Friends,
I hope the holiday season is treating you and yours well and brings time for rest, gratitude, and connection.
Over the past two weeks, about 30 of us--City elected officeholders and department heads--have spent many hours together beginning a year-long anti-racism training program. Led by national experts, we are exploring what it means to be anti-racist both professionally in our work as well as personally.
This is critically important work for us in Bloomington, to advance racial justice. We need to identify practical and effective steps to take that move us forward as a community. And we need each of us, from our own positions and with our own histories and backgrounds, to embrace how we each can and should think and act as an anti-racist.
Direct and sometimes challenging conversations have already been prompted among those of us in the training. We have months of structured work ahead of us as well, and I believe we all look forward to learning more and developing new ideas, understandings, and actions. I wanted to share just a couple specific early components of this training, also described as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training.
We’re reminded that every policy decision we make is either advancing anti-racism or perpetuating the opposite. That’s a sobering statement. It reminds me also of the notion that in every action with a colleague we are either increasing or decreasing mutual trust. In city government, we need to advance anti-racism consistently and effectively.
We heard Bryan Stevenson, a southern lawyer who has worked for decades to reduce racism in the American criminal justice system, describe being in Germany lecturing about capital punishment and its problems in America. A Berlin native stood and said “we can never have the death penalty here, given our history; it would be unconscionable.” (It’s outlawed in their constitution as well.) Stevenson amplified, think how the world would react if indeed there were capital punishment in Germany and it was shown to be skewed dramatically towards executing their Jewish population far disproportionately above their share of population. Unconscionable.
How is it not unconscionable, Stevenson then asks, that in America, after centuries of our brutal race slavery including the lynching of thousands of Black Americans between the Civil War and the Civil Rights era, how is it not unconscionable that our legal system today disproportionately executes Black persons (and reflects other terrible and deep racial inequities still at work)? How does an anti-racist respond to such disparities that persist and are baked into our judicial system?
We have much work to do in Bloomington to advance anti-racism and to achieve more justice. I appreciate working together with our colleagues on these issues. Thanks for all you do too, to advance anti-racism.
Democratically yours,
John Hamilton
P.S. I hope you’ll join local Democrats at the Viola Taliaferro Fall Dinner, on Thursday, December 16th, from 6-9pm at the Switchyard Park Pavilion. More information about the event and safety protocols available here. We Democrats have a big year ahead of us!