After the morning’s armchair discussion, Southern Partners Fund’s inaugural Social Justice Institute kicks off a full day of workshops. The room fills quickly for the one on structural racism. Maya Wiley founded the Center for Social Inclusion after working as a civil rights lawyer, senior advisor on race and poverty to the Director of U.S. Programs of the Open Society Institute, and helped develop and implement the Open Society Foundation — South Africa’s Criminal Justice Initiative. She has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union National Legal Department, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. in the Poverty and Justice Program and the Civil Division of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

After all of this experience, she tells us what she has learned is that the best way to end structural racism is not through litigation. She’d had enough of banging her head against the wall. Rather, we should be working on creating new and better policies that will work for everyone. Maya spends the next hour and a half convincing us of this fact during an eye-opening presentation on structural racism. She wants us to think of ideas for how we can combat it using the opportunity of having a new president. She asks us what are the opportunities for change in the midst of the economic crisis. We do have some assets we didn’t have before:

• Opportunities for new elected leadership, more people saying they want to step up
• A more informed community
• People realize we can’t do it alone, that we can do more together
• Country finally starting to acknowledge and understand the practices that got us in this economic mess in the first place
• Realization that we have a collective fate
• Opportunities to form partnerships across lines – with government, with business/banking community

One woman in the workshop says that President Obama can tend to bring people together and move toward compromise. Which means that the left needs to go more left.

There are many ways to examine structural racism, but today we’re looking through the lens of the economy. Someone else points out that you can’t have an open society in a closed south – and over half of black community lives in the south.

Maya teaches us that structural racism is not the same as institutional racism.

Structural racism defined:

• Multi-institutional – involves more than one institution ex. schools financing connected to tax structure, connect to school board, etc.
• Policy driven – structural racism didn’t just happen naturally, happened because of how policies worked
• Not race neutral – the things that are happening are impacted because of race, it doesn’t make sense to find the racists because it’s a larger problem that doesn’t need to say anything about race to impact people of color, policies aren’t race neutral just because they’re race silent
• Intent to discriminate not required – elected officials who just do their jobs and follow the law will still produce disparities in communities because the policies are set up that way
• Racial disparities are symptoms of the illness – they tell us where the systems are broken, otherwise fairness would prevail and there would be no disparity by race

Maya asks, how long has there been a middle class? The answer is not very long. America created it, it did not happen naturally. Policies created the middle class in 1950s-60s such as Social Security, Federal Housing Administration, G.I. Bill, Federal Highway Act. We didn’t have anything like this before the Great Depression, it took a crisis to produce these opportunities. These policies were race-silent, but the intent was there because the government knew what it would produce. For instance, domestics and agricultural workers were not eligible for Social Security when it was first created. These were jobs that most people of color held. What happened was that 60% of all blacks did not benefit from Social Security because of this structural arrangement. People of color were already segregated into certain job categories because of policies and our lack of education because of segregation. The Social Security program just exacerbated this.

Federal Housing Act gave opportunities not just for homeownership, but also for refinancing homes to start small businesses and pay for college degrees. By the 1950s, the federal government was guaranteeing loans for 50% of all homes in America.  Their loans supported racially restrictive convenants, and would downgrade credit ratings for those who wanted to move into integrated communities. So many people of color weren’t able to become homeowners under this program. Lack of homeownership meant not being able to do other things which would have increased wealth for people of color.

Maya asserts that we’re more racially segregated now in America than we were in the 1950s because of policies. While 200,000 people earned college degrees from G.I. Bill, few of them were people of color although the policy was race silent. But who was getting into the military? Not people of color – the Tuskegee Airmen had to fight to get into the military. Stereotype of “flat feet” and others kept Blacks from getting in. Even programs to help veterans get jobs after they came out of the war  were also impacted by race. Whites were tracked to management roles, while people of color were not, which impacted their future earnings and benefits.

The Federal Highway Act created more highways even though people of color are six times more likely to use transit. The majority of our tax dollars went to highways versus transit. Poor people ended up subsidizing the white middle class, who are the commuters. We essentially paid for the infrastructure of white flight to the suburbs. Even today, people of color are bearing the brunt of the recession.

All these policies built on each other to cause the conditions we see today. But then Maya gives us the good news.

Structural racism is not inevitable. But it can’t be dismantled without new policy.

john powell from the Kirwan Institute often asks, which straw broke the camel’s back? All of them, all policies build to have a cumulative impact across generations. There’s no question that privilege comes from opportunities given to our families in the past – owning land, homeownership, learning a trade in slavery, etc. How is it that two-thirds of people living in concentrated urban poverty are Black or Latino?

Even if policies are race neutral, the outcomes will not be. Race matters. Look at how structures impact on racial lines. Once we all get healthcare, we’re still not done. It’s race, not poverty. Sub-prime loans have pulled down global economies, yet 60% of all those who got sub-prime loans were actually eligible for a prime rate. This is not a poverty problem. Blacks earning $350,000 a year were more likely to get sub-prime mortgage than a white person earning $50,000 a year. This is not a poverty problem. This is a race problem.

Someone recommends the book, The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash if you want to understand the financial crisis.

Even with universal healthcare, there will be racial disparities – we will still have issues with access, unemployment. The healthcare bill can actually harm communities of color because of public hospitals closing. The bill is the first step, and we have to be ready for the next level of fights.

The real strategy is in fixing the root cause of the problem, not attacking the symptoms. The frame is also important – people of color have been scapegoats in policy debate – Latinos as criminals, illegal immigrants getting free healthcare. Yet only 5% of recipients might be undocumented compared to 95% of citizens who will be helped.  It’s about who gets to define the moral center. We have to do it first before the right defines it for us. We need to know where trends are going so we can put our race lens on it and get out ahead of the issues.

Barriers to undoing structural racism:

• Internalized racism - when you test for subconscious racism, blacks have a preference for whites
• Systems justification – people will often justify the systems when we start talking about dismantling them
• We can’t through policy constrain attitudes (can’t change racists through policy), but we can constrain behavior

Policy opportunities that could help people of color:

• Broadband access – will improve education, healthcare (telemedicine), make it easier to open a small businesses
• Public transportation dollars – improve transit such as subway and bus lines to make it easier for people of color to get to work – highways generally serve to help whites who have more cars and commute to work

Maya urges us to come up with good infrastructure projects that will help our communities and then advocate for them in this opportune moment with stimulus dollars flowing. How can we get more of them into our communities? We need a structural approach to issues like getting better schools – elect the right people to school board, in Senate, etc. We have to make sure that the people we elected with political power then change the policies.

The information presented in Maya’s workshop made us angry. But not angry enough to quit. Angry enough to continue the fight for social justice. Armed with new data and new insights, community organizers left the room ready to get back to work.

Full disclosure: Southern Partners Fund paid me to provide blogging services for this event to leverage the power of social media to share their stories with the wider philanthropic community. The views expressed here are solely my own, however, and I stand by my commitment to authentic coverage of these issues. Would you like to hire me? Visit my portfolio to see samples of my work.