From Chaos to Community

A few months ago I took a call from Harold Vines. I had not heard from Harold since the late nineties when he came to take part in a Hope in the Cities training retreat for community leaders in Richmond. Harold told me he had seen the advance notice of The Trust Factor in Washington, DC. He had recently retired from the board of the Servant Leadership School (an outgrowth of the Church of the Saviour) in the Adams Morgan neighborhood and he wanted me to meet his friends. A few days later he introduced me to the executive director, Joseph Deck, and other colleagues. Harold said that after reading my book, “I had to ask myself, ‘Am I trustworthy?’”

Joseph Deck was immediately enthusiastic and took a copy of Trustbuilding to read. Before long he had offered the Festival Center on Columbia Avenue as a “hub” for The Trust Factor. This act of generosity has been typical of the diverse team that has come together in Washington to host this week’s activities.  Four partner organizations are giving event space without charge. Others are contributing pro bono staff time and facilitation skills. Some only met each other for the first time in recent weeks but are taking responsibility wholeheartedly. It is a creative, selfless pattern of partnership, a demonstration of trust.   
 
Throughout the Trust Factor week we will be in dialogue with people involved in trustbuilding in business, economics, on university campuses, and in the community. We’ll learn how people are drawing on their different faith traditions to face personal challenges and to sustain their work, and we’ll work on tools for racial healing and equity. “Civic Participation and Responsibility in Building Trust in Public Life” is the theme of the all-day session on Saturday which features a public dialogue with three remarkable leaders of both conservative and liberal backgrounds representing African American, European American, and more recent Asian immigrant communities.

What better time for Washington – and the world – to hear this message of trustbuilding? "Occupy Wall Street", the protests in Greece, and the ongoing struggle for democracy in Arab counties all indicate a deep mistrust of existing political establishments and a disconnect between those in positions of privilege or power and the majority who feel disenfranchised.

When our advance team arrived at the Festival Center a few days ago four men were sitting in the entrance lobby. Joseph Deck introduced us as the organizers of The Trust Factor. One older African American man exclaimed: “Trust! If we could get to trust we could move from chaos to community!” It turned out the group had been studying Martin Luther King’s final book: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?  Next Sunday King’s memorial will be unveiled on the Mall. What better tribute could we pay to this great prophet of reconciliation and justice than to commit ourselves to building a sustained trustbuilding movement on which to build a fair and inclusive America?

Challenging a Racial Caste System

A “racial caste system” is alive in America, says Michelle Alexander, whose book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, provides some shocking statistics. I heard her speak in Richmond last week.

More African Americans are under some form of correctional control than were enslaved in 1850. As of 2004, more black men were disenfranchised (i.e. unable to vote due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870 when the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race. In a city like Chicago, more than eighty percent of working age black males are or have been involved with the criminal justice system. Eighty percent of African American children can expect to spend a significant portion of their childhood apart from their fathers.

Significantly, incarceration rates bear little relationship to crime rates.  In fact the “war on drugs” which has resulted in a vast increase in the prison population – overwhelmingly African American men – began at a time when drug crimes were on the decrease. The prison population exploded from 300,000 to over 2 million in two decades. There are more people now in prison for drug offenses (mostly for possession, not distribution) than for all other reasons in 1980.

Alexander says that although this trend started under Republican administrations, it continued under Democrats. All politicians compete to show they are tough on crime. It’s even possible for a first-time drug offender to receive a life sentence. 

Why does she call this the “moral equivalent of Jim Crow”? Poor whites, she says, felt “socially demoted” during the civil rights era and through affirmative action. They did not experience greater job opportunities or receive college scholarships. They were the ones bused to integrated schools while wealthier whites escaped to private institutions or moved to outer suburbs. Politicians saw their resentment as a potent political force to be exploited. It was no longer acceptable to appeal to race explicitly, but the criminal justice system, especially drug laws, could be designed in ways that effectively discriminate against minorities.

By branding people as criminals they become permanently unemployable. Barred from public housing, excluded from food stamps and from federal student aid, many have also accumulated child support debt while in prison and are thus ineligible to hold a drivers license. Most return to prison within a few months.    

 “Those of us in the civil rights movement have allowed a human rights nightmare,” said Alexander. She was speaking to a largely African American crowd and did not mention Hispanics who form an increasingly large percentage of the prison population.   

Alexander is a former law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court and a longtime civil rights activist and litigator. She holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Hearing such appalling statistics can leave you depressed and hopeless. The brightest spot in the evening came from two participants in Boaz and Ruth, a faith–based Richmond non-profit that supports ex-felons by providing life skills and training in small businesses management, furniture repair, and house renovation.

“Rebuilding lives, rebuilding neighborhoods,” Boaz and Ruth was the vision of a white businesswoman whose church had participated in Hope in the Cities dialogues. The two program graduates told the audience with obvious pride: “I am now a tax payer…I have a job… I got my GED… I drive a car… I own my home that I will pay off in ten years.”

Boaz and Ruth demonstrate one strategy that Alexander advocates: We must provide safe and welcoming spaces for those returning from prison. Becoming aware of the facts and being willing to talk about them is another vital step. Beyond that, she says, we must build a multi-racial, multi-ethnic movement to advocate for change in the system.    

My biggest question after hearing Alexander’s talk was this: How to build the necessary alliances to effect policy change? Highlighting examples like Boaz and Ruth is important because it demonstrates that people can and do change. But we will need to work strategically to engage people on both sides of the political divide.

I recall a forum in 1996 where Paul Weyrich, a conservative icon, surprised his audience by an admission that for many years he had ignored cries from the black community about police brutality and bias. “My attitude was, ‘Well, this is just a bunch of criminals probably trying to evade their just dues.’ But I must tell you that one of the most profound events in my political life was the revelation of the comments made by the detective Mark Fuhrman during O. J. Simpson’s trial. I was astounded and outraged... And so I began to look more closely, and I’ve taken a particular interest in Philadelphia where certain bad white cops have targeted a lot of innocent black people to advance themselves by enhancing their record of arrest.”

           

He concluded: “I now find that in many cases these cries have a great basis of legitimacy, and they are cries that the conservative community…needs to take seriously… And because of our own view on the subject of government power, and the need to keep government in check, we conservatives should have a natural sympathy for these cries and be able to start a dialogue.”

Moving from Remembrance to Building the Future

On the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks our youngest son, Andrew, who was 15 at the time asked us, “Will this change our lives?”  While we wanted to say, “No,” we understood that we had entered a new era of uncertainty.

Last Sunday, on the tenth anniversary of that fateful day, my wife and I participated in the launch of the Richmond Faith Forum at St Paul’s Episcopal Church, where we have been members since coming to Richmond thirty years ago. The forum’s mission, says Rev. Wallace Adams-Riley, is to “live, laugh, and learn together.”  

Richmond is fortunate that relationships between faith groups have withstood the test of the pressure of world events over several decades. In 2001, faith leaders claimed unity and many people in the Richmond region reached out to support the Muslim community.  A group of Muslims and evangelical Christians have sustained a dialogue over several years. It’s not unusual for Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims, to join Jews at a Seder table for a Passover meal, hosted by a conservative synagogue.

Sunday’s forum featured the voices of youth – beginning with a video of  ten-year-olds of all backgrounds talking about the kind of world they want to see.  Their comments were practical and insightful: treat other with respect; work out your differences; be prepared to compromise; stand up for someone who is being picked on – because it’s the right thing to do.

They were followed by three university students who recalled their memories of 2001, how it had impacted their lives, and their sense of responsibility for the future. “I want to do something to help change the world,” said one.

Imad Damaj, from the Virginia Muslim Coalition for Public Affairs, told how several years ago he had called Glenn Proctor, the news editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch to express his unhappiness at the way the newspaper was presenting the Muslim community. Proctor invited Imad to meet with him. Imad said, “I will come, but I am not coming alone," and took a representative team to the meeting. That honest conversation, said Imad, “marked a change in the relationship with the newspaper.”

Tom Silvestri, president and publisher of the Times-Dispatch underscored the power of hope and optimism, and encouraged everyone to get to know their neighbors.  An interfaith panel of area clergy engaged in discussion with the audience. Rev. Jim Somerville of First Baptist Church sat between Rabbi Ben Romer of Congregation Or Ami and Imam Ammar Amonette of the Islamic Center of Virginia. Said Somerville: “We’ve shared meals together. I bump into the Imam sometimes when I’m out jogging. I see Ben at the Jewish Community Center where I work out. It feels like a friendship is growing between us, and that’s remarkable for a Baptist minister.”

Sunday was a good day to be in Richmond and to feel the strength of this community.

The Revolution We Need

I write this from Cape Cod with the winds of Irene rattling the house.

On the way from Richmond last week, Susan and I visited the “Breakers,” the seventy-room summer "cottage" built in 1892 by the Vanderbilts in Newport, Rhode Island. The end of the Gilded Age, symbolized by such remarkable monuments to wealth and power and to a grand vision of America, was hastened by the introduction of personal income tax (the Sixteenth Amendment) under Taft's Republican White House in 1913.

His predecessor and fellow Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, challenged the financial and industrial barons with his antitrust actions. He promised a “square deal” for all Americans and in industrial negotiations he treated union leaders as equals with industry bosses. This trend towards greater equity in society continued through the 1960s.

Driving north we listened to commentaries on the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington. Irene forced postponement the dedication. But the memorial is already provoking conversation about what King might have said about America today. He died as he was launching a Poor People’s Campaign. Surely he would have been shocked and outraged to find a country growing ever more unequal. More than one in five children lives in poverty, the highest rate in two decades.  This is an appalling statistic for the wealthiest country on earth.

But today even talking about disparity provokes accusations of promoting class war. Warren Buffet is called a “socialist” for daring to suggest that people like himself might pay a fair share of taxes.  In the Orwellian-speak of today the “wealthy” must now be termed “job creators.” People receiving welfare are described by right-wing talk show commentators as “parasites,” “moochers,” and “irresponsible animals.”

Where did we develop this disdain for those in poverty? Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dime, reminds us that the working poor are the nation’s true philanthropists: they make it possible for the rest of us to live comfortably. There’s a case to be made that our whole economic system depends on paying people less than what they are worth.  

So far, America has avoided the violent upheavals experienced by several European countries. But we cannot assume that people who are being pushed to their limit will forever remain docile.

We need a revolution of unselfishness. Here’s a great example: the Fresno, California School Superintendent, Larry Powell, has just announced that he will take a pay cut – reducing his annual salary from $250,000 to $31,000. Fresno has extremes of wealth and poverty, and with schools facing painful budget choices, “My wife and I thought, what can we do that might help change the dynamic in my particular area?” Powell told ABC News.   

This kind of revolutionary unselfishness is needed more urgently now than ever.

What to do with our anger?

I was pleasantly surprised by Joe Nocera’s column in the New York Times on August 22.  He apologized. In an earlier column he had compared Tea Party Republicans to terrorists.

Like many of us, Nocera was outraged that those who precipitated the financial crisis are not being prosecuted more vigorously; by the attempts to undermine the Dodd-Frank financial sector reform law; and by the attacks on Elisabeth Warren as she tried to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The final straw was the political brinksmanship over the debt ceiling.

While not backing away from his convictions, Nocera had the grace to apologize for his “intemperate” remarks and to promise that he will refrain from “calling anybody names” in the future.

I share Nocera’s outrage. I’m mad as hell at the damage done by the greed of the banks and that those who were negligent and incompetent in overseeing Wall Street are now lecturing us on credit ratings. And I’m most angry that the poorest and most vulnerable are paying the price for the greed of the rich and powerful.

What do we do with our anger? Experience shows that simply venting our emotions and naming enemies may make us feel better but rarely leads to productive change. 

However much I may deplore their politics, I am certain that most Tea Party activists are true patriots who want the best for this country. Some of them may be misguided idealists, but it’s not for me to question their integrity.  

I once heard William Raspberry, a columnist with the Washington Post, tell a group of community activists that a focus on enemies “diverts time and energy from the search for solutions.”  It’s important to ask ourselves, “If I defeat the enemy in the battle I have engaged, will my problem be nearer to a solution? People respond more favorably to being approaches as potential allies.” 

Approaching enemies as allies. This seems to be the great challenge of our time. Because increasingly in today’s complex and interrelated world we cannot solve our biggest problems without some measure of collaboration and trust with those with whom we disagree.      

Collie and Audrey Burton, two activists in the African American community in Richmond, Virginia, had the courage to build a friendship and then a partnership with Howe Todd, the senior assistant city manager, a white man with whom Collie had clashed on public policy issues and whom they suspected of racial bias. That relationship, and Todd’s new willingness to listen to others in the community, sent ripples though the city and led to countless unexpected partnerships across racial and political lines and to what we now know as Hope in the Cities.  

In 1996, Initiatives of Change convened leaders from opposite ends of the political spectrum for an “honest conversation” on race and to launch A Call to Community at the National Press Club. Blacks, whites, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Republicans, and Democrats sat and talked. They had different views about the appropriate role of government, the efficacy of affirmative action plans, even about the nature of the problem itself. But they were united in the belief that through honest conversation, a healing for the nation might begin.

A Call to Community, which was endorsed by mayors across the country, by members of congress from both parties, by leaders of different faiths and national civil rights organizations, concluded with a seven-point framework for partnership and responsibility. It proposed: 

• Listening carefully and respectfully to each other and to the whole community
• Bringing people together, not in confrontation but in trust, to tackle the most urgent needs of the community
• Searching for solutions, focusing on what is right rather than who is right.
• Building lasting relationships outside our comfort zone.
• Honoring each person, appealing to the best qualities in everyone, and refusing to stereotype the other group
• Holding ourselves, communities and institutions accountable in areas where change is needed.
• Recognizing that the energy for fundamental change requires a moral and spiritual transformation in the human spirit.

Suppose our elected leaders – and those of us who elect them – used these points as benchmarks for our daily interactions. Could it lead to some unexpected and creative steps that would move the country forward?