By Alonzo l. Plough, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, June 8, 2022
Engaging in honest dialogue about race sometimes means lowering our defenses and acknowledging our feelings so we can walk together toward racial equity.
The opening of the Tops Friendly Market in East Buffalo was a triumph of community activism, a victory for residents who struggled for years against food apartheid. In a neighborhood that had long lacked a full-service supermarket, the store became a symbol of local empowerment in one of the nation’s most segregated cities.
This segregation is a contributing factor in why White people in Buffalo have a longer life expectancy than their Black neighbors living on the East Side. To counter these conditions, residents persevered in efforts to shape a healthier, more equitable neighborhood—residents like 67-year-old Church Deacon Heyward Patterson. Deacon Patterson volunteered at a soup kitchen and even drove his neighbors to Tops Friendly Market to access nutritious food when they didn't have transportation of their own. He was murdered while helping load groceries into someone's car.
The murder of Deacon Patterson and others sparked outrage across the nation. But when the initial shock fades away, we need to look harder at the role of racist systems and structures that endure in the United States and how they contribute to unbridled violence and lives that are cut short.
It is long past time to reckon with this nation’s dark, shameful history of white supremacy.
Until we recognize how present-day inequities—in all their forms—root back to a deeply flawed past, we will see more East Buffalos, more mainstreaming of “replacement theory,” and less willingness to do the hard work of advancing racial justice.
This is the subject of my new book, Necessary Conversations published by Oxford University Press. I suggest that having meaningful conversations about raceis a step towards that reckoning. Dozens of leading thinkers and doers—activists, policymakers, researchers, educators, and journalists—contributed their provocative ideas. As editor of these important chapters about understanding racism as a barrier to health and wellbeing, I am honored to highlight some of their thoughts here.
[Click here, Necessary Conversations: Talking Frankly about Race, to read more.]
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