Transitioning from Distressing Histories to Possible Futures
BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front
Over the past five months, I examined the history and impact of eight racial myths, highlighting how systemic racism continues to perpetuate inequities, using Ferguson, Missouri, as a powerful case study.
As we approach 2025, I will shift focus to solutions in four areas: equitable community investment, education reform for African American youth, economic opportunity, and advancing racial justice.
Implementing these solutions will be challenging, especially under an incoming Trump II administration, but progress can be made incrementally by figuring out how to leverage success from localized or pilot efforts.
In the past five months, in a shorter form than my book, I sought to explain in rich detail the history behind eight of our nation’s racial myths and how that history continues to play out today in inequities and disparities as well as policies and practices that sustain the unlevel racial playing field.
For the archive of my posts from late July to now, click HERE.
I saw in Ferguson, Missouri—a town of 20,000 I knew nothing about a decade ago—as a common and unfortunate example of how the many legacies of systemic racism in America funnel into a place. In four newsletter posts, I concluded my review of the myths showing how Ferguson’s contemptible pattern of discrimination, exclusion, and oppression led not just to Michael Brown’s murder by police but to a criminal justice system that preyed on the poor (disproportionately Black), a school system that lost its accreditation, a segregated town where too many African Americans lived in low-quality, mostly public, housing, all occurring within a larger St. Louis County with profoundly unequal life outcomes for Blacks.
I hope you were able to glean important insight and perspective throughout all forty of my posts this summer and fall. I’d love to hear what those have been!
As we approach a new year, it’s time to turn a page (as it were) toward hopefulness and promise. Starting in January and running for at least four months, I will focus on potential solutions that I cover in my book in four broad 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, the book highlights several dozen solutions. Almost every separate solution proposed is a heavy, singular lift. Solutions pursued together in each area would require lifts of superhuman strength. With an incoming Trump II administration, the implementation of many, if not most, of these solutions will become near impossible in the short term. That doesn’t mean we don’t push forward and it doesn’t mean some meaningful progress can’t occur in increments.
For many of the solutions I will highlight, I find examples of how localized or piloted versions of these have been attempted in the U.S.
If you know of specific solutions that you want to ensure I cover, please email me at level.the.playing.field@hey.com. I welcome any and all of your ideas!
As a teaser, I’ve included an inelegant graphic I drafted in PowerPoint months ago (warning, I am not a power user!) that hints at the solutions I will cover in the first half of 2025.
I wish you and your friends and family a wonderful, restful, and energizing holiday season to start the new year on sure footing!
Steve