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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor vs. Janaye Ingram on Hillary Clinton, Racial Justice & the Democratic Party

Re-post from Democracy Now

Watch:

To discuss Hillary Clinton’s historic nomination and how the Black Lives Matter movement is reflected in the Democratic platform, we are joined by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” and an assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, and Janaye Ingram, the former executive director of the National Action Network and a member of the 20/20 Leaders of America.

Guests:

Janaye Ingram former executive director of the National Action Network and a member of the 20/20 Leaders of America.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton University.

Full Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. This is “Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency,” our two-hour daily two-week special from the Republican and, this week, the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

To talk more about the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton and how the Black Lives Matter movement is reflected in the Democratic platform, we’re joined now by two guests. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. She’s an assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton University. And Janaye Ingram is with us, former executive director of the National Action Network and a member of the 20/20 Leaders of America.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Janaye Ingram. Your response to the nomination of Hillary Clinton last night, the formal acceptance speech that she gave on the floor of the Democratic National Convention, the first woman nominated by a major party to be president of the United States?

JANAYE INGRAM: Well, obviously, I think it’s a proud moment for this country that this has happened, notwithstanding all that has surrounded her nomination. I still believe that her nomination, the first female, is a moment that we need to pay attention to and we need to acknowledge as a history-making moment. I was happy about her speech last night. I think she could have done a little bit more with giving us personal—a personal story. I think, leading up to her speech, you had a lot of the speakers—and the video—you had her daughter talking about her as a person. The speeches in the nights prior, you had people sort of humanizing her and bringing that human touch. I was looking to hear a little bit more from that perspective.

But I was also happy to hear her talk about the Black Lives Matter movement, even though she didn’t specifically call it out. She did mention the fact that black and brown people are being sort of brutalized—that’s my word—brutalized by police. And I will say that was something. That was a recognition to have on a national stage by this candidate, was important to the movement. You had Reverend Barber earlier talk about Black Lives Matter. And so, having that repeated by Hillary Clinton, at least in her way of saying it, was an important moment, that shows, I think, a lot of the pressure that has been placed on her. She is feeling that pressure, and she is responding to it, at least now, with words.

AMY GOODMAN: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: So, I guess I was thinking that the speech, along with the convention as a whole, in many ways has demonstrated this gap between the kind of symbolism and the reality that exists on the streets of Philadelphia and around the country. And so, I think that Hillary Clinton gave a speech that was full of platitudes and that, in some ways, I guess, was of symbolic value, but that really lacked any kind of specificity in terms of how we are going to address very serious crises in this country. And so, I think that, to me, that’s part of the problem I kind of walk away with the convention with, is there’s all the talk about how great and wonderful the United States is, and in many ways, obviously, the convention reflected more of the ethnic and gender and sexual orientation diversity in the United States certainly than the Republican hate show last week, but I think that what we’ve learned from the Obama presidency is that we have to move from symbolism into actual policies and programs that are going to improve the lives of everyday, ordinary people. And in the speeches throughout the week and Clinton’s speech last night, I think we’re still waiting for that specificity in how we go from a kind of symbolic representation of people to the actual representation and improvement in the quality of people’s lives on an everyday basis.

AMY GOODMAN: What would you have liked Hillary Clinton to say last night?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, I think the two things that I’m most concerned with have to do with Black Lives Matter and specific policies that are going to be advanced to stop police abuse and violence in black communities. And also, Hillary Clinton gave a very heralded speech in Harlem in February, where she talked about the reinvestment in distressed communities, and that seemed to be something that was completely missing from the speech. So, in a city like Philadelphia, where the Democratic Party has been having this party all week, there’s 28 percent poverty, and half of those people are living in what is defined as extreme poverty. And so, what are the actual policies and practices that are going to be put into place to address that? That’s the concrete details that I wanted to hear about.

AMY GOODMAN: Janaye, why do you think Hillary Clinton is the best person to address the criminal justice system?

JANAYE INGRAM: I don’t know that I would say that she’s the best person. I think she definitely has a—having had the experience that she’s had, she does bring to the table certain criteria that I think would be helpful, as opposed to the person that she’s running against. To say that she’s the best person is not something that I would be comfortable saying. I think, given the two choices—you have Donald Trump, who has talked about essentially creating a law and order state, which when you’re talking about a fractured relationship between police and specifically the black community, that is very troubling and disturbing to hear. So, given the two choices, I think having someone who at least is willing to have the conversation and to recognize that, even if it is platitudes, that it’s important that she says it. I was really waiting to see if it was going to be said by her, to be honest, because, you know, I wasn’t completely sure. But the fact that she actually acknowledged it means that there’s an opportunity there for us to go further and hold her accountable to the things that she’s saying.

AMY GOODMAN: And you had this unusual moment on the stage of the convention where the mothers of those who had been killed, two of them by police, one by a vigilante—Sandra Bland’s mother, Trayvon Martin’s mother and Jordan Davis’s mother. What did you make of that, Keeanga?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, one thing that I want to say, though, is that Donald Trump may, in fact, talk about law and order and building a law and order—building further on a law and order society, but we have to remember that Bill and Hillary Clinton, in fact, did build a law and order society with the passage of the crime bill in 1994, passage of the Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996. And so, in many ways, we are recovering from the policies that were championed and doggedly pursued by the Clinton, the original Clinton, administration in the 1990s. So I think it’s important to say that.

In terms of the appearance of the Mothers of the Movement, I know that if my child were killed unjustly by the police or by a racist vigilante, that I would want to do everything in my power to bring the perpetrator to justice. So I don’t question the motives of the mothers who participated in the DNC program.

AMY GOODMAN: The fact that they were there.

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Absolutely. I do question, however, the motives of political operatives who I think would use the suffering of black parents for votes. And so, there’s nothing that I have seen yet in Clinton’s policy platform that, to me, takes seriously addressing the issues of police violence. There’s been talk about money on police training, that sort of thing. But what about police accountability? What is actually being talked about in terms of holding the police accountable for the deaths of black people? We’ve just seen this week, Freddie Gray—apparently, no one killed Freddie Gray. Freddie Gray’s death was declared a homicide, and no one will be held to account. And so, that—I’m interested in what Hillary Clinton has to say about that. And that’s what I mean that we have to move beyond promises during election time and platitudes into concrete specifics of what elected officials are going to do to defend black people from violence and abuse at the hands of the police.

JANAYE INGRAM: You know, going back to the earlier point about the—

AMY GOODMAN: Janaye Ingram.

JANAYE INGRAM: Yes—the crime bill, while I agree, you know, that was not the right legislation that we needed to have—and clearly, we are seeing the effects of that daily. The Clintons championed that, and so, by doing that, they are the face of that. I will say there were other people who championed that and who supported that bill, who looked like us, like the two of us. And so, you know, at that time, I want to put the context behind that bill. At that time, there was a lot of crime, and there were a lot of people of all races—it wasn’t just the Clintons who were saying this is the bill. And so, there is a responsibility that we have as a community, and I think that’s the part that I think is really important. Yes, we’re talking about—we need to talk about policy solutions, but offering policy, in and of itself, does not guarantee that that policy will even be implemented. Power concedes nothing without a demand. So, yes, we have to make sure that the power structure is meeting our demands and is essentially responding to the things that they said that they were going to do.

There’s a certain level of accountability that I don’t know has been achieved yet. And that’s not just by the black community. I think that’s by the American society as a whole. I think that’s part of the frustration that you’re seeing coming out with the Bernie movement. People don’t feel like politicians have been held accountable. But what they fail to realize is that we are the ones that are supposed to keep politicians accountable. And so, with that, I think, you know, we’re talking about policy solutions. I think Hillary Clinton needs to have someone in her ear talking about what types of solutions need to be had. I don’t know that, given the ’94 crime bill, that I would fully say, you know, “Have at it. You create the policies, and we’ll be behind it.” It needs to be a conversation.

AMY GOODMAN: Keeanga?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Yeah, I would just say that, first, talking about the 1990s, I think it’s one thing if you’re in a black community that is absolutely having issues with crime and poverty because of decades-long disinvestment in jobs and infrastructure in black communities, and you’re left with no other viable alternative. So, the alternative wasn’t either support the crime bill or support this host of public policies that are aimed at rebuilding the public infrastructure, rebuilding public programs that are intended to mitigate the worst aspects of poverty. People weren’t given that option. In fact, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton helped to usher in a period where they declared the era of big government, i.e. government programs, is over. And so, the only alternative that people were given was more police and more prisons.

And that’s the very important context, because the thing I think that we miss that was most pernicious about Clinton policies in the 1990s—the crime bill, the Effective Death Penalty Act, welfare reform—was not just that people ended up in prison, was not just that poor people lost access to important government benefits, but most importantly is the damage that was done to the idea that government has a role in the life of everyday people, that government has a responsibility to poor and working-class people. And, in fact, they helped to disconnect the idea that government has any role. They helped to disconnect the idea that poverty, that economic inequality is responsible for the issues of crime, that those things were responsible for people’s reliance or need for welfare. And these are ideas that we are still contending with today, the idea that government somehow is a bad thing.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is your assessment of Donald Trump, where he fits into this? Let’s begin with Janaye.

JANAYE INGRAM: My assessment of Donald Trump is obviously that he is using fear as a tactic to sort of gain him some votes, popularity. Even seeing his most recent comments talking about hitting some of the speakers, I mean, it’s—

AMY GOODMAN: He was in Iowa—

JANAYE INGRAM: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —and he said that he wanted to attack some of the DNC speakers.

JANAYE INGRAM: He wanted to attack—he said—I believe he said “hit.”

AMY GOODMAN: “Hit,” you’re right.

JANAYE INGRAM: He wanted to hit some of the speakers. It is appalling to me that this man is a nominee to be president. I can’t even fathom that this is the person that some people in this country want to lead this country. What he’s doing is not leadership. What he is doing, I don’t even know the word for it, but it’s disgusting. Whatever it is, it’s disgusting.

And ultimately, you know, I think, at the end of the day, I noticed in the package that—one of the packages you showed, someone was talking about how there was this sense of nationalism at the DNC. And I noticed it, too. I noticed the signs and the chants. What I attributed that to was when you have a person who is talking about making America great again, as if America hasn’t made strides, and talking about taking America back to a period when I don’t think it was great at all—let me not say “at all,” but I don’t think it was as great as it could have been. It did not live up to the ideals and the tenets that we want to hold America to. I think that was the reason behind all of that sort of sense of nationalism, to basically say this is still a nation to be proud of.

AMY GOODMAN: Keeanga, I’m going to end with the question about movements and where they fit into this whole electoral process into November.

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, I think the movements are quite critical in terms of keeping alive the issues that are most important to us, because, to be honest, there would be no discussion about police violence and police brutality, there would be no discussion about black lives mattering, without there having been, since August 9th of 2014, a movement highlighting and exposing that police violence is not just a case of bad apples or rogue cops, but that it’s absolutely systemic. And so, I actually think that in order to keep these issues alive, in order to keep whomever is elected in November, to keep their feet to the fire, that the movement can’t collapse into just blind support for Hillary Clinton because we know that Donald Trump is not on the agenda, and that the movement needs to remain politically independent, with its own set of independent objectives and goals that are not tied to whomever becomes president.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will certainly continue this discussion in these months to come, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and Janaye Ingram, former executive director of the National Action Network.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we take a look at the vice-presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, the senator from Virginia, and his time in Honduras. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

Allstate Minority and Women Emerging Entrepreneurs Program

Re-post from UB School of Management

 

Creating opportunities for individuals leading minority- and women-owned enterprises into advanced stages of development.

The Allstate Minority and Women Emerging Entrepreneurs (MWEE) program is a joint venture by the UB School of Management’s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and the UB Center for Urban Studies. The program’s mission is to construct a pathway that enables minority and women entrepreneurs to move their companies to the next stage of development. The MWEE program is partially funded with a generous grant from The Allstate Foundation.

The program helps participants:

— Forge relationships with successful business owners

— Learn more about the varied aspects of running a small business

— Formulate clear objectives and outcomes to guide the development of their business plan

— Devise realistic business goals and timetables and develop strategies for achieving them

— Learn about and connect with existing organizations and resources, public and private, that can assist with the development of their business

Participants (protégés) work with a mentor, attend monthly business development seminars and additional networking events, and complete a revised or newly developed business plan. The Protégé of the Year receives the Allstate Minority and Women Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year award and a $1,500 prize.

Who Should Apply

To participate, an applicant must be either a woman or a member of a recognized minority and own a business in the Buffalo-Niagara region.

Application Process

Applicants are encouraged to apply early as it is not unusual for the class to be filled before the deadline.

Apply Now.

Learn More

To obtain program fees, request a brochure or learn more, contact the CEL at mgt-cel@buffalo.edu or 716-885-5715.

Students tackle urban renewal at summer camp

Read the full article from WBFO here.

UB Center for Urban Studies is hosting its 4th annual Summer Academic Camp. The camp is designed for middle school students.  WBFO’s Eileen Buckley reports the theme is neighborhood development.

More than ten students are gathering in a classroom on the University at Buffalo’s South campus at the Hayes Hall Annex through mid-August for this Academic Camp. They’re learning about ”Transformation of the Visual Landscape’.

“In many of the east side neighborhoods, the visual landscape is harmful in the sense that it depicts an image of decay, deterioration, neglect and a sense of hopelessness — that is — that you can do nothing about it,” said Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., Director of UB’s Urban Studies program.

Professor calls poverty “systemic racism” in Buffalo

WIVB systemic racism

Re-Post From WIVB

 

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – Leaders in Buffalo love talking about the city’s renaissance. Progress is on display in certain places but the fact is, Buffalo is still the 3rd poorest city in the country, with 30.1% of the population struggling to make ends meet.

News 4’s Nalina Shapiro wanted to help us understand how some neighborhoods, like the east side, ended up the way it did. This story fill books. It’s a complex issue and it’s not easy getting answers from leaders but two two professors and one young man helped us understand Buffalo’s history and what changes still need to be made.

We met 14 year old Razhon Harris while he was doing yard work near the Broadway Market. He told us he wants to make an impact.

“Right now I’m helping my grandma with some grass, planting some grass for her,” said Harris.

A few feet of new grass might not mean much to you but it represents something much bigger for Harris. He lives in one of Buffalo’s poorest neighborhoods on the east side.

“Well it adds property value to the houses and it attracts some people over here,” Harris told us while he was planting the seeds.

Not nearly enough people are investing in the east side. One problem has to do with home values, which are low. The average price of a home sold on the east side went for $37,426, according to data sent to us by Emily Cornwell, a licensed real estate agent with Nothnagle Realtors. If you take a quick ten minute drive to North Buffalo, the Elmwood, Allentown and downtown areas home prices range from $128,000 to more than $500,000. The west side is also making a comeback with home prices valued on average at around $123,546. South Buffalo home prices are also lower, on average between $68,000 and around $85,000.

Still, the east side has the lowest home prices and some of the most empty structures. The area by the Broadway market has the highest rate of vacant houses in the city, 1,704 vacancies among 6,471 units according to Buffalo Business First.

“See my family, our house used to be abandoned but then we fixed it up and now it looks beautiful,” said Harris.

That’s just one family. Not everyone can afford to do that or wants to do that since home values are so low. Harris said the community needs more help.

“It’s like a war zone over here, when they’re spending money, our taxpayer dollars on certain stuff that doesn’t help everybody it’s only helping certain people,” said Harris.

If a 14 year old can tell you that, you would think leaders in Buffalo know investing in home ownership is one key to turning a poor neighborhood around.

“So they know they know they chose to do something differently,” said U.B. Professor Henry Louis Taylor.

Professor Taylor says choices city leaders made created the current state on the east side.

“It’s pure racism, systemic structural racism,” said Professor Taylor.

The pictures tell the story. If you drive by the waterfront and the medical campus it’s a completely different story than what’s being told on the east side, a predominantly black community.

“Buffalo rising and African Americans falling,” said Professor Taylor. “And people will say well how could that happen in a city managed by blacks and controlled by blacks and our answer is simple, black faces in high places don’t mean a thing if they have the same agenda as white faces in high places,” said Professor Taylor.

Building new, forgetting about the old and pushing people out into the suburbs is what Professor Taylor thinks will continue to happen unless more private sector money is invested into areas like the east side.

We asked Harris what his message is to the Mayor of Buffalo and other city leaders, to which he replied, “spend some more money over here, you only did a couple streets and these pots holes over here is crazy,” said Harris.

Historians will tell you east side roads started crumbling when new roads like the 33 and Scajaquada were built, to draw people to the newly developed suburbs in the 1950’s. That created a huge housing vacuum. People moved to the suburbs and left the east side homes empty.
“So, lots of absentee landlords and it led to a rent problem for homeowners and they couldn’t find renters so it led to high arson rates in communities like this,” said Buffalo State Sociology Professor Eric Krieg.

We spoke with him on a deserted Broadway looking in the distance at a blossoming downtown Buffalo.

“It’s an interesting place because there is hardly any traffic on Broadway and a lot of empty lots and buildings that need a lot of repair,” said Professor Krieg.

“I would like some more parks that are child friendly, because there have been a lot of shootings over here and it would be safer if there was more child friendly places over here,” said Harris.

While Harris said the city needs to help more he also added more young people like him need to step up.

“Some of the non lazy ones need to come outside and do some work instead of hanging around doing stuff that don’t matter,” said Harris.

Children can’t control where they’re born, but Professor Taylor says leaders can either continue to build what he calls a “latte city”  to attract only a certain type of business professional, or create a city that works to understand everyone’s diversity.

“What if happy talk was all over Buffalo not just in a few places, imagine what an awesome city that would be,” said Professor Taylor.

We reached out to the City of Buffalo June 6th when we began working on the story. The mayor just responded on July 11th.

“The city has spent significantly more on the east side of Buffalo than it has spent in Canalside. In fact the spending in Canalside is largely private sector spending and that is what is driving the spending we see at Canalside,” said Mayor Byron brown. “Figure in a 10-year period of time those numbers are well in excess of $300 million dollars on the east side of Buffalo.”

Mayor Brown says just recently Sinatra Development agreed to invest $20 million dollars at 1160 Jefferson street on the east side to create a mixed income mixed use space with apartments, retail space and a health center.

The Base

Re-post from the Boston Review

A protester demonstrates at a rally against police violence in Minneapolis. / Fibonacci Blue

 

In spite of Bernie Sanders’s primary win in Indiana and favored status in West Virginia, recent voting in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and a handful of other states appears to confirm what has long been anticipated: after a spirited campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Vermont senator is falling to earth. One would not want to write off a campaign prematurely—after all, dismissal of Donald Trump by the press and his fellow Republicans paved his road to the GOP nomination—but Sanders himself is retrenching. Staff cuts and campaign statements suggest he is now focused less on the presidency than on dents he can make in the Democratic Party platform at July’s convention.

Thus it is fair, at this stage, to ask what will become of the political fervor Sanders has unleashed. Supporters of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, hope some of that excitement can be funneled toward her general election run, securing a decisive victory and the legislative mandate believed to result. Especially if Trump is on the general election ballot, as seems all but certain, there is no doubt that a significant portion of Sanders backers will vote for Clinton in November.

Yet this lesser-of-many-evils approach only emphasizes the cynical calculus that Sanders’s supporters yearned to escape: the Democrats promise as little as they can get away with and hope the troglodytes parading in the Republican Party are enough to get the base out to the polls.

Bernie Sanders advocates redistributive government, which puts him at odds with the last twenty-five years of Democratic common sense.

But now some activists wonder whether the class anger orbiting Sanders’s campaign can transform the Democratic Party into a tool for movements against economic and racial inequality. An older generation remembers when the Democratic Party brandished its liberal credentials instead of being terrified by them. For these activists, Sanders’s surprising run yields nostalgic visions of “taking back” the party, reviving what they believe was a grassroots politics representing ordinary people.

Like much nostalgia, however, this is naïve. One need look no further than Clinton’s candidacy to appreciate the Democratic top-brass’s aversion to policies and politics centered on social justice. Instead of thanking Sanders for activating new voters and reinvigorating those still sleepy from the underwhelming presidency of Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton accused him of wanting to “shoot” people on Wall Street. Last December, instead of accepting responsibility for the security of its own data, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) smeared Sanders and falsely accused him of breaking into Hillary Clinton’s campaign secrets. Clinton has reluctantly appealed to Sanders’s supporters by referring to herself as progressive and declaring that the middle class needs a raise. But mostly she and the Democratic hierarchy have mocked Sanders for supposedly promising “free this and free that and everything”—a criticism she rejected when it came from Jeb Bush’s lips. Clinton has campaigned relentlessly on the improbability of universal health care and criticized Sanders for suggesting that there be free tuition at public universities and colleges.

This is not just a case of Clinton failing to detect which way the wind is blowing in American politics. As a steward of American capital, it is her responsibility to attack the idea of social entitlement. It was her husband and campaign surrogate who clearly articulated the politics of the “new Democrats,” when he declared that the “era of big government is over.” Sanders advocates redistributive government, which puts him at odds with the last twenty-five years of Democratic common sense. Hillary Clinton is not fundamentally opposed to the use of the government treasury for any and all social entitlements, but her refusal to embrace serious redistributive policies for the benefit of poor people shows that she sees her future job as her husband saw his in the ’90s: to crush, or at least ignore, the proposition that the public should provide for people’s needs.

This does not make Clinton a conservative Democrat; it just makes her a Democrat. Since her husband’s first term, the Democratic Party has successfully molded itself into a small-government, pro-privatization, law-and-order party. As then-Senator Joe Biden put it while celebrating the 1994 Crime Bill:

Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties. . . . The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.

Today the Black Lives Matter movement has compelled the party to walk back some of that rhetoric. But there is little reason to believe this is a genuine retreat rather than an exercise in political expediency. Biden was speaking to a deeper truth about how the party wanted to be known: as tough as the GOP, not socially liberal or especially concerned with the interests of minorities.

This is not just old news. Decmocratic veterans nationwide continue to push a regressive agenda. Consider Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, once a party kingmaker and now one of the most reviled public officials in his city. He earned his ignominy by covering for police criminality and attempting to dismantle public education, a process that included thelargest mass school closure in American history, in 2013. Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles has cracked down on the homeless, confiscating their property, including the “tiny homes” that were doing what the city wouldn’t—house homeless people. In New York City, mayor Bill De Blasio betrayed his supporters in the criminal justice reform movement bypledging to hire 1,300 more police even as crime continued its historic downward trend. In San Franciso, Mayor Ed Lee promoted a “Twitter tax break”—a payroll tax exemption lasting six years and intended to keep tech companies in San Francisco—which cost the city $34 million in 2015 alone. Meanwhile, San Francisco faces a $100 million budget shortfall, and Mayor Lee is calling for across-the-board spending cuts from city agencies. With Democrats scaling back services—excepting, of course, law enforcement—and pushing trickle-down economics, who needs Republicans?

One might protest that Democratic officials have generally been more critical of the latest excesses of campaign finance law than have been their GOP competitors. But these words don’t reflect principle. When it comes to absorbing corporate money and accompanying influence, the Democratic Party takes a back seat to no one. The party’s largest corporate donors embody the greed that courses through the financial and industrial economy: Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Bank of America, JP Morgan, and General Electric hedge their bets by giving almost equally to both parties. Lockheed Martin and Walmart veer toward Republicans but still give millions to Democrats, just in case. In the midst of the primary season, the DNC changed the party’s rules to allow presidential candidates to accept more money from lobbyists and political action committees.

The corrosive influence of money in politics is hardly a revelation, but it is sobering to observe it at work in an organization that claims to champion the welfare of the downtrodden. Take the Congressional Black Caucus, which used to refer to itself as the “conscience of the Congress.” The CBC PAC and its politicians politicians have received some of their largest donations from Walmart, General Motors, and Coca-Cola. Is it any wonder that the caucus has been almost absent in the fight for a higher minimum wage, even as more than half of black workers make less than $15 an hour?

Citizens angered by inequality and injustice should not be stifled by the pressure to organize through the Democratic Party.

Indeed, this campaign season has been a lesson in just how conservative the Democratic Party actually is. Hence Clinton’s unofficial campaign slogan of “no we can’t” and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s calm admission that unpledged superdelegates “exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists.”

The two-party system itself preserves the Democrats’ conservatism, which suggests that the party is not likely to change before there is a legitimate challenge from its left. Until then, the Democratic leadership can remain confident that its base has nowhere else to go. Thus, even when Democrats push policies that harm their constituents, they can expect little protest from the major liberal organizations. For example, when the Democratic Party promotes so-called education reform policies that are hostile to teachers unions andnegatively affect black students, officials themselves receive almost no resistance from teachers unions or the NAACP.

In fact, the opposite occurrs. While rank-and-file teachers oppose significant aspects of the reform movement, including the Common Core standards and the intensifying regime of standardized testing, their union leadership dutifully lines up to back the Democratic Party. The American Federation of Teachers endorsed Clinton as early as July 2015; the National Education Association followed suit in October, with no debate or discussion among its members. The civil rights establishment is largely silent on education policy, but, when it does get vocal, it tends to support reformers. This is not surprising considering that theNAACP and Urban League have received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, which champions charter schools, standardized testing, and privatization. Notably, education reform was the key agenda item of former Obama administration Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The party’s conservatism radiates outward, as its constituency learns to fall in behind its positions.

This makes the party difficult to capture, as the Tea Party had captured the GOP at one point. Yet the appeal of such a strategy is longstanding. The same question returns eternally: How to transform protest rabble into respectable politics? In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the move to integrate the New Left into the Democratic Party was heralded as a sign of maturation for the counterculture. But as the movements in the streets subsided and activists entered the electoral arena, they imbibed party norms and became less militant. In 1984 and ’88, the Rainbow Coalition led by Reverend Jesse Jackson was supposed to get tough with the Democratic Party and demand a seat at the table for black voters. Instead, the party got tough with black and other progressive voters by insisting that they take a back seat to the paty’s conservative wing, represented by Bill Clinton. And let us not forget that it was Al Gore, running against Michael Dukakis for the Democratic Party nomination in 1988, who introduced Willie Horton into the post–Civil Rights lexicon of racial symbolism, helping to derail Dukakis’s campaign and reinforce the era’s demand for crime-control politics and policies.

Given the resilience of party conservatives, their history of both rebuffing challenges from the left and absorbing the challengers themselves, it is hard to imagine a takeover strategy bearing fruit. This brings us back to Sanders and the most unfortunate aspect of his campaign: he is running as a Democrat. As a consequence he will, at some point, be asked to throw his support to Clinton. (Already he has agreed to back her in the likely event that she is nominated.) For Sanders, who has spent his entire political life working with and on behalf of Democrats, this is perhaps no great sacrifice.

However, the intractability of the Democratic Party is not the only argument against moving from protest to polite politics. The assumption that doing so is preferable or important underestimates the critical role protest plays in generating progressive change. When activists recall a Democratic Party that cared about ordinary people, what they really have in mind are the social movements and revolts that forced the party to respond to the needs and demands of those on the streets. There would have been no New Deal without the Hoovervilles, rent riots, sit-down strikes, and Communist Party activism of the 1930s. There would have been no Great Society without Civil Rights protests in the South and rebellions in more than two hundred cities across the country during the 1960s. Even Richard Nixon, who won office appealing to a racist “silent majority,” waited out his first term before he began dismantling Lyndon Johnson’s welfare state, lest he provoke protests.

As the great activist and historian Howard Zinn put it, “What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but ‘who is sitting in’—and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.” He didn’t mean that elections are irrelevant, but he emphasized what citizens do to shape their world. The anger about inequality and injustice in the United States, which has been given some voice by the Sanders campaign and most certainly by the Black Lives Matter movement, should not be stifled by the pressure to organize through the Democratic Party. It can’t be done. The movement for equality and justice should continue to organize independently and fight for its agenda regardless of what party sits in office.

Housing Bias Outlasts Ruling in a Long Island Village

Re-Post From New York Times

 

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — Mary Crosson, a housing activist, remembers moving to Long Island from Bayside, Queens, in the 1990s and being struck by the sharp divisions that seemed to keep blacks and whites apart.

“I come from South Carolina, so I understand discrimination,” said Mrs. Crosson, 68, who is black and lives in the village of Hempstead, where nearly half the residents are African-American. “In Queens, it was more of a mixed neighborhood. I came out here and I felt like I went back to the South all over again.”

A federal appeals court found last month that such segregation was not an accident. The court ruled that Hempstead’s next-door neighbor, Garden City, a wealthy village where 1.2 percent of the residents were black in 2010, had violated federal antidiscrimination law by rezoning land specifically to block multifamily housing — and the potential for minorities to move in.

“Something was amiss here,” a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote in its decision. “Garden City’s abrupt shift in zoning in the face of vocal opposition to changing the character of Garden City represented acquiescence to race-based animus.”

The ruling, which affirmed a 2013 decision by a Federal District Court judge, is a pivotal development in the long struggle to dismantle housing segregation as the federal government, courts and advocacy groups shift the battle beyond cities to white suburban enclaves that have deliberately erected barriers to integration.

The more aggressive posture reflects a growing impatience with the persistence of segregation a half-century after the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act, and an effort to apply more pressure on communities to finally open themselves up to black and Latino residents.

“It’s another signal that the tide is turning in terms of fair housing,” said Prof. Robert M. Silverman, of the School of Architecture and Planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who has written extensively on the subject of housing segregation. “There’s a historic pattern of segregation that those places have experienced.”
Continue reading the main story

In the case of Garden City, however, the legal victory may have come too late. The litigation dragged on for so long that a courthouse is now planned for the land at the center of the case, and local officials, advocates said, claim there are few other parcels on which to build.

From left, Mary Crosson, Diane Goins and Atlanta Georgia Cockrell at the headquarters of the Long Island chapter of New York Communities for Change. Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

The judges who ruled in the Garden City case raised the possibility that discrimination went beyond one community, directing the district court to determine whether officials in Nassau County, which includes Garden City and Hempstead, had deliberately steered affordable housing to low-income areas with largely minority populations.

Experts on fair housing say discrimination cases are flaring where the need for more affordable housing is greatest: cities where housing costs are high and their suburbs. In recent years, legal challenges have been raised inWestchester County, N.Y.; Marin County, Calif.; and the city of Dallas, among other places.

The litigation in Nassau County is entering its next phase as a new rule issued by the Obama administration takes effect, requiring communities that receive federal housing aid to detail how they plan to reduce racial inequality in housing. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has given local governments data and mapping tools to help them address segregation.

Bryan Greene, the agency’s general deputy assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity, said the requirement would help prevent what happened in Westchester, where some of the country’s most affluent communities sit next to hardscrabble towns and where, a judge found, officials had failed to consider race when they certified that the county had taken steps to promote fair housing.

Westchester, which entered a sweeping desegregation agreement with the federal government in 2009, helped “illustrate to many people nationwide that communities were getting millions and millions of dollars in block grant funding” without evaluating the problem of racial segregation, Mr. Greene said.

In the case of Garden City, local officials had not received federal housing money, but the Fair Housing Act applies to all housing transactions and policies, even when federal money is not involved.

The lawsuit that led to the appeals court ruling last month was filed against the village and Nassau County in 2005. It accused the village of discrimination by catering to residents who had protested the board of trustees’ initial embrace of a zoning classification that would have allowed multifamily housing on a 25-acre parcel that the county owned and planned to sell to a private developer.

While the classification did not specifically refer to affordable housing, the appeals court said, residents who opposed the move raised the specter of such housing being built and urged the trustees to “play it safe” by allowing only townhouses or single-family homes on the property. The trustees did just that.

Using what the appeals court called code words, residents said that multifamily housing would change the “flavor” and “character” of the village and would lead to “four or 10 people in an apartment,” and demanded a guarantee that the housing be “upscale.”

“The tenor of the discussion at public hearings,” the judges wrote, and a flier that circulated in the village, “shows that citizen opposition, though not overtly race-based, was directed at a potential influx of poor, minority residents.”

Garden City officials have yet to decide whether to appeal. The trustees said in a statement that the village had already begun to apply remedies ordered by the district court judge, Arthur D. Spatt, adopting a fair-housing resolution and appointing a fair-housing compliance officer.

Judge Spatt also ordered Garden City to require that 10 percent of new residential developments with five units or more be set aside for residents with household incomes of 80 percent or less of Long Island’s median income.

Advocates doubt the village will create such housing anytime soon. “They’ve been saying to us the whole time that they don’t have enough land to build anything,” said Diane Goins, chairwoman of the Long Island chapter of New York Communities for Change, a plaintiff in the case.

Nonetheless, Ms. Goins, who lives in Hempstead, called the ruling historic. “Having grown up in African-American communities on Long Island, I always knew that we were locked into certain places,” she explained. “You could visit Garden City, but you could not stay.”

The lawyers for the plaintiffs said Garden City and Nassau County were not unusual. “There are many violations going on all across the country, but unless someone catches them, it’s of no moment,” one of the lawyers, Frederick K. Brewington, said.

The broader implications of the case, and the appeals court’s question about whether Nassau had engaged in racial steering, could be far-reaching. Nassau “is one of the most segregated counties in the country,” said Stanley J. Brown, another lawyer for the plaintiffs.

In Westchester, the events that eventually produced a desegregation agreement started with a challenge by an advocacy group, the Anti-Discrimination Center, which accused the county of lying when it claimed to have followed fair-housing requirements while applying for federal housing money.

A federal judge agreed, ruling that the county had “utterly failed” to meet its obligations. The county said it would build 750 units of affordable housing in 31 overwhelmingly white communities. The units — intended for working, middle-class families — were to be aggressively marketed to nonwhite residents.

In Garden City, 2.6 percent of residents were black and Hispanic in 2000. “Something was amiss here,” judges with the appeals court wrote in their decision. Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

At the end of 2015, according to county officials, financing was in place for 649 units, 588 of which had building permits or certificates of occupancy.

But a thornier element of the Westchester settlement required the county to “use all available means as appropriate” to promote nondiscriminatory housing. That included pressing local governments to change zoning rules that discouraged the construction of apartments.

The federal housing agency has repeatedly accused Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive, of moving too slowly on the issue. He, in turn, has accused the agency of trying to expand the agreement’s scope.

In a recent opinion article in a local newspaper, Mr. Astorino, a Republican, said the housing agency was trying to “assault local zoning.”

The Nassau and Westchester cases have their roots in a much older housing-discrimination battle near New York: a seminal case in Mount Laurel, N.J.

The Mount Laurel case began in the 1960s when a group of African-Americans found themselves priced out of the township, a Philadelphia suburb. They sued in 1971, after local officials blocked an affordable-housing project.

The case reached New Jersey’s highest court, which in two key rulings limited the use of exclusionary zoning to prevent the construction of affordable housing.

More important, the ruling, known as the Mount Laurel doctrine, asserted that all municipalities had an obligation to provide a “fair share” of affordable housing. Since the mid-1980s, a total of more than 65,000 units have been built across New Jersey’s 21 counties.

Professor Silverman of SUNY Buffalo said continued litigation of fair-housing cases highlighted both the intractable nature of the problem and the robust enforcement now unfolding nationally.

“The fact that discrimination has been sustained over time, despite a series of different court challenges, has kept the issue salient,” he said. “People see the inequalities.”

 

Five questions for an affordable housing expert

Re-Post From Tennessean

 

During my research for Sunday’s editorial on affordable housing (“Solve affordable housing in parts, but focus on the whole,” April 17), in addition to speaking to key stakeholders in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, I sought to speak with an expert from outside the area.

Robert Silverman, associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, specializes in research on fair housing, gentrification and community development. He agreed to answer five questions of mine as the Nashville area seeks to address the growing concerns over housing affordability.

1. How might (and can) cities in the position of Nashville, as a boom city, create policies that address scarcity in affordable housing?

Inclusionary zoning is one option. Although your state legislature took mandatory inclusionary zoning off the table, having incentive-based inclusionary zoning is a useful tool. That usually takes the form of things like giving developers density bonuses if they include affordable units in their projects or if they pay fees that are earmarked for off-side affordable housing.

In addition to tools like inclusionary zoning, local government can make affordable housing part of their fair housing strategies. This is a new option with the newAffirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule that the Housing and Urban Development department just passed. So, being more aggressive about requiring landlords to accept housing choice vouchers (HCVs) and expanding who is identified as a protected group in local fair housing ordinances can help address affordability. One group that would be added as a protected class at the local level might be people facing housing discrimination based on source of income.

Another way to address affordable housing at the local level is by adopting rent control. And, for homeowners, adopting assessment and tax caps, as well as various tax credits and exemptions. (Editor’s note: Tennessee law forbids municipalities from controlling rents.)

2. Some advocates have conflated affordable and workforce housing — that is combining homelessness, low-income and middle class needs together. Does such an approach sufficiently address the complexities of the debate or are cities more successful when they address these issues separately?

In a place that is growing rapidly, there is a need for a multifaceted approach, since different groups in the population face affordable housing barriers for different reasons. Strategies like workforce housing usually focus on specific groups that fall through the cracks in tight housing markets — teachers, police officers, firefighters, etc. — who can’t afford to live in the place they work due to their salaries being too low.

So, affordable housing, down payment assistance, mortgage interest write downs or other policies are put in place to help them find housing. But, those types of programs don’t address the needs of other groups struggling to find affordable housing, like the elderly, students or the poor in general. They need a variety of other fair and affordable housing options. Even if things get conflated in the short term, the long-term needs of all constituencies will eventually surface and have to be addressed.

3. Are there cities that have best practices on managing housing needs for changing and growing populations?

People point to places like New Jersey as a model for regional affordable housing development. A lot has been written about the Mount Laurel case where affordable housing was part of the state’s regional fair share approach. Illinois, particularly in the Greater Chicago area, is also cited a lot for its use of inclusionary zoning and mixed-income development.

4. Can government be effective when a booming market is bringing together willing buyers and sellers even at the expense of existing residents, i.e., because they live in public housing that will be torn down, because renters will be charged more every year, and because property value increases will lead to an increase in taxes?

Local government can do some of the things I mention above to protect long-term residents from speculation and housing inflation. The most direct ways to protect existing residents are tools like rent control and various forms of property tax and assessment relief. But, local government can also be more aggressive about building more affordable housing.

Today a lot of that activity takes place with nonprofit developers using tools like the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) and by creating low-income housing trust funds. Trust funds are typically funded with fees applied to market-rate developments, payments for increased density that are part of incentive-based inclusionary zoning, and fees for deed transfers, etc.

5. Are there other factors I’m not taking into consideration that I should be on this issue?

Another tool that is being used more to provide for affordable housing are community benefits agreements (CBAs), which are negotiated with developers of large projects like hospital and university expansions, stadium development, etc. Part of those agreements can include set-asides for affordable housing development that are linked to larger projects receiving public subsidies.

David Plazas is the opinion engagement editor of The Tennessean. Call him at 615-259-8063, email him at dplazas@tennessean.com or tweet to him @davidplazas.

Center for Urban Studies Director Awarded Excellence in University-Community Engagement Award

The projects range from rebuilding Buffalo’s food system and improving the breast cancer screening rates for inner city women to helping city high school students complete their FAFSA forms and bringing dental care to rural communities.

These community engagement activities, notes Provost Charles Zukoski, “build important relationships and enhance university research and education.”

Six members of the UB community working with community partners to realize these and other significant needs in the community are the first recipients of the Excellence in University-Community Engagement Awards.

The awards, created by the UB Engagement Advisory Committee to recognize members of the UB community who are building partnerships with community entities that enhance research, teaching and service, were presented at a reception on Wednesday at the Jacobs Executive Development Center.

The reception was hosted by Zukoski and Mary Gresham, former vice provost for educational collaboration and engagement who retired at the end of the fall semester after 45 years of service to UB. Gresham chaired the Engagement Advisory Committee.

As a public research university, UB is “dedicated to pursuing transformative research and education that respond to local and global issues, and are directly engaged with our communities,” Zukoski told those attending the reception.

“Through UB 2020, we are committed to building partnerships in an effort to address community needs while providing faculty, staff and students with rewarding new research and learning opportunities.

“The engagement projects we are recognizing today exemplify this,” he said. “In collaboration with community partners, our honorees use research to address direct needs in our community and they enrich our students’ educational experience by inviting them to participate in the engagement activities.”

Each of the award recipients, Zukoski said, “embodies our mission as a public research university — serving the greater public good through your contributions.”

Gresham agreed, noting the efforts of the award winners “have strengthened relationships in the community and advanced UB’s public research mission.”

She introduced the award winners and offered a brief description of their accomplishments.

The Excellence in University-Community Engagement Award winners, their community partners and the title of their projects:

“Community-University Collaboration on Rebuilding Buffalo’s Food System”: Samina Raja, associate professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and community partner Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP).

Raja’s research lab, the UB Food Lab, and MAP have collaborated to rebuild and strengthen the food system in Buffalo, and also work together on events to raise community awareness about the city’s food system. Last year, they partnered to organize a “Just Food, Just Communities” event that included a public lecture on racial and food justice by noted civil rights leader Shirley Sherrod.

“FAFSA Completion Project”: Nathan Daun-Barnett, associate professor, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, and coordinator of the program in Higher Education Administration, Graduate School of Education, and community partner Say Yes to Education Buffalo.

Completing the FAFSA, a required form for college admission that determines the amount of financial aid available to students and their families, can be daunting. And failure to complete the FAFSA can mean the difference between access to and denial of higher education for a student. The FAFSA Completion Project addressed the problem and implemented a comprehensive strategy — the College Success Center — to help students complete the FAFSA. The project has expanded from one school in Buffalo to 14.

“Mobile Mammography Unit and Underserved Primary Care Practices”: Megan Wilson, community research facilitator, Clinical and Translational Research Center, and community partner Deborah Hemphill, Patient Voices Network.

The goal of the project was to improve breast cancer screening rates for inner city women by using a mobile mammography unit to provide on-site screenings at four urban health practices. Recognizing that many women are fearful of mammograms, the project created “patient ambassadors” who would deliver breast health education and help guide the women on screening days. As of last December, the project had screened more than 2,600 women throughout Buffalo.

“S-Miles to Go”: Stephen Abel, associate professor, Department of Periodontics and Endodontics, and associate dean for student, community and professional initiatives, School of Dental Medicine, and numerous community partners in Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and Allegany counties.

The S-Miles to Go initiative continues the dental school’s long history of addressing the oral health needs of medically underserved communities. This mobile dental unit travels to these communities to provide direct clinical services and health education. Senior dental students serve a rotation with the initiative, gaining valuable experience with rural populations. In some communities, they provide the only access to dental services.

Gresham also recognized senior faculty members Joseph Gardella and Henry Louis Taylor Jr. as recipients of the Excellence in University-Community Engagement Award for Sustained Contributions for having demonstrated “sustained contributions and commitment to university-community engagement throughout their careers.”

Gardella, SUNY Distinguished Professor and John and Frances Larkin Professor of Chemistry, has used his research expertise in chemistry to address community concerns for more than 20 years, Gresham said. In 1995 he was the first UB faculty member to modify a course —Analytical Chemistry of Pollutants — to specifically allow students to experience the subject matter in an applied context.

Most recently, she said, he has developed a formal partnership with the National Science Foundation and the Buffalo Public Schools to introduce STEM education strategies to high-needs schools.

Taylor, professor of urban and regional planning in the School of Architecture and Planning, has focused his research on “strengthening undeveloped neighborhoods by improving schools, engaging residents in neighborhood development, developing entrepreneurs, improving the delivery of health care services, and by designing and planning these communities to support this agenda,” Gresham said.

For example, Taylor’s “Community as Classroom” project, in partnership with Futures Academy, has worked with more than 1,000 children, teaching them how to use their classroom lessons to solve neighborhood development problems.

Michigan panel offers plan of returning safe water to Flint

Re-post from The Blade

 

Michigan National Guard member Zach Burrell helps distribute water to residents in their cars in Flint, Michigan, on January 21. The EPA didn’t act as urgently and as transparently as it could have to help the people of Flint – something it has acknowledged only grudgingly.

“The people weren’t put first, the health of the people was not put before profit and money”, Flint Mayor Karen Weaver says in an interview with Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered.

Walters says her 5-year-old son has developed speech issues and a compromised immune system since the water crisis began.

Taylor compares what is going on in Flint to New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown.

There are now lawsuits and federal investigations pending to find out exactly who knew what about the water’s toxicity and when they knew it, with much of the blame being directed at Gov. Snyder.

The agency also sent a letter to Snyder telling him the city is violating federal drinking water rules and must work quickly to fix them.

Water from the river, known locally as a dumping ground, was more corrosive, causing more lead to leach from Flint’s aging water pipes than the Detroit water the city previously used.

Snyder, a Republican in his second term, was blasted by Hillary Clinton in her remarks after the recent Democratic presidential debate.

“I’ll tell you what, if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and been in it, there would’ve been action”, she said. It was a city, not a state, problem, they said.

Research shows the presence of lead in the blood of children, even at low levels, can stunt their development seriously and irreversibly – in particular, the development of their brain.

“We’re talking birth rates defects, we’re talking sterility stuff like that, and that’s what really bothers me”, he said. Snyder has also “focused on improving education in all our cities, knowing that students need to not just graduate, but graduate with in-demand skills as they compete in a global economy”. Healthy Michigan was a whole Medicaid expansion.

Until Flint’s infrastructure is renovated and all of the corroded pipes are replaced, the water crisis will not end. He said he was releasing them “so that you have answers to your questions about what we’ve done and what we’re doing to make this right for the families of Flint”.

Many have argued that the public health crisis in the poor, majority-Black city points to issues of structural inequality and racism. In the early 1970s, the automaker employed 80,000 blue- and white-collar workers in the area. Fewer than 8,000 GM jobs remain.

In the wake of the financial crisis MI was hit harder than most.

“The real responsibility rests with the county, city and KWA”, he wrote, referring to the Karegnondi Water Authority.

The information comes from The Guardian, which says it received documents showing that city water tests are “systematically distorting” the amount of lead present. They would never do this to Ann Arbor.

13 in Flint, Michigan. He called for Snyder’s ouster and arrest.

Snyder made the emails public on Wednesday following widespread criticism.

“Let’s call this what it is”, Moore said. And the water crisis there is no coincidence, says Henry Louis Taylor Jr., University at Buffalo professor of urban and regional planning and director of the Center for Urban Studies.

Roger Schneider reported from Detroit. He’s known best for launching and contributing to the newsletterInside Michigan Politics.

Flint water crisis never would have happened in affluent white neighborhood, UB expert says

Re-Post From UB-News Releases

 

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Flint, Michigan is a predominantly African-American, poor, working-class city. And the water crisis there is no coincidence, says Henry Louis Taylor Jr., University at Buffalo professor of urban and regional planning and director of the Center for Urban Studies.

“This did not happen where prestigious white people were living,” says Taylor, whose research focuses on underdeveloped urban neighborhoods and race and class issues. “This never happens where wealthy white people live. Flint is yet another chapter in the book that is being written about oppressive and exploited conditions of African-American people. This narrative happens to be about a serious health problem where black and low-income whites were put in harm’s way by people attempting to save money.

“This is structural racism in action.”

A switch in the water supply in April 2014 led to elevated levels of lead in drinking water. The switch, from the Lake Huron supply that Detroit uses to the Flint River, was implemented to save money.

Complaints about the water began within a month of the move, but Flint did not return to Detroit water until October 2015 after tests showed elevated levels of lead.

Taylor compares what is going on in Flint to New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown.

“You see great disasters in all these situations that impact black- and low-income groups, but when you look even deeper, you see a community in New Orleans, for example, where the infrastructure was poorly maintained and in Ferguson when we look deeper we see a community devastated by the subprime mortgage crisis,” he says. “The dirty little secret is that systematic racism attacks both black people and the places where they live.”

When it comes to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and how his administration has dealt with the water crisis, Taylor says it really is not about politicians.

This is a systematic issue, he says.

“I don’t care about what happens to that governor as much as I care about what happens to the system and the people of Flint,” Taylor says. “Punishing the governor or firing people might satisfy the public, but it won’t mean a thing if the system that produced the problem is not changed. If we don’t get the system to change, then Flint would have been in vain. We need systems changed when it comes to how we deal with infrastructure, housing and the environment where black- and low-income people live.”

To find UB faculty experts on other topics – including issues trending in the news – visit UB’s Faculty Experts website.

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rstern2@buffalo.edu

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