Understanding the Historical Context of Structural Racism and Current Day Implications

[Music] welcome welcome welcome to the kansas racial equity collaborative i'm laura howard secretary for the kansas department for children and families our agency delivers social services for vulnerable kansans and is committed to healthy communities i'm erica glenn urban church ambassador for care portal care portal creates connections for families using the church community and technology i'm michelle moore carney dean of the university of kansas school of social welfare our premier research university is striving to reinvent innovate and transform and educate through quality education research advancement and community engagement our organizations are committed to courageous and critically important conversations we are launching into a statewide learning journey on the epidemic of black and brown children being over-represented in the foster care system having worse outcomes at every point in the system and leaving the foster care system with limited family connections this conversation is long overdue we must reimagine business as usual and begin to make systemic and long-lasting changes together the kansas department for children and families is leaving the racial equity collaborative because since dcf's inception in 1973 we have not focused enough on the harm black and brown families experience in the foster care system this must change care portal is involved in the racial equity collaborative because healthy families create healthy communities the ku school of social welfare is involved because we are driven by our guiding principles of diversity equity and inclusion for individuals families and communities the kansas racial collaborative brings together those directly and indirectly linked to the child welfare system for a statewide learning journey with four learning lectures and debriefs spanning six months there is also a dedicated website and listserv which will amplify our learning about racial equity in child welfare the racial equity collaborative will conclude with an in-person invitation only symposium sponsored by casey family programs on april 15 2022 on ku's campus in lawrence we need you we need you we need you to be a part of this movement and learning journey because the well-being of children families and communities depends upon we are extremely proud of the support the three founding organizations have shown along with our sponsors kansas health foundation and kc family programs i am chanel dupree with dcf thank you for joining the kansas racial equity collaborative today's learning journey is the first stop in a learning journey we are taking as the state of kansas to clearly define the problem through data understand how we got here through history and then move towards action we are so glad that you're here and there are so many online today we've had over 800 registrants who are involved in the child welfare system through your professional and personal work on this call we have lawyers judges legislators educators social workers medical professionals emergency personnel police officers activists mandated reporters the faith community community organizations foster parents and interested parties you're here for a reason which is to understand how you can affect racial equity in the child welfare system you may also be here to obtain a couple of continuing education credits there's a document in the chat that will be posted in the chat for you to review how you can receive your credits i do need to say a few things out loud so if you are in the legal community and you are looking to obtain the kansas a continuing legal education credit this zoom webinar is accredited for two cles the kansas cle commission ensures you have attended the presentation by a couple of ways login and log out times are recorded additionally there are four polls launched via zoom everyone is welcome to and encouraged to participate in the polls but if you are receiving cle credit it is required two polls will be launched per hour at the conclusion of the session i will receive a printout of everyone's login and log out times as well as their pull responses it doesn't matter how you responded just that you responded please also email ks.racial.equity gmail.com if you are having difficulty responding to the polls when the polls are launched the presenter will say it verbally that a poll has been launched and then there will be a visual display of the poll you will have one minute to respond finally i will enter the length of time you attended the zoom webinar into the kansas cle website individual attorneys are not permitted to report their own time for online sessions please allow 30 days for your transcript to be updated the other one that i'm going to mention is the continuing education credit it's accredited for two ceus for today to qualify you need to attend the full live event and stay for the duration uh please take the survey at the end and if you indicated on your registration form that you were wanting ceus you'll receive your certificate by october 8th it will be emailed to you please contact us again at ks.racialequity gmail.com with any questions this year this lecture series is also accredited for a continuing education credit and continuing medical education process as well which those instructions are in the document in the chat uh also casas you can also receive a certificate as well the above mentioned accreditation processes only apply to those attending live um a couple of things you won't be able to see yourself this is a webinar and you won't be able to respond in the chat but you can ask questions and we know that you may have some uh for our guest speakers on today they likely with so many folks online won't be able to respond to all of them but we're gonna try they're absolutely going to try to get to some of those questions today's flow and agenda is outlined for you in the chat so there's going to be another document that's going to drop in the chat and it has the agenda for you today what's important to remember is that up next you're going to hear about kansas data then the burns institute will be introduced and then they will present for an hour we'll take a break at 12 40. it's easier if you don't log off we can't see you anyway can't see or hear you anyway and then we'll come back together at 12 50 for a discussion and debrief and we'll we will conclude at 1 30. we're so glad that you're here and dr becky aiken it is in your hands hi everyone thank you all for being here i am dr becky aiken i'm an associate professor and a phd program director at the university of kansas school of social welfare i'm also the project director for a federally funded initiative in kansas called kansas strong for children and families and we are working with agencies across the entire state to try to improve outcomes for children and families who become involved with the child welfare system so thank you all for being here um as we begin this learning journey we want to stay grounded in data and the lived experience of families so today i'm going to share four key data points that show racial disproportionality and disparities in the child welfare system that occur across many different decision points so we've chosen that we're going to share four key data points and these data points start from kind of the front of the child welfare system with investigations and go through to exits from foster care system and so the point here being that we want to show how racial disproportionality and disparities happens in these multiple places in our child welfare system so point number one black families experience child welfare investigations at a much higher rate than white families and so this is from national research that showed that lifetime prevalence of child maltreatment investigation is 53 for black children compared to only 28 for white children and there's other research that has taken this and they've looked at even when we are considering the risk factors and type of maltreatment and poverty that this disproportionality is still occurring in our child welfare system related to this we want to stress that the system is more focused on reporting not supporting and so we did a study here at the university of kansas school of social welfare where we heard from black parents and black community members who discussed the child welfare system as child snatchers and talked about how it was harming their families and communities an example of reporting not supporting was also provided by child protection service workers who talked about schools doing things like hotlining parents for being late picking up their children so this again focus on reporting not supporting and that contributing to the disproportionalities we're seeing in our system point number two this is about entry into our foster care system so our data show that black children are placed in foster care at nearly twice the rate of white children and it's disproportionate to what we see in our child population so these are kansas data in kansas 8.3 of our child population are black children and 15.3 of our our foster care population is black children so those are disproportionate numbers on to decision point number three so this is about um what happens when kids are in foster care and just one example of data about that point in the in our system we chose to look at placement instabilities so this is data on the number of moves that children experience while in foster care and these are kansas data that show us that in the last year um children who were black had 3.5 placement moves per thousand days while children who were white had 2.7 moves per placement days so again showing more moves are happening for black children and we know that kids moving from place to place really is not a healthy experience for them um also we took those data and looked at them in a deeper way of another analysis of them where we accounted for multiple important factors like children's age their gender identity their race whether they had a disability like a behavior problem and also if they had trauma symptoms what type of maltreatment and when we accounted for all of those really important factors we still found that black children had a higher probability of experiencing placement moves so our final data point is about um children exiting the foster care system there's lots of different ways to look at this we chose to look at it in terms of them leaving the foster care system to their families in a timely way and so we find that black children ex foster care to family reunification at a lower rate than white children and in the most recent year 41 of white children exited to their own families within 12 months compared to 35 of black children exiting to their own families within 12 months so again differences in the the rates that we're seeing so the big point of all of this is that racial disproportionality and disparities that are occurring at many different decision points in our child welfare system so we have more data to share with you to demonstrate these racial inequities and we're going to be sharing them through our listserv and our future lectures so this is just a launching point for building our knowledge in this area and i thank you for being here i'm going to turn it now to abby frye to introduce our guest speakers thank you so much becky i am so excited to introduce our speakers to you today samantha mellerson and michael finley are part of the executive leadership team with the hayward burns institute the burns institute exists to dismantle structural racism and build community-centered structural well-being samantha brings over 15 years of experience in working with issues of social justice racial and ethnic equity education diversity youth justice and child welfare and well-being she has held a variety of positions with organizations such as being the senior associate of capacity building for the anna ekc foundation to the chief program officer for baltimore's local management board michael has almost two decades of experience working to reduce racial and ethnic disparities on a national policy level and in local jurisdictions across the country his background and law contributes to his expertise in implementation of burns institute processes for various communities across the us we're looking forward to hearing from you both today great thank you abby for that introduction um good to be with people today we can't see you all um but we know you're here and we're looking forward to our time with you just before we jump into slides just want to acknowledge that we the way that we're doing this presentation there's a lot of there's a lot to it we intentionally built it that way we want to make we work with the planning team to make sure it's a resource we can provide to you subsequently today um so there'll be things that we push through intentionally to hit some high level themes for you all today and also leave space for the second part of the session today where there's more conversation so we just want to acknowledge that we're aware that was done intentionally but this presentation will be a resource for you all as we um after today so we can jump into the slides you know the next slide and just as the next slide is coming up just uh and you can go to the next one um this just very briefly is the picture of our namesake w haywood burns and just we always bring them to the room just to center us in the work we do and to bring to life that data that you just saw as a reminder of why we do this haywood was the civil rights activist the human rights activist worked on as martin luther king general counsel on king's poor people's campaign represented black activists in the 60s like angela davis and worked on the post-apartheid constitution in south africa and he died tragically in a car accident a little more than 25 years ago in south africa at a conference and i'm so just a mentor to our founder and just someone we always bring into the room and just want folks to know who he is um in this space you know the next slide just very briefly today we'll spend a little bit of time just um introducing some core concepts we never make assumptions of what folks know um and you know where folks are in their own journey around race ethnic equity work and we'll spend most of time walking through history um of structural racism and its impact on human service systems that we all are engaged in now with some of the data that you just saw to show the historical impact of that and then leave you with a few strategies and tactics tools of what do you do with that right how do we actually deal with this how do we dismantle structural racism what does that actually mean in practice hey everyone and so as mike said to get started before we really do a deep dive into some of the historical um context and information we wanted to lift up just a few core concepts and terms that would be that will be important to kind of hold throughout the journey today um right here we just have you know the four levels of racism and understanding how this plays out from the personal you know our private beliefs um our personal prejudices ideas that there are more of a superiority for white culture and in an inferiority for people of color this is also the birthplace of where implicit bias lies so important to note that um the interpersonal is the exchange between people that um tends to be the most videotaped we've seen all we have uh now seen the slew of angry karen's as they call it in youtube videos that have gone viral this is the kind of expression of interpersonal racism that folks tend to have like um kind of no tolerance for right we want to eliminate that behavior um in treatment of of people in a negative way but then we move into the institutional and so this is where we really have to look at the discriminatory treatment policies and practices the things that are actually contributing to the disparity data that we just saw right all of those little decision points the various ways that the institutions are interacting with each other that then produce those disparities and then we really want to focus on the structural which is that large system the system in which we all operate um in which our public policies institutional practices and cultural representations and other norms really perpetuate that inequity and so today we're going to really focus on the structural but also connecting it to our personal responsibility to make change right how we connect to that structural picture and so we're gonna paint that picture as we move through um the next few slides so another key um concept to consider is this notion of othering and so we we borrowed this from our friends at the haas institute john powell who has the um other othering and belonging institute at uc berkeley this notion of othering is this concept by which like there's a generalized set of common processes that denies someone's full humanity based on them being less than the favored group and so um while the language can sound somewhat severe really thinking about how we've all experienced othering in very different ways othering is not being part of the main group when we think about that in the context and under the umbrella of structural racism it's understanding the distinction that happens when you are no longer part of that in group right the dominant culture in this case white dominant culture it's important to note that while othering um is is uh certainly a way to to um divide folks and and keep keep folks outside of that very intentionally we're not wanting to move to a place of saving we're not saying that everyone has to be the same but rather the opposite of othering would be having really a sense of belonging what it means to create environments of belonging where we know that our schools our structures our faith-based institutions are very open to celebrating our diversity and not using it to keep us divided it's going to be important to note as we walk through history today this notion of othering and how it can be used as a tool to make someone a little less human in our eyes in a way that almost makes it a little less harsh when you see someone or or someone treated very badly a group of people that are marginalized in a very particular way um it's it's often used as a tool to dehumanize folks keeping us a little further from our humanity and i think at this point we're gonna we'll launch the first poll question for folks and so you can read if have you experienced othering on the basis of this is multiple choice so just looking through those categories and just if you just check off any any of these answers where you have experienced being other based on how sam just described the definition give folks about a minute and just for time i think we'll have the posters who are controllers if you want to share the results and i think the point of this is just to say we and to sam's point think about othering throughout the as we go through these slides and to see how we've all experienced this from when you're five years old at the lunch table to what something could have happened yesterday so it's a experience we've all felt yeah thank you and we can move on thanks um oftentimes in our work as we look at racial and ethnic disparities we often dive into the policies and practices that produce the the data and um this is actually a a physical manifestation of a discriminatory design right and so we lift this up because it's very clear it's easy to see if sometimes policies and practices and how we talk about the terms of our work can seem a little blurry for folks this is something that is very clear and can illustrate um what what racism looks like through physical building through brick and mortar literally in this case this is a bridge that was designed from uh by robert moses who actually had a very heavy hand in a lot of the landscaping and physical environment of new york city um this particular bridge was very intentionally built low it was built low to prevent buses public transfer transportation from moving from the southern state parkway which leads into long island this was and that was primarily focusing on keeping african americans and puerto ricans out of those communities by eliminating the ability for public transportation to move through so again this is a physical manifestation oftentimes we think about redlining in other ways that we've seen this played out in neighborhoods where we can still see echoes of chronic disinvestment but these bridges these things that are very blatant very much in front of us you can pass them without realizing that there was an intentional design around keeping particular people out of predominantly white spaces and communities can go to thank you um and so part of this is one of the terms we want to also lift up is really understanding how white supremacy culture shows up right and the idea the white people and their ideas thoughts beliefs actions are superior to those of people of color um this is historically constructed right this is uh not a regular culture this is intentionally constructed in a way that normalizes white supremacy ideation which justifies the binding together of these other institutions as we talked about the institutional racism how they interlock towards these larger systems of power and control it's important to note that this white supremacy culture is not reserved for only white people all of us swim in this culture um and the longer we swim in a culture the more invisible it becomes and so people of color can also pick up the characteristics of white supremacy culture when that is the dominant theme that we're experiencing it's important to note this because we want to take away from this notion of blaming in this sense this is something that we are all all immersed in and it will take all of us to really understand it recognize it and begin to unpack and dismantle it and so thinking about again like what it means structural racism we defined it earlier this illustration is a good one because i think what it really illustrates for people is you see the black woman to the right the white man the left we understand the character sketch they're running this race and he's turning to her saying what's the matter it's the same distance and you see as a couple of hurdles ahead of him you know he's going to hit those and he'll get to the end the black woman has in front of her she has the chain around her leg there are various obstacles barriers you see that they're pretty severe um although they're on the same path this is to help us recognize that depending on our perspective and how we experience things how we walk through life some of us can walk through with very little understanding or awareness of of how low that bridge is right of the different ways that structural racism manifests and demonstrates itself although you can also be somebody that walks through the world and is constantly seeing this and hitting these obstacles in very real ways making it impossible to ignore the reality of what's in front of you this helps us to understand why we need to hear from each other and engage in these conversations to begin to see things that may be not as readily visible to you depending on who you are and how you experience the world so another concept we want you to consider is is mental models and so mental models um are just the explanation of our thought process it's how we understand the world around us it guides our perception and our behaviors um it really helps us like think about what are the assumptions the beliefs the values we hold that keep certain things in place right it's important to understand that uh how this connects to the current constructs there is something that we all believe um that may be like really hidden deeply in our in our mental models that allows the current constructs of structural racism and status quo to maintain itself so we have to begin to unpack that get it the root of our thinking so that we can re-engineer it the beauty of mental models is that absolutely can be unpacked we can re-engineer how we think about something and we can make really significant change so we like to just kind of walk folks through this iceberg which is a tool for systemic thinking is a great demonstration of how to consider unpacking some mental models right so there's that the component of the um iceberg that you see which is the event something just happened um and in this case we'll walk you through a very simple example where you may catch a cold right we've all had colds that's something we can relate to so the event has happened you've cut a cold looking just beneath the surface is where you can identify the patterns and trends well what trends have there been over time well i i tend to catch a cold every time i'm you know working really long hours that tends to be the time catching quote looking beneath that could be underlining like examining the underlining structures so what influenced these patterns what are the relationships between the moving parts it could be when i'm working really late hours i'm stressed i'm not sleeping as well maybe i have very little access to healthy food all of the things that i know are contributing to this pattern that i keep catching a cold in these particular ways we have to then ask ourselves what what is it that i believe that is somehow keeping this in place because it doesn't feel good i don't like the outcome i want to eliminate the event what am i believing what is it that i'm holding that is keeping this keeping me in this perpetual pattern so understanding the mental models and digging into that belief it could be in this case and for a lot of folks that i think work in human services it's that i you know we tend to really believe that we have to pour everything we have into our work we cannot take a break that's selfish we are here in service of other people we really need to dive in our career is the most important thing the service we're doing is so important that then we sacrifice these things that's a real mental model that we could be actually imposing harms on ourselves in this notion of believing in something so much greater wanting to help people um but then we have to unpack that and say okay well wait i can't actually be of good service to people if i am not wealth and so taking the time to then make sure that we are in a space that is healthy and and we have our well-being so that we can be in service really from a place of overflow because we can't serve from a place of deficit so we ask folks to really think about mental models that they hold as it relates to these other areas that we know racial disparities are pervasive this is public safety this is child welfare economic mobility education health wealth gaps these are all areas that we need to really begin to examine what is at the root of our thinking that we believe that may be maintaining these disparities they're maintaining the status quo in some way and so as you think about those mental models and we're going to walk through some history lives and take a quick trip through a lot of time but do think about those mental models the schools of thought the narratives and that piece of other ring that we mentioned earlier that become the themes um for how systems are developed and these are the systems right within which now we all work so just to keep that at the top of your mind as we go through these you know the next slide and so the next few slides will sort of run through but just they they show you um the origins in this nation right we had tribal land so what this will show you is what tribal lands and one thing just want you to note is the power of language right so even when we think of for us it's the theft of native american land but it's often described as indian land sessions or cessation and so when you think of stealing or theft right even how it gets languaged in the public sphere is often a very softer language and so again about narratives and themes so we'll run through the next few slides we want to show you is um we want to show you sort of you go the next slide where we started and this starts in 1784 the green is tribal land and you can see starting 1810 this takes you through 10-year increments and you can see the significant shift of land the stealing of land from the tribes and just to show you again this is a backdrop for how we started and this is important we think about the systems within which we are now all working you can go the next slide it just continues to show you how fast right the green disappears and we think that's just really important to look at and the other backdrop that's okay you can go to the next one so the other backdrop right is around slavery right and just understand the impact of the transatlantic slave trade and the unique quality of slavery in this nation right the concept of chattel slavery that you were property right that you were born as property and so we put we give that context those previous slides just showed about the ceiling of first nations land and then the transatlantic slave trade to give you the backdrop again to and we're going to keep moving forward that's the backdrop the context within which we really begin as you start to think of the 1600s and the stories about the pilgrims that we um that we hear hear about so as i go through this we will not touch on every so on every bullet point again you'll have this as a resource but just use some what we think are important things from this is in the 1600s one of the important things to note is that government and private institutions were not involved in the aspects of how young people were raised and how families interacted with each other and so we always referenced the stubborn rebellious act as an example of that it was simply an act and said in massachusetts but there are other statutes similar around the nation that if you were a boy who was older than 16 and eventually expanded to girls if you were disobedient your parents could put you to death they could kill you let's just understand the philosophy of how young people were even perceived we think that's important to note going next slide here you can see we're moving into industrialization so we're seeing a shift right from farming society to we're starting to have cities and factories but another philosophical piece the humane society founded the national federation of child rescue agencies investigate child maltreatment one of the themes that we think of othering this is progress this is evolution but that evolution did not always impact everyone in the same way and you'll see that and so also realizing that this was modeled after an animal rights organization so it's how we thought about young people and families again versus how we even thought about animals it's just philosophically it's important to understand and have that perspective in the next slide a few things on here um we had the houses of refuge which were developed 1825 was the first one and just think of those the first juvenile reformatory so we're seeing a system starting to be built right the concept of young people were not the same as adults in 1848 john augustus seen as the father of probation the idea is that he is a he is a um boot maker not a lawyer not a not a doctor you know not a police officer he's a community person who was trying to figure out how do we engage people and keep them out of um out of jail out of prison the orphan train movement is really this is really the birthplace and charles lauren brace who was a big proponent of the open train movement was really the birthplace of the modern day foster care system and that's just an important note the idea was he was in new york he saw young people again this was during industrialization he sees them feeling that they're not being supervised the idea was to take these poor and orphans and put them into the midwest in places like kansas in places like nebraska with hard-working farming families and i'm saying in that way because that's the narrative and so if you even think of today how we talk about um different parts of the country right it's important to note that um and the orphan trade movement and some of you might be familiar there's actually a national orphan train national complex in kansas um you've had about five thousand six thousand young people were placed in the orphan trade movement in kansas so this was a real thing it's important to note that not all these young people were orphaned some were forcibly removed from their families with no choice right they were simply poor and that's important to understand that such a poor backdrop of how we think of the modern day foster care system today and then finally the whittier school and we'll talk more about this in the subsequent slide but this was a place where latino boys particularly were were held in whittier california at a facility where they were confined when they were in trouble with the law and these boys were many spanish-speaking they were tested in english they failed their tests and were labeled as mentally deficient and that led to them being sterilized right so it's just to understand that backdrop again and keep moving sorry and these are some of the images of the time and so you see the lakota boys before and after or during their boarding school experience and to the right you have an illustration of a punishment in a forced labor camp the reason we hold these images up together is because we actually need to challenge ourselves to think about are there mental models that we hold that allow us to see the brutality of the physical pain in one image versus the violence of the other and so really pushing us to think about stripping people of their culture their language their family their customs is violent it's another form of violence and so challenging us to think about how this notion of othering plays out in a way that almost minimizes the harm done to some while we we see we can sometimes have a more readily available reaction to seeing a physical pain so just wanting to lift these up to challenge ourselves to to begin unpacking that um here we have a an image of convict leasing and convict leasing was really the system by which prisoners were leased out um to private parties and corporations and which very much were owned by you know white corporations and plantation owners um this is a essentially an extension of slavery this was primarily focused on keeping african-american men and in some cases as you see in the images here children away from from freedom it also gave states and in other corporations a real incentive to maintain this because they were profiting so much off of the free labor so when you look at 73 of alabama's entire annual revenue state revenue um was was really coming in through convict leasing in 1898 so an absolute incentivizing financial incentives to maintain this racial caste system and keeping african-americans in producing free labor um in building america it uh this is exactly the the birth of the prison industrial complex that we know today and so this is um as folks might be familiar with the concept of eugenics right and so it's a pseudo science that really speaks to you know the superiority of certain people and the idea of excluding others preventing folks from other folks were seen as inferior from reproducing right to keep a purity of a race and we often think we often link that to um the nazis and the holocaust it's important to know though that the nazis were watching the american eugenics movement and we don't seem to be provocative on necessities to say that was a fact they in post-world war ii when they were being put on trial of nazis for war crimes they talked about they were looking at the american eugenics movement and they used it as a defense in some of those cases and even in in kansas some of you might be familiar with there was the eugenics movement which was very normalized it was a school of thought it was and taught in academia and even in kansas there was the idea of sitter families and so this was an idea that and it was presented at the kansas state fair um and it spread to other states and they had competitions and the idea was to breed superior children that would fit these this very strict judging standards around sort of strong genes in dna right so just to understand how it hits so close to home for a lot of us and that when you think of the whittier school and i reference those young latino boys we're sterilized that comes out of the school of thought right of eugenics and that you are inferior enough and this was sam's point earlier about the othering we can treat you in a particular way that is dehumanizing and so again we just want to make sure folks really connect that um and that there's actually artifacts medals that people received at these fitter family contests and the medals read yay i had yeah i have goodly heritage and that was language used then so just to give you a local context and that there was about 30 000 sterilizations across the country in 30 states and kansas actually ranked sixth in that around from around the country so just to give you a local perspective this next slide just um speaks to domestic terror lynching and lynchings that occur from 1882 to 1968. we always tell folks on this slide if you have a chance to visit brian stevenson's museum equal justice initiative museum in montgomery alabama where they document 4 000 public documented lynchings um and you can see the expanse of this and so our point of this to say it wasn't just a sub in problem it was something that was existing around the country that sort of violence and again to keep thinking about these schools of thought that led to this violence and narrative that we still um even hear about today these know the next slide so as we're now in the 1900s right we're starting to see systems grow and so you're seeing an increase in child protection society an increase in in juvenile courts around the country there was a conference the white house conference on child health and protection where the thought leaders so again were talking schools of thought and how they were there to talk about you know child health and protection issue and how they defined socially handicapped was children foster homes juvenile justice black and indian children and so again we make these points say that these are the schools of thought the narrative that help build the systems in which we work now and are trying to address the challenging issues that's expressed in the data that was presented at the start of this presentation thank you and so then we move into the 70s 80s and 90s for a lot of us this was a very present period where we were sort of very aware of this the war on drugs um the central park jogger case out of new york which folks are familiar with um the the false imprisonment of those five young men and what we always like to make the point is that those young men were pretty much erased they were falsely imprisoned then you didn't hear about them in 2019 until ava duvernay's netflix docudrama when they see us that people start to hear about it again understand though that that energy and that mass media and the if it bleeds it leads and all that energy was happening particularly in the 90s and early 2000s was also was pushed by that whole juvenile superpredator theory which we've heard in a lot of national elections around the country but it's just to understand that john delia who who termed that and coined that term um was using bad science and he later admitted he was wrong but he's also now a tenured professor at the university of pennsylvania and so when you just oppose those young men whose lives were impacted how they were and the energy and the space that they're existing in and the narrative that led to that and then you juxtapose that with this social scientist who simply says oh i use bad science that science led to was what supported and justified a lot of the tough on crime policies that um communities of color felt in brunt of in the 90s and the 2000s and then rodney king folks are familiar with that which leads into um sort of current day viral videos that we've seen sam i'll see you no you go next five so as we um enter into the 2000s where we begin to see some really significant tipping points and so you see now that children are color children of color are now over represented in both child welfare and youth justice systems first nations youth are three times more likely to be removed from their homes in child welfare you see the disproportionality in terms of children in foster care as well as um detained youth nationally these are important because remember these systems were originally not designed to um to even serve young people of color and yet this is where we begin to see some really massive tipping points it's important to note this was also during a time where folks were very heavily investing in what they were calling colorblind decision making tools this notion of race neutrality as it related to um to these assessments and you know it's important to note now several you know several decades later that we know that those very tools actually exacerbated racial and ethnic disparities they did not control for it they made it worse um so again something really critical to learn from as we move forward um we in in that case i think it's just important to point out as as notions of racial neutrality may show up in different ways even currently it's it's really important to understand that we cannot dismantle structural racism without naming and seeing race we have to be able to acknowledge this to really deconstruct and build something different we can go to the next thank you um so the 2000s we also saw the implementation of the family separation policy right that zero tolerance approach which really drew international attention to our u.s borders but what's important to note with this is that while folks had very strong reactions to the images that they were seeing of course seeing kids in cages family separation is not new right we just kind of walked through several different examples of that so when you think about how mike started by showing us like the the theft of indigenous lands right seeing how the children were extracted and sent into boarding schools looking at the africans that were brought through the the um the slave trade the impact multi-generational impact on african-americans being separated children being separated from their families we also had a note around the japanese internment camps right and how that impacted families and then most recently you have here where we had a disproportionate impact on the latinx community regarding the borders and so what's important to note here is across all of these examples in in really across like massive gaps of time um we have very different families different ethnicities different cultures different languages different races experiencing this and what we know is the cross-cutting impact that it has had has been like significant multi-generational harm the ptsd has created the loss of sense of identity anxiety and depression health disparities we can go on and on it's important to note that this tool of family separation has very intentionally harmed multi-generationally harmed children families and communities of color across time as we go further into the 2000s um like 2014 and 15 is where we had um you know the two major cases that we want to lift up here highlight was michael brown and ferguson and freddie gray in baltimore it's important that we lift up these two cases that happened about six months apart and we lay them together in this way because st louis was something we had seen before unfortunately too many times in the past um and since right and so what we have in this case are you know predominantly white police force predominantly white leadership over policing chronically disinvested in communities of color where there were tensions between communities and the um in how policing was being done and the result was the killing of an unarmed black man which resulted in unrest right we've seen this before it is tragic we acknowledge that um and a lot of people came out and organized very quickly around that injustice when we look at baltimore this perplexed people internationally in particular that looked at america with confusion because in this case we had a predominantly black police force we had predominantly black leadership still over policing chronically disinvested in communities of color the tensions between community and police still relevant the result was the same the police killing an unarmed black man this really helps us demonstrate and understand the sophistication of structural racism and that while we may have people of color in in record numbers stepping into positions of color which is which is fantastic it can also lead to the veneer of justice in a way that is not accurate it demonstrates the strength of structural racism within those institutions and that we have to be very very intentional about understanding what supports are necessary and how to dismantle these institutions that are in place to then really shift and change how this is operationalized and how this continues to impact communities and then we had 2020. which you had in kansas we had north carolina we had in maryland we had everywhere right covered 19 which took our country to a new tipping point of death and despair and reflected those the same racial and ethnic disparities that we've just reviewed right over these hundreds of years you know and that's what underscored the tragedy we saw about armada are barry brianna taylor george floyd and a lot and all these things that led to un the unprecedented levels of unrest that a lot of us experienced um in 2020 and so while covid was new the cycle that we saw was not necessarily new and so when we take you through these four boxes right reaction was really when coveted hit we had to all react it was a new thing you know the mass and six feet and just how we needed to move and act what we saw on the justice side particularly was massive releases so bureaucracies that moved very slowly actually were very creative very urgent about trying to get people home and so we saw significant releases in in systems detention centers and jails across the country in record time but we also saw racial disparities get highlighted right so who had the work who were the essential workers which communities were disproportionately impacted by covet who was experiencing disproportionate death right and who those communities looked like and then we saw what we're seeing and we're battling against is a rebound right is um not going back to that pre-covered normal but trying to figure out how do we harness the energy that existed in those with that release side and that something there was a human moment we had how do we get back to that and harness that and make that um our new normal right and how do we move that change to our history and not go through this same cycle again and that is my little dog having a fit somewhere i can have to acknowledge that if you can hear that so this slide 2021 january 6 we're not making this is not a political statement but it is a political statement and what we're saying is historically for a lot of us this was a really really tragic day that actually had streams and through lines to that history that we walked people through those past 350 400 years right but the big thing of this is that these next couple of slides are our they're on our watch and so a lot of that history that was in the 1800s in the early 1900s we don't control but this is our story and we have to control you know figure how to change this story because this is on our watch and and we've up we keep updating these slides and so you know and earlier this year we saw sort of a new target um which reflects our history and this continued othering that we've seen right and so again this is on our watch and how do we deal with what became a new target and you go to the next slide because i think it speaks to the same big theme so when we look at the border and we have the crisis of haitians um of the of haitian migrants moving trying to get across the border right and these scenes right and it's these are all complex issues but what we're trying to do is is own our history and figure how to move in a different way as we move forward and so we really want to focus now on just how to make change right how do we move from understanding the depth of that history how it continues to repeat itself and and how we need to disrupt it um so part of this is really recognizing the characteristics of white supremacy culture as the driver right and recognize the characteristics that we may subscribe to oftentimes we just ask folks are you i are you actually open to the possibility that some of what you've been taught may not be accurate may not be true and are we open to learning something different so here um this is a display of some of the characteristics of white supremacy culture and these are based on the works of tamil khan and kenneth jones um i'm not going to go through all of these but wanted to just post them up here so folks could really see how many of us can relate to many of these um this you know is part of organizational culture oftentimes office culture agency culture we've experienced these in a lot of different ways and so wanted to lift these up so folks get familiar part of how we need to understand and learn this is is getting very familiar with these concepts so that we can unlearn them and change some of our behaviors we can move to the next one just as an example um paternalism and how that shows up right and oftentimes when we're doing human services this can be very real that those in power um make decisions for those um without power who are there in service of and oftentimes it can be very meaningful and well intended however it could have really detrimental impacts so here are some antidotes and some ideas because these things are all very um simple like when we unpack them and think about different ways it's like cultivating transparency and open dialogue around decision making ensure that folks know the process what what all is done in to to do that to ensure that folks know how these decisions are being made um ensure that everyone has has a part in that right and um and really understands their level of responsibility and authority i think most importantly is really to meaningfully include those that will be impacted most by those decisions include them into the decision-making process so this is one example but we can do these with all of the behaviors that were listed again when we think about problem solving oftentimes we have this huge sense of urgency when something has happened to move into action and this is a great illustration to show us maybe all the really critical steps that we skip when we feel that urgency that dives into action it doesn't allow us to be inclusive right and so taking the time to integrate a process that really builds relationships and trust gathers accurate information and analysis based on those additional relationships being able to use that information around visioning and planning for what the action needs to be then stepping into a place of action after all of those things have been brought into the circle right getting to a place that then we can you know reflect evaluate adjust as we move this is the circle for effective problem solving right and again an inclusive way having process in an inclusivity does not somehow reduce your sense of urgency it just makes your planning better for when you act and so in addition to that historical confidence that we took folks through and that sort of understand that shared understanding part of this is that person work right and so really being aware of the structural races and how it shows up in our existence in our daily lives personally and professionally and so this is a tool we developed stages of structural racism awareness tool that i'll just walk you through high level and it's but it's and i want to be clear just like that fishbowl we showed earlier this is not just for white people we all swim in this culture we all exist from this within this and so it's just something we have groups use journal just it's a way to help normalize certain conversations often folks struggle in um and to take a look at where you are on this and you're never one thing so just taking you um from the very left completely unaware and those are conversations often folks will say i don't see color it's about poverty we use race neutral tools like we referenced earlier or it will say i'm not racist some my best friends are and they'll plug in sort of a category of person of color moving to the right defensive and denial so i had nothing to do with it get over it prove it i'm not racist some of my best friends are and then you can incorporate a category of personal color then you have someone who acknowledges extreme forms of interpersonal racism ident so this one you the the karen in the park that sam referenced earlier you'll see something like that and no i identify that i disapprove of that that racist person's action but i'm not racist some of my best friends are incorporate for the first category of a person of color then someone acknowledges racism denies privilege right my family has struggled the all lives matter conversation i feel personally attacked by this conversation right often people disengage and so if you when you see this presentation later you'll see those white supremacy characteristics one is right avoiding conflict right the right to comfort not engaging these conversations and that connects to the actual person attacked by this conversation moving to the right right you become more aware begins to see the structural inequity so this awareness comes of disappointment as this new reality contradicts my world view right i feel personally angry and guilty and upset about what i saw so a lot during the social recipe saw after george floyd particularly we saw a lot of that conversation people coming to a different level of awareness about these issues connects the dots between inequity and privilege so my privilege does not reflect my morality but my response to it does and this this is why this is for everyone because all of us on this call have different pieces of privilege in our existence it's what you do with that privilege right and what your response to it is it's not just that you have it that's the problem then moving to the right leaning in being comfortable with the discomfort right so conversations about race are no longer threatening now that i see structural racism i can't unsee it and then finally being the change and making the change i understand that we need to close the racial ethnic gaps that structural racism produces and create more equitable opportunities and just again just to reiterate you're never one thing but we use this tool as just a way to mark you know where you might be at a particular point and to start normalizing some of the conversations that you know that you engage in when you're having these discussions on race equity and how to operationalize that in your daily life and so we often talk about how we anchor the work right and that it's really be it's beyond time to move away from tools and technologies to really begin the deeper work um that's required to advance real lasting change um and this involves real like real trust building between um and across systems and stakeholders communities and partners and to achieve the trust in its type of group it's important to also establish a sense of shared values to be very clear that the values truly represent the hearts and the minds of the people that we're in service of values that will then drive the direction of the work drive the directions of the strategy and ensure that there's a shared accountability to adhering to those we oftentimes talk about the need to establish working agreements how are we going to resolve conflict as they come up in any groups in any work conflict arises how do we do that how do we handle it setting those as norms beginning to really develop these authentic partnerships so that we can show up in in a in a much better way and then we often talk about the need for centering community and so i want to be clear that centering community goes uh much further than this notion of community engagement and just having a community person represented at the table somewhere right this involves real power sharing and decision making valuing the expertise of lived experience the same way we value books right like value that lived experience and really ensure transparency um we have to really be transparent in order to earn trust to keep trust right and the partnerships that we seek um it's not a transaction and it's not owed to you it's something that we have to work to earn that trust between each other to be able to advance together um and if there is a distrust at tables as historically there have been often distrust between community and system partnerships just acknowledge that it may not feel fair that that's your burden to bear but but it is right it's your responsibility to fix that so you take the time to put things in place establish those shared values bring people in in a way that's transparent and honest and authentic and ultimately in really what's needed to center community is to really truly believe that those closest to the issues hold the solutions we have to honor that lived experience and honor that proximity to the truth and i think this is where our last the last poll will be which relates to that last slide that we can throw up and so the question do you value community participation in your efforts and i'm going to let the the poster controllers close it when you see fit cool so we had 99 yes and so for us um just to close this is and i don't stand to get anything else on this slide no go ahead oh just in closing so you know that's the value we have and i think the the work is right how do we do that we all value it then the work is how you actually do that the same way i think most people will say we want to deal with you know racial equity work we want to engage that but how do we deal with those numbers that were presented at the beginning of this um we appreciate your time we're still so we're going to head into a break i just want to say that one of the hardest things to do is to talk about these issues to a large number of people that you cannot see we recognize we are not from kansas we are not in kansas and you know we reference some things in kansas it's not the cast dispersions or anything at people individually to say these are issues and that's why the domestic terrorist side shows you this is expansive this is we all swim in this we all own a part of it and this is our story and we really do mean that so we hope you you feel that and recognize that and hopefully you'll be able to use some of these slides as resources and some of what you heard today just as things to build on what you are probably already doing in your personal or professional practice so i think we're going to oh go ahead cam i just want to note for folks if we advanced um like two slides i know that there's um one just kind of the the charge for folks to um begin to apply differently but this last slide yeah i just love this cute little guy so just wanted to reference him but to the next slide this is we actually um while there's a lot of information on the slides we want you all to have that so you can dig into different parts of the history that interests you we want this to be a resource for you this last slide are links to the various um assessments tools uh articles things videos for you know variety of different learning preferences but really wanted to pull things together so folks have time to just dive in in your own time based on your own interests and wanted to just highlight that for you welcome back everyone i hope you able to get a good stretch in for your break and get ready for this next session which is the q and a and and debris session for this webinar so the purpose of the debrief today is to spend some time engaging with the content from the lecture and applying it to the work that you do we want to provide you an opportunity not to just need to be an anti-racist within the child welfare but how it might uh how we might engage in an anti-racist approach um and to be more racially equitable in our work i want to acknowledge it again that we understand that this is a different platform for everyone we are on a webinar and while it would be nice to sit around a coffee table and really have a great conversation about such an important topic that is not the world we live in right now uh so i am here along with my colleague pega to be your voices today so that we can recognize and hear what you have to say around this topic and really highlight that and elevate it we won't be able to get to everyone so because we have so many people online and that's just fantastic but we will acknowledge what we can and then that we'll try to answer the rest on our list server on our email so i want to go ahead and pass it over to pega before we get started with our debrief we want to go ahead and just check in with everyone to see how you're doing so pega if you want to go ahead and get started there we go absolutely hi everyone my name is pega nami jimenez i'm an associate research here at the university of kansas school of social welfare and really happy to be a part of this racial equity collaborative so before we jump into the q a and the discussion activity that we have planned i want to go ahead and share something with you all um to really center how our conversation's gonna be do you all see a screen with a thermometer on it i guess i'll ask my panelists do you all see that okay fantastic so this is something that i borrowed from the kansas leadership center and it's really about um you know these conversations are not always going to be easy the content that we hear is not always going to be comfortable but as we provide comments and as we have these discussions which we will be having virtually uh i i want us to center where we're at during that conversation so often times when we're hearing things that are maybe new or maybe uncomfortable for us we might we might hit our limit of tolerance where we're getting to that freeze flight or fight that defensiveness or just that shutdown mode so i really want us to check in when we feel ourselves getting um in those situations rather than checking out on the other end of this thermometer we can also get to a threshold of progress where we're avoiding the work um oftentimes we feel like these are really big topics and how do i as an individual have any sort of um way to be able to uh deal with this or combat this right white's membership is a structural thing how am i alone going to be a person to um a channel what i can do it from where i sit to be able to understand and dismantle some of these systems so if you're feeling yourself getting into that avoided stage again instead of checking out i want you to check back in and really where we want you to be is the zone of disequilibrium and the reason why it's called that is because again this isn't going to be comfortable this isn't necessarily going to be things that we like hearing because it does bring up issues of trauma um and we uh have to take care of ourselves at the same time so really that engagement understanding our purpose and the progress that we want to make is going to be really important for today's work and for the work that we do from here on out and that's why we're here today um so this is a really good reminder for me to always check in even when things don't feel great so i hope as we take you through this discussion um you all will practice doing the same with us so i'll go ahead and stop sharing my screen there and we're gonna go ahead and do a little q a with samantha and michael we did receive some questions from all of you participants out there um i think we have time for maybe about three these are three pretty big questions so i thought we could spend about five minutes or so going through them and other questions that we've seen pop up we'll try to get through our website or our list serve to send folks and resources so the first one um that someone posed was is white supremacy culture something that is seen worldwide i want to hand that over to samantha and michael to respond for us yeah no and thank you and thank you for the questions just overall i mean yes but i don't want to be flipping about that when i'm saying what i'm saying yes it's understand that then families speak to more than the definitions of this it's coming when you think about international colonialism across the world you think of not just the united states but europe and that when you think around the world how much when we talk like white is the norm right there's a norm that's sort of like that's the reference point for everything and that comes from a history right so when we speak about the expanse of it that's part of what we're talking about yeah and i apologize my dog has been barking so i'm trying to mute in between um but i think an important point is like thinking about even the origins of white supremacy culture and it as an ideology it was like 1478 where the pope um approved the establishment of the spanish acquisition right and inquisition and in that there were um an investigation of the cleanliness of blood as it was called right and it's actually through that like clean blood wasn't associated with christian in european um people right and the unclean blood was then non-christian in um and really seen as savage right and that was like way back then when we think like that was the seed right that was the origin of where this was planted and how that grew then to a place of white supremacy culture in white supremacy making it even possible to enslave other human beings right and so just understanding the origin is not here but it hopefully will show folks the vastness of this by design right how massive this was how it impacts all of our lives and in different ways um really just a across earth yeah absolutely thank you um so the next question um is so it starts with a comment before we can get to that question so it's i understand that white supremacy has been a huge problem but as a white woman i'm seeing that all whites are being blamed when a lot of us do not feel anyone is beneath us how do we combat this in a supportive understanding way as i feel people are swinging to an extreme blame game yeah oh great no it's just not it's it's um it's a it's a good question i i want to point out again that the the reason we really take the time to look at the structural racism like the structural inequities the massive system in which we all operate is actually to remove the individualized notion that somehow one person or a small group have con you know created or is maintaining it's part of why we show the fish bowl right it's very real to us like we're all swimming in this regardless of where we're from regardless of our our race ethnicity when we came here i mean this is just how it manifests in such a dominant culture and so i think really trying to move away from the idea that somehow this is constituting blame to you as a person it's so much bigger than that and so being able to disassociate a little bit from that although i can i can appreciate that that can be hard for some folks but to be able to step back a little bit and say okay understanding that this is such a big issue how do i move through this in a way that you know positions myself as an ally how do i start to begin to challenge some of the things that i see that i you know that i can start to deconstruct um with my peers but i think really trying not to uh personalize because i really don't think this is about blame it's about understanding that we are all swimming in this together yeah absolutely go ahead michael no just real quick i think a useful analogy is we live in a male dominated society i'm a man i don't think i and i can say i do not feel that i walk around being personally sexist one that may not be true so i have to explore that that's the mental models piece unpacking that and then i also have to understand that when things come to me i also cannot i have to deep connect a little bit to say okay actually there are structures in place that benefit me that i had nothing to do with but i need to be aware of that angling into that right which is not always going to be comfortable that's why that tool we have has those quotes it's not to say that you said that you're somehow a bad person it's really to say like wait let me let me do some reflection if you're how do i lean in differently to help shift some of these structures but again none of us on this over 800 people we hope you're still out there had anything to do with constructing those those structures and i'm glad that you have you really touched on that and i think what was important for that question for me in in in bringing it to the two of you is to really center ourselves within that structure and again you know taking our our interpersonal selves out of that of like well what's the structure around me look like so i appreciate that so we're just a little over time but i do want to combine two questions and ask this because i think this is what a lot of people are going to be thirsting for um one person from southeast kansas is asking what's the first best step to begin affecting change and i think that also goes with um someone else who asked like how do we know that progress is happening so what do you think that looks like from your standpoint yeah i mean i think what we've seen especially in the last couple of years that have been so challenging for everybody on multiple fronts right with kovid with the pandemic with the national unrest and organizing i think what we've seen this time around which is new and i think um certainly like a positive step forward is how quickly organizing spaces came together in such a massive scale and we're the most multicultural that they've ever been right so we've actually stepped away from not too long ago there was arguments around well why do we say black lives matter don't all lives matter we've moved past that now right like folks get it and i think we're engaging in a much more like multicultural dialogue and um stands together around fighting injustice in this way i i think it's that we haven't been here before the way we are right now this concludes the recorded portion of the kansas racial equity collaboratives lecture 1 understanding the historical context of structural racism and current day implications we extend sincere gratitude to our keynote speakers michael findley and samantha mellerson of the hayward burns institute we invite you to join our mailing list and register for upcoming events at our website at careportal.org kansas racial dash thank you so much for attending

Channel: Racial Equity Collaborative

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Id: h9g506QT-VE

Length: 78min 34sec (4714 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021