Middle-class white people seen as large obstacle to racial justice, equity in Conn.
The white middle-class is often the biggest obstacle to battling racial disparities in housing, education and economic improvement, a panel of Black and white authors and social activists agreed on Thursday.
During a webinar sponsored by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, the panelists, led by Clarence Anthony, executive director of the Washington-based National League of Cities, acknowledged that lower-income whites may have higher profiles in supporting the nation’s multigenerational racist system, despite the fact that higher incomes and better livings for minorities would make their lives better too.
But it’s the power of the white middle class that is a larger obstacle to progressive policies. Along the same lines, access to better, fully integrated public schools are better for all races.
Tim Wise, a nationally known speaker and the author of “White Like Me,” said that the Republican majorities in the Tennessee legislature tend to negate any social and economic advancements in his hometown of Nashville, so it should be easier to make social gains in blue-state Connecticut.
“Inequality is not sustainable,” Wise said during the two-hour Zoom program attended by about 300 registered people, plus viewers on other platforms. “This is just not healthy for anyone in the long run.”
Anthony, a former longtime Florida mayor, started the conversation by asking whether a “tipping point” has been reached this year, between COVID disproportionately affecting minorities and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement as an answer to high-profile police violence. “It’s time that we lift up the conversation even more,” Anthony said. “Our country seems to be facing a reckoning with race.”
“It’s up to white America,” Wise replied, stressing that the coronavirus has underscored the nation’s failures in public health.
“In a very concrete way, we are facing a structural meltdown,” said Bree Newsome Bass, who made national headlines in June of 2015 when she was arrested for taking down the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina capitol. “Racism has a lot to do with it.”
Newsome Bass, a grassroots activist, noted that the rise of the white middle class was been the result of systemic racism that has continued to confine Black and Latinx people both residentially and economically. The panel pointed to the longstanding racial disparities in Connecticut’s public schools, with the lowest achievements among generations of Black and brown students in the largest cities.
“What are the things that affluent districts are getting?” asked Wes Moore, CEO of Robin Hood, one of the largest anti-poverty organizations in the nation. He stressed that white people have a 10-to-1 advantage in the “racial wealth gap” that discriminates against minority entrepreneurs. “Race is still the most predictable indicator of life outcomes,” he said. “This is really about how we’re thinking about communities.”
While students in white majority towns can focus on education, inner-city students have basic worries about food, housing, transportation and urban social problems. “How do we get good outcomes for all our kids?” That’s the question to ask,” said Betsy Hodges, the former mayor of Minneapolis.
Elected officials, Newsome Bass said, have to be held accountable in a nationwide effort requiring a new kind of leadership. “A lot of it depends on our ability to organize ourselves,” she said. Within weeks, she warned millions of people are at-risk of eviction, at the height of the pandemic. “And people are debating how much relief is too much. Poverty is maintained through policy. People are segregated by where they live. They’re denied access to the kind of employment that leads to wealth.”
“Left to our own devices, white people probably aren’t at a tipping point,” said Hodges, adding that this year, “a lot more white people are a little more open” on the issues of racial disparity, so this is a good time to pursue policy initiatives, she told the Zoom audience, made up of local officials and advocates from throughout the state. “We could make it a tipping point. The system relies on training us into our whiteness.”