Does equity begin when we ask why we do the inequitable?

The Kalamazoo Community Foundation challenges Kalamazoo to step up to create a community where equity is for all residents.

The call to action came before a full house of 3,500 people at Miller Auditorium in what President and CEO of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation Carrie Pickett-Erway described as a conversation about equity undertaken as part of re-imagining Kalamazoo.

During the evening, she pointed out that Kalamazoo County--with a population of 250,000 of which African Americans make up about 11 percent--is segregated with the majority of its African American population in two urban core neighborhoods. High infant mortality rates and unemployment, plague the local black population.

She said there are many reasons for people to continue to love Kalamazoo--'love where you live' is an ongoing theme for the Community Foundation--but she asked that they be a "critical lover," one who takes a critical look at the community we love and asks what the community is doing to support these inequitable patterns.

"Ask why," was a theme introduced by Ta-Nehisi Coates, keynote speaker for the Foundation's annual meeting. A national correspondent for The Atlantic, the author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me, he is also the winner of a 2015 MacArthur Genius Award.

Coates opened his remarks with a reading from Between the World and Me in which he described the constant fear and violence he faced daily as a boy in Baltimore. His realization that he would get beaten whether he resorted to violence or if he avoided it led him to ask why the world is so much more violent and fearful for black Americans. He wanted to know why they still live under the weight of white supremacy, and are constantly coming up against the wall of a lack of a housing, education, employment and a criminal justice system that has made a prison term a normal rite of passage in the black community.

What he came to understand was that the criminalization of blacks is "part of the DNA of the United States." The dehumanization and demonization of slaves made it easy for their white masters to exploit them even as they built the nation's economic prosperity for 250 years. When you deny that a person is human you can label him a criminal, deny him all rights, and forgo paying him for the work he does, without a pang of conscience.

Those people brought to America to provide free labor were kept enslaved as the country grew, and by 1860, the value of the nation's 4 million slaves was $3.5 billion, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.  

Years later, the attitude that blacks were in inherently criminal made it easy to employ mass incarcerations of African Americans when violent crime spiked from 1963-93. Though the increase in violence was seen in many countries across the globe, including Canada, Great Britain, and Nordic countries, the United States' response was unique, Coates said.  

To deal with this "feeling that the world was now a more dangerous place," the U.S. went from incarcerating 150 per 100,000 to 300 per 100,000 over a 30-year span. "What that means is that the United States with almost 5 percent of the world's population has nearly 25 percent of the world's entire prison population."

Putting a black man in jail does not simply affect him, it affects his family, and ultimately the community suffers when so many black men are taken out of it. Once released, those who want to improve themselves find they are denied access to a whole suite of services that could help them. Many are completely cut out of creating a better life, Coates said.

"Why was this our response?" Coates asked. "Why did we do this? Why did we allow this?"

Coates said it is because blacks in the United States have always been viewed as "the outlaw class."

Before the Civil War it was illegal for slaves to learn to read, to leave their masters' property without a pass, to engage in unbecoming conduct in the presence of a white female, to worship if a white person was not there, to smoke in public, to walk with a cane, to not step out of the way of an oncoming white person, or to defend themselves from assaults.

"Normal human everyday things, these were considered criminal when black people did them."

They were living under a police state, Coates said. "There is no other way to describe it. The system was designed to enrich one group of people at the expense of others. The law said to defy the system was criminal."

This perception of blacks as criminally inclined would continue into the next 100 years, Coates said. The crime bill of 1994 that funded the states' construction of prisons is the policy that grew out of that perception.

America's black leaders from Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King Jr. have all been regarded as criminals (wiretaps of King were approved by President John Kennedy). "What hope do we have when nonviolent Martin Luther King is viewed as criminal?" Coates asked.

And those who don't want to accept the role of white supremacy in creating the fearful, violent world in which African American live invoke black-on-black crime.

"You have to understand that black-on-black crime did not appear overnight," Coates said. Though black people paid taxes, they often did not realize the benefits of those taxes. Though they were harshly controlled by the law they were under protected. "What about black-on-black crime? In 2015, as it was in 1915, that's always been the response to black people seeking equity."

Coates told the full auditorium that they should ask "why" when they see cases such as the gentle way today's white heroin users are being treated vs. the harsh way crack cocaine users were treated in the 1980s. "Ask yourselves why. How did we get here in the first place? Why are we completely unprepared to deal with the solutions?"

In a conversation with Pickett-Erway and Fernando Ospina of ERACCE immediately following his remarks, Coates put forth a case for one of those solutions people are not prepared for--reparations.

"When I talk about reparations I mean money. I definitely mean money," Coates said. "We're talking about plunder, the taking from one to benefit another. We had 250 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow. People paid taxes and had no vote, could not attend school, and could not go into the library for which their taxes were paying the upkeep. Jim Crow was theft. To pay the salary of the police and the police beat you--that is taking from you."

Today, black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. Black college graduates often are hired in jobs that are offered to whites with prison records.

"The history of plunder is a documented fact. To achieve equity we have to at least attempt to give it back."

Reparations would not be based on skin color but based on injury, Coates said. The country decided to give reparations to Japanese Americans who were injured by being unjustly imprisoned in internment camps during World War II.

"We can do the same thing. But we have decided not to," Coates said. "The question 'why pay reparations' is not the threat. Not asking the question is the threat. What is the price of not doing it?"

Kathy Jennings is the managing editor of Southwest Michigan's Second Wave. She is a freelance writer and editor.