>>The first question I ask my students when they come into my class, "Tell me about the community you grew up in."

Because your experience is a teacher, right?

And even if you lived in an all-white community.

"What was that like?"

And then they're like, "Oh, I didn't have any black people in my community."

So own that experience, and then you can engage authentically, and I think, beyond a transaction.

>>Production funding for Racism: Challenging Perceptions is provided by Community Foundation For a Greater Richmond, partnering with individuals, families, and businesses to connect local giving to our region's needs and opportunities.

More at cfrichmond.org.

And by viewers like you, thank you.

>>Over a year following the brutal death of George Floyd, and the onset of a pandemic that shed light on racial disparities, we will discuss what changes, if any, have occurred in how communities view and value black lives.

With me now are Ebony Walden and Dr. Wes Bellamy.

Ebony Walden is the Founder and Principal Consultant at Ebony Walden Consulting, EWC, an urban strategy firm based in Richmond, Virginia.

She works with a wide range of organizations to design and facilitate trainings, strategic plans and community engagement processes that explore race, equity, and the creation of more just and inclusive communities.

Ebony is also the creator of the Richmond Racial Equity Essays, a multimedia project focused on advancing racial equity in Richmond.

Dr. Wes Bellamy is the author of When White Supremacy Knocks Fight Back: How White People Can Use Their Privilege and How Black People Can Use Their Power.

He is a former Vice Mayor and City Councilman in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is currently the Political Science Department Chairman and Director of the John Mercer Langston Institute for African American Political Leadership at Virginia state university.

So as I was digging into you all's work, I'm really thinking about your racial equity series that you have, Ebony, and also Our Black Party.

There was some significant points around ownership, right?

And self-determination that really rise up in your work.

>>The Richmond Racial Equity Essays is a multi-media project.

We asked over 50 people in Richmond, what were their vision for racial equity and how do we get there?

And ownership came up a lot, so in my essay, which talked about really creating neighborhoods and communities that were centered on black ownership and identity.

If we're really gonna change things, you need land, you need capital, and you need the capacity to really do something with all three of those things.

So you can build wealth and close the wealth gap.

And the wealth gap is this cumulative and compounding of lots of different things that go into that.

Home ownership being one, the impact of redlining.

And so I think it's really important as we move forward, as we encourage black entrepreneurship, but also home ownership, business ownership, property ownership.

If you look at our communities, they've changed and, I'm an urban planner.

They've changed and redeveloped and been raised, and all of these things over the course of history, but we need to ground ourselves in ownership of our space, so it can really be reflective of our values, our community, our heritage, right?

And we can reap the benefit of passing down that generational wealth, right?

>>Absolutely.

>>And so that really is one of the linchpins of the wealth gap, right?

The inability to pass down generational wealth.

>>Absolutely.

When you look at some of the significant challenges that have been front and center to the work that we've been, you know, kind of facing over the last two years.

And so, as I was looking at your work, and then, Wes, with what you're doing with Our Black Party, which is an amazing national platform, right?

To kind of elevate the voices, especially in those political spaces.

If you could talk about that a little bit more as well, so that, you know, folks kind of understand what you're working on.

>>Sure.

So, I served as Vice Mayor and City Councilman in Charlottesville from 2016 to 2020.

And one of the things that I was consistently noticing when I would go to conferences or join different civic organizations and meet with different people, there was always this sense of there's very few spaces for us as black elected officials or activists and organizers to be our most authentic selves.

And we were not always pleased with what we were seeing on the national level from politics, whether that be from Democratic or Republican party, and the needs of black folk were often left out.

Now, black folk were often asked to be able to participate in X, Y, and Z, or come out and support A, B and C. But when it came time for our needs to be met, we were put on the back burner.

And it was very frustrating as an elected official, on a local level, to see this taking place and transpiring.

Not just in my city and state, but across the country.

Colleagues and I, we were saying, "We need to start our own party, "we need to educate our people, "we need to be able to develop and empower our folks to "understand that there is a place for black folk to go."

Black folk, many of us feel politically homeless.

So, Our Black Party was started as a political platform to be able to, again, provide space for our people.

We're not a quote unnquote third party, but what we are about is educating our people, ensuring that our folks know we have a place to go, and also more than anything else, understanding that you can be an elected official, you can be an activist, you can be an organizer, you can be whatever you want to be, and you can be civically engaged in the way in which you wanna show up.

There's nothing wrong with black folk owning our politics.

There's nothing wrong with black folk centering ourselves.

And there's nothing wrong with black folks understanding that before you were a Democrat, Republican, or an Independent, you were black.

There's nothing wrong with us putting ourselves first.

>>Is there a significant challenge that you often see about the work that you're leading?

Especially when it comes to, kind of, race in place and what you're moving forward.

Any particular challenges that have kind of stood out to you, especially since 2020?

>>I think that there is an interesting trying to find the balance between urgency and the reality that transformation takes time, right?

There's this natural tension 'cause people are, you know, in the past year, there's this wonderful, which I think is great, racial awakening or awareness.

And so people really want to do something, and I think that's great, but transformed people transform people in places, right?

And so we really need to do our own decoding, studying, working, and understanding best practice, and understanding the canon of work that has already been done.

While some people are new to this work, lots of us have been doing the work for a time, right?

And we're the tired folks, but I think that we just really need to, that tension between we wanna do something, but we don't want to perpetuate and reproduce the same systems in the same kind of thinking.

And so that transformation of self, of institutions, of our society, we didn't get here overnight.

There's been 400 years of this, right?

So a year or two, we wanna do the work, right?

And continue to push forward, but we also wanna allow the space for change, and I think we need both.

We need action, but we also need times of sitting in conversation, and reflecting, and reading, and really doing our study and work.

But we can walk and chew gum at the same time, right?

>>Absolutely.

>>I think the second thing is people, because the problem has been gone on for so long, so embedded in who we are as a people, in our culture, in our history, in our places you can go, I call it Everywhere, USA, there's not a place that you can go where you don't see the difference between black and white written on the landscape.

And so I just really encourage people to think about how do you influence the institutions that you're gonna work in.

We're all a part of some institutions, whether it's our job, whether it's the organizations that we volunteer with, whether it's some community organization, right?

We can influence those institutions where we already are.

And then what is the larger work across sectors?

The systemic work, the structural work that we want to tap into.

Everybody has a job or some place they're plugged in.

Everybody has a self that they can transform.

So that's like an easy plugin too, but then how we're gonna collaborate across sectors, because this is multi-layered work.

You gotta pull back the onion.

Housing and education, and our environment, all of those things are so interconnected that we have to work across sectors.

So getting people to really say, "Okay, this is the next thing that I can do, "as opposed to being paralyzed."

>>I tell folks all the time, a lot of us, especially our age, we love to quote Nipsey Hustle.

The marathon continues, but we gotta understand this is a marathon.

So for me, it's been similar to Ebony.

Traveling the country and traveling the state, I spent a lot more time in the state.

And as I've gone to different pockets, just the systemic differences in our communities.

So having the resolve to empower our people to say that we can do this, has kind of been the biggest challenge for me as of late.

At Virginia state university, we started the John Mercer Langston Institute for African American Political Leadership, which is a training institute for black political leadership, for those who wanna run for office, those who wanna work behind the scenes, those who just wanna understand, and we have our first cohort right now.

And through those trainings, we've been going across the state and building folks up.

It has been incredibly interesting and impactful to see how black folk across the country view their issues in their local communities, but how they are so similar.

So now our next step is, in your community, how do we get you to attend your city council meetings, to go to your school board meetings, to join your, or attend your zoning commission meetings, or your planning commission meetings.

Pay attention to those things.

So that's where a lot of our work has been.

And then again with Our Black Party doing that and trying to duplicate that on a national scale, has been a challenge, but it's all good work and things that I'm looking forward to us continue to do.

>>As you see the challenges you all quickly identify what's the solution, because you're transformative leaders, and so I think with this work, you're always unpacking.

I think you said about pulling back the onion, you're always unpacking these different things that are in your face, but I think where we stay most powerful and influential, is when we kind of couple that with a solution to help move us forward.

>>Solution and grace, I will say.

Because I think that we have to be able to be graceful with each other.

Some individuals can be judgemental or, "This person should have done that, "or they should have done A, B and C," while having to understand that for many of us, we're learning.

Unfortunately, you know, we don't have a playbook in which we can just abide by.

We're learning this stuff on the go.

And at the same time, we can't judge members of our communities for not doing more when they're still trying to figure out how to do their day to day and improve our community.

So a level of grace has to be to afforded to all of us in this work.

>>Absolutely, and I wanna echo that.

Just a level of respect for the different talents that we bring to the table too.

You know, Ebony will show up in a way that Wes may not, that Adrienne may not, but it's okay.

You know, the head does a thing that the foot doesn't, and that the arm doesn't even want to do.

And so when you look at the holistic-- >>Whole part of the body.

>>Right.

>>Yeah, the holistic movement, I so appreciate you talking about grace, us having grace with each other even.

Respecting the differences and the different kind of tips and tools that people bring to the table, but still using that for the collective movement, you know, that we're working on.

>>And I think grace for the process and ourselves, right?

And so, because we do this work, people are, "What's the answer, what's the answer?"

These are adaptive problems, right?

I had the opening for the Richmond Racial Equity Essays and somebody went, "What's the next step?"

And I said, you know, there are some things that we're gonna do, but I think the next step is going to emerge because I took this step.

We have not solved racism before.

(laughter) We have not done these things before.

So we have to have grace with ourselves to say, "I'm doing the next right thing, "I have a vision of where this is supposed to go."

But be graceful with yourself, 'cause you may need to go left, you may need to go right, you may just put something in the universe that didn't exist before, and me and Wes talking, something else emerged, and you have to open to that and where it's gonna go, and say, "Well, I don't know exactly where this is gonna go "in the sense of the steps that we're gonna get there "to really disrupt systemic racism, "but I'm gonna take this step, 'cause this is "what I'm called to do, these are my gifts and talent "and this is my platform and stage, and I'm gonna use that."

And that next step is gonna show you the next step and who next are you supposed to partner with.

So I think grace with ourselves and grace that this is a process that we're all learning together as a nation.

Really as citizens of the world, we're learning how to unlearn this supremacy culture, this false hierarchy of human value that any one of us is better, inherently better than another person, we have to unlearn that because it's everywhere and it crosses boundaries.

We have to have grace with ourselves.

We haven't been at this moment before, but we can go forward together.

>>I think sometimes we're in these situations where we feel like we have to choose between this or that.

But I think what we've learned is that the power is really in us recreating, re-imagining, you know, where we are and where we wanna go.

So this more, you know, black futurism has been a theme here lately, but-- >>Being bold enough to do so.

>>Being bold and brave enough to do so.

And so when I look at both of you, you all have been able to be bold and brave in a time that's been hard for black folks.

And so I often think about you all who are really leading this work and creating platforms for folks to get that voice out, how are you being supported and getting this work done?

And working in issues that are so intimately affected in your lives, like, what are you all doing for yourselves in order to keep the movements that you're creating going?

She passed it to you first.

>>I'm an avid believer in therapy.

I see my therapist every other week.

Every other Wednesday morning at 9:00 AM.

And one of the things that I learned to do during the later term, excuse me, the later portion of my tenor on city council, was to be selfish with my time.

So there's nothing wrong with me saying that, "No, I cannot make a meeting during these particular times of the day on these specific days," because I have to take care of myself and ensuring that I will put myself first, I will put my family first, I will do what I need to do for myself.

That only allows me to be able to do more for the movement.

And not allowing people to make you feel bad for putting yourself first, and I think that this work is draining as we know.

And the more in which you give, the more in which people will take.

But if we just consistently give, then we won't have anything for ourselves.

There's nothing wrong with working hard and grinding and sacrificing, but to a certain extent, you have to be willing to sacrifice maybe the spotlight or accolades for yourself to be able to ensure that you are where you need to be both mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally, so I'm an avid runner.

I like to jog, I like to lift weights, I like to play basketball, but I make time to do what I want to do when I want do it.

>>Awesome, awesome, awesome.

>>I second that, get a good therapist and take care of yourself.

But I also think too, daily restorative practices.

So I walk around the neighborhood after work and that is just like a daily forest bathing.

You go out and just experience nature and walking just shifts everything.

Shifts your perspective, you get some fresh air.

So that's really important to me, just leaning into black joy.

So there's so much that we've been bombarded with on TV that talks about black trauma or, you know, I work, obviously training folks about race and racism, right?

So every day, I'm looking at the disparities.

And so I really wanted to lean this past year into black joy, right?

So that's black love on TV, joking and laughing with my friends, making sure I'm going out to festivals.

Richmond's a city of festivals, that's a Richmond plug.

(laughter) >>Yes, it is.

>>Going out to different festivals and just having a good time.

I think this time has also been clarifying about, you gotta get clear about what your yes' are and what your no's are.

>>No's are.

>>And so that's really important to me this, this, no, 'cause the no's allow you to say yes.

And so we have to be discerning about, you know, every work, every good work is not my work.

And so I really am discerning about my time, what I put my, what my put my, like there's tons of great things to do, but every good work is not my work.

>>Absolutely.

>>And so really getting clear and discerning about what my work is in this world and what are the things that light up my soul and I wanna say yes to, and those things that are draining, saying no to those.

And that's opening the door for somebody who that is their work, to step into that place.

And a lot of times, you know, you have the few black folks that are like, you know, everybody's asking everything.

Whether to be on board or do this.

And I'm like, "Nope, Nope, Nope."

And it's not just to say no, but it's just like, I have these things, I'm clear about my purpose and what I want to do, but also evolving.

I wanna provide space for myself to think, to breathe, to have joy, and that has been a lovely re-prioritization at this time where I can say "No, no, no," so I can say "Yes, yes, yes," to all the things that light up my soul.

>>And you kind of lead me to the next question when you talk about the what's next and you know, doing what's necessary and now, but I'm curious with all of the very dynamic things that you all are building and have built, have there been any significant kind of ripple effects of the work based on what you created, any particular kind of after effects, ripples?

>>There's too many to name, but just like across the state, we see this next group and crop of leaders who are incredibly passionate, and bold, and educated on the issues and bringing others along with them.

That's kind of the ripple effect for me, because I remember what it was like being solo and kind of being judged, being misunderstood, and feeling as if you have to carry a certain mantle alone.

I remember what it was like feeling like you have to sacrifice all these things and, just not really many other people being vocal along with you.

But now to see so many others doing so, is just a beautiful thing.

And then I also think that for us collectively, for black folk setting and developing a multifaceted agenda across the Commonwealth of Virginia is incredibly important for us.

And your point earlier was so poignant in regards to respecting the fact that we have differences.

I mean, I got a part in the back of my head with a fist and designs all in my head, right?

This is how I should show up.

>>Yes!

>>I like to wear my chain.

_ We embrace you.

>>This is me.

>>We embrace you.

>>This is who I and I'm okay and comfortable with being myself, but that's not for everybody.

But let's lend my talents, let's lend that person's talents, and let's develop something in which we can create a better Virginia for black folks specifically.

Doesn't mean that we don't want a better Virginia for everybody, but again, there's nothing wrong with us centering ourselves and saying that as we continue to be the backbone in many capacities for this state, for this Commonwealth, let's develop what we need for ourselves, let's be bold in demanding what we want and what we want to see our communities, and our neighborhoods, and our businesses, and our families, and our people look like.

And I think there's enough enough of us around the room and across the state in which we can get together, we can put our expertise to use, and develop from our governments, from our communities, from the nonprofit structures, what we want to see.

And I think for 2022, that's kind of one of the things in which I'll be working on with Ebony.

>>For the essay, it's really interesting, because it just started as a essay.

I'm gonna do this essay ebook, right?

And so I told a couple people that I wanted some feedback and Duron Chavis, who's an activist and urban farmer, he had just finished Black Space Matters, which is a video series at the ICA, the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, had the equipment and said, "I wanna do something very similar to this project, "I think video would add another element."

And so we shot a video series, and because of that, I was like, I want to, so we went around and interviewed people, asked them what their vision for racial equity was and how do we get there?

But I love that the result of this project is 50 people in Richmond have gotten their thoughts out there.

Their concrete, their stories, their experience, and their solutions, right?

And so giving other people a platform to say these are complex problems across sectors.

Everybody from grassroots folks to what we call grass tops, I mean, to rooftops, right?

And so that is a broad spectrum and having those voices heard, because it's gonna take that collective collaboration, sharing of ideas, and impact to move us forward.

>>It's actually time for questions, here's the first one.

What is your opinion on allyship in regards to supporting black focused businesses geared specifically to black people, do you see ally purchases as appropriation or support?

>>Buying black and being intentional with buying black, even for black folk, is important.

My friends often get on me.

They know when we go to a new city or whatnot, or wherever we go-- >>Black restaurant.

>>We have to spend some of our money at the black restaurant.

>>Yes, indeed.

>>It may be a little bit challenging, and we may sometimes even have to pay more, but it is imperative that we put our dollars in our restaurants and our communities.

>>It's the learning that you get, it's the discovery that you get of another business.

So many of our businesses just have a story, right?

It's a bit of history around it.

And so I think the opportunities for people to connect in a different way, even when I think about the allyship question that just came up, it's an opportunity to do something in a really genuine way.

>>Yep.

>>From my perspective, when you are genuine and when you're authentic in your efforts, it's felt and it's shown, right?

>>I just love allies and I have a number of white friends that are true allies and co-conspirators.

They own their whiteness, right?

And they're like, "I'm white, I understand that, "I have processed that and begun my decoding process."

And you can tell people have done the work, right?

So you have to do the work and say, "How has whiteness showed up and white privilege showed up "in my life, in my community and over the trajectory?"

And when you own that, anybody, when you own yourself, you can engage with other people authentically.

I live not that far from a corridor that was pretty much an African American business corridor that's changing.

My neighborhood around Brooklyn Park Boulevard on the North side, and so I see lots of businesses with Black Lives Matter signs, right?

And so that's always peculiar to me.

And I was like, I wonder are they really engaging the black people that live in this community?

And so I think going past the visibility of it, engaging people, supporting black leaders, black systems, black businesses and the center itself.

So it's not necessarily about you sharing all this, but where are you putting your money?

Where are you putting your time?

Are you centering the voices of the people of the community and moving beyond because we can all post something on Facebook, we can post the Black Lives Matter signs.

But does it matter in your day to day life and interactions with black people and black communities, right?

But that is a huge amount of body of work.

And so we need woke white people to go awaken their brothers, sisters, cousins, children.

That is their work and how can they educate themselves so they can go in the arenas in which they move in and own, and really do that change work.

>>I love it, thank you all.

And just some of the sound bites, "Transformed people live transformed lives."

Unplugging to make sure that you're taking care of yourself.

It's a marathon and not a sprint, which is absolutely true in the longing work that we all set out to do.

Ebony, thank you.

Wes, thank you for being here as well.

>>Thank you.

>>Thank you.

>>Production funding for Racism: Challenging Perceptions is provided by Community Foundation For a Greater Richmond, partnering with individuals, families, and businesses to connect local giving to our region's needs and opportunities.

More at cfrichmond.org.

And by viewers like you, thank you.