The most promising thing about last week’s John R. Oishei Foundation announcement is not its promise to focus more intently on addressing Buffalo’s racial disparities. While welcome, we’ve heard such pledges before.
Rather, it’s Oishei’s willingness to hold itself accountable in ways that will tell us whether this region really is addressing the root causes of inequity or just dealing with its symptoms.
That distinction is critical because addressing root causes means doing something few willingly do: Share real power and resources.
In its outline for change focusing on the African American community, the foundation lays out measurable metrics that will document the region’s sincerity: improvements in poverty rates; in home and business ownership rates; in median incomes; in attracting outside investment; and in closing wealth gaps.
Little, if any, of that can be accomplished by opening food pantries, handing out clothes or any of the other charitable efforts that – while critical to alleviating individual suffering – will not change the facts on the ground that make such efforts necessary.
Do-gooderism that helps individuals while allowing the patrons to feel good about themselves is not the same as really listening to, being guided by – and ceding control of resources to – the people who can build up their own neighborhoods and businesses if afforded half the chance.
The foundation seems to recognize that in quoting a Color of Change official who notes that merely including people of color at the table isn’t enough: “Presence isn’t power. Power is the ability to change the rules.”
Those rules – from redlining, poll tests and locking heavily Black occupations out of Social Security, to more modern ones like voter suppression and forbidding the teaching of such history – are what created and perpetuate the gaps holding this region back, gaps Oishei wants to close.
It was those rules that created the…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply