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WEIGHING IN – As Schenectady City Council President Marion Porterfield said at Monday’s meeting following speeches by two council members to do with race, “Let’s just state the facts.”
Porterfield, who is Black, said she was reluctant to employ the term “racism,” as the other members did in their comments — Black City Councilman Damonni Farley to call out signs of racism and white Councilman John Polimeni to describe such claims as a defense mechanism. But Porterfield did call attention to the facts at hand.
The Council president noted that Schenectady is in the process of reconvening its Ethics Board for the first time in a decade. And this time, just like the last time in May 2013, the focus of the investigation has to do with a Black member of the council.
Facts are facts.
Facts are facts in Tennessee, too, where earlier this month two young Black state legislators were expelled after being involved in a protest calling for stricter gun-control laws within the state Capitol, while a 60-year-old white female legislator who participated in the same protest was allowed to keep her seat. (Thankfully both Black legislators, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, were reinstated.)
While we’re at it, let’s look at the facts in Saratoga Springs, where calls for disciplinary action by Public Safety Commissioner James Montagnino — a white Democrat — after a public protest during governmental business clearly parallel the Tennessee situation. Following the February meeting in question, Chandler Hickenbottom, a leader of Saratoga Black Lives Matter, was charged with disorderly conduct, which was similar to legal action taken against Saratoga BLM leader Lexis Figuereo following nearly identical protests in the summer of 2021. BLM activists call this “targeting.” Whatever the label, it’s true that none of the numerous charges against Figuereo has stuck.
Facts are facts.
And the fact is that systemic racism is a real societal ill that must be remedied. Myriad data sets tell us this, from the disproportionate number of arrests of Black people to the significant gaps that exist between white and Black homeownership. The system has been rigged against people of color since the first slave ship landed in Virginia in 1619.
Facts are facts.
The problem is that using these facts to point out racism has, for the moment, lost its effectiveness.
Right now, the conversation around racism itself has taken much of the oxygen away from policies that can truly mitigate its impacts. Porterfield, who is running a primary challenge against incumbent Democratic Mayor Gary McCarthy, seemed to acknowledge that in her comments.
“I’m hoping that this is our last debate on the floor between two council members, because as I hear from the public, maybe it’s time for a private conversation, gentlemen,” Porterfield said.
Facts are facts.
After the summer of 2020, when Black Lives Matter gained momentum due to the murder of George Floyd, we had reached a moment in our discourse that allowed us to begin to accept the impacts of systemic racism.
But now we’re at an impasse.
Why?
White fragility is throbbing.
That term — “white fragility” — comes from Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book of the same name and refers to the defensiveness that often sets in for white people when they are challenged on racial issues. When people are told their words and actions could be considered racist, they sometimes become angry, argumentative, sad and guilty, the book notes. These reactions shut down the conversation in a way that suppresses the issue of systemic racism and reinforces a society that favors white people.
Given this, and the fact that I’m a white man, I’m sensitive to the notion that calling for the conversation to move away from race explicitly risks feeding into white fragility and stalling progress.
But we have to look at what’s currently happening in our communities and consider whether a different strategy might be more effective — at least in this current moment.
I should say Damonni Farley disagrees. He made this clear in conversations with me this week as well as during Monday’s meeting.
“We’re going to continue to work, going to continue to call out systemic racism, until we as a city take a hard look at who we are,” he said during the meeting.
The tensions between Farley and Polimeni, which have to do with Polimeni’s calls to reinstate the city’s Ethics Board to examine Farley’s unpaid state taxes and potential double-dipping for accepting more than $580,000 in contracts from the Schenectady City School District while also receiving a full-time salary, are indicative of the ways in which we’ve been held up.
For that matter, so are Montagnino’s reactions, which included calling for an order of protection against Hickenbottom after sparring publicly with BLM leaders, and activists showing up to a meeting with shirts declaring that the public safety commissioner’s “racism is showing.”
We’re stuck in the same loop of arguing.
We’re witnessing a dynamic that “White Fragility” points out is typical when white people are given feedback about racism by people of color.
“When the individual giving the feedback is a person of color, the charge is ‘playing the race card,’ and the consequences are much more penalizing,” DiAngelo writes.
Haven’t we heard this very claim from Polimeni and Montagnino? In fact, during Monday’s meeting, Polimeni, a Democrat, said: “There’s a systemic pattern here. Every time something happens that someone makes a mistake, somebody screws up, here comes the racism charges.”
To Polimeni’s point, in the interest of sticking to the facts, Farley should continue to be honest, as he now has, about his unpaid state taxes, which total nearly $30,000. And he should be less defensive over the fact that his school district contracts present a very real possibility of conflict of interest and are worth scrutiny.
Facts are facts.
But much of the blame for the combustible meetings we’ve seen falls on white progressives, who have failed en masse to recognize their own culpability in enabling systemic racism.
“White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice,” DiAngelo writes. “White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetuate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.”
Many white progressives are quick to label Republicans as racist, but they are reticent to look within themselves and reflect on their own faults. They want to defend themselves and deflect all of the blame, which gets us nowhere.
This shuts down the conversation and has led to a moment during which everyone across the political spectrum seems to be on the attack. For anything to change, more people need to be open to feedback.
Again, I understand arguments about how this kowtows to white people’s feelings. But let’s say we were on a race course: We correctly pushed the accelerator in the summer of 2020 to allow for a broader acceptance of systemic racism as a problem. Perhaps right now the best move, as we grapple with a difficult section of the track that involves looking at what systemic racism means about us and our larger society, is to change the tenor of the conversation.
Again, I know Farley disagrees, as I am sure a lot of other people will as well.
But Farley does agree that the stakes are as high as they’ve ever been. In fact, he and fellow council member Carl Williams have received hate mail that police are investigating, which a Times Union report detailed this week, pointing to the very acute nature of the threat.
“I don’t want our children to think that racism is something they need to accept as the price of admission to positions of leadership,” Farley told me.
He argues the conversation needs to be explicitly about race for this very reason — the people most impacted by racism are the ones who live perpetually under attack.
“This is not an either/or choice. In fact, escalations of bigotry and the personal attacks are a direct response to the policies I’ve brought forth that address the impact of systemic racism, such as equitable allocation of funds, the Clean Slate Act and housing protections for renters,” Farley said. “Ignoring or not calling out racism as some kind of political strategy suggests we don’t have the courage to face our problems. It sends a message that this behavior is acceptable and diminishes the very real impact that it has on the lives of people in our community.”
Facts are facts.
But right now the conversations have become counterproductive.
The discourse has certainly become counterproductive in Schenectady, where talks of racism have dominated the City Council for more than a year while actual progress has been slow. The city finally held a much-anticipated and widely attended town hall on rising rent costs last December. And just this week the council passed a resolution that calls for state legislation to protect renters by requiring landlords to comply with the city’s rental certificate program before attempting to evict tenants. But more action is needed.
The arguing has been counterproductive in Saratoga Springs, where the city has been slow to implement a 50-point plan developed by the Saratoga Springs Police Reform Task Force, which was created in response to a 2020 executive order issued by then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo calling for communities to review and determine ways to improve their police departments. As I wrote about in February, activists’ actions resulted in a canceled meeting at which city councilors were set to discuss filling seats on the Police Civilian Review Board — a priority for BLM leaders.
And the ouster of the Black Tennessee legislators was absolutely counterproductive in a state that last month endured a school shooting that left three 9-year-olds dead and in January witnessed the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Black police officers — a tragedy that many have said demonstrates the deep rootedness of systemic racism.
In a telling guest essay in The New York Times, Justin Pearson, one of the temporarily ousted Tennessee legislators, said his goal was to continue to fight for many causes, but specifically gun-control legislation, a cause he shared with many who flooded the state Capitol to protest.
“We wanted action, too. And the difference was — it was literally our job to act,” Pearson wrote.
Facts are facts.
This focus on legislative action must happen locally, too. Let’s keep the conversations on the specifics rather than the abstract. Let’s focus on changing policies and practices that contribute to systemic racism rather than constantly having debates about racism itself.
There has to be a way to keep the notion of systemic racism always in the background without putting it on the backburner.
In Schenectady, this should mean more of like what we saw this week with legislation designed to protect tenants. In Saratoga Springs, action should include meaningful implementation of the Police Reform Task Force’s 50-point plan and hiring members to the Saratoga Springs Police Department to make it more diverse.
Change leaders will argue none of the current progress would be happening at all without a steady drumbeat that calls out racism.
“White fragility punishes the person giving feedback and presses them back into silence,” DiAngelo writes.
But what would happen if, at least for now, the tone of the conversation changed?
In a way, that’s what Porterfield called for when she advised Farley and Polimeni to meet in private, where there is more opportunity to be nuanced and vulnerable and come to a shared understanding about the impacts of systemic racism and the role we all play in helping to prop it up. Farley said he’d welcome such conversations.
Right now the public arguments and name-calling are standing in the way of action.
Facts are facts.
Columnist Andrew Waite can be reached at [email protected] and at 518-417-9338. Follow him on Twitter @UpstateWaite.
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