Equitable Nation
Angela Glover Blackwell and Anita Cozart – Urban Institute
This essay presents key principles to reverse inequities and forge a new vision of infrastructure as the foundation of an inclusive society. The piece also outlines how policymakers and communities can incorporate these principles into policies and investment strategies, taking lessons learned from cities leading the way in creating more equitable infrastructure systems. The author’s examples demonstrate that although the work is hard, the basic formula is simple. Investments must target and benefit the most vulnerable people and places, especially those harmed by the long history of inequitable and racist policies.

The Resegregation of America
by Christopher Petrella (NBC News)
“The consequences of creeping racial resegregation should constitute nothing less than a national crisis.
U.S. cities have grown more segregated over the past 40 years, and persistent and intensifying racial disparities between white communities and people of color have emerged. This systematic resegregation has grave implications for access to health care services, education and accumulation of wealth.”

How poor people in New Orleans were displaced by a golf course
Nathan Tempey – The Outline
“A curious article appeared in the sports section of The New York Times last weekend. Headlined “How a Golf Course is Reshaping a New Orleans Neighborhood,” the piece led with a photo of a black woman and her 9-year-old son, smiling with golf clubs in front of a row of neat brick townhouses…”
“There are some significant problems with the Times narrative. Mainly: It is the exact sales pitch used for the last decade by New Orleans’ business elite and outside Republicans to sell a massive transformation effort that, in the wake of Katrina, barred the city’s poorest black residents from returning to their homes.”

Cleveland Historical African American in Cleveland
This tour offers a sampling of stories that collectively tell a broader story about African American life in Cleveland in the twentieth century.

WHAT WE LISTENED TO

Who Pays for Justice? – No Jargon podcast iTunes
A $50 citation, $100 in court costs-for many Americans navigating the criminal justice system, fines and fees like these add up quickly. Professor Alexes Harris reveals why local governments charge convicts to pay for the justice system and how this disproportionately burdens marginalized people and communities.

Big Money, Big Power – No Jargon podcast iTunes
Congress is on the verge of passing major tax reform that many say is tilted in favor of the wealthy. This week we’re looking back at an episode with Professor Rick Hasen to explore why the wealthy often enjoy such outsized benefits and power in American politics – and how changing the Supreme Court is the best way to fix that.

The Captured Economy – No Jargon Podcast, iTunes
Inequality is on the rise in America, but what’s behind it? Professor Steven Teles and Dr. Brink Lindsey lay out how federal and state policies help the rich get richer, slow economic growth, and promote inequality.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Atlantic Interview (ft. Ta-Nehisi Coates)
In the inaugural episode of The Atlantic Interview, The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg talks with the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about race, identity, and her reaction to a nervous interviewer calling her “Chimichanga.” Atlantic correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a cameo. Read the transcript.

WHAT WE WATCHED

Richard Rothstein’s at The City Club of Cleveland
In Cleveland, 45 percent of African-American residents live in neighborhoods that care nearly 80 percent people of color. However, if we are to measure segregation by exposure to other races, our metro area ranks as one of the most segregated. Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, explains.

Race matters- by Cornel West
Cornel West – Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy of Religion, Harvard University
A self-described intellectual freedom fighter influenced by the Baptist church, American transcendentalism, the Black Panthers and European philosophy- seeks to revive the best of liberalism, populism and democratic socialism. In this talk, West teaches that racial division fosters the poverty, paranoia, fear and distrust that undermine our nations democratic process.

The US medical system is still haunted by slavery
by Vox
As the high rates of maternal mortality in the US continue to concern researchers, a new ProPublica report digs into one factor in this alarming trend. According to the CDC, black mothers giving birth in the US die at three to four times the rate of white mothers. That’s one of the widest racial disparities in medicine today.
While many of the inequalities in medicine can be attributed to economic factors like access to good health care, studies have shown minority patients tend to receive a lower quality of care than non-minorities, even when they have the same types of health insurance and the same ability to pay for care.
So how do we better understand this divide? History is usually a good place to start. In this installment of Vox and ProPublica’s collaboration, we lay out some of the dark history of race and women’s medicine. From the experimentation on slaves for medical science to the forced sterilization campaigns in black and poor communities, the vestiges of abuse continue to haunt the medical system, and give context to current racial disparities.

IOP- Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Case for Reparations
by UChicago Institute of Politics (ft. Ta-Nehisi Coates)
Ta-Nehisi Coates reignited a national conversation over reparations for African Americans with his 16,000-word cover story The Atlantic. The Case for Reparations argues that long after slavery ended, decades of racist policies and deliberate injustices – from Jim Crow to redlining – have continued to systematically wrong generations of African Americans, and “[u]ntil we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole”. Join the Institute of Politics, the Center of Race, Politics, and Culture, the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, and the National Public Housing Museum as Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the case for reparations and why Chicago is central to his argument.
Read Coates’ essay here

RACIAL EQUITY TERM OF THE MONTH

Structural Racialization
Structural racialization connotes the dynamic process that creates cumulative and durable inequalities based on race. Interactions between individuals are shaped by and reflect underlying and often hidden structures that shape biases and create disparate outcomes even in the absence of racist actors or racist intentions. The presence of structural racialization is evidenced by consistent differences in outcomes in education attainment, family wealth and even life span.