“The difficult and transformative road to equity leads inevitably through our heart of hearts.”
My telephone rang on a Wednesday afternoon in April. A dear friend was crying. “Did you see it?” she sobbed. I had. I was watching live television coverage with hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles residents as the verdicts were read for the Rodney King case.
I phoned Father Gregory Boyle for perspective and comfort. Father Boyle founded Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles to work with gang members. “This is terrible, Greg,” I said. “This is like lighting a match to dry brush.” He replied with words I’ll never forget: “This is the air we breathe every day.”
I watched the city burn that night from a television studio in Los Angeles, where I worked on a live national program with Rev. James Lawson, a mentor who trained non-violent protestors for lunch counter sit-ins and supported the sanitation workers strike in Memphis where Dr. King was assassinated.
By the end of what came to be known as the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 58 people were dead and more than 2,300 people had been injured.
Dr. Vincent Harding, another mentor of the Freedom Struggle, said, “… when it comes to creating a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, democratic society, we are still a developing nation.” Dr. Harding was well aware of the connection with other marginalized groups too, and he was clearly not referring to “first-world” development.
In fact, around the time Community Foundation Boulder County issued its 2017 TRENDS report, National Geographic published the results of a Gallup study of 15 metrics that signal happiness – from eating healthy and learning something new every day to civic engagement, financial security, vacation time, and even dental checkups. The happiest city in the United States? Boulder, Colorado.
The report noted, “Life is not always rosy in the Rockies – stress is on the rise; on average, 49 percent of locals surveyed reported feeling stress – but the qualities that keep Boulder on top make this city America’s happiest.”
One of Boulder’s locals is Zayd Atkinson – a black man who was recently picking up trash where he lived but found himself trying to justify his presence to armed police officers.
More than 60 people spoke this month at a Boulder city council session in response to this incident. Many called for an independent civilian oversight board. Some shared firsthand experiences of racial profiling. People of color and their family members spoke from their hearts about the air they breathe every day. They told Boulder’s elected and appointed leaders there remains a great contradiction between who we, as a community, are and who we profess to be.
Debby Irving, a racial justice educator, writes:
“There is language that gets to all of this. In just two words. For racial justice educators these two words are essential. To remove them from our lexicon is like taking the chef’s knife away from the chef. Like the knife, these two words cut swiftly to the heart of the matter. These two words comprise the essential tool in the racial justice toolbox…
So, let’s go there … White Supremacy. White Supremacy is the disease that creates the problems that diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism positions, offices, and committees attempt to address.
Are you having a reaction? Am I making you uncomfortable? If so, I get it … in my mind, the term White Supremacy was completely and totally connected to extremist hate groups. I didn’t yet understand it as an organizing principle or a philosophy, which is what it is and how it becomes like the chef’s knife, cutting to the core of what we’re dealing with […] White Supremacy describes the social order in which one kind of human being is superior to all others …
It’s this White Supremacist, stay-in-your-box, better-than/worse-than, bullying backdrop amidst which racial hatred, homophobia, misogyny, religious intolerance, classism, and other forms of oppression fester. And don’t be fooled-White Supremacy can come in seemingly benign packaging. I’ve always found it easy to point my finger at people I see as “bad” and “mean” and “racist”–
yet, to some degree, all of it also lives in me […] How could I not have internalized White Supremacist norms?
How about you? Can you go there? Can you examine how White Supremacy manifests in your school? Your company? Your town? Your mind? Your heart? Can you see it? Feel it? Name it? This is what eradicating racism, I mean White Supremacy, requires. Let’s go there.”
Dr. King dreamed of a society that judged people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, but he was not making an impossible case for color-blindness. He was challenging us to fulfill a promise of equity.
The difficult and transformative road to equity leads inevitably through our heart of hearts. We at Community Foundation Boulder County are committed to walking that road with you.
Yours in community,
Jeff
