Production and distribution of City Club forums and ideastream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland.

My name is Dan Moutlthrop.

I'm the chief executive here.

And as we get started, I just want to say you guys look great.

Thank you for coming today.

It is great to see all of you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's a small.

That was like a golf clap.

Thank you.

That's better.

Appreciate it.

So a few years ago, in 2017, when author Richard Rothstein appeared on our stage here at the City Club for his book, The Color of Law, he argued with exacting precision.

Now, segregation in America, the incessant kind that continues to dog our major cities and has contributed to so much social strife, especially in recent years.

He argued that this is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state and federal levels.

The color of law brilliantly recounted how government segregated our communities intentionally causing, causing and creating divisions based on race.

And while many had argued for decades that racial divisions in our cities were the product of de facto segregation, just choices people made.

Rothstein marshaled evidence, arguing the segregation was, in fact, de jure as the product of law, product of policy.

But the book left the reader with a big question What's to be done about it?

It was a question that nodded Rothstein, perhaps because his daughter raised it first, so much that he joined forces with their daughter, Leah Rothstein, who joins us today to find answers.

And the result is the book we're here to discuss today.

That book is called Just Action How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law.

And I want to note, too, that Leah Rothstein joins a special group of of people who women whose fathers also spoke at the city club years ago.

So Bobby Kennedy spoke here in 1968 and Kerry Kennedy followed him.

More recently, Dick Cheney spoke at the City Club.

And many of you may have been in the room when Liz Cheney spoke a couple of years ago.

And now now the Cheneys are thinking, wow, we're in league with the Rothstein's.

That's pretty cool.

These are senior policy workers informed by her years as a community organizer and a labor organizer.

Much of this work in Oakland, California, working on issues such as housing, environmental justice, workplace safety and youth leadership.

She has worked on public policy and community change from the grassroots to the halls of government.

And she's been a consultant to nonprofit housing developers, cities and counties, redevelopment agencies and private firms on community development and affordable housing policy practice and finance.

Moderating our conversation is a great friend of the City Club of Cleveland, Evelyn Burnett co-founder and CEO at Third Space Action Lab.

If you have any questions for Leah Rothstein, you can text them to 3305415794.

The number again is 3305415794, and the staff will work it into the second half of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming Leah Rothstein and Evelyn Burnette.

Thank you.

So excited to be on the City Club stage again with you.

Someone whose I like to think that I have the book first and read it first, but folks that know their space and know me know that we always start every conversation with a soul check dance that don't take a long time, everyone.

So this is going to be quick.

Okay.

What's your soul soother and booster like?

What's the thing that's, you know, giving you energy and what's the thing that's keeping you calm and collected in your soul?

And then just also wanted to know, like, who are you?

Where are you from?

What inspires you, inspires your work?

And you want me to do all of that quick dance?

Quickly.

All right, I'll try to be quick about it.

And I think I'll answer by telling a story this from a couple nights ago is walking down the street here just a couple of blocks away.

And, you know, I was walking alone and a man walked towards me, older, African-American man had a shuffle.

He was limping.

And I looked up, I said, hello.

He said, hello.

We look past each other.

And then he stopped and turned around and said, Hey, you know, I just want to thank you.

And I said, For what?

And he said, For looking at me.

And I was like, Well, of course.

And he said, Well, most people just look down and they don't look at me or say hello.

And he told me to thank my parents for raising me right.

Shout out to the parents know.

And I think that's both what suits my soul and what keeps me going.

Is this.

I mean, it makes me really sad and really angry that we don't acknowledge each other's humanity, not only sort of at the policy level, but at the individual level walking down the street.

And so that's what fires me up.

And it suits me that we can make a difference that way, like looking in someone's eyes makes a difference.

And made a difference for him and for me.

So I did that shortly, succinctly.

That was good.

That was that was strong.

I want to stay there for a minute, though, because you mentioned your parents.

Like, who are your parents?

Where are you from?

We all know about my dad.

Both of my parents are lifelong activists.

I grew up in California.

We moved around a lot when I was younger because my dad was a union organizer at the time.

Both of them were very involved in the civil rights movement, in the labor movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

You know, I grew up in a family where it was normal and and sort of understood to be our responsible party, to be active members of our community and society.

You know, as a family, we sort of understand what it's like to be persecuted and othered and and also understand what it means when we remain silent about others persecution.

And so it's just sort of been in my blood and the DNA of my family and sort of like more embarrassingly, as I grew up thinking that when I came to be in college, I would like magically have a massive social movement to join, like change the world.

Because, you know, I heard about that's what my parents did in college.

And, you know, it took me a little while to learn that that's not how it works.

You have to build that movement.

But so it's just sort of been part of my DNA and how I understand my role in in community and in society and sort of my safety comes from ensuring other people's safety and humanity also.

Thank you for sharing that.

A shout out to union organizer parakeets in the back.

So you talked about the role of being active.

So I want to to pivot and kind of ground for folks that haven't had an opportunity to read the book yet about the title.

So just action.

Think of just justice in action.

What were you signaling about the types of remedies needed to address the legacy and persistence of, of of racial and residential segregation?

Yeah, well, as you noted, the title Just Action has two meanings.

And one is that the action we need to redress segregation needs to be just, you know, we need to ensure that it's doing the thing we want it to do, which is redressing and remedying race specific harms.

So we want our actions to sort of bring justice to those, those past harms.

And we just need action.

Like, it's not that complicated, it's not that difficult.

We just need to start acting to do that.

MM mm.

Hmm.

For folks that struggle with that and I learned this we have the privilege of having Leah at the third space reading room just the other night.

And you're talking about your parents.

I imagine some folks might say, like, well, you know, you come from this this lineage and sort of legacy.

But I'm just you know, I hear this a lot in our work.

I'm just a regular person.

What do you say to those folks?

I mean, we're all just regular people.

And and I came from this legacy, but I still had to learn how to do this and overcome.

You know, it's scary to start to talk to people who don't look like you or talk about issues that are controversial in your community and start to, like, have a bigger voice.

But I think it just starts by talking to each other.

It really starts by getting to know each other and breaking down the barriers.

You know, like that man I met on the street, it's it's can be as simple as just, like, getting to know the humanity of our neighbors and other people in our community.

And then from there, learning how to work together to do things differently.

And, you know, that's sort of the personal beginnings.

And there's organizations are so many organizations here in Cleveland.

I've met a lot of you over the last few weeks doing this work.

And so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

You could get involved with an organization and just start to learn that way of learning through the institutions that you're involved with.

You know, your church or synagogue can you can work through that institutions, any other sort of institutions or agencies.

You already have personal involvement with can then become a bridge towards meeting people in other parts of the city and developing relationships that way.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

You mentioned race based segregation and then the intro, and this is one of the most fire intros I've ever read.

All So if you don't do anything, read that today.

But you note that slavery and Jim Crow were unique.

Why was it important to name that, like, right from the outset?

Yeah.

The part of the introduction of the book you're referring to where we try to warn against strategies that lump all people of color together.

We're, you know, sure, there are policies and practices that have discriminated against all, you know, minority communities.

But they act in different ways.

And they have had different sort of motivations and different ways of working.

And so if we want to not only stop those practices, but remedy their ongoing impacts, we have to be very specific about what we're remedying for.

And if we try to apply remedies that are too broad, they risk not being politically feasible, first of all, to be able to to prove what we're trying to solve for if it's too broad and we're not specific about the harms and the solutions, but they also won't be as effective, you know.

So the we focus very explicitly on this book on the harms of public policy that created segregation and specifically targeted African-American people and communities.

And so our solutions should specifically target those same people.

And solutions, what we say is race based crimes require race based solutions.

And in that section, we also acknowledge that other communities of color, other races and ethnicities have suffered discrimination at the hands of government.

And though they also deserve repair and remedy.

But those those strategies for remedy are different because the the ways that discrimination has played out has been different and that Jim Crow and slavery are unique and have had a different and longer lasting consequences than any other sort of racial discrimination we've seen in this country.

And when we're talking about segregation, the segregation of African-Americans and whites is persistent and has changed very little in many, many decades.

While the segregation of other racial and ethnic groups changes over generations.

And so, you know, when we're looking at solutions, we have to be not only conscious of what we're solving for, but also what the sort of ongoing impacts are that we're we're trying to remedy and mitigate.

Mm hmm.

I know that folks are eager for the recommendations, but I wanted to do a little bit more grounding to make sure that we into the recommendations, sort of from the right altitude.

And Dan mentioned it in his intro, and you also just mentioned this crime and the de facto versus de jure.

Can you talk a little bit about that just to get us around?

Yeah.

So we have this we've adopted, accepted as a country, an explanation for why we are racially segregated as a country.

And we tell ourselves that it's a form of de facto segregation, that means that it's a type of segregation that happens sort of by accident or by personal preference or private actions.

So people say, and we've accepted as a country for a long time that we're racially segregated because people just like to live around people who look like themselves and so they self sort into same race neighborhoods.

Or it's a question of economics that that, you know, income sort of vary by race.

And we live in neighborhoods based on our income or socioeconomic status, and that's why we're racially segregated.

Or it was a result of private actors, landlords, realtors, mortgage brokers who refused to sell or rent homes to African-Americans and white communities.

All of these explanations don't include some a very important piece of the puzzle, which is the government and the fact that, you know, these explanations don't actually explain how segregation happened in this country.

It was created intentionally and explicitly by government policy, all levels of government, local, state and federal.

And those private actors, you know, they're the the role they played in creating segregation was required by these government policies.

So whether they were bigoted or not, almost, you know, it doesn't matter because the government of all at all levels was requiring them to act in a way that created segregated communities and maintain that segregation.

And so the color of law took on that de facto segregation myth.

And, you know, the whole book is filled with detailed examples of government policy that created segregation.

And and, you know, we were the subtitle of The Color of Law is a Forgotten History of How Government Segregated America, because I think that's important to remember because these actions of the government when they were taken were not hidden.

They weren't a secret.

They weren't enacted by, you know, bad apples and government agencies.

This was explicit government policy, written into manuals, written into policy.

And these policies were in violation of our Constitution.

And so the government was or was breaking its own laws in creating these policies and and discriminating by race and and so, you know, once we reckon with that and understand that, we can see that we have an obligation to do something to remedy it.

Mm hmm.

So that sort of covers the de facto segregation myth.

And the truth is, is that it was really caused and continues to be maintained by government policies.

And so there's a lot we can do, you know, and we believe, as we did under that de facto segregation idea, that segregation happened by accident.

You know, it's sort of it's this magical occurrence.

If it happened by accident, it can only happen by accident.

And we have no role to play in doing anything about it or any obligation.

And so once we reckon with this forgotten history and remember how it really happened, we can see that we have an obligation to do something about it and have a role to play and to have agency.

And there actually is something we can do because it's not just this mystical occurrence.

Mm hmm.

I promise.

Recommendations after this question.

You say in the book that you hope to provoke the imagination of activists and of the many more who would like to support them.

Why was that important?

Yeah, well, so we wrote this book.

We started writing it.

I think.

In.

Late 2020 or early 2021.

So, you know, and we we wrote the book to answer that question.

What do we do with this obligation we have to remedy segregation?

How do we do that?

But then we you know, in 2020, there was a outpouring of support for racial justice.

There were 20 million people that marched and Black Lives Matter demonstrations after George Floyd's murder.

And so we saw that there were there's a huge appetite in this country for racial justice, 20 million people.

These were people of all races from urban and suburban communities, from all types, all regions of the country.

And so we saw an opportunity to reach those people, because what we argue in just action is that to make the changes we envision are are possible and necessary to redress segregation, we need a reinvigorated civil rights movement that can take on these issues locally.

Now, to do that, we need a lot of people who might not think of themselves as activists to start taking action in their own communities.

And so, you know, we believe that there's a a you know, an easy audience.

First of those 20 million people who turned out in demonstrations and then went home and put up lawn signs on their front lawns and maybe, you know, maybe they will never be activists.

And so that's why we also refer to their supporters, because we need the movement that we imagine that takes people who show up at city council meetings, who join and start campaigns to advocate for changes.

And it also means people in our communities who might not take those actions but understand what the issues are and so know what they're voting on when they vote on issues related to housing and segregation and elected officials.

And, you know, what their platforms, what it means when they talk about these issues and also what they can do to support advance these changes in their own communities, whether or not they show up at a demonstration, because we need supporters of all of all types to to advance these ideas.

So we know the who, the who is us.

Can you talk to us about some of the recommendations?

Just highlight some.

Of the how.

All right.

So just to sort of frame it, we describe dozens of strategies that local groups can take on to begin to redress segregation in their communities.

We focus on local strategies because, well, for a couple of reasons.

One is it's hard to do anything on the federal government level right now.

So.

So if we start there, I think, you know, we're setting ourselves up for failure.

Sure.

And, you know, there's there are things happening on the federal government when it comes to housing.

But, you know, there's a lot more that we can do in our own local communities.

We can build the political will to make these changes locally a lot easier than we can nationally right now.

And and, you know, furthermore, even though the federal government played a major role in creating segregation, once that segregation is created, to a large extent, it's maintained and perpetuated by local policy.

So there's a lot under local control that can be changed and challenged and enacted that will go a long way towards challenging segregation.

So not only is it more feasible, but it actually will be more rewarding.

It will have bigger impacts by focusing on local policies.

So then the local policies and programs that we talk about, they do two things.

And yes, these two things are what I mean when I use the term redress that it encompasses both ensuring that we don't continue to create and maintain segregation going forward.

So they're forward looking policies, but they're also pass looking policies.

We have to address the disparities that already exist today as a result of government sponsored segregation.

If we're truly going to challenge and remedy its impacts, you know, the Fair Housing Act, which was passed 56 years ago, looks to the future, which is great.

You know, we can no longer discriminate in the sale and rental of housing, but it doesn't address the past, the disparities that exist, the wealth gap that exists, the homeownership gap that exists all as a result of past government policies.

And so because the Fair Housing Act doesn't address that, here we are 56 years later, the homeownership gap between blacks and whites, the wealth gap is bigger.

Both the gaps are bigger than they were in 1968.

And so in order to really address these disparities, we have to do both things.

And then the strategies they fall into a few major categories.

They are what are called place based strategies.

So those that are concerned with increasing investments in lower income, segregated African-American communities, where the concentration of poverty, the sort of lack of access to resources in those communities that are a direct result of the same policies that created their segregation.

So to remedy the impacts of those policies, we want to increase access to resources in those areas.

And then we also want to make sure that when that happens in these communities, we don't just see sort of rampant gentrification where when when resources increase, higher income tenants, homebuyers move in, drive up the prices.

And the longtime residents of those areas are priced out of their own community just when resources are, you know, increase there.

So these place based strategies are coupled with anti displaced ment strategies to prevent some of the displacement that can occur.

So some of the examples of those kinds of strategies are start in community land trusts that create permanently affordable homeownership opportunities.

And these in places where housing prices are rising, protecting renters against evictions, unjust evictions through passing just cause eviction ordinances or rent regulations.

We write about Cleveland's Right to Counsel program as a model for the country, so supporting and expanding those programs that provide tenants with free representation when they're facing an eviction.

Passing inclusionary zoning ordinances.

These are all, again, locally based policies.

Inclusionary zoning requires that when new housing is built in a community, a certain percentage of the units have to be sold or rented at affordable prices.

So when communities start to see a lot of new development, this is a way to ensure that at least some of that new development can be accessible to the long time residents of that community.

Now we go a step further and say that those units, the affordable units created, should then have preferences or priorities on them to ensure that the long time residents of those communities can access those units.

And communities have done that.

So that's the first category of strategies.

The next category, or what are called mobility strategies.

And these are strategies for opening up exclusive, expensive, predominantly white, often suburban communities to more diverse residents.

So we need both of these angles to truly challenge segregation.

So some strategies in this category include changing zoning.

You know, most suburban communities require only or only allow one home per lot.

And this single family only zoning this.

I didn't know this until researching the book, but single family only zoning is the major type of residential zoning in the country and it came to prominence when racialize zoning was found to be unconstitutional.

So it used to be that cities could zone their residential areas by race, and that's how they created and maintained segregation.

The Supreme Court, somewhat surprisingly, at some point said, no, you can't do that.

And so cities adopted single family only zoning in those white neighborhoods to do the same thing, to keep those neighborhoods white by ensuring if you can only build one home per lot, the home prices stay high because as demand increases, you can't build more homes to meet that demand.

So if those communities stay expensive, only the most affluent families can live there, more likely white families.

And that's how a main way that segregation has been maintained.

So we need to challenge that type of zoning to allow more broader range of housing sizes and types and affordability and require affordable housing to be built in these suburban communities through zoning codes and zoning changes.

We can also work on how the Section eight or Housing Choice Voucher Program is is administered in our local communities.

You know, this is a rental subsidy that low income tenants, some low income tenants receive disproportionately African-American and low income families are, you know, in the Section eight population.

And the program has the potential promise to provide the opportunity to these low income families to leave high poverty neighborhoods if they want, because the voucher, the benefit is mobile, they can use it to rent anywhere in the private market.

But there's several reasons why they can't.

Discrimination is one.

The federal government allows landlords to discriminate on the basis of how a tenant pays their rent.

So if they use Section eight to pay their rent, that's an allowed form of discrimination.

Many cities and counties have passed source of income discrimination ordinances.

There are, I think, about 20 in in Ohio, 20 cities that have passed a source of income discrimination ordinance, but not yet Cleveland.

And I don't know why, but that could happen here.

And to pass a local ordinance to protect Section eight tenants from discrimination.

And then there are several other local aspects of the section eight program that could be changed by the local public housing authorities to provide more opportunity for these tenants to to live in higher cost areas if they want to.

So those are a couple of the mobility examples.

And then we also talk about strategies for increasing homeownership opportunities for African-American families in any neighborhood and all neighborhoods, reducing some of the obstacles that they face toward accessing homeownership, downpayment assistance programs, for example, to address that racial wealth gap that exists because of past government policies addressing the credit scoring system and the ways that that system has a disparate, discriminatory racial impact and and blocks African-Americans from accessing credit and mortgages.

And I can get into details on any of these and the questions I'm just trying to get through a lot.

So giving you a broad sort of summary.

And then there's a group of strategies that deal with, you know, oftentimes a lot of people in the housing field or people who are working on addressing the racial wealth gap and closing that gap, think that homeownership is the way to do that.

If we increase black home homeownership rates, the wealth gap will decrease.

And to some extent, that's true.

But it's not kind of the only answer, because there's a lot of ways that wealth building is limited for African-Americans in homeownership, in ways that it isn't for whites.

And so we need to address those as well.

Some of those ways are, you know, the appraisal of bias in the appraisal system.

If there's racial bias in getting your house appraised, which is when an appraiser tells you how much your house is worth when you want to sell it or refinance it, if the appraiser is undervaluing your home, you can't build the same wealth you could if if the appraiser was telling you that your home was worth what it really is worth.

There is also disparities in the property tax system where all over the country, homeowners in communities of color are overpaying in property taxes, relative to the value of their homes compared to white homeowners in the same county.

So if you're paying too much in property taxes, you might be a homeowner, but you can't build up the same wealth you could if you were paying your fair share in property taxes.

So there's sort of I say all of this not just to dump so much information on you that you can't sort of handle it.

But my hope is that the kind of overwhelm in hearing how many things there are to do can be translated into hopefulness that there's so much that we can do.

And any one of these strategies or policy changes will be hugely impactful to families and communities.

And so we just need to start kind of chipping away.

Mm hmm.

Well, I want to just take the opportunity to thank you.

We think your.

Your father's book changed a lot of people's lives.

Perspectives, including my own.

I thought, like, there's nothing else that can be written that, you know?

And then it came out and I was like, Wow.

And then.

And then this follow on, I think, really work of art from you all is is incredible and reminds us, especially those of us that find ourselves feeling pretty down sometimes, that there is just so much action that we can take.

So thank you very much.

Thank you.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A for our live stream and radio audience or those just joining.

I'm Evelyn Burnette, co-founder and CEO of their Space Action Lab and moderator for today's conversation about how our communities can undo can begin to undo segregation damage.

Joining me here today is Leah Rothstein, coauthor of her latest book, Just Action How to Challenge a Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guests, students and those joining via our live stream at City Clipboard or radio broadcasts at 89.7 W WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our panelists, please text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And a city club staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

Yes.

Could you talk briefly about how the segregation has adversely affected immigrants and refugees of color, particularly?

Yeah, so many of the policies that created segregation and maintained it, you know, redlining and discrimination and in mortgage access and home selling, those same policies impact newly arrived, more newly arrived immigrant groups and other groups of color aside from African-Americans, but affect them differently.

So immigrant communities, you know, Latin communities, many who are newly arrived immigrants, they do live in ethnic enclaves, segregated communities.

But these communities are a bit more freely chosen than segregated African-American communities.

These communities are places of slightly more opportunity.

That's where newly arrived immigrants find networks for jobs and families support.

And then often for these communities, a generation or two or three later, their children and grandchildren have left these these ethnic enclaves and assimilated, integrated into other communities, oftentimes identifying as white in the census, so that it's a very different sort of trajectory than segregated African-American communities, where that generation after generation, it's just harder to leave those communities and develop the sort of networks and and wealth building that you need to be able to access higher cost areas and leave and, you know, integrate into other areas.

And the reasons for that are the government policies that we're talking about and their ongoing impacts.

You know, like I, I mentioned briefly a credit scoring.

So the credit scoring system we think of as racially neutral, you know, it is in its design and it or it's in its intent how it was designed.

But the way it works is it takes your your financial history and then gives you a credit score.

If that scores high enough, you can access loans, car loans, mortgages.

If it's not high enough, you can't get those kinds of loans.

But it only factors in a certain type of financial history.

And it's a type of financial history that whites are more likely to have than African-Americans because of the neighborhoods that they live in.

If you don't have access to a bank branch, you don't have access to traditional financial instruments, which is the only kind of financial history that that feeds into a credit score.

So if you live in a neighborhood that doesn't have a bank branch, which is, you know, more likely African-American segregated neighborhoods have fewer bank branches because of the ongoing financial redlining of those communities.

If you don't have access to those traditional financial instruments, you don't have the history, the financial history to even have a credit score.

So this is how the sort of ongoing impacts are are accumulated over generations.

You don't have a credit score, you can't get a loan, you can't get a loan, you can't get a credit score.

And then you can't get a mortgage, you can't buy a house.

You can't leave that neighborhood if you want to.

So it has these sort of ongoing accumulation of impacts, these policies and programs, and slightly differently for different ethnic and racial groups.

And that's why our solutions need to be slightly different.

In regards to your policy recommendations in gerrymandered states like Ohio.

My name is Molly and I'm a community organizer.

I've worked on grassroots campaigns to pass local renter protections here in Cuyahoga County, like pay to stay, trying to pass source of income discrimination protections, and then most recently, a ballot initiative to give people more control of the local budget, and most particularly in that last suffered a lot of grassroots organizers and people doing more progressive policy work in municipalities in Ohio can't pass legislation without the threat of preemption.

And although there's a current effort to ban gerrymandering in November, the citizens, not politicians, amendment.

We know through other states like Wisconsin and Michigan that it takes multiple years to bear the fruit of those gerrymandered districts.

So what's your call to action to local elected officials, nonprofits and movement organizers who are trying to create local change on housing but face the barrier of preemption legally for local policy?

Oh, great question.

It's a very good question.

Molly's really tough.

Anyone here?

I mean, I don't have a perfect answer.

It's difficult.

And I think that this is true for everything I'm talking about.

It's always difficult.

You know, some communities face different challenges, maybe steeper hills to climb than others.

But none of this is sort of easy to enact or easy to do.

And it takes talking to people and building support in all parts of our cities.

So, you know, we have to make sure that the communities that more often oppose these kinds of changes get on board.

You know, we need a broader range of support in order to meet these obstacles and get through them.

And I think your point about it being a multiyear, you know, it takes a long time to see the impacts.

I think that's true for a lot of what I'm talking about, too.

Like we I speak to a lot of audiences about this and and I think I felt this way somewhat too, before starting to do this.

This particular work is that there's a lot of sort of expectation, if it can't happen quickly, it's not worth doing.

If it if there's going to be pushback or opposition, we shouldn't even try.

And, you know, none of those sort of things have stopped past social justice organizers or activists.

And, you know, we have to just push through all of that opposition and be patient and keep working on it.

And and yeah, that's the best answer I've got.

Thank you for coming to the city club and thank you for your rich and and clear needed voice.

And at the City Club, as you probably know, we have a tradition of tough questions and I'll give you two.

And you can choose which one or both to ask for.

So question number one is the R word reparations and is reparations a viable response to the did the history of de Gerald de jury segregation that we've got?

And here's number two.

Given your your and your family's rich history in organizing, what's your response to the current campus organizing and response?

I mean, how do you put that in the context of the sixties and seventies that you grew up in?

Who your choice or both?

You should take both of those.

I'm going to start with number one.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting that to be the easier question.

So reparations, we don't use the term intentionally, don't use the term reparations in our book, just action.

And there's a few reasons for that.

One is, you know, we're really working on building a broad range, a broad umbrella of supporters, and want to use language that will include people in that umbrella who might not otherwise opt in.

So we're very careful about the language we used.

Another reason now we do we do believe in repair and we use the term remedies and repair and redress because there are slightly less charged words.

And, you know, in terms of reparations, you know, I personally think the movement for reparations for slavery is important.

And I'm excited to see sort of the momentum that's building.

I do think that movement for repair and redress for the policies we're talking about are slightly different now.

Those policies, you know, slavery was legal when it was in place.

The policies we're talking about were illegal when they were enacted, they were unconstitutional.

And so it requires slightly different remedies, you know, and we have slightly more responsibility and obligation and legal justification for remedying those crimes.

Those were, you know, crimes when they occurred.

And so, you know, that's why we focus on on that piece of the repair and reparations conversation, though, I think since we wrote the book, even the the term reparations and kind of the movement and conversation around it has has expanded to include not just sort of monetary payments to repair slavery's injustices, but also the policy changes needed to to repair the unconstitutional government actions that followed slavery.

You know, another when you know, the expansion of the term, I think has also come to when we wrote the book, one of the one of the risks of using the word reparations is you can pass a policy.

You know, Evanston passed a reparations policy that has to do with housing in Evanston, Illinois.

There's a risk in calling a fairly small program like that, a reparations program, because then you can say like, oh, well, we did it.

We repaired that harm.

You know, we're done.

And so we're we're trying to, you know, make sure that we don't do that.

These are all a lot of the solutions talk about are smaller pieces to the puzzle and none of them are going to repair completely the harm.

And so we have to be expansive in our in our thinking around it.

Good morning.

You've certainly given us a lot to chew on today.

Much, much.

I, too, have a similar source, sort of like yours, but it goes into a little bit more detail.

But my question to you is, I live in public housing and I struggle with it as an activist and an advocate and a community leader.

Every single moment of every single day.

So how would you suggest a person would go about?

Because see, all of this is psychology to go warfare and all that.

This is spiritual warfare.

We have not examined that.

So when you bog down people of color with this type of thing, breaking them down, attacking their spirituality, and some of the first thing that I often say, why should I get up and do something when they're going to do?

The government is going to do what they want to do anyway.

So how do you go about repairing a person's spiritual and psychologically to have them even step forward, to even attack some of these issues that you talk about?

Mm hmm.

Well, I would love to hear maybe afterwards how you would answer that question.

I would love to hear how to repair your spirituality.

Last point, doing up and I.

Really like I love.

All of a sudden he stopped struggling and he started to cry.

I said, Not only do I love you, but somebody much more important than I love you.

Hmm.

You work on a person like that, and it's probably the only time he said anybody ever said that they loved him.

And that broke my heart.

So that also broke his spirit.

Yeah.

Thank you for that.

I mean, not to be a broken record, but I think all of this is about all of us actively engaging in these issues actively together.

People from all parts of our cities, all communities saying that it matters what's happening in public housing in our city, saying that it matters what's happening in a neighborhood that looks differently from mine.

And I care about it.

Not because it's, you know, next door to me, but because it's part of my community.

And I care about all of the people in my community.

And I think that's how we start to start to repair of the harm by by showing up for people who look differently from us and and, you know, being willing, I think, a lot of the resistance to a lot of these ideas around racial equity and repair and housing equity, you know, as people who are comfortable, fear, change, and they fear that they might become less comfortable.

And I think we all have to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable and also understand that life has changed.

Cities change, neighborhoods change, that this idea that our neighborhoods can't change is one of the sort of very harmful ideas that have come out of planning and zoning that, you know, our my neighborhood should always look like this and it should never change.

And it's my birthright to live in a neighborhood that always looks like this when really neighborhoods should be dynamic and we should all learn to accept that reality.

And I my hope, my sort of vision is once we start spreading that understanding and living according to that understanding, some of this sort of feeling that nobody cares about, other people will start to shift.

That's my hope.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Nick.

I'm with Envy five question.

So I'm.

No, I'm no idiot.

I just bought a house.

I'm getting all these letters to refi the house before that, when my credit score is before, between 580 and 670 was getting all this quick money mail and I fell prey to this really early in my life.

It took me a long time to bounce back and get a house.

And I'm reading these new refinancing letters and they're very attractive in this language that they're using.

The fine print is very hidden.

And I know for a fact that 2008 housing bubble hit people hard in the tough areas.

People that had homes for decades, even a century in their families lost them.

People have not bounced back.

And I read the book, Some of us, by Heather McGhee, and she talks about how the finance sector controls a lot of Congress and so has not paid for the wrongs of that rapacious lending system.

How do we go after them?

How do we teach our kids to resist this predatory lending and to focus on the basics of finance right now?

So, well, we can go after them by organizing in our communities and pressuring our local banks.

We do write about in just action using the Community Reinvestment Act to pressure banks to live up to their obligations to invest in all areas of their service area, not just in the richer, whiter areas that doesn't directly address their for the crimes in the subprime mortgage scandal.

That's kind of a larger, harder to access as local residents.

But the local residents do have great success in organizing using the Community Reinvestment Act.

So the Community Reinvestment Act was enacted in 76, I think in the 1970s too, in response to redlining, to try to get banks to reverse their redlining practices by requiring them to invest in the lower and moderate income neighborhoods in their larger service area.

They get a score on how well they do that, and fortunately most of them get good scores, whether or not they're actually doing well at it.

And so that's where community involvement comes in because the scores, the assessments that banks get are all public information.

And when banks want to acquire or buy another bank, which happens a lot more often than you would ever imagine when they want to merge or acquire another bank, they have to get federal regulatory approval.

And those federal regulators look at the CRA scores and they have to take public input.

And so community groups organize efforts to create campaigns, you know, to publicize these banks, poor performance in the subprime lending crisis or in current day, how they're lending in our communities.

Banks really don't like negative public, you know, information out there.

They like to be seen as upstanding members of the community.

So using that information can help pressure banks to come to the table to negotiate with community groups.

And they many of them do this.

They then negotiate community benefits agreements where the community groups can get, you know, commitments around mortgage lending in their communities, small business lending, investments in affordable housing, investments in economic development.

And in exchange for these commitments that community groups agreed to support their merger acquisition application.

And that's how communities can use their what the the levers that they have under the Community Reinvestment Act to to help banks to improve their performance.

And there's groups doing this all over the country.

There's a national organization, the National Reinvestment Community Reinvestment Coalition, that helps local groups organize these campaigns and find out when banks are merging.

So there's resources out there for helping communities figure out how to do that.

Hi, my name is Arthur.

I'm a retired pediatrician, and I want to thank you for you and your father.

You've you've borne witness so that each of us now know that these cruelties only exist by our choice and we can change them.

So thank you.

I want to give a shout out to the St Luke's Foundation, Clean Foundation for being purpose built Community Project to Cleveland if you drive by Woodhill stage, you'll see community transformation in process.

And my question is a community led that is they brought to this program that allows residents to lead this transformation.

But my question is, have you seen a community desegregate A and B, has that had an impact on one of the cruelest de facto realities of segregation, which is the disparity in infant mortality in Cleveland, their neighborhoods where a baby who's born deemed of color is seven times more likely not to survive to the first birthday than a baby born deemed white.

And we know that is by choice, because that disparity doesn't exist in the U.S. Army.

So we know it has by choice.

And the question is, are there neighborhoods that have desegregated where we've seen infant mortality disparities go away?

Mm hmm.

Great question.

I want I don't know, like the details of the infant mortality rates.

But you're correct that the neighborhoods we live in determine our health outcomes.

Children who grow up in segregated African-American communities have higher rates of asthma.

They have higher grew up to have higher rates of cardiovascular disease, cancer and shorter life expectancies.

You know, a neighborhood a mile away from another neighborhood could have a life expectancy ten, 15, 20 years shorter.

But and that is, like you said, by choice, not the individual's choice, but the choice of us as a society where we decided that this neighborhood could be right next to a freeway with diesel trucks and could be right next to a factory.

And, you know, can the children there could live in houses with lead?

And so all of that sort of access to pollution and stress and lack of access to open air trees, green space, all of that determines our health outcomes.

Now, in terms of integrating a community and changing health outcomes, I think integrate it communities do have better health outcomes because when a community is integrated, the sad truth of our country is if a community is racially integrated, it's harder to subjugate it the same way and to depress the resources in those in that community in the same way and to put factories right next to it in the same way.

And so that's part of why, you know, racial integration improves everybody's outcomes.

So I don't have the specific data on that.

I'm sure it exists out there.

But, you know, living in integrated communities tends to be healthier communities.

Yes.

Lee Rothstein, Evelyn Burnette, thank you so much.

I feel like we've been waiting a couple of years for that, for this conversation.

So we really appreciate this and the book as well.

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We'd like to extend a special welcome to students who are joining us from M.C.

Squared STEM High School.

Hey guys.

Also, in addition to those tables hosted by our sponsors, we'd also like to welcome guests at tables hosted by the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland by Cleveland Birthing Beautiful Communities, the Cleveland Foundation and Global Cleveland, who has a special group of leaders from southeast from across Southeast Asia with us today.

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Reading Room for selling books today.

Up next at the City Club on Friday, May 17th.

Jodi Rudoren, who is the editor in chief of the Forward and the former New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem will join us in conversation with Dante Geronimo.

He's director of the First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

They'll talk about the importance of independent media in an age characterized by polarization.

But if there's one thing about which there is no polarization, it's the brilliance of eight time Grammy winner Terence Blanchard, who will be joining us on the 21st.

He is a trumpeter pianist and he got his start composing, composing while working on film scores with Spike Lee.

Yeah, I know.

So he's going to be he'll be here as part of his participation in the Cleveland Orchestra's Mandela Humanities Festival.

It's May 21st, as I said.

And former BET producer Jeff Johnson will moderate that conversation.

Tickets about all these events and more at City Club dot org.

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