Racial justice activists take on ‘a fight for society to be humane’
For 27 years, Anthony Bennett has served as pastor at Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport, leading the predominantly Black congregation and the local community in many efforts to combat racial inequality.
He has provided ministry to families of gunshot victims and has worked toward improving de-escalation techniques in local policing. He and his colleagues have held many forums on reform and organized marches to call attention to issues involving local police.
And after all these years of fighting for equality, there’s still one question that sends him over the edge.
“When we talk about police reform and moving against police brutality, the retort is often, ‘Well, what about Black-on-Black crime?’ And I just have to walk away or blow up,” Bennett said.
“We don’t deal with white crime like that. It’s an absurd claim, that in essence is saying ... it will be OK to talk about police brutality when Black people stop killing Black people,” he stated.
Crime within Black communities doesn’t excuse persistent, systemic racism and yet it’s used to hijack conversations, Bennett said. It’s used as a shield, he said, to avoid a stark reality that racism exists in policing and the criminal justice system and it influences just about every other sector in society, including education.
The retort is just one of many barriers standing in the way of progress toward racial equity and justice.
Bennett and other social justice advocates and community leaders participated in a recent Connecticut Conference of Municipalities forum examining racial inequality and disparities in education, housing and policing.
Looking ahead, Bennett and another panelist, Bianca Shinn
Desras, director of Family Advocacy for middle school programs at Stamford-based Domus Kids, spoke about the complex task of starting to make progress, and what it would take to move forward on racial equity.
A major sticking point, ShinnDesras said, is the silo effect. A centuries-long problem cannot be addressed by working on separate areas. And it can’t happen just by studying individual institutions, such as police departments or other large organizations.
“Let’s say you have a house infected with mice. Do you think just washing the house with soap and water will take the mice prob away?” she asked. “Systematic racism is so deeply entrenched, one practice cannot solve that issue.”
A more expansive approach
While Bennett called the forum “powerful,” he and almost all other panelists said 15-minute segments dedicated to three topics does not even begin to help the public understand the complexity of racial disparities nor learn how to address them. Addressing racism requires the understanding that systems and institutions all work together to uphold and perpetuate the same disparities that have existed for decades upon decades, Bennett said.
It takes a more expansive approach, of examining the issue more comprehensively, to unravel an occurrence so complex and ingrained in American culture, said Shinn-Desras.
After the killings this summer of several Black people, including George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, the Black Lives Matter movement forced many people to think deeply for the first time about issues involving race in America.
Institutions, sports leagues and influential people began working to address the pressing problem, for example, by hiring more people of color and promoting them to leadership positions, by instituting training on diversity, equity and inclusion and boycotting some events.
The signs are clear: In Connecticut, schools are still deeply segregated and in some districts, almost all students are white, making it much more difficult to bridge the racial divide and inequity gap.
School suspension rates are higher for Black and brown students, and advanced placement courses often lack diversity.
Black people are disproportionately killed by police, and the Connecticut education system lacks educators of color, ShinnDesras said.
No progress in prison numbers
In Bridgeport and across the country, Black people are often criminalized and, therefore, exposed more frequently to the criminal justice system, Bennett said.
Racial disparities continue to also persist in Connecticut prisons and jails, even though the overall population has dropped over the years.
As of January 2011, there were
13,580 sentenced people incarcerated in state prisons in Connecticut — 42.7 percent of whom were Black — even though, at the time, Black people only made up about
10 percent of the state’s total population.
Almost a decade later, the percent is identical.
Of the 8,885 sentenced people in prison on Jan. 1 of this year,
42.7 percent were Black, and that racial group made up 12 percent of the state population, according to census data.
And those are only a few examples of the racial disparities that exist in the state and across America.
“All those are part of a larger narrative of this institutional disregard for Black and brown life,” Bennett stated.
To help alleviate the disparity, he’s supporting the “clean slate bill” which was introduced before the COVID-19 pandemic closed down the legislature in March. It would clear low-level misdemeanors if people don’t commit any other crimes for seven years.
Members of the Congregations Organized for a New Connecticut or CONECT, which Bennett is a part of, had given Gov. Ned Lamont more than 800 letters asking him to support a broader proposal that would expunge felonies and shorten the amount of time people had to remain crime-free for their records to be cleared.
“But the reality is ... persons in more suburban towns have the perception that this bill is going to primarily let Black and brown people off the hook, because the perception is that Black and brown people might commit another crime, when in fact, that is not necessarily the case,” Bennett said.
Culture of inclusion in schools
Shinn-Desras, who has a background in education, said hiring more teachers of color is a small step toward creating a culture of inclusion.
Once those teachers do arrive, school leaders must work to maintain that culture by infusing Black and brown teachers into high-level decisions and discussions, such as about innovation and policy change, “because they’re experts on the ground,” battling the system, she said.
Teacher education programs that examine inequality should be administered early on in a teacher’s career and administered constantly, she said.
Education funding should also be changed, with perhaps, a move to a countywide funding structure to create more equality she said. Thad idea has led to sharp backlash when legislators such as Senate Pro-Tem Martin Looney,
D-New Haven, propose even modest steps toward regionalization of schools.
The best teachers should be placed in smaller classroom sizes with students in remedial courses and paid more for their services, she said.
“The fight for inclusion to break down systematic racism benefits all,” Shinn-Desras said. “It’s not just a fight of just Black and white. It’s a fight for society to be humane.”
‘ The white cultural narrative’
In discussions about racial equality, people “eat the elephant one bite at a time,” and divide the plan to address the problem into different topics like housing, education and policing, for example.
But Bennett said the racial disparities that exist in each of those represents component parts to one fundamental narrative, since the founding of this country, “which centers white life at the central part of the narrative.”
In America, “our efforts are the efforts to get Black and brown people to move as much as we can into the white narrative — the white cultural narrative,” he said. “The problems overlap and synergize into white supremacy.”
Some leaders of predominantly white towns in Connecticut say they are also working toward equality and inclusion. In Westport, First Selectman Jim Marpe said he and other local leaders are creating more affordable housing units in order to create more economic and racial diversity within the town.
“We know that that’s one of the challenges that young people of color who do live here have expressed concern about, and I know the school administration and Board of Education is focused on trying to rectify that problem aggressively, at hiring programs, specifically, on hiring people of color,” Marpe said.
But while Americans move through yet another racial reckoning across this country, the weight of that struggle and compromise is again, carried on the backs of Black and brown bodies, Bennett said.