Amidst the Objectionable Tr*mpian Landscape, Racial Equity Perseveres
(more good news)
Bottom Line Upfront
Whites Believing in Reverse Racism: Despite having little lived experience of discrimination, large segments of White Americans—especially evangelicals—feel aggrieved by racial equity efforts. This sentiment is amplified by conservative media, which fuels backlash against diversity/equity/inclusion, critical race theory, and affirmative action.
STILL, THE GOOD NEWS:
Art as Resistance in L.A.: The 1.3-mile-long Destination Crenshaw monument is transforming Black Los Angeles through community-led public art, celebrating Black identity while reshaping public space and narrative.
Beauty as Political Power: Black beauty salons and barbershops have long served as centers for economic independence, political organizing, and cultural pride—continuing a legacy rooted in self-determination and resistance.
Maryland Targets Environmental Racism: Governor Wes Moore’s budget includes $11 million to eliminate lead poisoning in children, with a special focus on low-income communities, where Black children are disproportionately affected.
Black Wealth Through Housing: In Tacoma, WA, a coalition of Black developers is prioritizing Black-owned construction and design for over 240 housing projects, building community wealth and keeping dollars circulating locally.
Reparations-Inspired Homeownership: The Reparation Generation and Black Wealth Builders Fund in the East Bay are redistributing White wealth to Black families via direct grants and no-interest loans for homeownership—local reparations models with national potential.
New Housing Models Gain Ground: Community Land Trusts in Boston and Vermont offer permanently affordable housing and reduce homelessness among public school students—showing the scalability of collective ownership models.
Education Equity Through Innovation: In Philadelphia and beyond, nonprofits are stepping in to train and support Black educators, while districts in Colorado and North Carolina are providing teacher housing, tackling the dual crises of affordability and educator shortages.
Each of these initiatives is a “pebble” in a vast and often hostile landscape—but together, they represent scalable, local models for equity-driven systems change.
Discrimination against Whites?
Although my focus today will be on more positive news regarding racial equity and justice issues, primarily at the local level, I want to begin by providing some context that helps explain why any equity- and justice-focused effort is implicitly challenging, if not, at times, nearly impossible in the current environment.
In a March 2025 poll, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) discovered that while as many as 37% of Whites agree with the statement, “Discrimination against White Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against other groups,” that number soars to
59% for White evangelical Protestants
54% for Latter Day Saints
47% for White Catholics
47% for White non-evangelical Protestants.
Remember from last week, in another national poll, that 20% or fewer of the Whites surveyed believe they have been discriminated against themselves.
This is what I refer to as the Fox News effect (previously known as the Rush Limbaugh effect).
Many Whites don’t have grievances based on personal experiences; they’ve been led to believe for decades that they permanently now sit on the ‘short end of the stick.’
That a country that has always favored them no longer does.
That the benefits they so richly deserve are being taken away from them.
That because Whites (supposedly) no longer sit at the top of the racial caste.
That the country now must be restored, rehabilitated, reformed, and resocialized back to greatness.
It helps explain why and how the anti-DEI, anti-critical race theory, and anti-affirmative action movements have grown so large and, in the post-George Floyd murder era, been so successful, much to my disdain.
And helps explain why the Tr*mp administration feels vindicated in its massive purge of anything vaguely aligned with their vague definition and notion of ‘DEI.’
Good News to Keep Hold Of
I’m spotlighting a bunch of important equity-focused initiatives below. They come from many sources to which I subscribe. I want to give a special shout-out, for the second time during this newsletter’s history, to an exceptional publication and organization, Next City.
Next City is a nonprofit news organization that believes journalists have the power to amplify solutions and spread workable ideas from one city to the next city. Their mission is to inspire greater economic, environmental, and social justice in cities. https://https://nextcity.org/.
This “Unapologetically Black” Monument Is Already Changing Los Angeles
This 1.3 mile-long (!) monument to Black Los Angeles—the largest public Black art project in the U.S.—is beginning to transform the historically Black, working class set of neighborhoods known as Crenshaw. The monument-creation project has been led by a non-profit community development organization, Destination Crenshaw, in partnership with L.A. city council members over the past four years.[1]
Black beauticians have always done more than style hair—they’ve built power
African American women (and men) know a truth that is not visible to those outside the community (particularly, Whites): Black beauty salons (and Black barbershops) have long served as places for supporting political activism, resisting anti-Black ideology, and strengthening the Black community by providing a safe space and economic capital in “Black woman-owned, run, and patronized businesses.”[2]
Beauty shops and beauticians have created the center of Black beauty while making room for the Black woman’s perspective to be shamelessly expressed and strengthened. “Hair care became a means to an end to create confidence for women, to help them become economically independent, to help them to become leaders in the community, to help them make a difference,” says A’Lelia Budles, great-great-granddaughter of Madame C.J. Walker, the U.S.’s first female self-made millionaire who built her wealth through Black hair care in the early 20th century.
From The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom that reports on gender, politics, and policy, https://19thnews.org/2025/04/black-beauticians-salons-power-community/.
Maryland Tackling The Problem of Lead Poisoning in Children
Governor Wes Moore of Maryland approved a budget this month that included funding to eliminate lead poisoning in children across the state, not just in Baltimore City, where it is especially prevalent. Numerous Maryland cities have rental housing with lead paint, as it was commonly used when constructing new homes in the state until it was outlawed in 1978.
The Maryland Department of the Environment leads the coordination of efforts across the state to eliminate childhood lead poisoning. With the passage of the latest budget, it will have an additional $11 million this fiscal year to expand case management, increase inspections, and remove lead hazards from homes, with a special focus on properties in communities where a high percentage of households have lower incomes.[3]
High levels of lead exposure during childhood can significantly affect cognitive development.
In chapter 3 of my book, I explain that although lead poisoning in children occurs across races in the U.S., Black children are five times more likely to suffer from lead poisoning than White children, primarily because they are more likely to live in housing (with lead paint and served by lead pipes) built before the late 1970s. Additionally, they are more likely to reside near airports (where planes use leaded gasoline), ore and metal processing plants, and waste incinerators (among other sources) that routinely expose lower-income households to lead.[4]
Black Developers Collective Aims to Keep the Black Dollar in the Community
This National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) article features a group of Black real estate developers in Pierce County, Washington (home to Tacoma, WA, a bit south of Seattle) committed to keeping the “Black dollar” in the community and helping to build local Black wealth. The coalition hires Black contractors and Black businesses to conduct the work. The collective was co-founded by developers and several pastors from local Black churches.
The two-year-old collective currently has more than “240 homeownership and rental development projects in the South Puget Sound waiting to be fully funded.”[5]
Crash Into Housing: How the Bama Works Fund mobilized private, public, & philanthropic capital to transform public housing
A philanthropic organization located in Charlottesville, VA, Bama Works Fund, has helped mobilize significant amounts of capital in this small city (home to U. of Virginia) to build resident-led affordable housing projects. It increased its investments and involvement after the 2017 White supremacist ‘Unite the Right’ Rally there.
“In each project, residents were placed at the forefront of decision-making and redesigning their community to ensure procedural equity. Reforming the entire public housing system in Charlottesville became a vital project, not only for the livelihoods of residents but also to serve as a model for other public housing initiatives. … This model of cross-sector collaboration and resident-led initiatives offers a replicable framework for addressing system-level affordable housing challenges in other communities.”[6]
Charlottesville, like just about every other city in America, has a history of zoning based on race and class. In a 2019 study of the city, 25% of Charlottesville families did not earn enough to meet the costs of living and working in the city (e.g., making $45,000 for a parent and 2 kids). Black families were slowly being pushed out of the city with the introduction of luxury housing (from 2010-2019, the city saw a 96% increase of families earning more than $150K) and new companies migrating there.[7]
Although I couldn’t find any data more recent than 2005, in that year, 84% of Charlottesville residents living in public housing were African American. This once again demonstrates how the housing affordability crisis disproportionately affects African Americans, making the Bama Works Fund more essential than ever in Charlottesville and beyond.
East Bay organizations address racial wealth gap, promote Black homeownership
In 2021, a White Berkeley resident, Karen Hughes, horrified by the police murder of George Floyd, co-founded the nonprofit Reparation Generation (RepGen) alongside Kiko Davis Snoddy, an African American philanthropist from Detroit.
Says Davis Snoddy, the organization “provides reparative transfers to Black Americans, specifically for wealth-building pursuits, by redistributing wealth from those [White] individuals, businesses and foundations that acknowledge the history has prevented Black Americans from reaching their full economic potential.”[8]
“RepGen believes that reparations need to be determined by the people being harmed, in this case, Black American descendants of slavery. … Homeownership is their first initiative.”[9]
The focus of the organization in its early years has been to offer $25,000 in a homeownership reparative transfer (HORT), a transfer of wealth, to assist aspiring Black homeowners in purchasing their first house. So far, the wealth transfers have supported the first cohort of six homeowners and a second cohort of eight.
RepGen inspired the formation of the Black Wealth Builders Fund (BWB) in the East Bay (Oakland, CA region), established by a retired White pastor from a local United Church of Christ parish that has a Racists Anonymous chapter. This initiative aims to transfer White wealth to Blacks locally through housing. His group collaborates with a Black-led nonprofit, Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, to provide down payment assistance (through no-interest loans) for new homeowners. BWB also partners with two local organizations, the Richmond Community Foundation and Richmond Neighborhood Housing Services, which help applicants throughout the entire home purchase process. From mid-2022 through the end of 2024, BWB provided loans to 42 homeowners.[10]
Both initiatives offer new local models for wealth transfer and race-based reparations that can be initiated anywhere in the U.S.
How Community Land Trusts Create Lasting Change
Community land trusts (CLTs), a model for housing designed to ensure collective land ownership and permanent housing affordability, have gained popularity over the past decade, despite having existed for more than half a century.
Two examples from this article:
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston (MA) has been around for several decades and fought to acquire 30 acres in the city to build CLTs for households with lower incomes. In 2023 alone, “they helped house the families of 450 public school students … with the aim of permanently reducing student homelessness in Boston.”[11]
The Champlain (VT) Housing Trust (CHT), the largest CLT in the U.S., has created a new affordable housing community site with 94 homes for rent or sale, “with rent prices capped at roughly one-third of the income levels of the low-tomoderate-income residents slated to live in the community.[12]
Although the estimates of CLTs nationally range from 225 to 450, the bottom line is that these new housing models can create thousands of permanently affordable housing units across the country.[13]
U.S. Cities Need More Diverse Teachers. Philly Has An Answer
Public education in America is highly vulnerable due to a multitude of actions by the new Tr*mp administration, from threatening to withhold federal funds to the faux-war on DEI and the elimination of AmeriCorps programs that provide teachers in countless high-poverty neighborhood schools. As always, it remains very difficult to recruit and retain Black and Brown teachers, who are essential for the success of Black and Brown students.
Two Philadelphia nonprofits have stepped in to fill the gap in their city.[14]
Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia works on both the student and teacher sides of the equation, “introducing middle school students to transformative educational opportunities while simultaneously exposing college students to the teaching profession.” They are not new to the game, having trained 500 college students to become teachers over the past 30 years while helping build the academic foundation for more than 1500 middle school students to achieve significant success in high school and beyond. https://www.breakthroughphilly.org/.
The Center for Black Educator Development recruits, trains and retains Black teachers through mentoring, coaching and culturally responsive training to help them not only get hired but also thrive in their teaching careers.
Rent and teacher shortages are on the rise, so this school district is building a tiny home village
A tiny home village built for young people experiencing poverty in Colorado Springs (CO) inspired school system leaders to collaborate with the founder and CEO of We Fortify, who developed this village, to create something similar on school system property.
We Fortify is a nonprofit land development and human services social enterprise that seeks to elevate young adults out of poverty and provide teachers and other public service professionals—such as nurses and firefighters—a better chance to serve, all through innovative forms of housing, such as villages of tiny homes.
The nonprofit is now set to build two tiny home communities for teachers and school staff on one of its community school campuses.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School system (NC) is offering a different model, by providing apartments “at below-rate rent, homeownership opportunities for teachers, and eventually build its own housing development.”[15]
By providing more affordable housing, these two school systems support teachers facing the dual challenges of stagnant wages and rising housing costs, a reality that is true nearly everywhere in the country.
Both initiatives demonstrate another model for housing affordability. Although neither is a race-based solution, comparable efforts in many urban and suburban communities would significantly support teachers of color by providing a potentially compelling model for housing affordability.
In Closing
We don’t need to be reminded that each of these initiatives represents individual pebbles sitting on a vast landscape in which high barriers are being actively constructed to restrict, if not ban, anything resembling racial equity. Yet, we also know that there are literally thousands of ‘pebbles’ that can be found across all 50 states, with some occurring at the state level and most happening locally.
We must continue to build and expand these initiatives and innovate comparable models—such as housing, education, community development, criminal and environmental justice—in as many locations as possible.
Next week, I’ll look to explore more.
If you know of any examples you’d like to see me spotlight, email me at level.the.playing.field@hey.com.
Footnotes
[1] “This ‘Unapologetically Black’ Monument Is Already Changing Los Angeles,” Next City, May 8, 2025, https://nextcity.org/podcast/this-unapologetically-black-monument-is-already-changing-los-angeles.
[2] Sabreen Dawud, “Black beauticians have always done more than style hair—they’ve built power,” The 19th, April 7, 2025, https://19thnews.org/2025/04/black-beauticians-salons-power-community/.
[3] Kevin McManus, Maryland Tackling The Problem Of Lead Poisoning In Children,” WFMD-93, May 2, 2025, https://www.wfmd.com/2025/05/02/maryland-tackling-the-problem-of-lead-poisoning-in-children/.
[4] Sources include: Robert D. Bullard, “Environment and Morality Confronting Environmental Racism in the United States,” Identities, Conflict and Cohesion Programme, Paper Number 8, October 2004, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, p. 8, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/45938/8.pdf.
And Lindsay Key, “Lead Exposure, Segregation Combine to Widen Achievement Gap,” Duke Global Health Institute, August 11, 2022, https://globalhealth.duke.edu/news/lead-exposure-segregation-combine-widen-achievement-gap.
[5] Kristi Eaton, “Black Developers Collective Aims to Keep the Black Dollar in the Community,” NCRC.org, April 28, 2025, https://ncrc.org/black-developers-collective-aims-to-keep-the-black-dollar-in-the-community/.
[6] Christine Mahoney, “Crash Into Housing,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, April 28, 2025, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/funding-public-housing-bama-works-fund.
[7] “The Impact of Racism on Affordable Housing in Charlottesville: A report by the Charlottesville Low-Income Housing Coalition, 2019, https://www.justice4all.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Housing-Report-FINAL.pdf, pp. 1-2.
[8] “Kiko Davis Snoddy, Crain’s Detroit Business, November 8, 2021, https://www.crainsdetroit.com/awards/kiko-davis-snoddy-2021-most-influential-women.
[9] Katharine Davies Samway, “East Bay organizations address racial wealth gap, promote Black homeownership,” Oakland Voices, December 26, 2024, https://oaklandvoices.us/2024/12/26/reparations-east-bay-repgen-black-wealth-builders/.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Akin Olla, “How Community Land Trusts Create Lasting Change,” National Community Reinvestment Coalition, April 29, 2025, https://ncrc.org/how-community-land-trusts-create-lasting-change.
[12] Ibid.
[13] “The Community Land Trust Model and Movement,” Grounded Solutions Network, https://groundedsolutions.org/resources/community-land-trust-model-and-movement/.
[14] Michelle Palmer and Sharif El-Mekki, “U.S. Cities Need More Diverse Teachers. Philly Has an Answer,” Next City, May 6, 2025, https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/u.s.-cities-need-more-diverse-teachers.-philly-has-an-answer.
[15]To combat teacher shortages, this district is building housing for its educators, GoodGoodGood, February 5, 2025, “https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/teacher-housing-charlotte-mecklenburg-schools.
Thank you Steve. I needed some good news.