Take a Knee
Over 9 minutes and 30 seconds on Memorial Day – Monday, May 25th, 2020 – George Floyd was slowly suffocated by Derek Chauvin. As Mr. Floyd cried out that he could not breathe, and bystanders shouted that the officers were killing a man who was subdued with a zip tie behind his back, not resisting, and lying face down on the pavement, Chauvin executed lethal force almost nonchalantly. At least that’s what it looks like from the video.
Citizens in 140 towns and cities across the United States took to the streets, propelled by the pent-up accumulation of racism, rage, and status-quo fatigue. Tens of thousands of people continue to march together in protest – through phalanxes of police in riot gear and National Guardsmen brandishing automatic weapons – even in the midst of a global pandemic that poses additional risk to their lives.
Property destruction and looting has occurred but the vast majority of protesters are not out for booty or blood. They want to exercise their First Amendment right to say they’ve had enough.
Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer
(Nina Simone, Mississippi God Damn)
The continuing COVID-19 crisis has allowed real-time quantification of our nation’s racial health disparities, as the bodies of black people piled up over three months this winter and spring at rates nearly two times greater than would be expected based on their share of the population. In four states, the rate was three or more times greater.
The killing of George Floyd, a black man, by police – coming as it did on the heels of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man, by three white men as he jogged through their neighborhood; and the killing of Breonna Taylor, a black woman and medical worker, shot eight times by police executing a no-knock warrant as she lay in bed – blazingly illuminated ongoing racial inequities built into how American law enforcement is meted out.
Racial health and criminal justice disparities are on full display in this season of COVID, police killings, and curfews. Less blatant but no less insidious is America’s racial wealth divide, cut deep over the course of centuries and generations by “an endless series of policy choices that have boosted the ability of White Americans to build long-term wealth, while blocking communities of color from doing the same,” according to a 2018 report by Washington DC-based Prosperity Now:
“For example, the massive investments in the American economy that led to creation of the American middle class—from the programs established under the New Deal to the G.I. Bill of 1944—came both in response to significant tumult wrought by the Great Depression and World War II, and at a time of legal segregation.
The result of this confluence of circumstances led many of the very same policies that built the lauded middle class and its respective wealth to be designed in some cases in ways that explicitly excluded certain beneficiaries, as was the case with the Social Security Act of 1935, which excluded farmworkers and domestic workers—many of whom were people of color—from being covered by the Act. In other cases, these policies were designed to be flexible enough for the private and public sectors to decide who would benefit, as was the case when countless Black households were restricted—“redlined”—from purchasing a home of their choice due to discriminatory underwriting standards established by the Federal Housing Administration.”
Most of an American family’s wealth resides in home ownership. Redlining and other discriminatory housing practices – such as flooding communities with subprime mortgages that put many homes underwater when the 2009 Great Recession hit – have contributed mightily to the current racial wealth divide. Today, 33% of Latino households and 37% of Black households have zero or negative net worth—more than twice the rate among White households (16%)—meaning they owe more than they own, according to Prosperity Now.
Housing discrimination is not ancient history. Both Gregory and I experienced it, though from different sides of the red line.
Gregory was conceived and raised in urban L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood. Shortly after his parents Amos and Julietta married in 1956, they found their dream home in a white suburb south of Los Angeles in Orange County. Julietta was pregnant with Gregory’s brother and studying to get her teaching certificate. Amos, a Korean War veteran, was a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service. Amos and Julietta were told they didn’t qualify for a loan to purchase the home. They finally found a lender for property in the segregated neighborhood of West Adams – for a home that cost $4,000 more than the one in Orange County.
I was raised in an upper-middle-class suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. My childhood home, where my parents still live, contains an exclusionary covenant in its deed that restricts sale to whites. In 1963, the first black family moved into our neighborhood. Almost from the beginning, Dr. Laing, his wife, and two young daughters were plagued by racist incidents, including the painting of “KKK” on their car, broken windows, and watermelons left at their doorstep. At 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day, 1969, a male called their home and identified himself as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He then said he and his friends “were coming over to kill the niggers.” Dr. Laing went outside to protect his family. At about 3:45 a.m., a pick up truck with darkened headlights pulled up to the Laing residence. Four men got out and began pelting the house. When Dr. Laing confronted them they ran to the pick up but Dr. Laing chased them and grabbed the driver through the window. The next thing he remembers, he was laying on the street. Both of his arms were broken. One of the attackers was my across-the-street neighbor.
The past is present. We see it in our hospitals, on our streets, and in our neighborhoods. Most recently, Gregory and I saw it at the Petro Travel Plaza near the I-5 and Highway 152 interchange. It was Sunday, one week after George Floyd’s killing and days into an explosion of protests, property destruction, and arrests in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The cashier, a young white guy behind a piece of plexiglass but not wearing a mask (Gregory was) asked Gregory where he was headed. “Home to LA,” he said. The cashier waited until Gregory had picked up his chips and Vitamin Water and had turned to leave and said, “Have fun burning down buildings.” Gregory kept walking. I followed him out.
My brother-in-law used the French term “L’esprit de l’escalier” when I told him this story. You know, when you think of the perfect retort too late, after you’ve left the scene or the moment has passed? What my architect husband should have said, my brother-in-law suggested after the fact, is: “I don’t burn them down; I build them.” (That was the suggestion he offered, without the expletives.)
It’s incumbent on all of us to help create the conditions for a better, more inclusive future. Jane Jacobs gave us a pro tip more than half a century ago. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her brilliant evisceration of urban renewal policies of the 1950’s, she observed that, “Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties.”
To get to vibrancy, we’re going to have to reconceptualize and then rebuild our collapsed economy and shattered neighborhoods. At Urban Renewable, we favor making a policy point of equitably investing in historically under-resourced communities. This kind of “targeted universalism,” a term coined by our friend john powell, is a method of designing policies to allocate more resources to those who have been historically excluded and who need a boost in order to share equitably in America’s promise and possibility.
2020 has already been the year of COVID, police killings, and mass curfews and it’s not even half over yet. We still have time to make it the year of long-overdue and positive change as well.
