Violence Against Black Americans: Leading by Listening
by Stacey Childress, CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund
The murder of George Floyd in broad daylight last week sparked days of protests around the country. Pain, anguish, and frustration boiled over into the streets after days of indifference and inaction.
By Thursday morning, members of our team at NewSchools were exhausted by the constant and overwhelming rush of devastating news. One of my Black colleagues told me they had been unable to stop crying for two days. Another said, “I’ll recover my energy for the bigger fight at some point, but right now I just need them to stop killing us.”
As angry and heartbroken as I am about the persistence of racism, it does not affect me in the same way as it does my Black colleagues. But changing the systems and structures that create and sustain racial inequities is not just their work; it is our work.
The protests that have spread to cities in every state are a rejection of the systems and structures in our society that routinely disregard the full humanity of Black Americans.
At NewSchools, our work is focused on education, but the coronavirus pandemic laid bare the degree to which long standing racial inequities are intertwined across our health and economic systems, too. We see them in the outsized mortality rate among Black Covid-19 patients; the food insecurity exacerbated by school shutdowns; the access to basic tools to keep kids connected and learning; and the debacle of the first round of CARES Act paycheck protection loans, which bypassed many of the small Black-led businesses that needed them most.
As the public health crisis unfolded over the last three months, we’ve needed compassionate, steady, unifying leadership. Instead, the words and actions from the very top were indifferent, erratic, and divisive.
In this context, we learned Breonna Taylor was killed by police in her own home and saw three violent acts on video: the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery; a white woman using law enforcement to make a racist threat against Christian Cooper; and the choking death of George Floyd by a police officer while three others looked on.
At NewSchools, we are committed to working together with others to destroy what Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) calls the “dehumanizing myth of racial difference and hierarchy.” This pernicious myth degrades the humanity of us all. It underpins the racial inequities we’re working on in education, as well as those in health care and our economy. And it drives devastating differences in our access to those most basic of American rights: life and liberty.
Our work over the last six years has been increasingly focused on addressing racial inequities in educational outcomes and in the educators and leaders who receive funding to do the work. We’ve made progress, but it’s not enough, and we want to do more.
This week we are making two grants totaling $250,000 to Black-led organizations on the frontlines of this fight. EJI, which works to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, and Color of Change, which aims to end practices and systems that unfairly hold Black people back, and champions solutions that move us all forward.
In the coming weeks, we’ll think deeply with our team and others in our extended network about what else we should do. We will engage many of you in that thinking and share more as we go.
