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Inclusion is the word

As tomorrow's 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. draws near, race and racism continue to score high on the news radar. And in the conversations coursing through the traditional media and the blogosphere, two words are starting to bubble up that were rarely heard 40 years ago:

Inclusion. Inclusiveness.

On NPR's Talk of the Nation yesterday, a half-hour discussion centered on black liberation theology. Toward the end of the conversation, retired United Methodist bishop Forrest Stith said that while integration was a key concept of Dr. King's under which he's lived most of his life,

I tend now to move toward a different word, which is inclusiveness. Integration simply puts people in the same box together. It doesn't empower those with differences. It doesn't acquire the opportunity for many to be themselves in the fullest way possible. Inclusiveness does, however, and I think inclusiveness has to be the key because people still live in this country under oppression, in mass poverty - who happen to be black - and under great educational and family stress.

Meanwhile, at her fine EquityBlog, PolicyLink founder and CEO Angela Glover Blackwell wrote a post March 20 about how the nation now has another opportunity for conversations about racism. A day later, amid robust discussion in the comments, she added this:

As this conversation moves forward, we need to make sure that those of us doing the policy and advocacy work to build a more inclusive society tie the conversation about race to the conversation about inclusion.

That means the issue of gentrification and the displacement that’s often associated with it, can’t be dismissed simply as “market forces operating.” It must be put in the context of the historic exclusion of African-Americans and others from the mortgages, the jobs and the educational opportunities that would have enabled the current residents to make positive changes in their lives and become the higher-income residents of the neighborhood.

It means our transportation discussion can’t just be about building new highways to growing suburbs, but there has to be a recognition that there has been discrimination against the public transit investments needed in inner-city communities.

It means our concern about education must move beyond looking at the failure of busing to solve the educational problem and ask why the nation has not been able to muster the political will to make sure all schools in all locations can perform at high levels.

The conversation about race must move beyond what is in our hearts and concentrate on how we can make change through smart, inclusive public policy.

Here at Everyday Democracy, we say amen to all that.

P.S. Today is the 40th anniversary of the prophetic "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech delivered by Dr. King in support of striking Memphis sanitation workers the day before he was killed. If you haven't read it lately, you can do so here. A video of the last minute of the speech can be viewed here.

War, faith, and a new social contract

This is the second of two posts from the Take Back America conference held this week in Washington, D.C. More than 2,000 progressive activists and organizers attended the event. Julie Fanselow was at the event as an invited guest (independent of her work at Everyday Democracy). Here are some of the interesting stories she heard:

• "A New Social Contract" was the theme of a panel moderated by Miles Rapoport, who is the president of Demos, described on its website as "a non-partisan public policy research and advocacy organization committed to building an America that achieves its highest democratic ideals." (He also is a member of the Board of Directors of the Paul J. Aicher Foundation, which oversees our work here at Everyday Democracy.) In this panel, Kate Kahan of the National Partnership for Women and Families, policy analyst Karen Kornbluh, and Julie Smith of Ohio Acorn discussed ways that the United States might replace or augment government programs that were designed for the 20th century with policies and programs that recognize modern realities. Rapoport noted how, after World War II, businesses, labor, and government all collaborated to increase prosperity for everyone. "It was public policy," he said. "It wasn't an accident." And yet the old contracts left a lot of people behind, notably people of color and women. They also were formed at a time when unions were stronger and the U.S. faced little global competition. So what - beyond the "plastic net" of mortgage and credit-card debt - might be part of the tool kit we use to rebuild the middle class? The panelists mentioned living wages (including a much higher minimum wage), paid sick days and an expanded Family and Medical Leave Act so workers can care for their families and not lose their jobs, and other policies that value families and individuals.

• As U.S. involvement in Iraq entered its sixth year this week, ten congressional candidates led by Darcy Burner of Washington state used the conference to unveil what they call A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq. Their central point is that America shouldn't have to decide between an endless U.S. presence in Iraq and a sudden, destabilizing withdrawal. The candidates also indicated that - due to media ownership consolidation and war fatigue - many citizens have disengaged from the discussion. "The American public must also re-engage in the discussions and decision-making about how to proceed," the plan's text says. Although the plan's 10 original endorsers are all Democrats, it cites pending legislation including several bills with strong bipartisan support, including the Media Ownership Act of 2007 and the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2007.There also was a lot of talk at the conference about the "Iraq Recession," with speakers pointing out that the cost of the war in Iraq - more than a half a trillion dollars so far, and estimated up to $3 trillion once related costs are tallied - has prevented the United States from dealing with domestic spending needs at home.

• A panel on "Religious Activism and the Public Good" featured a lively discussion among several prominent clergy members and community organizers over recent shifts in some parts of the evangelical movement away from  issues like abortion and gay marriage and toward environmental activism and poverty relief. As evangelicals begin to work with more mainline and secular activists on these issues, they will need to focus on the common ground and minimize their differences on other issues. But it also means that activists who see the world in secular terms need to respect the religious views of others. "That will be a chance for progressives to be more progressive," quipped the Rev. Brian McClaren of Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

• Speaking at the final session on Wednesday, Deepak Bhargava of the Center for Community Change noted that political candidates from both major parties are busily seeking the votes of people of color and of low-income and working-class Americans. The big question, he asked, is whether low-income communities and communities of color will be as central to elected officials' agendas in 2009 as they are this year, when the elections are at stake. He advocated for a governing philosophy that benefits us all, but pays special attention to people on the margins.
  

Were you at Take Back America? What did you take away from the experience?

Obama speaks about race

This week, more than 2,000 people are in Washington, D.C., at the Take Back America conference, one of the nation's largest gatherings of progressive political thinkers and activists. This is the first of two posts we'll have at DemocracySpace reporting on the event, which ends today.

It was a few minutes before the scheduled panel discussion on "Race Matters: Progressive Transformation in the 21st Century," and nearly a dozen people - including moderator Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion - were huddled around a laptop, watching a replay of the speech that presidential candidate Barack Obama had delivered in Philadelphia a few hours before. As the room filled, Wiley returned to the rostrum, saying "I had to pull myself away ... he's actually summarizing our panel for us."

Obama's speech on Tuesday sought to place into context the recent news reports over the words of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Although he had previously talked little about the impact of race on his campaign and in America, Obama on Tuesday wound up giving voice to many of the same thoughts and questions and strong emotions that people across the country have about the issue. In one sense, he indicated that we seem to be moving into an era where people really are judged by the content of our character and not our race, ethnic heritage, gender, sexual orientation, or religion. On the other hand, Obama talked about continuing prejudice and of a generation gap between people his age and that of his pastor, whose life was shaped by civil rights-era struggles, and even that of his own white grandmother, who admitted being terrified of black men.

Time and again Tuesday, speakers at Take Back America and writers on blogs like The Super Spade and Booker Rising and Pam's House Blend echoed and dissected and even wept over what Obama had said in Philadelphia. The candidate spoke of structural racism that persists in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and prisons. It's true, Maya Wiley noted at the "Race Matters" program, that communities of color are often the first people harmed when society's structures fail, either by natural disaster or human neglect.

And as Obama talked about the achievement gap, Catherine Albisa of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative told of schools that basically warehouse children until they can kick them out, and Dennis Parker - director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Racial Justice Project - spoke of filing suit Tuesday against a Florida school district where far fewer black students graduate on time. Parker also pointed to the trend toward school resegregation and the reality that students in these schools, hampered by lower tax bases, continue to lag behind students in schools with more resources.

For people doing racial equity work, this passage from Obama's speech had particular resonance: "The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect," he said. "And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American."

This election season, the United States has an opportunity to examine its deeply racist (and sexist) past, recognize that tensions and prejudice still exist, and consider a different future: one that might not include a white man in the top job at the White House, and one in which an ever-widening range of viewpoints and life experiences are considered in forging public policy. By the end of the year, voters will decide whether this future remains an idea, or whether it has already arrived and we're living it. However we choose, Everyday Democracy (formerly the Study Circles Resource Center) has resource materials on racial equity, education, and more to help keep the conversations moving.

Friday digest-open thread 1/11/08

So it looks like we may finally get the real national conversation on race that many Americans have been seeking for decades. In the wake of Barack Obama's rise as the first African-American presidential candidate to win the Iowa Caucus, news reports, blogs, and coffee shops are abuzz with his success and what it might mean for broader racial - and perhaps generational - politics in our nation. But in an essay in the current issue of Newsweek, Ellis Cose writes:

All the celebrating notwithstanding, Obama is still a long way from wrapping up the nomination, much less the election. For all his allusions to harmony and change, he has not yet demonstrated that we have ceased to be "a collection of Red States and Blue States," as he put it, but are one, united America. Indeed, in the end, the messages of change and unity may find themselves in conflict. For as beautiful as the dream of one America may be, the reality is of a country where income disparities are growing, not narrowing, and where the very privileged have less and less in common with those who are constantly struggling. Two generations after the major rights were fought and won, we are still a nation whose inner cities and barrios are full of people with no real sense of a better tomorrow. In an era when incarceration is seen, in certain neighborhoods, as the nearly inevitable fate of young men, talk of one, united, bighearted America can seem like something of a joke. Their problems will not be solved, nor their outlook notably changed, simply because America elects a new president—even one who is young, attractive, black and runs on a platform of national unity.

Against this backdrop of hope mixed with realism, the Study Circles Resource Center - soon to be renamed Everyday Democracy - is pleased to announce a new  Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative. As seen on the SCRC website, eight communities will embark with us on a process "aimed at helping communities create and sustain public engagement and community change on issues around racial equity." The communities include Stratford, Connecticut; Syracuse, New York; Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland; Lynchburg, Virginia; Burlington, Vermont; Jacksonville, Florida; Sacramento, California; and New Haven, Connecticut. Read more here.

Meanwhile, back on the campaign beat, Rich Harwood of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation has advice for all the presidential candidates:

Now, the presidential candidates have discovered that "hope" is the coin of realm and that "change" is required. Campaigns have a way of dressing up ideas, proposals, and new directions in language and packaging that can appear to be citizen-centered and community-driven, but in reality remain very much about Washington and politicians and policies that touch the edges of change. But such words, and even the deeds that may follow, will only transform America if we're called upon to step forward to bring about new conditions in our communities, to tackle tough issues such as entitlements, or to pursue policy initiatives that inevitably will require serious trade-offs and sacrifices.

Read more here, and also consider downloading a print or audio copy of Rich's new essay, Make Hope Real.

In other news:

The community of Cortlandt, New York, is forming a diversity task force and plans community dialogues and outreach programs following a cross-burning at the home of a black family last November. Organizer the Rev. Adolphus Lacey of Mount Olivet Baptist Church in nearby Peekskill told the local media that the cross-burning "revealed an underbelly of underlying intolerance we want to deal with."

Climate dialogues have been launched in Port Townsend, Washington, and in other Puget Sound-area communities. Phil Mitchell, director of the Greater Seattle Climate Dialogues, describes the dialogues as "a grassroots, science-based process that aims to bring the whole community into this crucial conversation."

UU Allies for Racial Equity, building an anti-racism movement among Unitarian Universalists, will hold their annual conference February 1-3 in Memphis, Tennessee. The multigenerational gathering is for whites who share a goal of learning to work to end racism and being allies to people of color. Click here for more info and registration details.

Please add your comments on these stories below. And if you have a news tip or see a timely piece of commentary for the weekly digest, email it to us with the relevant links.

Hate crimes: Do stats tell all?

In an annual report released yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that hate crimes rose 8 percent in the United States last year, with 7,722 incidents reported by participating agencies.

That last phrase raises questions. At the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog, Heidi Beirich noted that only 12,600 of the nation's more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies took part, and that some states (including Alabama, Hawaii, and Mississippi) reported suspiciously low numbers or no hate crimes at all. In fact, she adds, a 2005 Department of Justice study found there are actually closer to 200,000 hate crimes in the United States each year. The FBI website itself, however, says, "Whether it’s cross burnings or noose incidents, we continue to take all hate crimes seriously. Please contact your local field office if you believe you have witnessed or been victimized by a hate crime."

The FBI reported that more than half of all hate crime victims (51.8 percent) are targeted for their race, though sizable numbers of crimes were motivated by biases against religion (18.9 percent), sexual orientation (15.5 percent), or ethnicity/national origin (12.7 percent). The Study Circles Resource Center - soon to be renamed Everyday Democracy - has helped communities take action to promote racial equity for nearly 20 years. Click here to learn more about how your community can face racism and other forms of oppression head on.  

From the pop culture files

I rarely watch much television, but yesterday - while nursing a cold - I came across a write-up of a new series premiering last night, Aliens in America. The premise of a Midwestern family taking in an exchange student from Pakistan sounded interesting, so I decided to watch.

Once I got past the requisite teen-age sex jokes (which seemed to fill most of the first 10 minutes), this was a show worth watching on a topic that - as far as I know - hasn't gotten much play on prime time network TV. We cringe as Raja, on his first day of school, hears his teacher explain how he "practices Muslimism," so "let's have a dialogue." The dialogue rapidly descends into a girl blaming "his people" who blew up the buildings in New York. "But that is not true," Raja says. His teacher stops him, explaining that in America, we wait for our turn to talk. (True, but maybe what these kids - and viewers - need is a real interfaith conversation, such as the kind NCDD is offering with 20,000 Dialogues.)

The other "alien" on the show is Justin, the high-school misfit with whom Raja has come to live. Justin and his parents are first aghast that their exchange student isn't a blond European, but over the course of the half-hour (minus commercials), Justin and even his frantic mom (who quotes Bill O'Reilly as saying terrorists are "posing" as students) come to see Raja not as a foreigner but as a fellow human being. We learn in the final scene that the show will apparently explore an interracial romance for Justin's sister, Claire, too.

Also on the pop culture front, I heard an NPR review yesterday of the new book from Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This is the first young-adult novel from Alexie, perhaps best known for his screenplay for the 1998 film Smoke Signals. It sounds semi-autobiographical as well, since Alexie - like his character Junior - was born with water on the brain and left the Spokane Indian reservation to attend an otherwise-all-white high school. In a review from School Library Journal, we learn that Junior "expects disaster when he transfers from the reservation school to the rich, white school in Reardan, but soon finds himself making friends with both geeky and popular students and starting on the basketball team. Meeting his old classmates on the court, Junior grapples with questions about what constitutes one’s community, identity, and tribe." It may be a young adult book, but this one's going on my fall reading list.

What are you reading or watching that resonates with your experiences in study circles?