Whatcom County Council Votes to Create Racial Equity Commission: Reflections of a Post-Modern Revolutionary

 Dear friends, I'm posting the link of a piece I wrote for the Salish Current, a Bellingham online newspaper. It's about events leading up to the passage of an ordinance to create a Racial Equity Commission by the Whatcom County Council ... Happy reading!

Whatcom County Council Votes to Create Racial Equity Commission:  Reflections of a                                                                          Post-Modern Revolutionary

 

The author is a member of the stakeholders’ group that volunteered to create the proposal for the Whatcom Racial Equity Commission

                   

 Whatcom Racial Equity Commission organizers (from left) Heather Flaherty of the Chuckanut Health Foundation and WREC founders Bellingham City Council member Kristina Michelle Martens and Shu-Ling Zhao

On Tuesday night the Whatcom County Council, on a 4-3 vote, passed an ordinance to create a Whatcom Racial Equity Commission. Though the council is elected on a non-partisan basis, the vote divided along known partisan lines and shows that the council clearly has a progressive majority prepared to respond locally to the nationwide protests after the murder of George Floyd in May, 2021. Here peaceful marches and rallies and community organizing were the preponderant response, in liberal Bellingham, but also In Lynden and Ferndale.

In Bellingham, after a series of actions, activists asked if the local elected officials would consider the creation of a racial equity commission. The leaders who emerged in those conversations were Kristina Michele Martens and Shu-Ling Zhao, young women, African and Chinese American respectively. Upon gaining a favorable hearing these young activists, ably supported by the Chuckanut Health Foundation, conducted a Racial Equity Summit in May 2021, which was attended by more than 200 people.

From that platform citizens were invited to join a stakeholders group to create a proposal for the racial equity commission. A group of 32 citizens emerged that contained racial, gender, generational and class diversity, and included significant membership from rural parts of the county as well as Bellingham. It probably included very little in the way of ideological diversity (a point I shall return to later). Over the period of one year the stakeholders’ group met monthly to devise the composition of the commission and the proposed ordinance that the county council approved on Tuesday.

There are two observations that I want to make regarding the threshold reached this week. First, the murder of George Floyd allowed the arguments that the Black Lives Matter movement had been making since the killing of Skittles-eating 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 by a white vigilante to be heard. The movement exclaimed that police and vigilante killings of Black men were the result of a historically racist structure of institutions --- a system of racism that has existed to control Black people in this country since the first slaves ship arrived in 1619. Individuals can certainly be racist and engage in racist behavior; but they too are products of conscious institutional structures that cast Black people as inferior and dangerous. Indigenous, Latino and Asian American populations all have their stories of the way that a consciously racist system marginalized them historically and until this day.

 

Because the system is deemed to be racist, debates swirl among activists as to whether it can be transformed internally via long-term, gritty involvement from within, or must be dismantled and replaced by a new system. In the 1960s people used to call the dismantling of the system “revolution.” And indeed some can be heard using the “r” today, but usually as a rhetorical device and not the invitation to join their revolutionary party (though the Communist Party and other revolutionary organizations still exist). The prison abolition movement is foremost among those calling for just that, the abolition of mass incarceration due to its disproportionate and deleterious impacts on Black and Brown communities. They call however, for the creation of innovative ways to deal with crime other than placing people in cages, i.e., and new system. That would be revolutionary!

Others, aspire to transform the system from the inside. The activists who demanded the racial equity commission have chosen this latter path. The stakeholders, myself included, have opted to launch the project from a governmental platform. The stakeholders are private citizens from all over the county, but our work was surrounded by an array of committees (project development team, planning group, working group) which were largely populated by politicians and bureaucrats. Thus, the visioning effort was engulfed from its inception by the system! The challenge will be to garner the sinews to transform that daunting labyrinth from within in ways that take us resolutely, toward racial equity.

My second observation is that, although the voices decrying the murder of George Floyd were vociferous in 2021, America remains divided between those believing that our institutions are  racist and others who believe that racism is primarily an individual trait. During the public comment some citizens of color shared that they had immigrated to America, were poor, experienced racism, but were still able to make a good life for themselves. Others (mainly white) see potential for the commission to generate more government encroachment on individual freedom like mask mandates during the height of the pandemic. Conservative council members Kathy Kershner and Ben Ellenbaas favored an equity commission that would look at inequitable outcomes across a broad range of demographic groups.

Thus, misgivings about the commission are alive and well in the county. The commission is to be composed of up to 12 representatives from entities like the Indigenous tribes and community of color organizations, and up to 19 members appointed by the county executive and the Bellingham mayor. It can afford opportunities for conservatives to be at the table to hopefully, find common ground, or push back in areas where they disagree,. To his credit, councilman Ellenbaas expressed a commitment to getting diversity, equity and inclusion right, but wasn’t sure this format was the best way to approach those themes. I hope he encourages some of his likeminded citizens to apply for appointment to the commission.

The challenge facing those of us who believe in the racial equity commission project is to engage our conservative fellow citizens in the conversation about race. In that way we might take steps toward building Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s. “Beloved Community” in our county.

 

 

 

 Progress Report: Unidos US

Juneteenth from an Interracial and Historical Perspective

Vernon D. Johnson with Julienne Gage, Western Washington University MA, Anthropology, 2000

https://www.unidosus.org/progress-report/qa-civil-rights-activist-dr-vernon-damani-johnson-looks-at-juneteenth-as-a-launch-point-for-examples-of-interracial-solidarity-throughout-history/

Your thoughts ...

 

On the Survival of Democratic Governance:

From Lincoln’s Time to the Present

 

Many have commented since 2016 and the populist thrusts of Donald Trump from the right and Bernie Sanders from the left, that the United States is more polarized than at anytime since the Civil War. That polarization led to the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 and sparked the secession of eleven Southern states and the Civil War.

 

In this turbulent time we are divided over a number of issues. They seem to fall into three broad categories. The first set of issues revolve around race and what it means to be an American. Here we include how to manage our southern border, immigration and the browning of America in general, and policing and criminal justice in Black and Brown communities. Second, there are the whole range of issues related to individual rights versus social obligation, These include gun control, queer and trans people’s rights, pro-life/pro-choice, and now, the conflict over response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A final grouping, climate change, health care and education demonstrate differences over the both the extent and the kind of government regulation and intervention into private affairs to create opportunity and attend to the general welfare.

 

This laundry lists of issues that divide us is broader and more complicated than the 1860s, when one issue, slavery caused an irrevocable division. But in the 1860s and today, the issue of race is at the center of our political chasm. Slavery was obviously about race. I’ve said above that race is one category of issues. But race and racial inequity run through my second category issues like gun control and COVID-19 outcomes and responses; and also through third group issues like access to health care and education.

 

Returning to Lincoln, on different occasions he offered a number of reasons why the political opponents of his day could not separate from their foes. For our purposes two stand out today. In his first inaugural address in March, 1861 Lincoln declared that …

 

Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections

from each other nor build an impassable wall between them.

 

Four months later In his July 4^th, 1861 address to Congress Lincoln posited that the civil war …

 

embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of

man the question whether a constitutional republic, or democracy--a government of the

people by the same people--can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own

domestic foes.

 

160 years later, as we watch our fascist president waging desperate last-ditch efforts to destroy our republic, Lincoln’s two great dictums are once again of critical moment; and they are intimately connected. Despite our “interminable culture wards” and the way we “sort” ourselves ideologically by zip codes, there is almost no place of any size where Americans are not living in close proximity to, and interacting daily with people of opposite political views. And although most white Americans continue to live racially segregated lives, an increasing number of extended families are multiracial. My own family is a case in point. My nuclear family is bi-racial. And my extended family includes flaming liberals, Trumpites, and black, brown and white people. There have been rough moments, but the brood still hangs together with something approximating familial love. So too late! America is already multiracial and multi-ideological down to the family level! We can’t sort ourselves from one another.

 

Relating to Lincoln’s second point, we are once again called upon to make democracy,  government comprised of the people who are already here, work. The populist base of the Republican Party wants to trash our political institutions, because they don’t want to live in a democracy where the new majority is no longer white, and that majority generally favors a larger government role in determining life-chances in areas such as education, healthcare and environmental protection.

 

And as Lincoln suggested all those generations ago, the whole world is watching, Trump wannabes and right-wing populists have seized the high ground in country after country. What are they witnessing? Through this electoral season thus far, except for the Republican Party, the institutions appear to be holding up. Trump is a right-wing fascist populist, but our system is not yet a fascist one where a dictator gets to make up his own rules. But let us remain vigilant for the immediate future. Each of us may yet be called upon to play a part in the drama of constructing a multi-racial society with democratic institutions to match

Biden, the Democrats and a Time for Healing

 

Biden, the Democrats and a Time for Healing

I wrote in 2009 that the United States was not one nation, but two, and that the forces of populism were animating those two very different notions of what it meant to be American. Fueled by Bernie Sanders from the left and Donald Trump from the right, the two poles of populism have deeply influenced the base of both great American political parties since 2016. At those poles, are irreconcilable views regarding not only what it means to be an American, but who is and who can’t be; and with that totally divergent views over the direction and emphasis of public policy.

 

Joseph Biden emerged from this tumultuous year victorious in perhaps the most important presidential election since 1860. Biden has pledged to lead the nation on the path of healing in the aftermath of fissures over response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the crisis in policing fostered by the execution of George Floyd.

 

Focusing just on race, the discourse on healing and racial reconciliation is well-known in racial justice advocacy work among progressives, but it is not a routine part of policy debates around Capitol Hill. The last presidential initiative on race, that of Bill Clinton in 1997-98, occurred in the absence of national racial turmoil, was plagued by Clinton’s impeachment, and in any case sat on the shelf without any follow through.

 

John Judis (The Populist Explosion) has argued that, since the 2008 Great Recession, political elites must craft a new political consensus that tends to the needs of middle and working class constituencies who were hurt badly. White middle and working classes have been Republican since the 1960s. They tend to see Black and Brown people who “take” government “handouts,” and immigrants who “take” jobs as their enemy in a zero-sum economy. The Republican Party, always the party of big business, is now also the repository of “disgruntled white people.”

 

Indigenous, African, LatinX and Asian Americans of all classes have grouped around the Democratic Party. The party was able to shepherd civil rights legislation through Congress in the 1960s with Republican help, against the opposition from its own Southern wing. As Southern segregationists and  whites elsewhere moved to the Republican Party, Democrats have been the stronger of the two parties on race and civil rights issues.

 

Pragmatism --- doing what works with a spirit of innovation facing unchartered territory --- is an American cultural value and the hallmark of the way our political  system works. Politically, it requires finding a center where the moderates of the left right, and most Americans, can broadly agree on policy direction.

 

Joe Biden has pragmatic political instincts. He talks of healing and rebuilding a political center in the wake of a Trump presidency which was not concerned about that political center, or national unity. As a typical populist, he favored his “real Americans” against of the lazy or opportunistic Black and Brown “takers” who support Democrats. The bad news is Trump won over 47%  of the popular vote and 57% of the white vote after four years of racist rhetoric and executive orders.

 

Biden cannot tack to the middle without the multiracial base of the Democratic party. He must see which moderate Republicans will tack with him to create that broad political center, but he mustn’t go too far to find common cause with a party who’s base includes white nationalist. In a recent column David Brooks said that the future of both parties lies in a multiracial working class base. The Democrats have a huge lead in that regard, because that’s already who it’s base is.  Moreover, polls consistently show that most Americans support universal health care, more aggressive action on climate change, and policing reform to curb the use of excessive force in Black and Brown communities. These are Democratic Party issues. So in the pursuit of pragmatic reforms, it’s Republicans who’ll have the farther distance to travel.

 

Democrats should be hardheaded, but at the same time, willing to compromise a little to nudge things a little to the left in terms of policy outputs. As for healing to bridge the cultural divide, that would be great. But the incentives for people funded by big monied interests and tied to our electoral cycle don’t run toward directing legislation, budgets and staff time to “healing conversations.”

 

Actors in civil society have already taken the lead closer to the ground to engage in face-to-face racial reconciliation in real communities where people live. Two outstanding examples of this kind of work are Repairers of the Breach and the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Project.

 

Repairers of the Breach was founded by Reverend William Barber in North Carolina. It works from a religious foundation through faith-based organizations to foster interracial understanding and a moral common ground. Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation is a program of the Kellogg Foundation, which takes a more secular approach to the same issues. Both of these initiatives are national in scope, and they are an example of many other more localized projects of this kind currently underway. If Biden and Harris are serious they will tap into these kinds of efforts. Perhaps this work could be charged to a revitalized Community Relations Service in the Department of Justice. Or, as many communities, including some local governments, have declared systemic racism a public health problem, the Department of Health and Human Services might take on a healing project.

 

Healing, particularly along racial lines, is important to address if we are to reunify into one nation this century. But if national level actors can’t muster the resolve to do it, local actors must take up the project make strides in every corner of the country, and change our national discourse and our national destiny from the ground up.

Repairers of the Breach

https://www.breachrepairers.org/

 

Kellogg Foundation, Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation

https://www.wkkf.org/news-and-media/article/2017/06/wkkf-announces-14-truth-racial-healing-and-transformation-engagements-throughout-the-united-states