Seminar addressing race on tap for today

Timed with MLK Day, city to host Groundwater Approach forum

WOONSOCKET — Margaux Morisseau had attended many seminars and special trainings over the years on how racial bias affects outcomes in healthcare, education and criminal justice, but the Groundwater Approach forum in Warwick last year had a unique affect on her.

“I was a little bit shaken,” says Morisseau, director of community engagement for NeighborWorks Blackstone River Valley and a member of the Martin Luther King Community Committee. “Because I thought we had made more progress.”

With the aid of a $5,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation, the same seminar that Morisseau took part in several months ago will be offered today at the Millrace, 40 South Main St. About 100 people signed up to participate, including most of the City Council, police and school officials, as well as many members of the general public. It’s all part of a weekend-long series of events organized by the MLK Community Committee honoring the memory of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who would have turned 91 this week had he not been cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

Brainchild of the Greensboro, N.C.-based Race Equity Institute – one of the nation’s foremost think-tanks on issues of race and justice, the Groundwater Approach is an intense, three-hour tutorial that attempts to explain why the major institutions that mold everyday American lives continue to yield such different results for people of color than whites.

The curious name for the seminar offers a clue to the central premise of the Groundwater Approach. Like groundwater – which is to say, a good chunk of all the water on the planet – racism in the United States is “structural,” the Groundwater Approach posits. If some of it seeps to the surface and kills just one fish, it might be easy to dismiss the cause of the problem as a sick fish, but when hundreds of fish turn up dead in five different lakes separated from each other by miles, the problem is likely deeper and calls for a systemic overhaul.

To “fix fish” or clean up one lake at a time simply won’t work — all we’d do is put “fixed” fish back into toxic water or filter a lake that is quickly recontaminated by the toxic groundwater,” explains a synopsis of the Groundwater Approach on REI’s website. “Our groundwater metaphor is designed to help practitioners at all levels internalize the reality that we live in a racially structured society, and that that is what causes racial inequity.”

A Woonsocket resident who ran for state senate from the Foster-Scituate area when she used to live there a couple of years ago, Morisseau says the Groundwater Approach seminar was so persuasive for her because it was consistently grounded in hard, research-based data.

“Two trainers will be joining us from the national organization,” she said. “They fly in. Looking at years and years of data...university data, credible sources, and they start layering the data in ways that paint a picture that’s quite different than most of us think.”

Participants can expect the trainers’ data-driven focus to be national in scope, but Morisseau says it’s been micro-sampled in various localities in the past and the results are consistent.

City Councilman James Cournoyer was one of several council members who were apparently invited to attend the seminar. He says it piqued his interest so he said, “Sign me up.”

“When I get this training,” said Cournoyer, “what I’m going to looking for are actionable results. What can I do as a member of the city council to have an impact?”

Morisseau said five member of the council are signed up to attend, including Councilors Alexander Kithes, Denise Sierra, David Soucy and John Ward. In addition, Police Chief Thomas F. Oates, Public Safety Director Eugene Jalette, and Schools Supt. Patrick McGee are coming. And one member of the council who has a scheduling conflict – Vice President Jon Brien – signed up to attend another installment of the Groundwater Approach taking place elsewhere later in the year.

“It’s a real mix of just everybody,” she said.

For the MLK Committee – including Emma Dandy, Brenda Figueroa, Thomas Gray, Carol Wilson-Allen, Monique Austin, Lt. Col. Sharon Harmon, Rosalind Mitchell, Carol Nasuti, Rev. Lee Williams and Kris Wright – there’s no time like the present to offer the seminar.

“The MLK Community Committee discusses every year issues we want to address in our community and every year those issues change,” said Morisseau. “This is the second year in a row we’re focusing on racism. “We actually feel, some of us feel, the needle has moved in the wrong direction in the last year or two.”