Intro to Solutions – Investing in Racially Equitable Communities to End Our Continuing Forms of Apartheid

Dec 30, 2024

“In law school you’re taught if someone’s rights are violated, there have to be remedies. And the remedies are shaped by the nature of the violation, which is understanding what the motives are, what the intent was, what’s the extent of the injury. It’s central to what kind of remedy you impose.” 
Bryan Stephenson, author of Just Mercy

BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front

Systemic racism has entrenched segregation, poverty, and disinvestment in African American communities, requiring bold action to reverse these trends.
Racist housing, zoning, and transportation policies created apartheid-like systems that continue to deny equitable access to opportunity-rich neighborhoods.
Addressing food, healthcare, and banking deserts—products of intentional neglect—requires transformative policies and investments.
Solutions must prioritize racial integration, equitable development, and dismantling the systemic barriers that perpetuate segregation.
Each remedy should be evaluated for its ability to repair past harm, address current disparities, and create a level societal playing field.
Achieving meaningful progress demands widespread support across racial groups (especially Whites) to dismantle the legacies of systemic racism.

As I indicated in my last post of 2024, after this newsletter steeped us in the sludge and filth of systemic racism’s history and legacy, it is time to focus on how we, as a nation, finally climb out of the mire.

In my book, I devote the final section to a voluminous range of transformative solutions that cut across the critical policy areas where we have failed to invest in the social and economic change required to redress two and a half centuries of wrongs perpetrated against African Americans. I organized the solutions into four areas:

Investing in racially equitable communities to end our continuing forms of apartheid
Transforming the education landscape for our African American youth
Transforming pathways to economic prosperity
Shortening the arc that bends toward full racial justice

Across these areas, I highlight more than three dozen solutions. Installing each proposed solution would require a heavy, singular lift. Implementing multiple solutions in, say, a half-decade would require lifts of heroic strength. With Donald Trump taking office in a matter of weeks, many of these proposals will likely be near-impossible to come to fruition while he’s in office.

That doesn’t mean the pressing need for redress and repair doesn’t remain in full view.

We should strive for meaningful progress everywhere we can while preparing to power toward transformation … pushing harder whenever the right opportunities arise.

[1]

Let me be clear: I support reparations, but I don’t believe they will be possible in my lifetime (I’m 63).

So, if not reparations, how do we even begin to pay back a societal debt that not only accounts for slavery but also for:

The lengthy time of the Black Codes (several decades) and Jim Crow laws (nearly a century)?
Convict leasing of hundreds of thousands (probably more) of predominantly Black men for misdemeanor crimes and, worse, fabricated charges (more than half a century)?
A patently unscrupulous sharecropping system holding predominantly Black farmers (several million of them) in near-perpetual circumstances of debt to White landlords (three-quarters of a century)?
Thousands of lynchings and hundreds of White-on-Black massacres after the Civil War (more than eight decades)?
Systematic redlining and forced residential segregation (much of the twentieth century)?
The deployment of sundown towns in thousands of jurisdictions across dozens of states (nearly a century)?
Lawfully segregated schools (nearly a century) and systematic underfunding of majority-Black schools (largely continues today)?
The Homestead Acts benefiting several million White families to the near exclusion of Black families from free land distribution (one hundred years)?
Intentional exclusion from nearly all New Deal employment programs (1930s and 1940s) and the GI Bill (the 1940s through the 1960s)?
Federal and local urban renewal initiatives and the enactment of the Federal-Aid Highway Act that intentionally decimated Black neighborhoods in hundreds of large- and medium-sized U.S. cities (primarily the 1950s–1980s)?
Intentional public and private disinvestment from and neglect of urban and semi-urban Black neighborhoods causing food, banking, and healthcare deserts (more than a century and continues today)?

And the list goes on.

We never redressed or repaired any of these wrongs.

Recommendations from the 1968 Kerner Commission made a valiant and failed attempt at redress and repair (Kerner Commission). Although their proposals were nowhere near as transformative in their thinking as reparations, they went further than anything else, before or since.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share the recommendations from the chapter, “Investing in Racially Equitable Communities to End Our Continuing Forms of Apartheid.”

Each solution would make a measurable difference in changing and improving outcomes for African Americans across our land.

A few could be straightforward to enact, whereas many others would not.

All would require a relative groundswell of support from people across race and ethnicity, especially White people.

As you read each, ask: Will this substantively contribute to our collective duty of repairing past harm, undoing current harm, unraveling legacies of systemic racism, and systematically making the societal playing field far more even?

Or, as Bryan Stephenson infers in the opening quote from this chapter: Do these remedies match the extent of the injuries suffered?

Fundamental to the change we need is how we finally undo residential, racial segregation, and everything that comes with that. Why start here?

We know full well that throughout the twentieth century, the growth and development of cities and suburbs alike served White households incredibly well, most often at the direct expense of Black households, through racist housing, zoning, transportation, and environmental policies, plans, and investment decisions.

Despite advancements from the civil rights era, far too many African Americans still live in or near neighborhoods with concentrated poverty because housing discrimination, exclusionary zoning, and other systemic barriers have systematically prevented them from living in amenity- and opportunity-rich areas and more racially integrated and wealthier communities.[2] Our history contains a fundamental set of disinvestment and exclusion issues needing redress and repair.

In other words, we have to reverse the direction of our many forms of apartheid.

Any headway we make as a society toward undoing our informal apartheid structures will require entirely different mindsets, strategies, and game plans for neighborhood and community investment.

We need to look at how we undo and permanently correct the food, healthcare, and banking deserts, as well as the environmental malpractices that have made near-permanent dwellings in too many Black neighborhoods. These deserts do not naturally occur, as the term seems to imply. Instead, they are forms of apartheid—intentional forms of racial segregation, discrimination, and disinvestment. To move far away from the realities of apartheid, we need new, transformative policies, practices, and investments that allow for far greater residential and racial integration and far more African Americans living in high-opportunity neighborhoods.

My next post will explore the first of a dozen solutions in this area.

Leveling the Playing Field (finally!)

Discussion about this post