Essay by Trina Jackson with links to a new report entitled Racial Inequities, Policy Solutions: Perceptions of Boston’s Communities of Color on Racism and Race Relations by The Hyams Foundation. While the reported data is specific to Massachusetts, the issues are national and relevant for all of us. Here are some excerpts:
The data from this illuminating report reveals a familiar story to many living with and working hard to re-address these racialized inequities. Across the people polled, the data represents that we generally agree on many common sense solutions to these persistent problems. Specifically, the solutions mentioned in this report are to: engage in dialogues to improve race relations; upgrades to public transportation, investments in jobs for young people and early childhood education; and end the racial discrimination within the criminal justice system.
But what we have historically lacked is a commitment to follow through on the implementation of the policy changes we know are needed. Our organizations and institutions continue to be the biggest barriers to actual progress and change. The only way for that to happen is to shift the culture at our organizations and institutions to include people of color in leadership roles and decision making positions to ensure that policies, public dollars and projects are being implemented where they have the most impact in dismantling racial inequities, and include the people who are directly impacted.
How many of us have been in or led organizations where we say we care about racial equity in our workplace but will address it more in real and meaningful ways in the next budget or quarter, with the next hire or promotion?
I have.
How many organizations, led mostly by white people, have made significant changes even after being "educated" about structural oppression?
How often are we owning our own stuff, personally and professionally, and where we do and don't acknowledge power and privilege -never mind share both?
How many of us realize our refusal to think, talk and address racism in our work and workplace is the problem, that we perpetuate and maintain the status quo even though we saying that's what our work is about fighting against?
How many of us don't realize our power or ability to make meaningful changes for ourselves and marginalized communities we are not a part of but that are our community?
For years I have thought about ACEs only as adverse childhood experiences. In fact, in the car with my fifteen-year-old daughter, I tried to explain diffetences between adverse community experiences and adverse childhood experiences and adverse community environments.
She didn't get it. At all.
She asked how come when racism or homelessness happens to a kid, it 's not an adverse childhood experience even though it's adversity happening in childhood?
I didn't know what to say to that except that that's not how we started talking about ACEs and we have not completely challenged our own bias or updated ourselves.
We is white people.
She said why aren't all child adversities ACEs and it's just some happen in the home and some in the community?
My daughter is a kid of color, and doesn't differentiate her childhood experiences as though some are had on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and some are had on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. She shouldn't have to educate her mom on the obvious, but she did.
I've remained pretty oblivious.
Dr. Ken Hardy said:
When you think of racial trauma then, there are a couple aspects I think are woth noting. One is that the effects of racial trauma are enduring. It's not like you experience it and then you get over it. It's lifelong. It's a life sentence. It's a life sentence. And so it has a certain endurable quality.
Secondly, it's transmitted intergenerationally. So you pass it on like you do anything else in life. That's part of what makes it inescapable, it gets passed on from generation to generation.
And that you can also, not only do you experience it direclty, you can be impacted viariouclsy as well.
As white people in the non-profit sector, our track record has been horrible. Despite solid research, lots of facts, and being educated we've done a crappy job making actual changes addressing and healing racial trauma, and our own biases.
As a white woman in the non-profit sector in Massachusetts, I'm part of the problem. If I talk about trauma but not racial trauma, I'm part of the problem.
We can't keep saying next time or later on next year or we are doing Trauma-informed BS.
Dr. Ken Hardy said:
"So the rules of engagement are really different when it comes to racial trauma. We're much more tolerant of it when it invades the life experiences of white people. We're much more critical of it when it happens to people of color.
So even like this question that permeates the whole trauma filed, when you;re thinking rauma-informed changes the question you ask. You ask what happened to you not what's wrong with you. "what happened to you." That's the question that white folks get asked, people of color, it's about what's wrong with you and if we're too slow in answering, it gets answered for us."
We can't keep asking other people and systems to stop traumatizing already traumatized people, if we ourselves, are unwilling to do the same when it comes to racial trauma and the ways we use our privilege at the expense of others.
We have to risk being vocal about racial trauma and racial equity and to listen to the ways our failures hurt individuals and families and communities, for generations and generations.
Then there was the issue of my father was severely ill, and before he died a year ago, my family and I continued to debate and grapple with whether we would put him in a nursing home because the gravity of his health concerns greatly exceeded our capacity to provide for him.
But there was race again because we couldn't trust that even in his waning movements, as a black man, that he would get the care he needed. That his blackness would overshadow his illness."
We can't talk about health, healing, wellness and resilience without talking equity, inclusion and structural oppression too. There is no race without ACE.
Comments (2)