All right, so now it's time for our second panel this morning, which is the Intersectionality
of Race, Religion, Integration, and Civil Engagement.
And as you already know I'm Layli Maparyan, and I'm going to introduce this morning's
speakers and then I'm going to say a few words about intersectionality.
So the first speaker I'm going to introduce is Linda Goler Blount.
Linda Goler Blount, MPH, joined the Black Women's Health Imperative as the President
and Chief Executive Officer in 2014.
There she oversees the strategic direction and is responsible for moving the organization
forward in its mission to achieve health equity as well as reproductive justice for black
women.
Linda has served as the Vice President of Programmatic Impact for the United Way of
Greater Atlanta, where she led the effort to eliminate inequalities in health, income,
education, and housing through place and population-based work.
She was also the first ever National Vice President of Health Disparities at the American
Cancer Society where she was responsible for providing strategic vision and leadership
to the Society in its 12 geographic divisions to reduce cancer incidence and mortality among
underserved populations and to develop a nationwide health equity policy.
A sought-after speaker and a member of the American Health Association and the National
Association of Health Services Executives, Linda holds an MPH in Epidemiology from the
University of Michigan and a BS in Computer Engineering and Operations Research from Eastern
Michigan University.
So welcome to Linda.
Now I'd like to introduce Katherine Culliton-González.
Katherine Culliton-González is Senior Counsel at Demos, a civil rights lawyer, author, and
policy advocate.
She focuses on voting rights, electoral reform, overcoming racial discrimination, and access
to political power and justice, and crafts policies to promote inclusive democracy and
protect vulnerable communities.
Katherine has been serving as Chair of the Voting Rights Committee of the Hispanic National
Bar Association since 2012.
She previously served as Director of the Voter Protection Program and Advancement Project
and as a Senior Attorney in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department
of Justice.
She has worked with community groups and developed successful discrimination against discriminatory
voting practices in seven states.
Highly published and recognized, Katherine also authored influential reports on LatinX
voting rights and provided expert advice regarding the legislation needed to restore the full
protection of the Voting Rights Act for voters of color in the south and the southwest.
And last I'd like to welcome Deborah Holmes.
Deborah Holmes is Chief Communications and Engagement Officer for the Women's Funding
Network.
Deborah's work is informed by career experience spanning media, healthcare, agency, and human
rights.
Prior to joining the Network, Deborah served as Chief of Staff and Vice President of Communications
at Global Fund for Women, where she led the organization's communications, reputation
and brand management, media relations, and human resources.
An accomplished television news reporter and analyst for more than 35 years, Deborah has
worked for local and international news organizations and received numerous awards for investigative
reporting and documentaries.
She is a tireless activist for racial and social justice equity, political empowerment,
and freedom of the press.
In addition to her numerous professional service posts, she is the incoming Chair of the Wellesley
Centers for Women Council of Advisors.
So let's give all of our presenters a hand.
Now the topic of this panel is intersectionality.
And while I'm going to assume that most of the people in this room know quite a bit
about intersectionality, just in case there is someone that is still struggling with the
term, I wanted to just pull out a few statements about it just to set the tone for our conversation
this morning.
Intersectionality, and again I'm sharing things I found online.
If you want the resources, let me know.
Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that
is different from the component identities.
These identities can intersect to include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality,
religion, language, sexual orientation, age, and various forms of mental and physical disabilities.
The idea that these identities are all reciprocally constructing of who a person is and how they
experience life and society.
This framework can be used to understand how systemic injustice and social inequality occur
on a multidimensional basis.
The idea is that these forms of oppression or these identities interrelate creating a
system that reflects the intersection of multiple forms of discrimination.
And to relevance for us today because laws and policies usually only address one form
of marginalized identity, but not the intersection of multiple identities.
Intersectional identities often go overlooked.
Since they are overlooked, there is a lack of resources needed to combat these forms
of discrimination and the oppressions are cyclically perpetuated.
Now this term was coined in 1989 by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, and she
has said that it is important to clarify that the term was used to capture the applicability
of black feminism to antidiscrimination law.
She said antidiscrimination law looks at race and gender separately, and because of this,
initially the laws that were set up to address these various forms of discrimination could
not address the intersectional experiences, perhaps, of a woman of color.
So, for example, a black woman could not prove gender discrimination because not all women
were discriminated against and couldn't prove race discrimination because not all
black people were discriminated against even though she was discriminated against as a
black woman specifically.
This idea of intersectionality also helps us understand how different power structures
interact in the lives of people with diverse identities.
It also causes us to think about not only marginalized identities that people have,
but also forms of privilege that people have and how people's identities are often a
mix of privilege and minoritized statuses.
For example, a white woman is penalized by her gender but has the advantage of race.
A black woman is potentially disadvantaged by her gender and her race.
And a Latina lesbian experiences discrimination because of her ethnicity, her gender, and
her sexual orientation.
So these things relate to how we experience ourselves in the world, but they also relate
to how we do policy and how we are able to make policies effective for real people.
So because we have three experts here who each work on this in different ways, I'm
going to invite them successfully to give statements about their work and on this theme
of intersectionality.
We'll begin with Linda.
From here, up there, does it – (Inaudible.)
Either way?
Okay.
Can you all hear me?
All right.
Well, thank you Lailene.
Just a little couple minutes of background.
The Black Women's Health Imperative is now in its thirty-fifth year.
It was founded by Billie Avery when she brought a few of her friends, about 2,000 of them,
together at Spellman's campus to talk about the need for black women to take care of themselves.
And so that's really been a theme for the last 35 years, and we have been talking about
self-care.
You see it expressed in our work in terms of sort of modifiable lifestyle, behavior
change, chronic disease prevention, HIV.
But also reproductive justice.
And in the last 15 years or so, we have really adopted a strong interest and concerted effort
in the policy.
So I'm happy to be able to be here to have this conversation with you all.
I'm probably going to come at intersectionality maybe a little different way than you might
be expecting.
Because of my background, I tend to look at the world through data.
But believe me, we're not going to talk about data.
But when I think about intersectionality, we talk about race, and gender, and class,
and ethnicity, and immigration status, all of that, which, you know, is true.
But when I talk about it, I talk about the intersection of racism, classism, sexism,
ageism, able-ism, you know, whatever the ism is because that's really what we're talking
about.
If everything was fine, we'd be off doing something else this morning.
So as we think about it at the Imperative, we think about the lived experience of black
women.
You know, as Lailene said, we're female, we're black, we may live in the south, we
may not be Christian.
You know, there are so many different aspects of black women, and women in general, that
scientist physicians, since we're a health organization, public health people, do not
consider what it means to be that woman.
So if I come into a physician's office, he or she is going to treat my complaint.
But she's not going to ask me, so what's life like?
You know, because her reimbursement is dependent upon treating my complaint.
So what we have started doing is looking at data differently.
This just got released earlier this year.
We partnered with researchers at Boston University, who are the authors of the Black Women's
Health Study.
I don't know if there are any participants in the audience.
So for 20 years, collecting data from 60,000 black women, beautiful papers have been written
that the average black woman, the women in the study, have never read because most of
them are not researchers or scientists.
But also in health equity work the message we get is something is wrong with black women.
You are obese, diabetic, hypertensive, you know, whatever the thing is.
Your mortality rates are this.
So we asked them, is everything bad?
Do any of the women in the study think anything good is happening?
As it turns out, the majority of the women in the study defined their health as very
good or excellent.
So, not a huge majority, but a majority.
So we asked them to go back, look at these women, and what this says is, what can healthy
black women teach us about health?
And let's see what is going on.
Let's look at the data differently.
So in this book, we've translated this research into narrative, into stories, into personal
experiences.
So it is written for the Essence magazine subscriber, who actually formed the cohort
of this study.
It's not written for researchers or policy makers.
But it is also written for community groups to use in their work in talking about data
in a way that actually makes sense for black women, in a way they can understand it and
then act on it.
So that's one thing we've done.
Another thing that we have done, and we will continue to do, and I'll talk a little bit
about this, is employ social listening tools.
Because the fact is black women are telling us every single day what they think and believe
and feel and do about their health.
The problem is nobody is listening to them.
But they're telling us.
So, for example, you look at freshman black women and Latinas coming into college, so
17, 18 year olds.
A good 50% of them are pre-diabetic, pre-hypertensive, well on their way to developing chronic diseases.
But they're talking about their health in social media.
If you listen, if you look at Twitter, if you look at Facebook, if you look at Instagram,
they are talking about what issues are important.
And the fascinating piece is you can look at it over time, you can go back three, four
years, and come forward, and see how the conversation has changed.
You know, this body image issue is all over social media.
But the way black women talk about their bodies now is different from the way they used to
talk about their bodies.
But it's information for us to use in our messaging in our programs.
So one thing that has come up recently in research is black women and stress.
We're now looking at the link between stress and disease expression.
And we've talked about that for a long time.
As it turns out, two years ago when the viral videos of police violence against children
and black people were being killed, you know, we all could capture them, showed up, what
psychologists and physicians began to see were signs of post traumatic stress in black
women.
And so part of the reaction was to hang onto their children.
So in reproductive justice, you know, we say a woman has a right to have children, a right
not to have children, and a right to raise her children in a safe and healthy environment.
Well this created a shift, so black women were beginning to hang onto their kids, keep
them from doing things.
No, you can't go outside.
No you can't go to this party.
And so what we're going to see is the effects of that on our children.
And that will express in terms of emotional distress, but also physical disease as well.
So, again, women are talking about this on Facebook, in social media, but nobody is listening.
So there's some tools out there that we can use to listen, but then we use them to
create messaging, and then for our work create programs that we can give to our partners.
We don't deliver services.
We look for the best of the best in the community and give them money and say here are evidence-based
strategies, communications mechanisms, here's how you do this, here's what this means
for policy in your state or nationally.
And then, finally, a little joke there, the thing that we're about to move into, which
is, for me, really exciting, and a little scary, is data analytics.
So data science.
We're applying data science to this issue.
Now the folks who worked for Obama for America did this beautifully.
They figured out a way to listen, employed social listening tools, to get young people
out to vote.
And they did it and it worked out really well.
The Trump campaign folks figures that out, too.
They listened, and they figured out the messaging that tapped into white male disenfranchisement
and give them a place to focus their anger.
It's black and brown people.
It's immigrants.
That's why you are in the situation you're in.
And he talked about that beautifully.
So folks got out and voted.
Well, we can do the same thing but for very different reasons and hopefully very different
outcomes.
If we look at sort of data analytics, if we listen to what black women are saying, and
you can get down to very granular levels.
We can get down to the district level.
We can then create profiles of black women.
We are not monolithic.
Direct our messaging to them.
Help them understand why it's important to vote.
Here's what the issue means.
I mean we have to be nonpartisan because we are nonprofit, but we can help them understand
this is what your vote means, this is what not voting can mean.
And tap into their lived experience.
The higher cortisol levels that black women have in their bloodstream.
The expression of that kind of stress, what it means for our daily activity.
What it means to be at work and, you know, workplace policies.
But also state and local policies and national policies.
So the next phase of our work is to take data science, create these predicted profiles based
on what women themselves are telling us.
We're not making things up, we're just listening to them.
But then using the research, using messaging, using evidence-based programs to go directly
to and give them the tools that they need to do the best thing they can for their health
but also to give tools to community organizers to do what they are doing.
And what I'm hoping we can do, which is pretty ambitious for the next 15, 16 months,
and maybe we'll get a chance to talk about this, is to create a sense of shared outrage.
We, in this, we are so fragmented in this society.
Poor people are busy not trying to be poor, not trying to join with other poor people.
Wealthy people are busy trying not to be around poor people.
I don't know if you saw the recent study that with wealth comes greater social isolation.
We've got to figure out a way to create shared outrage so we get women out to vote
and do what they can do to protect their health and the health of their families.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's just very inspiring to be here.
I'm with Demos, and we are committed to intersectional work as we work for an inclusive
democracy.
Our name actually is the root word of democracy.
It means we the people, and it means we, all the people.
I'm just an attorney, but I think a lot about intersectionality because I fight injustice
and fight for an inclusive democracy.
And I'm glad to be working for an organization that is led by a woman of color, by (Inaudible)
McGhee.
And an organization that believes in inclusive democracy and power to the people in the fullest
sense of the word.
In addition to talking about Demos, I just want to tell you a bit of my own journey as
a feminist.
One of the first I learned is the personal is political.
And I've been thinking about that as I think about inclusive democracy.
I spent the first ten years of my career really in Latin America working with the Latin American
women's human rights movement, and with the human rights movement, and the racial
justice movement.
And then tried to transfer some of that to the United States, and it hasn't been easy
for the reasons that Lailene mentioned.
You know Kimberlé Crenshaw hit the nail on the head as an attorney and as a person who
works on policy or as an activist, we're put into silos, we're put into different
categories, and there really isn't a way to make claims or make policies that take
into account people's lives.
But I think that we have an opportunity to do so today.
So today I speak to you as a very privileged woman who became a civil and human rights
lawyer.
And as the mother in a mixed race, mixed immigration status family who is just completely horrified
at how President Trump has exacerbated structural racism to the point of making immigrant communities
live in terror.
I fear for stepsons coming home at night.
I fear for my neighbors being picked up by ICE.
I'm basically a nasty woman in a house with a bad hombre, and we've been labeled that
way, and we're being treated that way.
So it's something that is happening to so many people in a very intersectional way.
Ever since the election we've heard hate speech, hate crimes, nooses in D.C., racist
language in my son's elementary school, the threat to sanctuary cities, which I'm
going to talk a little bit about, and ICE criminalizing all immigrants and tearing apart
Latino families.
Literally tearing children away from their mothers.
I'm afraid for children of color and communities of color and women of color.
And I'm really also afraid for all women because of the blatant sexism exhibited by
Trump.
And I feel that if we don't get it together in this civic engagement arena, despite the
fact that the new Demos and the next generation is majority non-white, so presumably against
structural racism, and together with single women very progressive and presumably against
sexism, we're not going to be able to overcome unless we unify and work on intersectionality.
Demographics is simply not destiny, and I think that's the big lesson from the last
election.
Every day since the election I've been eager to talk about intersectionality and civic
engagement, and I'm glad to be here talking about inclusive democracy.
Let me just explain just how different it is in other institutions compared to the United
States.
So in the Latin American human rights movement, inclusive democracy has sort of come naturally.
I assisted that movement in the 1990s, during the transition to democracy.
Was just very lucky to be asked to come and live and work side by side with Latina activists
who had overthrown the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.
And had overthrown dictatorships across the region.
They also built a strong women's human rights movement because they said, look, these rights
that we're fighting for, these human rights, are also our rights.
And violence in the family is a form of torture.
And inequality is something that women also experience.
And they built better legal systems than in the United States.
And it has actually resulted in more women being elected to the Presidency in Latin America
than, of course, in the United States.
The feminism in the legal system in Latin America I also found more community centered
and holistic.
It recognizes the need for affirmative actions and systemic changes rather than being centered
only on individual rights and claims, and I think that that is something that intersectionality
can encompass, to be more family and community oriented in addition to opposing more than
one type of discrimination at a time.
It also took a while for a racial justice movement to emerge in Latin America, but it
did, and it still has a long way to go, but it has resulted in better systems and better
protections, and more acknowledgment of intersectionality than here in the United States.
The other thing that I learned in Latin America is there is a greater recognition of socioeconomic
rights than in the United States.
So when you are working with low income folks, oftentimes there isn't really a legal claim
that you can bring.
Or the solutions to problems of low income women, low income women of color, are very
different than for middle class women.
And so I think that that recognition of socioeconomic rights is very important.
Inclusive democracy is also something I learned in South Africa at the first UN World Conference
Against Racism in 2001 where I worked with a Latin American women's group called the
Race, Ethnicity and Gender Justice Project.
Women of color pushed very hard for intersectionality and it resulted in a body of human rights
law that recognizes intersectional types of discrimination and the experiences of women
of color.
So let me just translate that to what is happening in the United States today.
Today's brave leadership of immigrant women during these incredibly challenging times
is also a fight for inclusive democracy.
Working with immigrant communities is often working with a community that has been overlooked
because of the lack of access to citizenship, because of the lack of voting rights.
So we see less attention in the civic engagement field being paid attention to immigrant communities,
but a very high level of interest in activism.
And also so many have fled racism and sexism from their countries of origin in Central
America and Mexico only to have their experiences discounted.
You only have to look at the news or follow me on Twitter and you will see case after
case of a women who has fled gender-based violence from Central America or Mexico, is
the mother of U.S. citizen children, is a woman of color who is being told that her
family is criminal, that she herself is a criminal, being ripped apart from her children.
That has all kinds of intersections in it.
Her experience as a woman and as a mother I think is central to the issue.
And also to the fact that our system is likely sending women and men and children back to
situations where they are in extreme danger in Central America and Mexico because of these
same systems of structural racism and structural gender inequalities and classism.
The situation of mothers of color also resonates with me through the stories of very brave
women such as Mike Brown's mother.
The African-American mothers who see and fear for their children due to extreme levels of
racial profiling and systemic violence by police, and who is leading the Black Lives
movement?
It's women of color who experience all of these intersectionalities.
I think that moving forward we need to ensure that all the candidates believe that women's
rights are human rights for all women.
We don't need candidates who are not clearly against mass incarceration and mass deportation
and detention of mothers and children at the border.
I think this goes to not only encouraging civic participation in the form of access
to voting rights, which is something I picked and spent some time on, but also what are
the issues that we work on.
Civic participation has to be more meaningful and more community oriented.
It has to take into account the lack of access to citizenship for millions of people of color.
Very quickly, in 1960, around 80% of immigrants to the United States were European and majority
white.
Since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which took away facial
discrimination, or quotas, racial quotas, from the immigration system, we've seen
some changing demographics in immigration.
And today only 11% of immigrants come from Europe and are majority white.
And what we've also seen over that course of time is an increased heightening and restriction
and targeting of immigrants as the demographics have changed.
And that is why there is less and less of a path of citizenship.
But there are other forms of civic engagement.
I think that the lack of a path of access to citizenship, and the lack of traditional
civic engagement is something that we have to take into account at the family level.
Twenty-six percent of American children today have a parent who is an immigrant.
Whether or not they have been able to naturalize or they are still living in fear of being
targeted because of immigration issues within their families, and these children's lives
have changed dramatically over the past decade and also since the election of Donald Trump.
Let me also say that one out of three African-American men and women are disenfranchised by felony
disenfranchise laws.
There are so many other barriers that I can tell you about that have intersectional outcomes,
but they've also surgically targeted people of color.
They've seen in the voting rights movement and in the emerging civic engagement movement
the leadership of women of color.
We often can't bring all of these claims or tell all of these stories correctly because
of the limits of the law, but we have to keep pushing for a way to do that.
And even with this presidency and a difficult Supreme Court, we absolutely need to keep
pushing racial discrimination claims and show the structural racism underlying things.
And I have a couple more ideas about the type of intersectional research that is needed.
There is an awful lot of work to be done in what we call black-brown coalitional work.
There are actually claims among African-American, Latino, and Asian and Pacific Islander communities
that are based on the fact that the elite that is discriminating against those communities
and discrimination really doesn't differentiate, they are discriminating against all people
of color.
And yet the differences are there, too.
However, we're seeing an emerging political cohesion.
And so one of the big outcomes, I think, of the election, just to get to the data, as
the last panel was talking about, very, very high levels of racially-polarized voting.
And what that means is that white people voted for a white candidate and voted against a
candidate who associated with people of color.
So that level has increased even after the election of an African-American president.
And we see more levels of cohesion among people of color in their voting patterns.
And we need to take that into account in the redistricting cycle and also just think of
the intersectionality between different groups of people of color and how to get data about
that, describe it, and then fight together for an inclusive democracy from the ground
up in our country.
Thank you so much and looking forward to the discussion.
Geez.
(Inaudible).
That's a lot.
But you know what?
It's a good segue.
So I'm going to talk about three aspects of this work.
One is the role of women's foundations and funds.
Two is being black in America.
And three is not being heard.
There are a lot of things that have been spoken about today that black folk have known forever.
And we have been saying over and over, this is what's going on in police departments,
this is what's going on in hiring, this is – and we are not believed.
We are not believed.
We are told you're being too sensitive.
Are you sure?
Maybe you should think about it this way.
For once, one thing that we would love to have just once in our life is for white people
to believe us the first time.
You know, we don't make this stuff up.
You know, when the hair on the back of my neck is standing up, I'm telling you something
racial is going on here, and it's not the first time that it has happened.
It is hard to be black every day in America.
But at the same time, I love being black.
Because we have so much power, and the fact that we are in this room, and in this place,
and still strong, and nobody has knocked us down, says a lot about our people.
Even though we have a large segment of the population who wants to bring back Jim Crow.
But we're not going to let that happen.
There's a couple of things I need to respond to right quickly that I thought about when
the previous speakers were talking.
One is one of my favorite people I follow on Twitter is Angry Black Lady, Imani Gandy.
And my mantra now is something that she said after the President's first State of the
Union speech.
And they did an interview with a black woman who was watching.
And she said, you know, it was a nice speech.
I congratulate his speech writers, blah, blah, blah, but I'll believe it when I see it,
you know, actions speak louder than words.
And Imani wrote right after that on Twitter, black women should just run everything.
Every damn thing.
And that is like my mantra these days.
But let me start about intersectionality if I can bring that back because this really
does matter in the work that I do.
Because the value of women's foundations and funds is that they have always understood
that the experiences of women and girls are very different than they are for other folks.
Women and girls at different income levels and so forth, so Women's Funding Network
is like the mother ship of global women's organizations, women's funds.
There are women's funds in 39 states including the District of Columbia here, and 20 countries.
And they invest millions of dollars into local, community-based groups, often grass roots
groups, led by women who are doing amazing work on the ground in communities like Washington,
D.C. here.
The Washington Area Women's Foundation, you may have just seen they released their
report that was an analysis of the 2018 District Budget, where they didn't just talk about
what was wrong, but they also talked about what the solutions were.
So they pointed out, for example, that it is great that D.C. is going to put money into
building child care centers, but they also said there are no resources going into improving
the quality of child care in Washington, D.C.
It's great to be building more affordable housing, but there are no resources going
towards getting people off three and four and five and six-year wait lists to get housing
in the first place.
So women's foundations and funds have always seen the intersectionality of economics, of
violence, of health, of education, all of those issues.
They've been saying for 30, 40 years, you can't look at these issues in and of themselves.
So they've done a good job of that.
They are now forming partnerships with university partners and others because you can't have
a livelihoods project in your area without addressing education, both at the mother's
level, but also at the child's level.
You need to discuss child care.
So that's very important.
And so they've done a really good job on that front.
I think where, as many nonprofits have struggled, is on bringing racial equity into the mix
in a meaningful way.
And by that I mean it's not that organizations, the women's foundations and funds, don't
do that work.
But it's seen in that silo that you were talking about.
And so we are in a moment now where WFN, as the mother ship, is bringing the funds – going
to be bringing the funds along on making racial equity reality as part of the work.
The other thing that has happened that is really good about this particular time in
history is that the rise of white nationalism in the United States in leadership positions,
as well as in Europe, has really forced women's foundations and organizations out of their
comfort zones and they are doing immigration right now.
They are doing work with – well they always done work with LGBTQI, but they are seeing
and doing it in a way of intersectionality.
They are getting grants.
There are organizations like the Chicago Foundation for Women which had never done rapid response
grants before, doing them in the first 100 days after Trump was elected because people's
lives were actually in danger.
I was talking to one of the staff members earlier this week, and she said, we were looking
at the violence in Chicago, we're looking at the violence that's going on in immigration,
and we said we can't just sit here and do nothing.
So they totally revamped a whole segment of their grant making so they could get grants
out the door quicker.
On the flip side of that, another one of our funds, the Urgent Action Fund, which primarily
funds globally, they had to bolster their U.S.-based funding particularly around immigration,
labor, and LGBTQI because people's lives were actually in danger.
So they are responding.
But what I wanted to talk about that really changed my perspective about this and made
some interesting memories for me was an article by Alana Samuels in The Atlantic this week.
And basically the tone of her piece said the blacker the state – the blacker the state,
the stingier the benefits.
And there is research coming out that shows that the more homogenous states are very generous
with social safety net kind of services.
The ones with more black people in them, and I'm saying black particularly because that
is the decider.
One of the things we see in immigration is the darker the skin, the worse it is.
If you can pass, nobody is picking on you as much.
But if you are darker, it's a big problem.
But listen to these statistics that she states.
Oregon is 84% white.
If you look at, for a family of three the maximum benefit for a month, in Oregon, which
is 84% white, the maximum benefit is $506.00 a month.
Mississippi, which is 60% white, 38% black, $170.00 of month for a family of three.
Mississippi has a work requirement, as many of these plans do, but nothing in the plan
to help you find a job.
Oregon links people to employment and then pays wages up to six months.
That shows the differential in what race can do.
It also suggests, they looked at what they call the TAMP poverty ratio.
TAMP to poverty ratio.
TAMP is the Temporary Assistance.
And they looked at the number of families per 100 living in poverty.
Vermont, for example, has 78 who get services.
And in Vermont, 78 out of 100.
Oregon 46.
The lowest TAMP to poverty rate is in Louisiana, four to 100.
And Arkansas is runner up with seven to 100.
Fifty-six percent of African-Americans live in 25 states that rank the lowest – the
lowest – in the TAMP to poverty ratio.
So race matters.
When people tell you that it is not a big deal, that is a lie.
It is, it always have.
And black folks have been saying this for centuries.
That it is race that matters.
It is race that is the differential in how we are treated and how we experience things.
We are at a moment now where we have an opportunity, perhaps, in coalition with other black and
brown folk, to really rise up in a way that we rose up when we shut down the busses in
Montgomery, when we forced people to listen to what we have to say.
History matters.
History matters.
You don't have to live in it, but we can learn from it.
And remember that when welfare started, it was a white woman's thing.
It was a mother's welfare thing.
And who got it was white women because they didn't work, and the mentality was black
women should work.
Black women needed to work.
And my final comment is around something Senator Hassan said earlier today.
And why this all matters.
It's because you have Congress now looking at turning social safety net programs into
block grants.
The whole history, and why I gave you those statistics before, is that's what happens
with block grants.
States have tremendous discretion in how much money gets distributed and who gets it.
And as Alan's article points out, when there's more black people in the state, there are
less benefits.
Block grants are not the answer, and you should be asking serious questions of your elected
officials and everybody else when they start bringing that up, and point out the facts.
Get the facts.
Knowledge is power.
So thank you, Linda, Kathy, and Deborah, for really presenting us with a wide spectrum
of policies where intersectionality is relevant and letting us know how a lot of policies
are dropping the ball on being fully intersectionally relevant to all affected communities.
What I'm curious to hear your thoughts on now is how do you think we can advance good
intersectional policy in the policy environment?
What kinds of communications do we need to do?
How can we bring research into the equation?
What is your formula for how we can make better intersectional policy?
No small question.
(Inaudible).
Revolution.
I mean nothing short of revolution.
I'm sorry, but I mean young people have got it right.
They are not going to stand down.
And you cannot go home and say well we lost this one today.
I mean, backing down is no longer an option.
The facts matter, and we have to get the facts into the right hands of the people.
And that includes your friends and associates who need to read and use critical thinking
skills.
Because there are facts out there.
But if you choose not to read them, or you ignore them, then they are of no benefit to
anybody.
I think one of the most frightening things, and I know people want to criticize the media
all the time, there's plenty to criticize.
But losing first rate investigative journalism like the stuff The Atlantic is doing and others,
is one of the worst things that can happen in this democracy.
All you have to do is go live somewhere where there isn't any, and you understand what
that is.
We should not be throwing all the media out the window.
There's some excellent reporting going on there that needs to be read and shared.
And then the final thing I would say is white folks need to have conversations with their
own people.
I mean, this racism thing is on you.
We have been talking about this for a long time and trying to do something, but your
folks are the ones doing this to a large extent.
So serious conversations need to be had at that level, and sharing that data.
So I'd have to agree.
Thank you.
In my field, in public health, if there are any public health people in the audience hopefully
you won't be offended, we do the absolute worst job at communicating with people.
When we start talking to folks, eyes roll back, people go to sleep.
So I get it, you know, I understand you've got to talk about research a certain way,
but I guess from my perspective you can either be right or effective.
And I choose to be effective.
We need to learn how to talk about data, to talk about these issues, in a way that people
can actually understand it and can do something with the information.
I can give you data all day long.
So what?
You just go home with a bunch of facts that will probably depress you.
But we need to figure out how to turn the information we have, turn that knowledge into
power, as Deborah said, but also into action.
Don't just – we have to stop just giving people facts.
We have to say, here are the facts, now here's what you do with them, or, here's some things
you can do with them.
Here are real tools that work.
Because otherwise, all we do is end up having a conversation with a bunch of people like
us, and we can, I guess, feel real good about that, but we don't actually get much done.
There was, about ten years ago, there was this Health In All Policies movement that
started.
Basically it was just intersectionality but the public health people put their name on
it.
And the idea is look at health, the health impact implications in all policies.
Great idea except it never really happened.
So if we actually could look through that lens, that intersectional lens, at education,
at food, at housing, transportation, whatever it is, and think about what this means for
our health, we might actually get something done because I guaranty you on your last day
you are not going to say, gee, I wish I had spent more time in the office.
You know, people always say if I only had my health.
Well since we can predict the future, why not start using the information that we have
right now to bring people together.
I agree, white folks need to talk, but we all need to talk because if white people just
talk to each other about racism, then, you know, so what?
We have to figure out a way to actually cross those boundaries.
We are more segregated now than we were 50 years ago.
So if we don't figure out how to cross those barriers and inform policy and act on it that
way, we're going to be having this conversation in another 30 years.
I couldn't agree more.
I couldn't agree more.
So, I mean, as a white woman who works with people of color all the time, I feel like
I grew up in White-opia and I go in between my different worlds, right?
Yeah.
White-opia, a colleague of mine, Rich Benjamin, wrote a book about it.
It's places where white people are really, really polite and nice to the occasional person
of color who moves into their circles, but otherwise the systems stay the same, right.
You don't say racism out loud.
So I guess also just a couple of points to answer the question in my field in civic engagement
or thinking about, I mean I work for – I'm a civil rights lawyer working for social justice,
it's really about power.
And I think if we look to how it is that black women, for example, have the highest voting
rates and do the most civic engagement work out of any group, and the funding comes around
during the election cycles, get out the vote, rather than asking grass roots black women
what are the policies that you would like to fight for?
Who are the candidates that you would like to see?
Would you like to run for office?
So when we work for inclusive democracy, we're looking at it from the ground up and supporting
women of color and their leadership and leading their communities.
And I think also the sanctuary movement that I'm working in, it's very grass roots.
We see like states and localities basically saying, look, Donald Trump, we are not going
to support your mass deportation machine.
And as we're doing that, we need to think about police profiling.
We need to think about Jim Crow.
We need to think about the anti-black racism that's impacting everyone.
We're not having our local police turn people over to federal immigration enforcers because,
one, that's a violation of due process rights, but second, there are a lot of equal protection
and racial justice issues in that, too.
And the police have been mistreating people of color for years.
And so that's a movement I think that in my mind is coming from the ground up in a
place where women and people of color, you know, have some power.
We don't really have that much power in the federal government right now, so we might
as well not even, you know, we might as well push that but not try.
But I think when you do look at the demographics, which are not at all destiny, the hope is
in the resistance, and the hope is in some unity and some intersectionality in the resistance
and listening, really, to women of color who hold a role in their communities that's
very different than the role that the federal government holds in our communities.
But this whole issue of power is something we haven't talked about very much this morning.
I'm sure we will later today.
But from where I'm sitting, you know, as one of my colleagues, Vanessa Daniel of the
Groundswell Fund, said a couple of weeks ago, America has a real serious problem with sharing
power with black and brown folks.
I mean there is an attitude of if I benefit from something, white people lose.
And that's not how it works, and that's actually not how it plays out.
All you have to do is look at the statistics for affirmative action.
The biggest benefactors of affirmative action have been white women.
It hasn't been black folks.
I mean it's not like we haven't gotten anything, but you know what I'm saying?
There is a real issue with power.
And Lailene, when you were talking about when President Obama was elected the first time,
yes there was all this joy in the air, but the studies now show that a whole lot of white
folks were scared crackles.
Because a black man was running the country.
A black man, and all of the stereotypes that go around, that go on with black and man,
went with that.
And so this stuff has been simmering under the surface for a very long time.
Donald Trump, and Marie Le Pen, and some of the other candidates globally, have just given
us another channel for people to – for that to be legitimate for people to come out and
act it out.
You know, one thing that all of you mentioned on some level was communication, and the issues
that we are having with communicating effectively to advance an intersectional agenda that is
good for all people.
And I want to sort of push back a little bit about – to take you to another level of
granularity.
I mean, given that the media has been one of the main places where we're segregated
now, we're segregated by age, by color, by ideology, political party, education level,
almost every variable you can imagine, there are these media communities, whether it's
social media communities, whether it's different TV channels and different news outlets, whether
it's different magazines and newspapers, you know, we're not ever in a common forum
anymore.
And even when it comes to specific kinds of communication, like the kinds of policy briefs
we need to write to deliver to staffers of policy makers and so on, what kind of media
strategy can you imagine that would help us advance and get us out of our communication
silos and get into a common conversation as well as to build up kind of a broad media
strategy because that's where reality is determined today.
And so how can we make the media more effectively reflect?
So all of you touched on that, and I'd love to hear your individual thoughts about that.
Well some of it you have to create on your own, so there is independent media out there.
So there's the mainstream media and then there is online, there's all sorts.
But the thing that you are referring to is something that I've seen for the past 20
years and that is people are only reading or watching stuff that they totally agree
with.
And so they're not coming out of that shell.
So if I come and tell you that the sky is yellow, and you are one of my regular viewers,
and you walk outside and somebody says isn't that blue sky?
No, it's yellow.
There is nothing that anybody can say to you.
I mean that is the thing that people have become.
They don't want to even hear what somebody else has to say.
So that means that you have to create different means of communication where you can reach
people where they are.
People are all over the place.
We know that some people prefer print.
Some people prefer online.
But what you have access to and what you don't have access to can make a difference in what
you hear and what you don't hear.
So that may mean, like for some of our global organizations, you know, they actually go
out in the communities and do it the old fashioned way with flyers and handouts.
Sometimes you have to do that in communities.
Some communities, everybody has a mobile phone so they can do something on mobile.
And believe it or not, one of the biggest users of mobile technology is on the continent
of Africa.
And so it is not this backward continent where nobody – they use mobile technology way
more than we do in this country.
The other thing that I would say is we need to invest in those independent media outlets
that are just doing bang-up work.
Pro Publica has been doing some amazing work.
That is – PRI is another.
Public Radio International.
You can invest in those kinds of entities because they are doing good work.
But some of the stuff we have to do on our own.
Our young people have been leading the way (inaudible).
Social media – what were you just saying?
Who – you were talking about what black women were talking about on Facebook.
That's a – I mean people tell more personal stuff on Facebook.
I've heard stuff from my friends – a friend of mine at 3:00 in the morning sent a message
saying I'm having a double mastectomy.
It's – but that was the place where she felt that she could say that.
We need to use – get smarter about how we are using all of those forms of media.
One of the challenges many of our small grass roots organizations face is they have – it's
enough to keep the lights on and get the work done.
They don't have somebody that can do communications for them.
They don't have somebody out there thinking proactively about what channels should we
use.
If you are going to invest in those kinds of grass roots communities, invest in them
so that they can get their own communication and have their own voice.
We're not using the platforms that are out there and those are growing to the extent
that we should be.
I think that Linda's point there is also how do we put data in the media in a way that
people – I mean I think about the infographics that circulate in social media that are very
effective presentations of data, and, you know, they're friendly to people that aren't
necessarily data heads, but, you know, it's more thinking about that kind of thing.
I'm convinced that at least the near term future is in data visualization.
Yes.
Because people, as much as this hurts my heart to say this, especially in front of academics,
people don't read, and reading levels are actually falling, you know.
So we, you know, kind of people who write health education materials, they say, oh,
aim for the sixth grade level.
And that's not good enough anymore.
But the point is people don't want to read.
So we have got to figure out how to talk about all these issues in pictures, and in charts
that are easily understood.
Now 82% of all page views happen on these devices.
People are not sitting at their laptops, they're not going to websites.
So whatever you do has to be mobilized.
And as somebody said to me not too long ago, social media is an art form.
Really?
But apparently it is, and so you have got to learn how to use hashtags, how to use tag,
how to include people across the spectrum to drive them to your property for your message.
Because we are segregated, but it is possible to do this.
But you've got to know how to do it, and to Deborah's point, most small organizations
just simply can't do it.
You have to be able to segment your audience as well.
That sounds so very marketing, but that's very true because people learn differently.
I'm a visual learner, so, you know, when I see a paper that there's not even a chart
on there, I'm going to – it's not that I'm not going to read it, I'm not going
to read it right away.
But if you are trying to get to me, visually is the way to go for me.
And then I go in and dig deeper.
But you use Instagram for certain things.
You use Facebook for certain things.
You use Twitter for other things.
Like at Women's Funding Network, we use Twitter really to push out advocacy and policy
pieces.
Facebook is more the community building among our network and among others.
I mean, understand the channels that you work with and understand who you are going after
and how they receive information.
How do they best respond to information?
And Kathy, I want to ask you, too, specifically about communicating with policy makers.
You mentioned so many policies, and you probably have some strategies that are particularly
effective in that arena.
Yeah, with policy makers they respond to constituents, and you don't have to necessarily be a citizen
to be a constituent.
And I think policy makers at the state and local level, you know, are better able to
support equality and inclusive democracy.
But they also really need to be pushed, right?
You know, we just tried to pass sanctuary legislation in the state of Maryland, and
it didn't work.
We're going to keep trying, working with CASA.
I also just want to – I feel like I should mention the power of Spanish language media
for the Latino community.
Even if you don't speak Spanish, you know, it's, you know, (inaudible).com, fusion,
and watching (inaudible).
They are actually the number one broadcasting station in New York City and Los Angeles.
And we know, in the immigrant justice movement, you know, that's how we got the 2006 marches.
The big immigration marches where millions attended.
And we know that's a very, very powerful organizing tool.
The other thing I wanted to mention is I think we need to – I feel that this segregation
in some ways needs to be bought, and in other ways, you know, despite the fact that it's
my job to talk to racist white people and try to change their mind, like there are some
people who actually, you know, we know from the polling are not going to change their
mind, and (inaudible) messaging towards them, as opposed to the 80% of the people who want
justice, who want equality, who want to fight racism and sexism and xenophobia and all of
those things.
So I think there is, you know, different messaging for different audiences, but oftentimes I've
noticed that, you know, we have pulling sort of about the way things are as opposed to
the way things could be, you know, if we talk to the majority of the folks who have been
excluded from the system.
Okay, thank you.
Now on that note, we have about five minutes left, and I want to take time for a couple
of audience questions for our panelists.
Way in the back.
Hi.
How do I talk to my white friends about racism?
For context, I'm from Montana.
Most of my friends are college educated and white and less than one percent of our population
is black.
So if I don't talk to them about racism, there aren't a lot of other people who can.
But those conversations don't necessarily go super great.
Sometimes I feel like I'm running against a brick wall.
So I would say that Kathy's point, your job probably isn't going to be to convince
them to change their minds during that conversation.
You might start with having the conversation.
People want to be heard.
And your friends would say, we're not racist.
Would they?
Probably.
Most people don't consider themselves racist.
So you might try engaging them in conversation and offering them the opportunity to look
at their lives.
They probably have no experience with people of color.
I mean, you're in Montana.
Not a bunch of them.
And so you could actually kind of pose it from that perspective and ask them to sort
of reflect about themselves in this world, in society, in what's happening now and
get – kind of start the dialogue that way rather than, you know, you're a racist and
I'm here to help you with that.
And I'm going to add to that.
Another thing you can do is help them think about racism in systems, not just in people.
Yes, that's what I was going to say.
And say, you know, I'm not saying you are a racist, but let's look at the way the
policy environment is operating in the United States and who is being advantaged and who
is being disadvantaged and that's another level.
And have some examples that play that out.
There's plenty of them.
But I was going to say the same thing because it's the systemic stuff that is really almost
worse than the in-your-face things because you can't always –
Yeah, it's hard to get (inaudible).
All right.
Another question.
Again in the back, on the right-hand side.
Hi, good morning.
So I come from the immigrant rights movement but now I work in Latin America with trade
unions.
And I remember after Obama was elected and he had majorities in the House and the Senate,
I was like, if we don't do immigration reform now, it's never going to happen.
Like we need to take advantage of our time.
So presuming that there will be enough revulsion, which is speculative, at what the GOP is doing
right now, and there is another, you know, House-Senate majority and eventually we get
a presidency, what would it take to get the Democratic party to focus on statehood for
Puerto Rico and D.C., which would totally change the game, right?
Because, you know, Americans have been totally fine with disenfranchising I don't know
how many millions of American citizens, who happen to be mostly black and brown, probably
just a coincidence.
But all of the issues with the electoral college and the gerrymandering become so much smaller
if all of a sudden we've got these two new states in the game.
And so, again, that opportunity would be a small window, right, it would have to be like
your first big punch before everyone else would be like, what?
Puerto Ricans aren't in Mexico?
But to make that move happen, is there any dialogue about that like at the higher levels
of power?
I mean not at the current higher levels of power in our nation, right, in who's in
charge of government.
But I think, you know, among the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic
Caucus, and the CBC, the Congressional Black Caucus, so it's something that has always
been talked about in the voting rights movement.
And I think – and so in my opinion I actually feel for you because I worked for trying to
get comprehensive immigration reform for quite some time, too.
And I think it's going to happen one day, but it's going to have to be from the grass
roots up, right.
So we've just got to change the country from the grass roots up.
But there is no reason not to be aspirational, right?
There's no reason not to be aspirational about these various types of disenfranchisement
and just blow them apart because, you know, what have we got to lose, right?
Yeah.
Tomorrow is mine, right?
You know, basically we are at a time when we need to reinvent our country from the ground
up and get rid of structural disenfranchisement and structural racism, so why not?
We need to make those goals for whatever movement it is that we are building in the resistance.
Okay.
One more question.
Yes.
Hi.
One of the communities that isn't often talked about when having these discussions
is the Native community.
So if we're talking about intersectionality, what can we, as people who are really trying
to promote intersectionality, do for women in Native groups?
Do you want me – I want to do health first.
So briefly, so, you know, the issues are the same and worse, obviously.
But there's no different strategy that – the strategy is to be inclusive.
Because what happens is Native women often get left out of the conversation.
In the public health space and equity space, we're talking about the issues of Native
women all the time.
We've got some political issues to deal with depending on where they live, because
the Indian health service has been a challenge for us.
But the point is we've got to bring them together and make sure that the folks in this
space understand how inclusive we need to be.
And it is interesting in the public health space oftentimes that doesn't happen.
But the strategies of intersectionality and inclusivity are the same.
And then the Women's Funding movement and women's foundations there's a very strong
Native movement among Native American women.
We're also part of a collaborative called Change Philanthropy.
And it's like the Association of Black Foundation Executives, and Bay Area Blacks in Philanthropy.
It's the HIPs as I like to call them, Hispanics in Philanthropy and so forth.
But there is a very strong Native Americans in Philanthropy group that are doing bang-up
work in the west and southwest.
And then we have women's funds out of the west and southwest who are particularly dealing
with those populations in an intersectional way.
Understanding that their experiences are different.
And to your point, one of the challenges with Native American women is depending – you
mentioned where they live.
there's a big difference between if you are living on reservation and if you are not
living on reservation.
And if you are living in a small town, and if you're – because of the way the – we
have trashed so many treaties with Native Americans, and grayed the laws, if you will,
of what is and what isn't, depending on where you live can make a difference on what
services you get or don't get.
I mean just to put it bluntly like that.
And that's something that has to be dealt with at the local level, but also as well
as the national level.
And I would say one other thing, that everybody in this room needs to do and tell your friends
is that this work takes time, and it takes actual engagement.
So it means you actually have to do something.
So it means that you need to show up at the library board hearing when they're discussing
what books are going to go in the school.
That's the places where ordinary folk are not showing up, but the people who are very
passionate about it are, and that's how your books are getting banned.
School board elections are another place.
I mean these kind of community-based, go to the planning council where economic development
is happening.
This takes time, and so you have to make a commitment within yourself and among your
friends that you are going to devote some actual time to this in addition to the knowledge,
but we have to show up.
And I would just add one thing to that, which is we have to change the narrative because,
you know, when you think about how kids learn about Native Americans, they learn about it
in textbooks, they are talked about in the past tense.
Yeah.
So you have generations of Americans coming out not even aware that Native Americans are
in their midst and that there are current issues today.
So we're not doing a good job of even at the youngest levels talking about including
that community in our national identity.
And we need to do a better job at that level as well.
Okay.
I think that we have to stop here because we need to give you guys a five minute break
before the next panel.
But – oh three minute – we're on a three-minute break schedule.
Okay, so in three minutes I'm going to stand up here and announce the next moderator, so
(inaudible) and be right back here in three minutes.
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