Social Equity and Racial Justice Resolution
There is some misinformation about the Social Equity and Racial Justice resolution recently passed by the Ashland City Council that seems to have taken on a life of its own on social media. Specifically, the issue seems to be around how and why the resolution came before the Council. This post is written to clear up the misinformation so that the people of Ashland understand both the motivation and process behind the resolution.
A Bit of Background
George Floyd was murdered on May 25. By the time our next Council meeting happened on June 2, demonstrations were happening locally, across this nation, and around the world calling for racial justice. At that meeting Councilor Akins announced the creation of the Truth and Conciliation Commission and invited interested councilors to attend their first meeting, which was to be that Friday.
I attended that first meeting of the Truth and Conciliation Commission and saw that they were setting up to do good work – creating a structure and beginning to talk about the scope of the commission’s work. I had to leave at the 1.5 hour mark for another meeting, so I didn’t hear the process for future meetings. I haven’t received any information from the organizers about future meetings, but I was and remain interested in the Commission’s work. What was also true was that I didn’t see many Black/African American residents at that first meeting and I wanted to hear specifically from that community.
At our second Council meeting in June, Councilor Rosenthal suggested that we needed to speak to this issue and lend support as a Council. That rang true for me, so that week I reached out to people I knew from the BIPOC community who work on diversity, equity, and inclusion at various organizations around the community (SOU, the Ashland School District, and OSF primarily). I asked if they would talk with me about what their community needed from the Council – and I asked them to invite anyone else they thought should be in the conversation.
Several of them did invite other people and we ended up with seven BIPOC community leaders on the Zoom meeting. I met with two additional BIPOC leaders individually after that meeting because they couldn’t attend due to scheduling issues. Councilor Slattery and I had been working on one of the issues in this resolution starting last fall, so I reached out to him and invited him to attend as well, which he did. I figured that Councilor Akins was working on the Truth and Conciliation Commission, and this conversation was a way for Councilor Slattery to engage as a councilor and as part of SOU.
The meeting was very simple. We asked two questions:
1. What does the BIPOC community need right now to feel supported by city government?
2. What needs to be on the longer-term agenda for moving our community forward?
I did not attend thinking that we would be drafting a resolution necessarily. I just wanted to know from BIPOC community members who had been leading locally on these issues for a long time what the community needed from their perspective.
What They Said
These community members spoke to several themes that hit home for me. I mostly listened, asked clarifying questions, and typed as quickly as possible to capture what they were sharing with us.
The first general theme, and what prompted me to move forward with drafting the resolution, is that they are exhausted. Many have been working on racial justice and social equity work for decades without seeing much change. Between that constant strain, generational trauma, COVID-19 tearing through frontline communities, and George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, they were pushed to their emotional limits.
We heard that these injustices and the systems that create them are not their doing, yet they are the ones harmed by them, so we should be aware of how much we ask of them to lead the effort to change these systems. And we were reminded that most of Ashland is white, and that white people also have a responsibility to lead action for change. We should not sit back and expect BIPOC people to do all the heavy lifting. We heard that we need to take up the work and be understanding of what the world is like right now for BIPOC people.
While words of support are important, they wanted more than just words – they wanted support backed up by meaningful action. They wanted us to say out loud that while many Ashlanders hold the value of equality and welcome, we are still a place where people of color do not feel authentically welcomed or safe. As a community, we simply aren’t there yet in making our actions align with the values we espouse.
We heard frustration that Council hadn’t stepped forward when it had opportunities in the past to lead this community forward on issues of racial justice and help Ashland become the community so many of us want it to be. They wanted Council to affirm and support that black lives matter and to celebrate Black/African American culture. They wanted us to take responsibility for the systems we manage in this community.
They told us that we, as councilors, have the power to take action and circles of influence that others don’t have and that we needed to use them. They wanted us to use our influence with other government bodies – to push our elected colleagues and leverage the special relationship that local governments have with county, state, and federal bodies.
They wanted more community conversations with our police department so that officers can continue to learn about the experience of BIPOC people in the community and the people can understand better what our police department is doing in terms of racial justice issues.
They wanted accountability – as a Council and as a community, as well as widespread training resources. They wanted our community to have a way to recognize businesses that are getting it right and have a mechanism to respond when someone has a negative incident that can help that person move forward while offering training and guidance to the business or individual so that it doesn’t happen again.
And they recognized that this work will need to be supported financially if it is to be effective in the long-run. Efforts have gotten underway before, but until there are resources to sustain the work, it will not get the traction it needs.
We were asked what type of cultural competency training had the Council undergone so that it could better serve the local BIPOC community? The answer is none.
We heard that we need to create some small successes now to build hope and inspiration for more successes in the future.
And we heard stories.
A young man who had played football for SOU a few years back told about seeing “Go Raiders!” signs in local stores and walking in and it being very clear that even though he played on the team, and the business would gladly take his money, he wasn’t actually welcome. He was calling in from in front of Martin Luther King’s house in Atlanta just a few days after the killing of Rayshard Brooks. We could hear the emotion in his voice and he spoke of his desire to be done with discrimination and that while he can’t speak for everyone, he thinks all people just want to be accepted.
A man told of being physically sick from this work and fearing for the lives of fellow advocates because of the strain of advocacy work.
A woman spoke about her daughter being followed and harassed by other customers in an Ashland store.
Home Influences
Some people know that my children, most of whom are grown, are Haitian American. Throughout this situation with George Floyd’s murder and the demonstrations that continue to follow it, I have checked in with them to see how they are feeling and what they are thinking about it. I have listened and I have shared my perspective, when it felt appropriate to do so, that this moment in time feels different than past moments and this may be the time our nation finally stands up and does the social equity and racial justice work needed to fulfill its promise.
But several of my children do not feel hopeful. One of them said that they would “believe it when I see it” when I asked if they thought real change would come from the efforts that are underway. Another one told me that they didn’t think they would see racism change in their lifetimes. Both are in their 20s – so young to be feeling this hopeless about the possibility that their community and nation will ever treat them fairly.
Ashland has been a very supportive community in many ways for my children. It is also true that my children ran home one summer day after someone in a pickup truck yelled the N word at them as they walked down Ashland Street. They were middle school aged, terrified, angry, and confused as to why people they didn’t even know could feel such hatred toward them.
If I walk into a store a few steps behind my children so that people don’t realize we are together, I can see how they are perceived in the world - how they are watched more closely than others by store employees. and how they are suspected, more than others, of being thieves. I have also seen the demeanor of store clerks change for the better when I walk up and make it clear that I am their mother. I know white privilege is real because I have thrown it like a cloak over my children to try to protect them – even in Ashland.
About a year and a half ago, one of my daughters had a humiliating experience with a local store clerk. She called me for help and when I arrived the woman simply stopped talking to my daughter and tried to focus the conversation on me, relegating my daughter to the role of a child even though she is a grown woman. When it was over, there was nowhere to go for help. This woman had caused great harm, but she hadn’t broken any laws, and our community doesn’t have any sort of response and training program for situations like this.
Just before COVID-19 arrived this year, one of my children finally just walked out of a local grocery store after literally being stalked through the aisles by a store employee.
My children, and many other young people in the BIPOC community, want elected officials to take action so that these, and other more intense situations with authority figures, stop happening to them. And much, but certainly not all, of what needs to happen is already known.
The Decision to Go Forward with the Resolution
Using the notes I had taken from the various conversations with BIPOC community members, I decided to draft a statement to put before the Council at the next meeting. It would say some of the things that needed to be said out loud. It would include actions to back up the words. It would support our local BIPOC community members and recognize our collective responsibility to act. It would have accountability. It would be a beginning of sustained action at the City of Ashland to help our community make real change.
What it would not be is THE resolution. It would not be the only option for action at the Council level. It would be A resolution – hopefully one that would open the doors to future actions by making it clear that this Council supports racial justice and social equity goals. The resolution would not preclude any future action by Council.
I drafted the resolution and distributed it to the people I had spoken with, including Councilors Slattery and Rosenthal, for comments. I also attended the Friday night vigil at Railroad Park and talked with the Amplifying Melanated Voices organizers about this resolution. They were interested, so I sent the resolution to them the next day, but did not receive any feedback from them before the Council meeting. We received several positive responses and some thoughts about where it could be strengthened from BIPOC leaders. I did my best to incorporate those suggestions into the document.
Timing
Once the draft resolution was released, several members of the BIPOC community reached out before Council considered this resolution to ask that it be delayed. Their concern was not with the list of actions, per se, but with the process of creating them. The assumption out in the community was that the resolution was created just by councilors and that the BIPOC community wasn’t involved in the discussions that led to this resolution. This, in spite of the fact that I have consistently spoken to the process that led to the resolution and have been happy to answer questions about it. The simple fact that it wasn’t written by the BIPOC community made the resolution invalid in some people’s minds.
I seriously considered postponing it. I believe in community engagement and I see the value of both broad and deep public participation. I still see the value of that engagement with these issues in Ashland because what is in the resolution is not, by any means, everything that needs to be done. Many other conversations are happening and I fully expect Council to consider additional actions in the future. There are also plenty of opportunities, even with COVID-19, to bring the community together to consider next steps for actions not included in this resolution.
But I also know, especially after watching from my seat on Council, how slow government works when it comes to making significant changes in its operations and taking on new programs. It’s designed this way because it’s generally not a good idea for government to be able to shift direction too quickly. Imagine what would have happened if Donald Trump could have had everything change to the way he wanted it the day he took office.
But here’s what happens if we wait:
We would first need to create some form of community process. That would likely be followed with the development of a commission, which takes 30 days after it is created to become active. COVID-19 shut down most of our commissions and they are just now starting to meet by Zoom, but that could change at any time if our virus numbers spike. Then there is the process of adding people to the commission before it even starts to do its work. By now it’s September. Commissions meet once a month for two hours generally. I know from chairing the new Climate Policy Commission over the last year that it takes several of these meetings for a new commission to get its bearings and begin to work on the issue it was convened to address. By now, it’s November or December. We have new councilors coming on from the election and they are being thrown immediately into the budget process, which is all consuming for several months after the start of the new year. Now it’s next spring – and Council still hasn’t gotten anything done.
If I am going to have regret about my response during this moment in time, I want that regret to be that I took the wrong action, not that I failed to take any action. But I don’t think this list of Council and City of Ashland commitments are the wrong actions. By and large, they come from local BIPOC leaders. They are necessary, if not sufficient by themselves, and there is general agreement that they need to be done, so waiting doesn’t feel like the right choice.
Elements of the Resolution – And How They Got Here
The actual resolution is HERE. .
There are four actions that the City Council takes immediately:
1. Designate Social Equity and Racial Justice as a Value Service – This is critically important in order to have these issues taken up in strategic planning efforts at the City, which is how resources may be brought to bear on the work over time. We are trying to get this planning process, at least for several Value Services, up and running over the next few months, and my hope is that we can take this particular Value Service up, along with Homelessness, and possibly one more this calendar year. This is also the mechanism that helps the City provide sustained effort in partnership with other community organizations. (Addresses the need for sustained support identified by BIPOC community leaders)
2. Proclaim Juneteenth as an annual day of municipal commemoration and partnering with others to celebrate it (Cultural celebrations requested by BIPOC community leaders and called for by residents who have written to Council)
3. Advocate at the state and federal levels for policy reforms. (Leverages Council’s sphere of influence and relationships with other elected officials as requested by BIPOC community leaders)
4. Work as a “Committee of the Whole” to move these efforts forward. This means that essentially the City Council is taking on work elements in the following list and will be reporting back on their progress at regularly scheduled Council meetings. (Accountability, words of support followed up meaningful action, and creating early victories as requested by BIPOC community leaders)
The Council then committed the City of Ashland to the following (not in any priority order):
1. Ashland Police Department to take a more active role in on-campus conversations about racial justice at SOU and help residents understand APD’s policies and programs related to social justice (Direct response to requests from BIPOC community leaders to have APD engage more with the community)
2. Strengthen cultural competency and intrinsic bias training for city councilors and staff (Response to question about what training we are doing as a Council in order to be able to best serve BIPOC community)
3. Display Black Lives Matter signs at City-owned locations (Response to request to show visible support for advocates from BIPOC community leaders)
4. Continue and enhance support for the annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The City has generally taken a very minor role and while the celebration may be changing, the City will take a more active role in the future (Cultural celebrations requested by BIPOC community leaders)
5. Connect with SOU and its students to better understand student experiences in town, especially for students of color, as a first step toward improving that experience. We don’t know what is happening to our BIPOC students in our community, so this is a first step toward understanding so that effective actions can be planned and implemented. (Requested by BIPOC community leaders)
6. Work with community partners to develop training, incident response, and community acknowledgement programs to address systemic root causes of inequality and racial injustice. This is the project Councilor Slattery and I were working on before COVID-19 hit. This effort will work with community partners to offer trainings to residents and businesses, a way for BIPOC people to get help when they have a negative interaction, and public acknowledgement of businesses that are doing their social equity and racial justice work. (Requested by BIPOC community leaders and my daughter)
7. Work with Jackson County and neighboring communities to develop a program that will provide trained mental health professionals for instances where a call for help is made because someone is having a mental health crisis. This is essentially creating a CAHOOTS-like program that works for smaller communities like Ashland. (This comes from many advocates in the community – I don’t know how many of them are BIPOC community members – who have written to Council about the intersection between race, poverty, and addiction/mental health and have asked us to figure out how to make sure that calls for help are routed to the right services.)
8. Determine the feasibility of a mural project to express our community’s commitment to making meaningful, visible, and ongoing progress. (We know art is a powerful medium for expression, healing, and inspiration to do hard work. Several residents have shared news articles about how other communities are coming together around community mural projects.)
9. Request a proactive review of the policies that pertain to the standard process of investigating use of deadly force incidents in Jackson County. (This has come before Council twice through a process that gives us very little opportunity for input, but I think there are real problems with this policy, so I added this myself.)
10. Review recruiting/hiring practices to address implicit bias with input from leaders of local diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. (We have started some of this work at the City, but we need to do a more systemic review process and re-set our procedures so that we are ensuring diverse applicant pools as a first step. I added this to strengthen the work that has been started.)
11. Renew the effort with Indigenous leaders in the community to find a solution to the renaming of Dead Indian Memorial Road. (Direct request from BIPOC community members as well as residents writing to Council.)
Next Steps
After the resolution passed at the last council meeting, I requested that we have a standing agenda item for this topic going forward while the Council is operating as a “Committee of the Whole.” My intention is for us to assign tasks from this list to staff where appropriate, have councilors (or teams of councilors) sign on to move other tasks on this list forward, and to set timelines for when we, and the community at large, will receive progress reports at Council meetings. It is my expectation that many of these tasks will involve engaging with the BIPOC community - not to ask them to do the heavy lifting for us, but to make sure we are getting it right.
Next, the City must engage the community in conversations about actions that are not on this list. That is tricky in these days of COVID-19, but certainly not impossible. I am open to conversations with local BIPOC leaders, both the ones we consulted with to develop this resolution and any others, about how we move forward with broader community engagement while Council takes on the tasks in this resolution.
I have been heartened by the immediate and strong support for social equity and racial justice work shown by all Ashland City Councilors. I see strong support from staff as well. There may be disagreements about the right process for moving forward, but it is clear that we are all are committed to doing the work to make Ashland the community so many of us want it to be. I look forward to hearing more from the Truth and Conciliation Commission and collaborating further with our local BIPOC community to create lasting solutions.
If you have questions or comments, please send them to my council email: tonya@council.ashland.or.us