The past is all that makes the present coherent.

—James Baldwin

THREE

Then Is Now

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak of 2020, reports that Black people were two to four times more likely to die from the disease¹ than white people were met with surprise. I was surprised by the surprise voiced by politicians and other leaders because health disparities among Black people are well researched and, I thought, well known. I discuss health disparities in depth in chapter 4. This is another example of sublime ignorance.

Not only do many, especially white people, not know much about racist systems that disproportionately affect Black people, they also seem to be unaware of the lack of progress in reversing the trends. This is a major source of fatigue for Black people. There has been a lack of significant progress since legislation such as the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 ending segregated public schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning segregation in public places and discrimination in hiring; Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteeing what had been promised in the Fifteenth Amendment; and the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968,² which was supposed to ban housing discrimination. Since these legislative actions and others designed to eradicate overt acts of racism, socioeconomic, educational, housing, health, and workplace outcomes have improved very little, if at all.

During The Winters Group’s learning sessions, we sometimes engage participants in a “fact or fiction” exercise in which we display a statistic about some aspect of diversity and ask for a show of hands: “Is this fact or fiction?” A few of the race statistics that we sometimes include are the following. Test yourself before you look at the correct answers, shared in the next paragraph.

1. Black college graduates with similar backgrounds as whites have twice the unemployment rate.³ Fact/Fiction
2. African American babies are twice as likely to die before their first birthday, regardless of the socioeconomic level of the mother.⁴ Fact/Fiction
3. Blacks with advanced degrees earn about the same as their white counterparts with similar degrees.⁵ Fact/Fiction

Do you think you got the right answers? Number 1 and number 2 are facts, and number 3 is fiction, because even after controlling for age, gender, education, and region, black workers with advanced degrees are paid 18.5 percent less than white workers. Were you surprised by any of these data? Many white participants in our sessions usually are. They say that they cannot believe that there are still such widespread disparities. Many of the people of color in the sessions are, however, not surprised. While it is good to raise awareness, it is frustrating and fatiguing that session after session, white people are not aware that such inequities exist. In a recent conversation with a Black woman executive at a major health care organization, she lamented that it is “maddening” for her to sit in meetings with the CEO and his direct reports time and time again when they seem to be clueless about the structural racism that exists in their system. She said that even after years of training in cultural competence, antiracism, and unconscious bias, they do not seem to understand how the system perpetuates racism.

Stagnant Socioeconomic Progress

The most alarming and perhaps the most telling are the economic indicators. Black households have the lowest median household income and net worth of any demographic group, and those measures of progress have not improved. Unfortunately, then is now.

Figure 3.1 shows that Black household median income is the lowest of all groups and has only increased an infinitesimal amount ($62) in the last decade compared with much larger gains for whites and Hispanics.

Net worth is the difference between one’s assets and liabilities. The net worth of white people was 10 times that of Black and Hispanic people in 2016 (figure 3.2).⁶ While median net worth tends to increase for whites as levels of educational attainment rise, even controlling for educational differences the gap does not improve. For example, the median net worth of Black households headed by someone with at least a bachelor’s degree was $26,300 in 2013, while for households headed by white college degree holders, the net worth was $301,300, 11 times that of Black people. In other words, contrary to logic, more education does not correlate with income equity. And shockingly, the median net worth of a single Black woman without a bachelor’s degree is $500 and with a bachelor’s degree is $5,000, while a single white woman has a median net worth of $8,000 without a bachelor’s degree and $35,000 with one.⁸

Figure 3.1. Change in median household income, 2007–2017
Source: The Winters Group based on data in Valerie Wilson, “10 Years after the Start of the Great Recession, Black and Asian Households Have Yet to Recover Lost Income.”⁷

A large part of this disparity is intergenerational wealth transfer. White people have the opportunity to transfer their assets to their children, giving them a head start with net worth. Generationally, Black families, because of the entrenched racist system, have not been able to amass wealth. As a matter of fact, many of us who have “good jobs” have to support our parents or other family members who have not been so fortunate, something known as the “Black tax.” When you consider that nearly one in five Black families have zero or negative net worth, and Black household wealth is on track to reach zero by 2082,⁹ it is hard to imagine the possibility of Blacks gaining financial freedom, let alone establishing generational wealth. Wealth is important to increase access to a better education, a healthy and safe living environment, better health care, and better job opportunities.

Figure 3.2. Median value of family net worth by race or ethnicity, 2016
Source: The Winters Group based on data in the Federal Reserve Board, “2016 Survey of Consumer Finances,” 2017.

Several additional key factors exacerbate the vicious cycle of wealth inequality. Black households, for example, have far less access to tax-advantaged forms of savings, due in part to a long history of employment discrimination and lack of access to financial institutions. A well-documented history of mortgage market discrimination means that blacks are significantly less likely to be homeowners than whites and therefore are not able to access the tax advantages associated with home ownership, as discussed shortly. It is also well documented that Black people face more discrimination in the labor market and are more likely to be underpaid and underemployed. Studies show that applicants with white names are 50 percent more likely to get a callback than those with Black names, regardless of the industry or occupation.¹⁰

In summary, Black families have less access to stable jobs, good wages, and retirement benefits at work—all key drivers of net worth. These persistent socioeconomic inequities maintain the intergenerational cycle of wealth inequality.¹¹ While reparations may not completely fix the socioeconomic disparities, it is a start. I discuss reparations in chapter 9.

We must hold banks accountable.

Unemployment Rates for Blacks Have Been Double Those of Whites since the 1960s

Regardless of the time period, education level, or occupation, Black unemployment rates are twice those of whites, and this discrepancy has held steady since the 1960s (figure 3.3).¹² While unemployment rates for every group were low in 2019 and have improved for marginalized groups, the disparity persists.

Figure 3.3. US unemployment rate by race, 1973–2019
Source: The Winters Group based on data in US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Unemployment Rates by Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity.”¹³

Home Ownership and Gentrification Continue to Stymie Progress

Black and Latino families are no more likely today to own their own home than they were in 1976, as shown in figure 3.4. Then is now.

Fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in mortgage lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be regularly denied conventional mortgage loans at rates much higher than their white counterparts. In a study by the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2018 of 61 metropolitan areas, even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan amount, and neighborhood, Black people were as much as 2.7 times less likely to be granted a loan.¹⁴

Figure 3.4. Home ownership Note: The data for Asian Americans start in 1988.
Source: The Winters Group based on data in Pew Research Center, “Demographic Trends and Economic Well-Being.”¹⁵

In the 1930s, surveyors with the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “legally” drew lines on maps all around the country, marking some neighborhoods red to indicate their rating as “hazardous” for bank lending because of the presence of African Americans or European immigrants, especially Jews. Under the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977,¹⁶ banks had a legal obligation not only to not discriminate but also to solicit borrowers and depositors from all segments of their communities. This type of legislation has not quelled the systemic racism in housing. As a matter of fact, 75 percent of neighborhoods that had been marked “hazardous” in the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s redlined maps of the 1930s are still the most economically disadvantaged.¹⁷ Then is now.

Relatedly, Blacks still largely live in segregated neighborhoods. According to the National Fair Housing Alliance, “In today’s America, approximately half of all Black persons and 40 percent of all Latinos live in neighborhoods without a White presence. The average White person lives in a neighborhood that is nearly 80 percent White.”¹⁸

Gentrification is also a key issue that negatively affects Black and Brown families. It is the systemic changing of underinvested, predominantly poor communities from low value to high value. Longtime residents and businesses are displaced, unable to afford higher rents, mortgages, and property taxes. Gentrification is happening all across the United States. Because of the displacement of poor people from their previous neighborhoods, it is almost impossible for them to find affordable housing. From Charlotte (where I live) to San Francisco (where I frequently consult), the lack of affordable housing is a problem of epic proportion.

In the 1960s gentrification was called “urban renewal” (a federally funded project to “clean up slums”). In a 1963 television interview, James Baldwin said, “Urban renewal is Negro removal.”¹⁹ Then is now.

The Workforce: Little Progress Has Been Made in Leadership Positions in the Workforce

Many companies continue to wrestle with the paucity of people of color in leadership ranks. Over three decades ago, when I started diversity and inclusion work, white male leaders lamented the lack of women and people of color in leadership roles and attributed it to their shorter tenure in large corporations (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was only 20 years old). Today leaders still lament the lack of women and people of color in leadership roles, but the excuse now is that there are so few Black and Brown people with the qualifications that the competition is stiff, and they are lured away by other organizations. The reality is that Black people leave organizations because of the fatigue associated with needing to constantly prove themselves and not being acknowledged for their contributions, which I explore in later chapters.

Black employees with college or advanced degrees are also more likely than their white counterparts to be underemployed when it comes to their skill level. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 40 percent of Black workers are in jobs that do not typically require a college degree, compared with 31 percent of white college graduates.²⁰

In the 1980s, a Black female friend of mine had risen through the ranks of a major corporation, but not until she had jumped through many more hurdles than her white male counterparts. She was a chemist by training and then got her MBA and then a doctorate in chemistry, as well as many professional certifications along the way. Tracy (not her real name) was always studying and working 70–80 hours per week. She was a director, trying to rise to vice president. Every time she asked what more she needed to do, there was another “something” that she needed. She retired from that organization and never made vice president. Tracy felt that she was micromanaged, required to be overeducated, and in the end undervalued and underappreciated. She retired early because she was burned out. Recent research by the Center for Talent Innovation reveals that these issues still continue to inhibit progress for Black women.²¹ In healing sessions with Black employees during the Black Lives Matter movement protests of 2020, needing to be overqualified for consideration for promotions was a common theme. “You are never ready for the next level. No matter how many degrees or certifications you have, it is never enough.” Then is now, and it is fatiguing.

Ascend, the largest nonprofit Pan-Asian organization for business professionals in North America,²² developed the Executive Parity Index (EPI) to assess disparities in the leadership ranks. If the EPI is equal to 1.0, then a group’s representation is the same at the top and bottom of the pipeline. If the EPI is less than 1.0, or below parity, then there are fewer at the top relative to those at the bottom. An EPI greater than 1.0 is above parity. Using the 2015 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission database of employment statistics by race, gender, and job classification and applying the formula, white men have an EPI of 1.81; Hispanic men, 1.07; white women, 0.65; Black men, 0.63; Asian men, 0.56; Hispanic women, 0.49; Black women, 0.30; and Asian women, 0.24. Obviously, with the exception of Hispanic men, Black and Brown people are woefully below parity.²³

This was a headline in 1984: “Many Blacks Jump Off the Corporate Ladder: Feeling Their Rise Limited” (Wall Street Journal, August 2, 1984). This was a headline in 2019: “Study Examines Why Black Americans Remain Scarce in Executive Suites” (New York Times, December 9, 2019). Then is now.

Several of my recent clients have initiated diversity efforts because their boards of directors are requiring it. These are the power brokers. Boards have the clout to dictate change. They are asking, Why are there so few people of color in leadership roles? Why do you have such a high turnover rate among people of color?

Most large organizations have a lot of work to do to change their cultures in order to move from rhetoric to sustained equity. I have personally been consulting on this for over three decades, and then is now.

Elected Officials

Of course, we all point to the pinnacle achievement in politics of the election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, in 2008 and again in 2012. While clearly a milestone, it did not come without backlash that we continue to contend with today. For many white people, Obama’s election was proof positive that racism was no longer an issue in the United States—we could declare it a nasty, ugly thing of the past. It was deemed by many a sign of the advent of a postracial society. However, we started to see the backlash of his election very early on with death threats, personal attacks on his family, and a Congress that was determined to vote down any legislation that even remotely looked like it would benefit Black and Brown people. Many say that the election of Donald Trump was the ultimate backlash.

On a positive note, we have seen tremendous progress in increasing the representation of Black and Brown people in the House of Representatives; however, there has been little progress in the Senate. Fifty-two House members are Black, putting the share of Black House members (12 percent) on par with the share of Blacks in the US population overall for the first time in history.²⁴ Also, currently, 43 House members are Hispanic,²⁵ and 17 are Asian.²⁶

The first Black US senator, Hiram R. Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, was chosen by his state’s legislature to fill an empty seat. He served for a year, from 1870 to 1871. Since then, only nine other Black Americans have served in the Senate.

Voter Suppression

Then is now, in terms of voter suppression. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the Constitution abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) gave Black people equal rights, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) specifically prohibits the government from denying US citizens the right to vote based on race, color, or past servitude. The nation also adopted the Enforcement Acts between 1870 and 1871 that criminalized voter suppression and provided federal oversight in elections.²⁷ The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is considered landmark legislation to overcome legal barriers such as literacy tests and poll taxes that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the Fifteenth Amendment. The act called for federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50 percent of the nonwhite population had registered to vote, and authorized the US attorney general to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections.²⁸

In 2013, the Supreme Court declared the oversight provision unconstitutional.²⁹ Striking down this requirement has increased voter suppression. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brian Kemp put over 50,000 voter registrations on hold, 70 percent of which were from Black residents. Several states with large and growing Black and Hispanic populations closed polling places: Texas closed over 400 polling places, Arizona closed over 200, and the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina closed over 250.³⁰ These closures are a direct result of the Supreme Court’s decision not to hold the Voting Rights Act intact.

In 2016, 6.1 million Americans, mostly people of color, were unable to vote because of a felony conviction.³¹ Efforts to overturn such laws are often defeated. For example, voters in Florida passed legislation amending the state’s constitution to restore voting rights to US citizens with prior felony convictions. This change would have meant that 1.4 million Floridians, including one in five Black residents, would regain their right to vote. However, Republican legislators in Tallahassee, led by Governor Ron DeSantis (R), circumvented this action by imposing new financial restrictions, such as fees unrelated to citizens’ sentences, for people with prior felony convictions to vote.³² These restrictions are similar to those of the Jim Crow era that perpetuated barriers to voting.

In 2018, the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute increased the possibility for voter suppression in that states were permitted to eliminate eligible Americans from their voter rolls, also known as purging, if they decided to skip some elections.³³ The ruling supported Ohio’s decision to purge 846,000 disproportionately Black voters from its rolls for infrequent voting over a six-year period.

In June 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not impede partisan gerrymandering on the state level, even though it admitted that gerrymandering could produce unfair outcomes.³⁴ New software maximizes partisan advantage, and since state legislatures are predominantly Republican, voting districts have been redrawn to the disadvantage of Democrats. Seventy-nine percent of Black people are registered Democrats, as are 62 percent of Latinos.³⁵

Without political clout, it is impossible to change entrenched systems of discrimination. Too often, people of color are so fatigued from fighting these actions, they simply give up and do not vote, which leads to the increased chance of being purged from the rolls. Do you see how the system, not the people, is the problem?

Education

Public education is in crisis and has been for decades, with the most damaging impact on lower-income Black and Brown children.

The 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision banning segregation in public schools was the result of a hard-fought battle. Schools are more segregated today than in 1954. Children of color represent a majority of the student body in 83 of the 100 largest cities, and in all but three, at least half of them attend a school where a majority of their peers are poor or low income.³⁶ Researchers coined the term “apartheid schools” to describe schools where students of color form more than 99 percent of the population. Such schools educate one-third of the Black students in New York City and half of the Black students in Chicago. Nationwide, apartheid schools educate as many as 15 percent of Black students and 14 percent of Latinos.³⁷

Studies also show that the more schools are integrated, the better Black students fare, including with lower dropout rates, higher standardized test scores, and improved outcomes for Blacks in areas such as earnings, health, and incarceration rates.³⁸ Racially diverse schools also benefit white students. Studies show that exposure to other students who are culturally and ethnically different from themselves leads to improved cognitive skills, including critical thinking and problem solving.³⁹

Public schools attended by a majority of Black and Brown children are underfunded and underperforming. Despite decades of lawsuits throughout the country to eliminate the inequities, there remains a $23 billion gap in funding between school districts that serve predominantly Black and Brown students and those that serve white students, and they are serving the same number of students.⁴⁰ Between 2005 and 2017, US public schools were underfunded by $580 billion in Title 1 and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act federal dollars, money that is earmarked specifically to support 30 million of our most vulnerable students.⁴¹

The gap in standardized test scores of Black children appears before they enter kindergarten and persists into adulthood. While it has narrowed since 1970, on average Black children still score below 75 percent of American white students on almost every standardized test. The reasons for these differences are complex, and some experts say the gaps are more about teacher competencies and biases, lack of understanding of cultural differences, and how parents interact with their children than income, intelligence, or school funding.⁴²

Research shows that non-Black teachers have lower expectations of Black students than Black teachers.⁴³ Black teachers only represent 10 percent of the teacher corps. Black men represent 2 percent of teachers. Black students are 3.8 times as likely as white students to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions.⁴⁴ While 6 percent of all K–12 students received one or more out-of-school suspensions, the percentage is 18 percent for Black boys, 10 percent for Black girls, 5 percent for white boys, and 2 percent for white girls. Black children represent 19 percent of the nation’s preschool population, yet 47 percent of those receiving more than one out-of-school suspension. In comparison, white students represent 41 percent of preschool enrollment but only 28 percent of those receiving more than one out-of-school suspension. Black students are 2.3 times as likely as white students to receive a referral to law enforcement or get arrested because of a school-related problem.⁴⁵ These disparities are related to deeply entrenched biases that white teachers hold about the innocence and intelligence of Black children. I elaborate on this in chapter 8.

Even though there are a number of programs designed to recruit Black people into the teacher corps, many leave the profession after a few years because of the fatigue of not having the resources or support to do their job effectively. I remember some years ago the daughter of a friend of mine was required to make copies of textbook pages because there were not enough textbooks to go around. She paid for the copies from her first-year teacher’s salary because the school did not have a copier that could handle the volume or a budget to cover the copies.

The problem is not the children. The problem is the system. The continued gross inequities in access to quality education for Black and Brown children and the rampant bias that leads to disproportionality in punishment are interconnected with life outcomes such as job opportunities and, ultimately, socioeconomic progress. And then there is legislation that disadvantages Black students. The current education secretary, Betsy DeVos, rescinded Obama-era legislation⁴⁶ on school discipline guidance that would have made it harder to suspend Black students. The policy was scrapped based on research the Trump administration relied on that showed that Black children are disciplined more than white children because Black children exhibit behavioral issues that start earlier in life, rather than because of institutional racism. The administration used this one data point and ignored mountains of other evidence to the contrary.⁴⁷ It is a vicious cycle that is fatiguing. Then is now.

Shifting the focus from the children as the problem to the system would lead us to:

• Lobby for policies that would provide equitable, not equal, funding to schools.
• Make teachers’ salaries commensurate with their worth like those of valued professionals in a corporation.
• Focus on environmental racism in neighborhoods.
• Ensure that parents earn a living wage.
• Corporations should fund public education.
• Hold school administrators accountable for inequitable outcomes and refuse to accept rationale like parents are not involved and do not care about their children’s education. Start with the premise that all parents care about their children’s education and all children can learn. If they are not learning, there is something wrong with the system, not the children.

Criminal Justice

At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, more than 4,000 victims of racist lynching are remembered over the heads of visitors. From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings were recorded in the United States. Black people accounted for 72.7 percent of the people lynched. While these numbers seem large, the actual numbers are even bigger, because it is known that not all lynchings were recorded.⁴⁸

While lynchings, as historically defined, may not be happening anymore, 26 percent of civilians killed by police shootings in 2015 were Black, even though Black civilians represent only 12 percent of the US population. And according to a study conducted in 2019 by Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice, Washington University’s Department of Sociology, and the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, in the United States African American men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. Black women are 1.4 times more likely than white women to be killed by police. The researchers used verified data from police records from 2013–2018.⁴⁹ Another study showed that 15 percent of the Black people police killed in 2015 were unarmed, compared with just 6 percent of white people who were unarmed when killed by police.⁵⁰

A NewsOne story released in June reported that 83 Black men and boys have been killed by police since 2012.⁵¹ In addition, in that same time frame, at least 22 Black women have been killed by law enforcement.

Police brutality had been going on long before 2009. As I mentioned in the preface, the Black Panther Party was started, in part, as a result of the killing of an unarmed Black 16-year-old in 1966. Protests erupted in Los Angeles in 1992 when three white policemen who had savagely beaten Rodney King a year earlier were acquitted.⁵² In 1999, Amadou Diallo was fired on 41 times as he stood unarmed in the hallway of his apartment building. The officers involved in the case were acquitted.⁵³

As many of these killings can be described as modern-day lynchings, in 2018 the House unanimously passed the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, a law that criminalizes lynching for the first time in history. From 1882 to 1986 Congress failed to pass antilynching legislation 200 times.⁵⁴ The bill, introduced by Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Tim Scott (R-SC), is stalled in the Senate as of this writing. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) wants an amendment that would weaken the language in the bill.⁵⁵

In 2017, Black people represented 12 percent of the total US population and 33 percent of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64 percent of the adult population and 30 percent of prisoners. And while Hispanics represented 16 percent of the adult population, they accounted for 23 percent of inmates. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Native Americans are incarcerated at a rate 38 percent higher than the national average.⁵⁶ While the gap is narrowing between whites and Blacks in prison,⁵⁷ a Black boy born in 2001 still has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison, while a white boy has a 1 in 17 chance.

Another gross inequity in the criminal justice system is that Black people represent a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated. They constitute 47 percent of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016) and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in “group exonerations.”⁵⁸

We must destigmatize Black people, men in particular, as criminals. The media plays a large role in this. Studies show that the media reports of murders, thefts, and assaults where Black people were suspects far outpaced their actual arrest rates for such crimes.⁵⁹ The media also portrays Black suspects as more threatening and scarier than whites by showing mug shots of Black suspects more frequently and perpetuating a narrative of white victimization.

Mass incarceration is a serious problem. The United States represents 5 percent of the world’s population and has the highest incarceration rate in the world at 25 percent.⁶⁰ As chronicled in Michelle Alexander’s landmark book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,⁶¹ from 1980 to 2000 the number of incarcerated people jumped from 300,000 to 2 million, with the majority of those being people of color. The impetus was President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs program. Rather than categorizing drug abuse as a public health issue as it is today, largely because more white people are now addicted, the program labeled it as a crime and many people were sentenced to long jail terms without the possibility of parole. Systemic racism continues even after release, with laws that disallow felons to vote or to find gainful employment. This leads to high recidivism rates.

SUMMARY

Then is now. Black people are fatigued because of the lack of progress in dismantling centuries-old racist systems. The forces that maintain the status quo are deeply entrenched. The widespread denial that racism is at the root of these interconnected issues is fatiguing and literally killing those who are the victims of this system.

We must first change the narrative. Current strategies, by and large, focus on Black people as the problem rather than intractable racist systems. We put Band-Aids on the issues with programs primarily designed to fix Black people. If corporations want to help, they will not only offer passive support by declaring Juneteenth a holiday and increasing their philanthropic dollars earmarked for Black-serving institutions, they will become actively engaged in lobbying for antiracist legislation. They will no longer be nonpartisan. They will dedicate resources to understanding and addressing both external and internal racism from the roots up.