“...What we've done is we've used our definition of freedom to exclude any understanding of relationship from freedom. Freedom and relationships are mutually exclusive, and this is a catastrophe, and this is not what the Bible says.” - Dr. Douglas Campbell

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The issue of racism has become a real hot potato and political football this year, and Dr. Douglas Campbell returns from the last episode to help us break through the fog of the bipartisan rhetoric that we are currently experiencing so that we can begin to better understand the belief systems that perpetuate our struggles to ensure equal justice and equal opportunity for all citizens. In the last episode of the podcast, we began to talk about something that both sides of the argument say that there is much too little of – that being freedom. We talked about what it is and what it is not, and, along the way, came across an interconnected question – what is justice, and what is not justice? Dr. Campbell continues to touch upon and explore these questions from a Biblical perspective.

As a reminder, Dr. Campbell is a professor at Duke Divinity School where he has become, since 2003, one of the most respected and innovative New Testament scholars in the world. He specializes in the history and theology of the Apostle Paul, having published five incredibly influential books that have changed the way we Christians understand Paul's writings and large portions of the New Testament itself, and he also directs Duke's Prison Studies program. His latest book is titled Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God's Love, a truly interesting and helpful book that I can't recommend highly enough!

He continues to discuss freedom and what he calls in Pauline Dogmatics quasi-freedom, or phony freedom that often masks itself as actual freedom. He also touches upon freedom in relationships such as marriage, what it means to regard someone as a neighbor and how to do so even if that person is very different from us, and why Christians should be more inclusive and accepting of differences. He also offers some insight regarding what next steps we as Americans should take to move closer toward achieving our country, a topic touched upon in the last episode, and he points toward grounds for hope.

Dr. Campbell has taught us so about freedom, love, and justice and what they mean and don't mean from a Biblical perspective, and he has given us a great Biblical account of these values. In our next episode, we are going to pivot to build on this discussion of love, justice, and freedom but will be applying these values to a discussion of our criminal justice processes. Returning guest Dr. Derek Woodard-Lehman will discuss what he has learned about this topic from teaching a course about it from a Christian ethics perspective. I hope that you'll join us, and be sure to invite your friends to listen in as well!

Show Notes

[3:53] – Dr. Campbell helps us understand how some people misunderstand what real freedom is.

[6:02] – Dr. Campbell gives an example of freedom in relationships.

[8:52] – Dr. Campbell discusses the freedom of obedience.

[10:04] – We receive an example of freedom around the world in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and being asked to wear masks.

[12:02] – Dr. Uffman and Dr. Campbell return the conversation toward marriage in connection to Biblical freedom.

[15:02] – Dr. Uffman offers some summarizing insight on Dr. Campbell's discussion of freedom thus far.

[17:18] – Dr. Uffman shifts the conversation toward Dr. Campbell's discussion of structures in his book, Pauline Dogmatics.

[19:09] – Dr. Campbell reveals how he would respond to someone saying that they should have the freedom to choose who their neighbor is.

[21:40] – We learn how to regard people who are different from us as neighbors as Dr. Campbell encourages us to stop seeing people under categories but rather networks.

[24:45] – Dr. Campbell reflects on the Civil Rights Movement and how it was driven by deep friendships.

[26:05] – Dr. Campbell comments on how the military understands forming bonds over shared struggle.

[28:13] – Differences, Dr. Campbell asserts, create possibilities for new things to be learned.

[31:22] – Dr. Uffman directs the conversation toward the hierarchies of human value and Othering and what Dr. Campbell says about these topics in Pauline Dogmatics.

[32:16] – Dr. Campbell offers more insight regarding how God is at work in all of humanity.

[35:12] – We hear Dr. Campbell make an analogy between substance abusers and sinners.

[38:12] – Far too many people think that their problem is other people rather than themselves.

[40:22] – Dr. Uffman compares our differences to playing different notes in a symphony, with God being the conductor.

[41:27] – Paul wanted to foster the diversity within the communities that he founded, who were not strictly Christians.

[43:40] – We learn what next steps Americans should take to achieve our country, explaining how to put peace into action rather than just theory.

[45:56] – Dr. Campbell points toward grounds for hope and signs that peace is possible.

Links and Resources

Dr. Campbell’s Website

Duke Divinity School - Our Faculty: Douglas Campbell

Douglas Campbell – Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God's Love

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“Unequal societies are not societies that have equal opportunity. It's a zero sum game. The more you have inequality, the less social mobility you have; social mobility is equal opportunity...” - Dr. Douglas Campbell

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Dr. Douglas Campbell joins us today to help us consider the proverbial elephant in the room whenever we talk about our struggles with racism. Whether you are White or non-White in America, it's something that we Americans claim that we want for ourselves and our neighbors even though if you listen to us talk about resolving our racial tensions, it's the thing that both sides seem to believe there is much too little of. What is that elephant in the room? Well, I am talking about freedom! Dr. Campbell is here to, amongst other things, discuss what freedom is and what it isn't from a Christian perspective.

Dr. Campbell is a professor at Duke Divinity School where he has become, since 2003, one of the most respected and innovative New Testament scholars in the world. He specializes in the life and history of the Apostle Paul, having published five books that have changed the way we Christians understand Paul's writings and large portions of the New Testament itself, and he also directs Duke's Prison Studies program. His latest book is titled Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God's Love, and I highly recommend that you pick it up and read it!

He is here to discuss values that we tend to take for granted - values like love, justice, and freedom – especially within the framework of racial tensions. He believes that there are healthy and unhealthy ways to think about these values that can actually contribute to and perpetuate our racial tensions. He talks about the teachings of men like Martin Luther King and James Baldwin and how their perspectives can be tied to God's love, and he addresses what love means from a Christian standpoint and how we need to unlearn what we've been told love is and relearn what it actually means, which could very well include learning from others who are practicing it. He also talks about what happens in society when there is inequality and refers to what he calls social mobility being affected as a result.

Dr. Campbell has given us such a great Biblical account of values such as love, justice, and freedom. Join us next time as we continue this conversation, when Dr. Campbell will dig deeper into this issue and will explain terms such as quasi Christian freedom, a variant that masquerades as freedom but ultimately does more harm than good. He will also help us recognize some of the unhealthy ways that some of us sometimes think about freedom. This conversation has been so helpful, and I can't wait to have him back on to continue this talk! I hope that you'll join us, and be sure to tell friends who might be interested about the podcast!

Show Notes

[2:41] – Dr. Uffman opens the conversation with a quote from James Baldwin from Baldwin's book The Fire Next Time.

[4:17] – People like Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, as pointed out by Dr. Uffman, believed that a lack of love was what was impeding us from achieving our country.

[5:18] – Dr. Campbell explains what he means in his book Pauline Dogmatics when he argues that we need to learn how to love.

[7:40] – Former President Trump, Dr. Uffman reflects, once stated that he couldn't understand why military personnel would lay down their lives in sacrifice – a form of love that is being discussed in this podcast episode.

[9:25] – Dr. Campbell makes the argument that we sometimes play justice off against love even though being loving is being just.

[12:20] – Dr. Campbell discusses the difference between the law and justice, using the Jim Crow laws as an example of the distinction.

[15:16] – Dr. Campbell argues that the only place where we can see a perfect reflection of God's love is in Christ.

[17:32] – We learn that true justice is transformational, reconciling, and restorative.

[20:13] – Dr. Campbell makes the case that justice is doing the right thing even if that isn't congruent with the law.

[22:34] – Dr. Campbell explains how love through sacrifice relates to our struggles here in the United States.

[25:31] – Dr. Campbell believes that Christians need to help democracy strive for love.

[26:40] – We discover what Dr. Campbell means by first having to unlearn love before learning it.

[29:54] – Dr. Campbell reveals how he defines freedom according to his book Pauline Dogmatics.

[32:10] – Dr. Campbell explains his distinction between positive freedom and negative freedom.

[34:54] – People who are being harmed, Dr. Campbell shares, need to be liberated.

[37:02] – Dr. Campbell makes a connection between structure and freedom.

[40:22] – Dr. Uffman offers insight on Dr. Campbell's emphasis on structures, nodding toward the Civil Rights Movement of 1963.

[41:27] – Dr. Campbell brings his home country of New Zealand into the conversation and refers to inequality as a zero sum game.

[44:05] – It's not our laws that make us free, Dr. Uffman summarizes, because there are too many other factors that impede freedom.

Links and Resources

Dr. Campbell’s Website

Duke Divinity School - Our Faculty: Douglas Campbell

Douglas Campbell – Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God's Love

Douglas Campbell – The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul

James Baldwin – The Fire Next Time

Richard Rorty – Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

Isaiah Berlin – The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

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“...Caste is not just about White and Black. It's about power.” - Bishop Prince Singh

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In our last episode, Rt. Rev. Dr. Prince Singh joined me to share his experiences as a boy growing up in South India as well as his experiences as a young priest engaging the consequences of caste serving communities of Dalits (formerly known as Untouchables), the lowest ranking on the caste system. In this episode, we will be picking up where we left off, although this time, we will shift our focus over to Bishop Singh's experience as a priest and bishop here in the United States.

As a reminder, Rt. Rev. Dr. Prince Singh is the eighth and current bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester, NY. He was born in the larger state of Tamil Nadu in South India where he served many congregations as an Anglican priest before coming to the United States. While earning his PhD in New Jersey, he served multiple parishes and became such a powerful spiritual force that the people of Rochester called him to be their bishop. He has spent decades leading people to grapple with the challenges of racial reconciliation, and he is here to help us reflect on caste and to share his experiences of wrestling with racism here in the United States.

Bishop Prince shares what it was like to move here to the United States as a man of color, where he was now a minority. He reminds us of two of the main components of caste – purity and pollution – and how those components also play a role in racism here in the United States as White is often socially regarded as pure. Bishop Prince also acknowledges his privilege as a man and discusses how he goes about remaining aware of that privilege, and he offers some incredibly inspirational and moving grounds for hope for the future – such as humanity's move toward beloved community (a term that he explains and exemplifies) and how the COVID-19 pandemic has made some of us realize how divided we were even before the virus made us quarantine and be literally divided.

Speaking with Bishop Prince was such an uplifting experience as it always is, and I thank him for coming on the podcast to help us think about caste from the perspective of someone from India who is now living as a leader here in the United States. In our next two episodes, we will pivot from our historical descriptions of the realities of our racial tensions to do a deep dive into the habitual thoughts that cause and sustain said racial tensions. New Testament scholar Dr. Douglas Campbell of Duke will be joining us to help us think about the values that we tend to take for granted – values like love, justice, and freedom. Dr. Campbell believes that there are healthy and unhealthy ways to think about these values that can actually contribute to and perpetuate our racial tensions. Join us next time to learn more, and be sure to tell friends who might be interested in the podcast about us!

Show Notes

[4:26] – Bishop Prince reflects on what it was like moving to the United States where he was now a minority as a man of color.

[5:56] – Bishop Prince frames New Jersey as more progressive than Virginia but also more complex.

[7:43] – The South and the North, Bishop Prince argues, have the same iterations of racism that are just manifested differently.

[10:00] – Bishop Prince reminds us of how caste involves perceived purity and impurity.

[12:05] – Bishop Prince addresses his privilege as a man and how he works to become more aware of that privilege.

[14:57] – Dr. Uffman offers insight on the hierarchical worldview described by Bishop Prince.

[16:17] – We learn what it is like for Bishop Prince being a parent of boys of color in Rochester.

[18:54] – Bishop Prince reveals what benefits resulted from one of his sons finding a school that embraced how he learned.

[21:16] – Bishop Prince reflects on what he has observed and processed in Rochester regarding race.

[22:38] – We learn about the antidote to internalized racism.

[25:28] – The only hope to fight structural and internalized racism is to embrace community and break down the walls that separate us.

[26:50] – We discover what Bishop Prince means when he refers to beloved community.

[29:30] – We cannot have dreams without reparations, Bishop Prince argues.

[32:35] – It's not about being colorblind, Dr. Uffman interprets, but is rather about being color-sensitive.

[33:30] – Bishop Prince shares what pockets of the beloved community that he has observed.

Links and Resources

Episcopal Diocese of Rochester – About the Rt. Rev. Prince G. Singh

Isabel Wilkerson – Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Program - Dalit Solidarity Forum in the USA, inc.

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“...My parents...were probably also trying to inculcate in us as children growing up that we were beyond caste...and I think that there's both a blessing and a problematic in that because it's one way that a lot of people move into avoidance without necessarily confronting something that is a present reality for a lot of people especially if you're from the lowest of caste...” - Bishop Prince Singh

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I am so happy to have Rt. Rev. Dr. Prince Singh join me in this episode of the podcast not only because of the invaluable wisdom that he has to offer but also because he is such a dear friend. Rt. Rev. Dr. Prince Singh is the eighth and current bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester, NY. He was born in the larger state of Tamil Nadu in South India where he served many congregations as an Anglican priest before coming to the United States. While earning his PhD in New Jersey, he served multiple parishes and became such a powerful spiritual force that the people of Rochester called him to be our bishop. He joins me to share his personal experiences of wrestling with racism in both South India and here in the United States.

I met Prince ten years ago when I came to lead a parish here a year after he became the bishop. Bishop Prince has spent quite a long while leading people to grapple with the challenges of racial reconciliation, and he is here today to help us reflect on something that has been discussed several times in previous episodes of the podcast – caste. He reflects on his childhood and where he grew up, revealing that he grew up in a Christian family and that, as a young adult, he got his undergraduate degree in Zoology and his graduate degree in Public Administration.

Interestingly, Prince grew up as a boy not seeing the world through the perspective of caste. In fact, as he narrates in detail, he didn't have a great awareness of it and didn't really learn about it until later on when he encountered it for the first time. He theorizes as to why that is and admits to having been privileged because of his family's socioeconomic status and his parents having been college educated, describing his lack of awareness of the caste system as a child as a blessing but also problematic.

Prince also addresses the multifaceted nature of colonialism and how, from his perspective, it isn't all about domination and has actually had some positive impacts as well. He discusses the two components of caste and the intersectionality between caste and gender, ultimately ending here by pointing to the huge differences that he and his wife Roja Singh have helped make reality for many young girls who were otherwise victims of the caste system. In our next episode, Bishop Prince will be returning, and we will be continuing this conversation. We will follow his story to the United States and will learn how he experienced some of what we have been talking about in previous episodes of the podcast. Please join us, and be sure to tell friends who might be interested in the podcast about us!

Show Notes

[1:09] – Dr. Uffman announces Rt. Rev. Dr. Prince Singh as this episode’s guest and briefly touches upon his credentials.

[3:27] – Bishop Prince helps us visualize where he grew up.

[5:14] – We learn about Bishop Prince's educational background.

[7:38] – Bishop Prince talks about his family's economic status while he was growing up.

[8:31] – Bishop Prince describes what the weather was like where he grew up, sharing that it was very hot and humid.

[11:17] – Dr. Uffman alludes to caste and recognizes it as a tool that we can use to help understand our current racial tensions.

[12:49] – Bishop Prince reflects on his childhood and what his experience was like as a Christian boy in his state.

[14:05] – We hear Bishop Prince recount one specific encounter when he observed caste play a role via someone's behavior.

[16:12] – Bishop Prince discusses his observations of villages having two parts because of caste.

[18:08] – Bishop Prince reveals that he encountered the concept of caste the most after becoming a priest, and he explains why.

[20:06] – Bishop Prince posits theories as to why he didn't grow up with much awareness of caste division.

[22:47] – Bishop Prince discusses colonialism and how it is a multifaceted system with many layers.

[25:42] – Bishop Prince credits the missionary movement as having had positive influences within India.

[28:06] – We learn a little bit about Bishop Prince's time as an Anglican priest in India.

[31:00] – Bishop Prince describes his early engagement as a priest in South India as adventurous.

[33:51] – Bishop Prince points out the problematic nature of state-enforced prevention of people choosing their own religion.

[36:51] – We hear about the flaws within Christianity because of how caste is sometimes followed even within the Christian faith.

[38:57] – Bishop Prince addresses the intersectionality between caste and gender.

[40:45] – We learn what the term manual scavenger means.

[43:48] – Some children would drop out of school because of being treated as manual scavengers, even by teachers.

[45:23] – Dr. Uffman reflects on how the differences that Bishop Prince and his wife Roja Singh have begun to make for young girls make for grounds for hope.

Links and Resources

Episcopal Diocese of Rochester – About the Rt. Rev. Prince G. Singh

Program - Dalit Solidarity Forum in the USA, inc.

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• Craig Uffman’s Messages Along the Way

“...We’re increasingly aware of the challenge of spatial equity, right? There's a lot of conversation about it now. Now we have the tools to map it, to explain it, to illustrate it, to develop strategies around it. I think that leads to a great deal of confidence.” - Dr. Kurt Culbertson

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Hello, folks! In the last episode, Dr. Kurt Culbertson joined us to help us understand some jargon from his life as a landscape architect – words and terms such as vacant land, habitat, and spatial justice. He also began to help us understand how historic government policies as well as local traditions have combined to limit the habitat choices especially of non-Whites and have constrained the flow of resources to the low income neighborhoods in which they have been allowed to live.

We concluded with a brief discussion of how land use and habitat choice are great examples that denote what we mean when we use phrases such as structural racism. We therefore finally dug into defining what structural racism means with some evidence and examples that are really hard to deny. We will be picking up where we left off in this episode, digging even more deeply into some persistent racial inequities in the domain of spatial justice.

As a reminder, Dr. Kurt Culbertson is a scholar and a practitioner in the field of urban renewal where he uses his expertise as a landscape architect to help cities imagine how to design landscapes that consider environmental, social, and economic factors so that they can best optimize spatial justice in the urban renewal efforts. Dr. Culbertson is chair and C.E.O. of Design Workshop, an international design studio out of Aspen, Colorado but with offices all over the world. They are most famous for their twelve projects that were selected as performance based case studies by the Landscape Architecture Foundation. In 2016, Kurt was awarded the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal which is the highest possible honor in his profession, and he is also the pastor of the ASLA Council of Fellows and The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Kurt returns today to continue discussing inequities in the design of our communities today. Dr. Culbertson provides us with countless examples throughout history of Blacks and non-Whites being displaced and relocated out of their habitats to make room for architecture, interstates and highways, and so on – examples of egregious disturbances within the world of spatial justice. He touches upon pollution and health and safety hazards and their links to spatial justice and also offers some hope for the future, pointing toward an eminent quote from Theodore Parker as inspiration. He even offers some tips on what actions that we as average citizens can take to help equity progress and continue to arc forward.

These past two episodes with Kurt have been such a blessing because they have made it very clear what some folks mean when they refer to structural racism, a reality that we still need to wrestle with today. He has given us concrete examples as someone who is actually observing things on the ground, examples that point toward how historic policies and practices continue to shape our present. We covered so much ground, and I thank Kurt for joining us.

In our next episode, we will pivot from this practical deep dive into spatial justice in order to hear the personal experience and wisdom of Bishop Prince Singh, a man who has wrestled with racism as a person of color both in India and here in the United States. Prince spent a long time leading people to grapple with the challenges of racial reconciliation, and he will be joining us to help us reflect on phrases like caste and hierarchies of value. Until next time, thanks for tuning in, and be sure to invite your friends to listen as well!

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. How does exposure to toxic pollution correlate with class and race? Why?
2. How did St. Louis realtors in the 1960s and 1970s use blockbusting to generate profits and transformed entire neighborhoods they knew had environmental time bombs from white to black in a matter of years?
3. How did the East Bank/West Bank vote on taxes to support flood insurance in the New Orleans metro area impact non-whites after the floods of 1980?
4. Why do hurricanes impact non-whites disproportionately more than whites?

Show Notes

[3:48] – Dr. Culbertson offers some egregious examples of disturbances in the domain of spatial justice.

[5:02] – Dr. Culbertson provides examples of population displacements and slum clearances in cities.

[8:02] – Dr. Uffman and Dr. Culbertson discuss Robert Moses and his move to intentionally design projects to exclude non-Whites and the poor.

[10:20] – Dr. Culbertson expands on how extensive the impact of the interstate highway system relocating Blacks and non-Whites has been.

[12:40] – Dr. Culbertson comments on how urban renewal legislation through the 1970s negatively impacted non-Whites.

[15:28] – Air quality and water quality affect public health which is another disturbance.

[18:25] – The projects in New Orleans leading to de facto segregation around the same time as Civil Rights legislation, Dr. Culbertson explains, was an unintended consequence.

[20:43] – Exposure to toxic pollution is correlated with class and race, and Dr. Culbertson elaborates upon that correlation.

[24:07] – Dr. Uffman and Dr. Culbertson discuss the phenomenon of flooding in cities and how it disproportionately affects non-Whites.

[26:30] – Dr. Culbertson expounds upon why natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina tend to disproportionately impact non-Whites.

[29:25] – Dr. Culbertson reflects upon management decisions made to address shrinking cities and what that portends for non-Whites.

[31:47] – Dr. Culbertson points to a parks and open space plan that he just finished in Vancouver.

[34:23] – We discover how fragmented metropolitan governance has negatively impacted our ability to deal with spatial equity.

[37:33] – Dr. Culbertson points to some locations as grounds for hope.

[40:22] – Dr. Culbertson explains why taking formerly polluted lands and converting them into open space gives him hope and offers more examples of reasons for hope.

[42:40] – We learn how we can get involved in moving equity forward.

[44:23] – Dr. Culbertson analyzes the meaning behind a famous quote by Theodore Parker.

Links and Resources

Design Workshop - Website

Landscape Architecture Foundation - Website

ASLA Council of Fellows - Website

The Cultural Landscape Foundation – Website

Robert A. Caro - The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Environmental Protection Agency - EJSCREEN: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool

NPR – “Theodore Parker and the 'Moral Universe'”

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“We as humans don't like change...We like everything in its proper place and in its proper order, and so we have sought in our cities to try to lock things, if you will, into place the way we want them.” - Dr. Kurt Culbertson

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and more!

We have a real treat for you today in this episode! Joining us is Dr. Kurt Culbertson, a scholar and a practitioner in the field of urban renewal where he uses his expertise as a landscape architect to help cities imagine how to design landscapes that consider environmental, social, and economic factors so that they can best optimize something that he refers to as spatial justice (which we're going to learn more about in this episode) in the urban renewal efforts.

Dr. Culbertson is chair and C.E.O. of Design Workshop, an international design studio out of Aspen, Colorado but with offices all over the world. They are most famous for their twelve projects that were selected as performance based case studies by the Landscape Architecture Foundation. In 2016, Kurt was awarded the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal which is the highest possible honor in his profession, and he is also the pastor of the ASLA Council of Fellows and The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Kurt was awarded a PhD in Landscape Architecture from Edinburgh College of Art for his research that helps us in thinking about how we ought to use - as a society - our vacant lands. Kurt is here on the podcast to help us understand the inequities that we see in the design of our communities today. The Great Recession of 2008 led to Dr. Culbertson moving a bit away from commercial work and balancing a bit with public renewal projects.

The argument that structural and systemic racism is a myth is an argument that is not new; it has been being made for years, but Dr. Culbertson presents us with physical evidence of its reality – how human value has a hierarchy culturally attached to it is literally manifested in physical structures such as buildings and bridges. He touches upon various topics such as redlining and how physical evidence can be presented that proves that systemic racism and spatial injustice are still major problems even today.

We cover so much ground in terms of management decisions and the economic impact on issues of inequity. In our next episode, Dr. Culbertson will return to talk about what he refers to as disturbances and how we have actually taken actions that have made some things worse. He will share with us what approaches that have been taken that appear to be working to help mitigate this problem. Thanks for listening, and be sure to invite your friends to tune in as well!

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. What is ‘vacant land’ and what does Dr. Culbertson denote when he speaks of spatial justice?
2. To what extent have non-whites been limited in the choices and range of actions for the choice of habitat?
3. Where did most non-whites live in our cities prior to the 1920s, and what habitat choices did they have during and after that period?
4. How did  government policy in the forms of SCOTUS decisions and legislative actions contributed to our current reality of ‘hollowed out cities’?
5. How do we see the residual impact of redlining on our communities today?
6. How has the fact that the average net worth for Black is a small fraction of that for Whites historically impacted Blacks’ ability to buy homes in safer neighborhoods, provide education for children, and withstand hardships?

Show Notes

[3:40] – Dr. Uffman opens the conversation by talking about structural racism and points to the recent massacre of Asian women in Atlanta.

[5:12] – Dr. Culbertson defines the terms vacant land and spatial justice.

[8:18] – Dr. Culbertson explains why we are concerned about vacant land.

[10:30] – Dr. Culbertson describes what he is able to influence and change in his field.

[12:35] – Dr. Culbertson provides us with a potential reason why non Whites don't have the same choices as to where to live as Whites do.

[15:11] – Cities began to implement racial zoning, which Dr. Culbertson defines and explains.

[17:16] – Dr. Uffman shifts the conversation toward management decisions made by the executive branch and refers specifically to Herbert Hoover as an example.

[19:24] – Dr. Culbertson describes what life might have been like for non Whites in cities and what habitat choices that they had following the Emancipation Proclamation.

[22:27] – Dr. Uffman provides insight about his own observations in his hometown in Baton Rouge.

[24:27] – Dr. Culbertson expounds upon mortgage lending and suburbanization, returning to the subject of Herbert Hoover.

[26:55] – The process of redlining, Dr. Culbertson details, excluded the flow of resources especially for low income neighborhoods where a lot of people of color resided.

[29:08] – Dr. Culbertson asserts that redlining caused impacts that still linger today, almost a century later.

[31:39] – Dr. Uffman and Dr. Culbertson discuss the inequities around wealth creation.

[34:23] – Dr. Culbertson touches further upon management decisions and executive decisions impacting spatial justice.

[36:25] – Dr. Culbertson reflects upon how he would respond to someone who would argue that structural racism isn't real or is no longer a problem.

Links and Resources

Design Workshop - Website

Landscape Architecture Foundation - Website

ASLA Council of Fellows - Website

The Cultural Landscape Foundation - Website

Edward W. Soja - Seeking Spatial Justice (Volume 16) (Globalization and Community)

Conversations: Race on the Rocks - “How and Why We Birthed Jim Crow”

Conversations: Race on the Rocks - “Jim Crow: The Yankee Variant”

Conversations: Race on the Rocks - “Redline Reasoning: Why We Built Segregated Cities”

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“...I suspect for much of your audience, you need only look at your own city or town to find markings of that structural racism that could be overt or they could be lurking.” - Salin Geevarghese

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We covered a lot of ground in beginning to understand racial inequities in the housing domain in our last episode. Mr. Salin Geevarghese joined us in that conversation, and we will be picking up where we left off in this episode, drilling down even deeper into that discussion. What are some of the obstacles that are impeding our dream of truly becoming the diverse and inclusive society that values equal opportunities for all? Tune in as we begin to answer that question.

As a reminder, Salin is a man with many hats but is probably best known for being a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development for President Obama and his administration. He is currently one of the world's foremost experts in the art of bringing opposing groups together to transform racially polarized pockets of urban blight into sustainably inclusive cities and communities.

Salin's credentials make him the perfect guest to help us with our exploration of the stories that have shaped the racial landscape with which we currently wrestle, and this episode dives further into what we talked about last time about inequity within the housing domain. We discuss how getting rid of the Jim Crow Laws and implementing the 14th Amendment might have been progressive movements but did not solve all problems and certainly did not put an end to structural racism. Salin shares with us what the situation is like where he lives and how there is a shocking 15-20 year gap in life expectancy depending on what part of town you live, but he also lays down ground for hope and how even though we still have a long way to go, there are already signs of progress.

We have been so privileged to have an expert in this field come onto the podcast and help us understand so much of what many of us might not have been aware of. I hope that you will join us in our next episode when we meet another expert in a related field, Dr. Kurt Culbertson. Dr. Culbertson is a prominent landscape architect who has built some places that you would probably even recognize. We will dig deep into these issues of racial inequity from the perspective of landscaping and architecture. Thanks for listening, and be sure to invite your friends to tune in as well!

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. To what extent have Fair Housing laws since 1968 remedied and prevented discriminatory land use and housing-related policies in the 2020s?
2. What about inequitable community development practices?
3. What about racial bias in mortgage lending and rental housing?
4. What other racially biased policies and practices that have fostered pervasive negative impacts on non-whites that should concern us today?
5. Describe the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. How does it help us gather around a measure for weighing our success in correcting racial inequities in the housing and community development domain?

Show Notes

[2:22] – Salin reveals why he began walking the path that he is on now and how he hopes more people will be inspired to work toward building a more inclusive nation.

[4:06] – Salin links our current discriminatory land use policies to the Jim Crow Laws and the Civil Rights Movement.

[6:52] – Dr. Uffman has a close friend who doesn't believe that structural racism exists because of the 14th Amendment having been passed.

[8:58] – Salin expounds upon the difference between law and practice within inequitable community development practices.

[9:40] – Salin explains how urban density is an indicator of structural racism.

[11:42] – You can hear people using both covert and overt language that speaks of trying to avoid living near people with less means or who look different than they do.

[14:11] – Salin explains how we are doing concerning racial bias within mortgage lending.

[15:54] – Communities need various types of housing in order to thrive.

[18:30] – Dr. Uffman and Salin discuss maps that show data supporting Salin's argument and how listeners can access them.

[21:48] – Salin provides other examples of pervasive policies and practices that have led to negative impacts on people of color.

[24:00] – Dr. Uffman gives an example of the post office serving as a bank to many who use money orders due to inequity.

[26:11] – The hierarchy of human value is something that permeates society all the time through social signals that are sent.

[28:30] – Salin worked during the Obama administration on a tool to help us build diverse and inclusive communities.

[31:18] – The Trump administration, as Salin describes, immediately delayed implementing Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing and ultimately rescinded it entirely.

[34:37] – Salin shares what he is currently seeing that seems to be promising.

[36:27] – It is important that we do something about the inequity of neighborhoods while also allowing people who don't want to move to stay where they are, and Salin details why that is.

[38:20] – Salin moves the conversation toward more concrete examples rather than abstract examples.

[40:38] – Salin reflects on the current state of the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore.

[44:05] – There is grounds for hope, and we can be a part of the solution. There are already signs of progress.

[47:03] – Salin encourages listeners to be open and willing to understand that society's sense of hierarchy of human value is prevalent everywhere.

Links and Resources

Raj Chetty

Opportunity Insights

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
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• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

“...Look, we have ordered our society where certain people are more valuable than other people, and that rubs up against our sense of values, of fairness, equal justice under the law...” - Salin Geevarghese

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Returning to the conversation is Mr. Salin Geevarghese, whom you may remember having been a guest on the very first episode of the podcast. Salin, as a reminder, is a man with many hats but is probably best known for being a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development for President Obama and his administration. He is currently one of the world's foremost experts in the art of bringing opposing groups together to transform racially polarized pockets of urban blight into inclusive cities.

Salin's credentials make him the perfect guest to help us start our exploration of the stories that have shaped the racial landscape with which we currently wrestle, and this episode particularly dives into discrimination and inequities in the world of housing and how we can begin to hopefully find solutions to such problems. Although we will talk more about the hope and the possible solutions in our next episode, Salin begins to touch upon that near the end of this episode, sharing that new coalitions pushing for progress and the celebration of diversity gives him hope.

Salin gives us such a great introduction into the racial inequities that persist even today in the domain of housing. I hope that you will join us in our next episode as we continue this conversation, drilling more deeply into the challenges that have been brought about by our history of discriminatory policies. We will also begin to talk more deeply about hope and promising solutions. Thank you for listening, and be sure to invite your friends to listen in as well!

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. As we seek to create diverse, inclusive communities in which all have a sense of belonging, what would success look like?
2. Why are distressed neighborhoods so hard to turn around?
3. What kind of progress can we celebrate in healing housing inequities since the 1960s civil rights legislation?
4. How does bias remain a factor in where we live in such a way that, even in the 2020s, it determines the life chances of whites and non-whites differently?

Show Notes

[4:18] – Salin begins by giving us an update on some of the challenges that still need to be confronted today when it comes to inequities in housing.

[7:16] – Salin comments on what goals that we should set and what success would look like, starting with physical transformation.

[8:55] – The second stage of success is the ability for new neighborhoods to attract and hold on to diverse residents.

[10:57] – Salin explains what the last stage of success is – addressing the unfinished business that we still actually have and questioning who is benefitting from what we are seeing.

[12:40] – We learn why it tends to be so difficult to reverse the situation for distressed neighborhoods.

[15:54] – Craig and Salin discuss hierarchies of human value and how Salin defines it.

[18:44] – Salin discusses what progress that we can celebrate that we have seen over the last several decades.

[20:22] – We have seen a rise in wealth in the United States, but the problem is that the wealth is concentrated.

[21:48] – Salin confidently asserts that implicit bias definitely plays a role in the problem of racially disparate housing.

[23:21] – Salin assures Dr. Uffman that implicit bias still plays a role a century after the 1920s and gives concrete examples.

[25:54] – Segregation continues to persist today, and the country is, in fact, resegregating.

[27:58] – Dr. Raj Chetty, the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard, has given us hard data that both sides of politics can agree on.

[30:17] – Where you grow up has a major impact on what opportunities that you have throughout life.

[31:53] – Salin encourages listeners to look at Dr. Chetty's research on Opportunity Insights.

[34:16] – Salin talks about his hope that we will see progress and change in our lifetimes due to progress that has already been made and unfinished business that we have yet to do.

[37:08] – Hope is very necessary right now because solidarity is constantly under attack.

Links and Resources

Raj Chetty

Opportunity Insights

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

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• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

“I grew up never having to fear and always being able to live with this confidence that all I need to do is speak the truth and good things will result, and I can count on it and so I can boldly approach other individuals and live with them in a way that is less anxious...” - Dr. Craig Uffman

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We covered a lot of ground with Dr. Derek Woodard-Lehman in our last episode of the podcast as he helped us consider why it's so difficult for some of us to have conversations about race and racism and whether or not racism is still a problem today. We also talked about colorblindness and how even though some people who say that they're colorblind might mean it from a place of good intent, it isn't yet a sufficient standard for us, and we discussed why that is. We also began to try to understand what is meant by the controversial phrase systemic racism, and we will be continuing that conversation today.

As a reminder, Dr. Woodard-Lehman teaches at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, specializing in Christian Ethics. He is focused particularly on how Christian commitments have mobilized political resistance to racial injustice. We have been talking about situations on the podcast such as the American Civil Rights Movement, which is definitely one such instance of this having happened.

I hope that you will join us as we continue this conversation, discussing topics such as the also controversial phrase critical race theory and political commentator David French's take on it, lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw's take on intersectionality, white privilege and what it means, the distinction between guilt and responsibility in terms of white privilege and how we share that responsibility, and so much more!

I owe Dr. Woodard-Lehman so much gratitude for once again giving us so much to think about. I hope that you will join us in our next episode as we begin to look deeply at whether or not our racial disparities actually exist and whether or not they are systemic. Thank you for listening, and be sure to invite your friends to listen in as well!

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. What is generally referred to when scholars speak of ‘whiteness’ as a way of analyzing our racial tensions and conceiving of solutions?
2. What is critical race theory?
3. What is intersectionality?
4. How is it helpful to distinguish between guilt and responsibility in talking together about our racial tensions.

Show Notes

[3:07] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman provides us with a reminder of the geological metaphor that he used in the last episode, comparing the formation of the Finger Lakes and the water that they supply to people to racism and inequity.

[6:10] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman adds that his metaphor applies to not only social problems of historical times but to social problems of today as well, even if such problems are not immediately visible to us.

[8:29] – People on both sides of this argument generally agree that there are statistical disparities.

[10:15] – Dr. Uffman recalls a conversation between Chris Wallace and Donald Trump about systemic racism and why Trump ended the racial sensitivity training that addresses white privilege.

[12:31] – Dr. Uffman switches gears to the executive order dictating that we are not allowed to teach the idea that the United States is inherently racist or sexist.

[15:42] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman defines critical race theory and what it entails.

[17:08] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman defines intersectionality – a central facet of critical race theory – and gives examples of it provided by lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw.

[19:27] – Intersectionality is a tactic used to dismiss cases of discrimination based on one facet of a person's identity.

[22:38] – White privilege, as Dr. Woodard-Lehman expounds upon, has a broad spectrum of different meanings but does have an especially helpful and useful meaning.

[24:59] – White privilege oppresses not just Blacks but persons of color in general.

[25:29] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman provides us with an example of a time in college when something about him was wrongly assumed because of his race.

[28:16] – Dr. Uffman provides us with an example of a time in Times Square when he inadvertently benefitted from white privilege.

[31:03] – Dr. Uffman came to realize that white privilege, when it comes to how people are treated by police, is in part because of convict leasing in the south in the 1880s.

[32:42] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman emphasizes that experiences with law enforcement is one of the most important aspects of white privilege and provides further examples.

[35:45] – Dr. Uffman returns to the concept of inequity and racial sensitivity training.

[36:28] – One component of racial sensitivity training is sharing stories like Dr. Woodard-Lehman and Dr. Uffman have been doing and acknowledging white privilege as real.

[39:22] – An instructor crafting their syllabus with texts from white male scholars is not usually doing so out of ill intent.

[40:39] – Dr. Uffman reiterates how easy it is to see racial inequity and disparity as natural rather than socially constructed, something that he himself has done.

[43:02] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman stresses how white privilege can be blatant and obvious but can also be more subtle.

[45:57] – Dr. Uffman once again returns to Dr. Woodard-Lehman's water metaphor and emphasizes a distinction between guilt and responsibility.

[46:50] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman further explains the difference between guilt and responsibility and how we should be discussing responsibility rather than guilt.

[47:27] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman provides an example of responsibility over guilt coming into play when action needs to be taken to correct something that is wrong.

[50:10] – There are situations, such as in the example that Dr. Woodard-Lehman provides, when we must take responsibility for correcting wrongs even if we are not at fault.

[52:27] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman discusses our shared responsibility over social arrangements, responsibility that is ours even though we had little to no part in initially arranging them.

[53:45] – The difficulty that we have over having fruitful conversations about race and racism is partially because of how we wrestle with wondering who to blame.

[54:37] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman predicts what obstacles exist other than an inability to look past guilt.

[57:15] – Dr. Woodard-Lehman offers a potential explanation as to why some people might be inclined to disagree with antiracist ideology.

Links and Resources

Isabel Wilkerson – Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent
Ibram X. Kendi – How to Be an Antiracist

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

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“...Treating people rather differently is, in a certain sense, treating them the same when it comes to treating them fairly.” - Dr. Derek Woodard-Lehman

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Dr. Derek Woodard-Lehman joins me today to help us make sense of a lot of the jargon that we tend to hear surrounding racial tension – words and phrases such as racist, racism, critical race theory, and racial formation.

Derek teaches at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, specializing in Christian Ethics. He is focused particularly on how Christian commitments have mobilized political resistance to racial injustice. We have been talking about situations on the podcast such as the American Civil Rights Movement, which is definitely one such instance of this having happened.

I hope that you will join us as we discuss important topics such as the recent rise in racial tension in 2020 that took place especially during the presidential election, why people seem to be bothered and pained by racism still being a problem being brought up in conversation, whether or not it is sufficient to identify as colorblind, how there is a difference between equality and fairness, what racial formation is and how we should best approach talking about racism, and so much more.

Derek gives us a great deal of information to process, encouraging us to think about how our society is structured. Join us next time as Derek and I continue this conversation, making sense of what we have learned so far by remembering the American story more completely, and be sure to invite your friends to listen in as well!

Show Notes

[2:04] – Dr. Uffman opens the conversation by discussing the rise in racial tension that permeated much of 2020 and the 2020 presidential election.

[4:36] – Dr. Derek Woodard-Lehman offers possible explanations as to why it tends to be painful for people to talk about racial tensions, explaining that some people take the suggestion that racism is still a problem as a personal attack.

[7:08] – There is a possibility, as Dr. Uffman and Derek both posit, that some people are bothered by the topic of racism because they see it not only as a personal attack but also as an attack on their culture or region of the country.

[10:06] – Derek evaluates the appropriateness of the term colorblind and whether or not it's sufficient to identify as such.

[12:18] – We hear Derek share a story of being in Upstate New York this past summer, offering the topology of the Finger Lakes as a metaphor for racism in current times.

[14:40] – Dr. Uffman provides us with insight as to why identifying as colorblind is not yet sufficient.

[17:15] – Derek gives us a metaphor for the appropriateness and sufficiency of identifying as colorblind – a metaphor involving being a coach on a soccer team in which your child is a teammate.

[19:32] – We should treat everyone fairly but not blindly. We have to account for various demographics and differences.

[22:19] – Derek touches upon systemic racism, offering his own definition of what it means when it's said that a community or a nation is systemically racist.

[24:39] – Derek uses a metaphor of water allocation as a link to systemic racism.

[25:45] – In Protestant tradition, there is a conception of sins as total depravity, and Derek explains what this means to him.

[27:52] – Derek ties the concept of total depravity to structural racism.

[30:35] – Derek begins to propose an appropriate way to discuss racism in, for example, a classroom setting.

[33:23] – We learn how Derek's pastor talked about racial formation as Derek was growing up.

[36:38] – Dr. Uffman offers closing insight on the conversation, presenting the possibility that speaking of racism should not necessarily be assessing one individual's motives.

Links and Resources

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
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• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

“You don't go out and march if you don't believe change is possible...Americans are going to disagree about what that change should look like, and some of it is going to lose momentum as it passes through the political system, but once you've unleashed the possibility of change, it can be really hard to control that.” - Dr. Kevin Boyle

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and more!

In our last episode, Dr. Kevin Boyle joined us to help us understand how the Reagan coalition led to three decades of law and order politics taking precedence over civil rights enforcement. We also briefly discussed the war on drugs and how that tied into issues of race and the impact that it had on minorities, but that was really just a brief introduction to it.

We now pick up where we left off in that conversation, digging deeper into the problem of mass incarceration that resulted from the war on drugs first initiated by Richard Nixon, and we also begin to talk about a highly controversial topic even today – protection of minority voting rights.

As a reminder, Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement (which, of course, happens to be our focus). He also has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others.

Join us today as we dig deeper into the events in United States history that have shaped the racial landscape of today. We discuss the increased incentive to increase the prison population due to having criminalized American Blacks and poor Americans. Dr. Boyle also talks about voter suppression and how numerous attempts have been made over the years, especially by Republican politicians, to find creative ways of suppressing the Black vote.

Dr. Boyle stresses, however, that hope is not lost. We have seen a rise in activism and conversation, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, in recent years which indicates that people believe that change is possible.

While this unfortunately closes up my conversation with Dr. Boyle, I hope that you will join me next time as I bring on another guest who will talk to us about how Christian commitments have mobilized political resistance to racism. Be sure to invite your friends to listen in as well!

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. How did the economics of prisoner leasing create incentives for municipalities to arrest more people?
2. How does the reality of mass incarceration affect non-minority voting?
3. What strategies have been pursued since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to suppress non-White votes?

Show Notes

[3:06] – Dr. Uffman returns to the conversation around the experience of the young Black man or woman at the time, referring to their experience as a triple whammy.

[4:07] – Dr. Boyle makes a connection between a local economy collapsing and illicit economy.

[6:01] – The Bill Clinton administration, as Dr. Boyle explains, took a bipartisan approach by encouraging Democrats to embrace Reagan's politics.

[7:07] – Dr. Boyle describes the language used by both parties to describe some Blacks, language such as super predators.

[8:06] – Dr. Boyle discusses how mandatory sentencing led to a vast increase in the prison population.

[10:07] – We created a profit incentive, as Dr. Uffman points out, for the arrest of people who could do manual labor, leading to the poor and Blacks being arrested because they were already criminalized by Whites.

[12:49] – Dr. Uffman reflects on how many Blacks are unfairly trapped in patterns of poverty.

[14:30] – Dr. Boyle defines what the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was and what it put into effect.

[15:55] – In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some Republicans were attempting to suppress the Black vote in sneaky ways such as limiting polling places in predominantly Black communities.

[18:17] – Dr. Boyle gives an example of the Republican party recently attempting to suppress the entire vote of Detroit in the 2020 presidential election.

[21:06] – An example is offered and described by Dr. Uffman of attempting to suppress votes by requiring an official ID or driver's license.

[22:47] – Dr. Boyle explains how gerrymandering works in different ways on a racial basis such as splitting up a Black community between two White communities.

[24:45] – Gerrymandering can actually reduce the value of a singular vote.

[27:29] – Dr. Uffman prompts Dr. Boyle to focus on hope for the future, and Dr. Boyle credits the Black Lives Matter movement as a reason to have hope.

[30:09] – Dr. Boyle reiterates that there is disagreement around the solution to the problems such as whether or not we should defund the police.

Links and Resources

James Forman Jr. – Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
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• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast
  

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

“...In 1955, the Supreme Court said the school desegregation had to happen with all deliberate speed, and that was meant to be an ambiguous phrase which then an awful lot of schools in the south – where the only place where Brown applied – used to delay any sort of desegregation for years and years and years. ” - Dr. Kevin Boyle

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and more!

In our previous episode, Dr. Kevin Boyle joined us to talk about the political coalition that united working Whites and northern Blacks during the FDR era. We also discussed how Richard Nixon's law and order rhetoric led to a rise in White resistance. We are picking up where we left off in this episode and will be tracing the strategy of the Nixon administration to shift the national focus toward priorities other than racial equality.

As a reminder, Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others.

Join us today as we dig deeper into the events in United States history that have shaped the racial landscape of today. Dr. Boyle discusses at length how many Whites resisted school integration and how that led to long delays in integration actually being put into effect, resulting in schools actually being more segregated today than they were when forced busing was ordered by the federal government. He also begins to give us a solid understanding of how Nixon's election led to a war on drugs which caused a mass incarceration of Blacks in the United States and also caused a major shift away from civil rights legislation.

Join us next time as we dig more deeply into the issue of mass incarceration targeting Black males. We will also discuss how well we have managed to protect the voting rights of minorities. Be sure to invite your friends to listen in as well!

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. How did school desegregation turn out in South and North? What’s the status now?
2. How did segregation, the advent of the Information Age, and globalization impact Blacks young men and women in the mid-1980s?
3. How the Reagan coalition impacted blacks in terms of the safety net promises of the Great Society?
4. What did both parties think would happen and what actually happened in our War on Drugs? How did that impact minorities?

Show Notes

[3:25] – Dr. Uffman discusses his own experience with segregation and desegregation growing up, noting that his high school didn't integrate until he was a junior in college.

[4:23] – Dr. Uffman fast-forwards to the 1990s, illustrating the changes that had taken place since his youth.

[6:39] – Dr. Boyle further elaborates upon what happened following the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in the mid-1950s, such as how many schools found loopholes to delay desegregation.

[8:08] – Dr. Boyle explains when schools in northern states needed to, by law, start desegregating and what happened as a result.

[9:12] – The critical way to integrate schools, as Dr. Boyle emphasizes, was between cities and suburbs, which led to the Supreme Court ruling in 1974 that that didn't need to be done, resulting in integration in the north coming to a halt.

[10:27] – Dr. Uffman reiterates that re-segregation is not strictly a southern phenomenon, and Dr. Boyle agrees, emphasizing that segregation is more common nowadays in the north than it is in the south.

[11:38] – Many of the United States' industrial jobs moved to other countries, and Dr. Boyle begins to touch upon what that meant for Whites and Blacks competing for industrial jobs.

[13:45] – Dr. Boyle clarifies why the shift of industrial jobs was significant from a racial standpoint, pointing to what effect that it had on Blacks at the time.

[15:52] – Dr. Uffman offers a hypothesis of how youth was not properly equipped for the new information age, and Dr. Boyle further describes what the experience might have been like for a young Black man in a big city around that time.

[17:39] – Dr. Uffman argues that the success of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama should not serve as proof that there isn't a racial problem in the United States.

[18:49] – Dr. Boyle comments on how young men and women, especially men, got caught up in the war on drugs due to joblessness.

[21:05] – Dr. Uffman prompts Dr. Boyle to talk about Ronald Reagan's harmful rhetoric regarding welfare queens and predators, prefacing that he looked up to Reagan because of the positive things that Dr. Uffman saw from him while he served in the military.

[23:36] – Ronald Reagan, as described by Dr. Boyle, was a conservative Republican in the Goldwater tradition, which meant that he believed that welfare entitled people, making them think that they didn't have to work.

[25:32] – Dr. Boyle points out that it wasn't likely a coincidence that Reagan chose to kick off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi – the town where civil rights activists were infamously murdered only sixteen years prior.

[27:13] – Dr. Boyle makes the case that Reagan's agenda was an approach to small government that he infused with racial dog whistles that then became a large part of future conservative politics.

[29:18] – Dr. Boyle insists that Richard Nixon began the war on drugs and that one of the main problems with it is that it had a racist agenda and was creating mass incarceration for Blacks.

Links and Resources

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
  
• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast
  

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

“African Americans don’t receive aid quite to the degree that Whites do. Early on, huge numbers of black people are excluded from Social Security. They are not allowed to participate in it. If you’re a farm worker, which is a huge number of poor African Americans in the South, they weren’t in the original Social Security Act. If you were a domestic worker, a maid, you weren’t in the Social Security Act. But for all that discrimination, what New Deal programs did do is help African Americans in a way that the government hadn’t done before.” - Dr. Kevin Boyle

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and more!

In our last episode, we concluded a conversation with Dr. Kevin Boyle about the struggles and the fruits of our Civil Rights era. Specifically, we talked about our struggle toward justice in regards to housing, education, and the right to vote. Welcoming back Dr. Kevin Boyle as today’s guest, we take a few steps back to discuss the New Deal and its impact on the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s.

As a reminder, Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others.

Join us today as we dig deeper into the events in United States history that have shaped the racial landscape of today.

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. What was the New Deal coalition, and how did FDR create it legislatively?
2. Summarize briefly the three legislative achievements of the Great Society concerning civil rights. What hopes did they spawn?
3. Describe the massive shift in the electorate and the rise of a new governing coalition that began to appear with Nixon.
4. How did White rage in response to civil rights legislation and fear set the stage for law and order politics to dominate the ensuing decades?

Show Notes

• [3:15] - Dr. Boyle begins the conversation today by describing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited the segregation of public space and outlawed discrimination in employment.
• [4:02] - The enduring achievements of the second civil rights movement were the the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Housing Act of 1968.
• [5:13] - Dr. Uffman reminds us that there was a Civil Rights Act passed after the Civil War but was famously vetoed by Andrew Johnson.
• [6:01] - Following the veto of that first Civil Rights Act, Dr. Uffman lists several events that took place to lead the United States to its condition in the 1950s and 60s.
• [8:22] - Discussing the achievements of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, Dr. Boyle explains the New Deal and its intent.
• [10:01] - The New Deal put into place several job programs to build the economy back up after the Great Depression. It also established Social Security which Dr. Boyle describes.
• [11:33] - The New Deal programs reached out to poor white people and to poor black people but not at the same rate.
• [12:29] - Early on, huge numbers of black people are excluded from Social Security. They are not allowed to participate in it.
• [12:50] - For all that discrimination, though, New Deal programs did help Blacks in a way that the government hadn’t done before. Half of Black population in major cities were receiving federal aid.
• [13:24] - By reaching out in this way, President Roosevelt reconfigures the electoral landscape so that the Democrats become the majority party. Dr. Boyle describes how Roosevelt did this and the types of voters he drew in.
• [15:41] - In the 60s, Lyndon Johnson won the election by a landslide and put into place a culmination of the New Deal. He didn’t create programs, but he made them bigger, and they were called the Great Society.
• [17:02] - The two most important programs that came out of the Great Society are Medicare and Medicaid, which we still have in place to this day.
• [18:07] - Dr. Uffman points out that at this time there was an effort to suppress the black vote, with the percentage of active black voters decreasing to 1% in some areas.
• [21:08] - Dr. Boyle describes the urban upheaval in the late 60s that “ruptured apart” the New Deal coalition and how this affected the election of 1968.
• [22:44] - Richard Nixon ran as the voice of the middle class. He wasn’t calling Whites to rampage, but rather appealing to Whites who wanted things to be calm.
• [24:07] - Dr. Uffman references The Moynihan Report and the sociological factors that generated violence in urban areas where these riots were taking place.
• [25:01] - Moynihan’s argument was about the breakdown of the black family. There was a rise in single parent motherhood in black communities and he argued that there was a series of structural issues that led to this going all the way back to slavery.
• [25:58] - The Moynihan Report publication date coincided with the rising fear among Whites of black lawlessness. There is not necessarily a direct connection between reality and the panic people sometimes get about crime.
• [26:47] - Blacks staged urban upheavals as a political response to racial oppression but Whites saw them as random violence.
• [27:04] - In 1966, the FBI altered the way they collected crime data. When they did that, the reports of crime spiked and made it look like we were in the middle of a crime spike. Republicans picked this up in 1968.
• [28:02] - Dr. Boyle describes this as “the perfect storm” leading into more upheavals and violence going into the 1968 election.
• [28:44] - Dr. Boyle uses an example from his hometown of Detroit setting up a rumor control center that had an extreme increase of calls after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• [30:27] - The most common rumor that came through at this time was that Blacks were going to go through all the suburbs of white communities and kill all the white children. That is the depth of paranoia and given the time of year was also “the passover.”

Links and Resources

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast
  

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

"I don't think democracy works without hope. Democracy is built on a faith in each other and a faith in our possibilities. Even in very dark times, I think what we risk by abandoning hope is we risk the very experiment of democracy. We can never give in to the cynicism that says that this doesn't matter." - Dr. Kevin Boyle

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and more!

With the help of our guest, Dr. Kevin Boyle, we have covered a lot of ground. In the last episode, we paused to synthesize all of the previous ten episodes, so that is an excellent summary to listen to if you are just joining in the conversation. That last episode also helped us set the stage for understanding the nonviolent movement of the 1950s and 60s that sought to restore the civil rights that were already guaranteed to all citizens by the 14th and 15th amendments but denied to Blacks during our Jim Crow era. Dr. Boyle helped us drill down into some details regarding the players, strategies, and objectives of both sides in the battle for equal opportunity in our public spaces.

Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in the 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others.

Today we pick up where we left off, tracing the pivotal moments of the quest for legislation that would finally provide equal rights. We end today's eye-opening conversation with grounds for hope as we move forward to pursue racial equality in America.

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. How did we use everyday practices to enforce notions of caste?
2. So how did the movement leaders take on American practices of caste?
3. How did we get to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and what was its significance?
4. How did we get to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and what was its importance?
5. What are some of the characteristic techniques the moderate white eschews the language of segregation and white supremacy while obstructing the change needed?

Show Notes

• [2:50] - In the last episode, Dr. Boyle shared with us the beginnings of America's first nonviolent movement and how it sought to call us all to be our best selves and a part of one beloved community.
• [3:54] - The people involved in this first nonviolent movement of this era were courageous in their fight for equal rights, and Dr. Uffman reminds us that they were very young. John Lewis, for example, at this time was only 19 years old.
• [5:04] - The movement followed the Gandhian principles of starting small. They began at the lunch counters, stood up for justice, and then moved out into wider protests.
• [5:52] - One of the tricky things about nonviolent protests is that they result in violence. Dr. Boyle explains how this nonviolent protest resulted in White outrage and mass arrests.
• [6:17] - Gandhian tactics create bigger and bigger and bigger events that will freeze up the power structure so that the powerless can bring down the powerful through nonviolent means. Through that, you will create the beloved community described in the Bible.
• [6:55] - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech is evoking the beloved community, but we can't hear it anymore. We've heard it so many times.
• [7:58] - Dr. Boyle describes the Freedom Riders. They were pacifists who would defy local law on the bus and bear witness. This began with CORE, a group of radical pacifists in the 1940s.
• [8:50] - In 1961, a small group of pacifists heads off on the Freedom Rides, get down to Alabama, and are brutally attacked by Whites. CORE called it all off.
• [9:39] - SNCC in Nashville picked up the Freedom Rides again, and they were also attacked. Although they were beaten, Freedom Riders accomplished the constitutional crisis they sought.
• [10:40] - President Kennedy at that time gave them federal protection. They could force federal action through redemptive suffering.
• [11:01] - Dr. Uffman points out the distinction that this was interstate transportation. Because they were crossing state lines, President Kennedy could step in.
• [12:31] - Blacks were stripped of their right to vote through disenfranchisement laws. One of the Civil Rights Movement's ironies is that you had to take your politics into the street because of disenfranchisement, and they did, to enormous effect.
• [14:00] - After Johnson was elected in 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s organization demanded voting rights. Johnson was a supporter of voting rights, but he didn't want to work on that yet. Using the same Gandhian tactics, people marched to the courthouse in Selma, Alabama, and as they were turned away, they would come back in more significant numbers.
• [15:14] - One of the protestors in Alabama was killed, and this sparked the decision to do a more dramatic demonstration: a march from Selma to Montgomery. This was a dangerous path through Alabama.
• [16:10] - Marchers set out but could not leave Selma as they were attacked by state troopers. The footage from this played on national television.
• [17:15] - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was not present at the Selma attack, traveled there and called all people of faith to join him in Selma as an act of moral witness. Nuns, priests, ministers, and rabbis flooded the town. A minister was killed, which led to more protests, and eventually, protests were started nationwide.
• [18:15] - The pressure became so great on Lyndon Johnson, he had to introduce voting rights legislation. Dr. Boyle describes this as one of the most extraordinary events of any presidency.
• [19:02] - Quoting President Johnson, Dr. Boyle explains how his speech to legislate voting rights made him one with the movement and demonstrated the beloved community.
• [20:10] - This moment was incredible, but Dr. Uffman also points out that there was backlash, and a woman was killed as a result.
• [21:01] - Another crucial piece to this story was the availability of television and watching footage of the violence and brutality.
• [22:05] - Shifting focus to the northern states, Dr. Boyle explains that there was no northern state that embraced disenfranchisement, but segregation in housing and education was enforced through violence.
• [23:27] - Brown did not apply to these northern states because segregation was not supported or enforced by law.
• [23:43] - Voting rights aside, the difference between the north and the south regarding segregation and violence was not very profound.
• [25:22] - Dr. Uffman refers to a book called Cold War Civil Rights by Mary Dudziak. He points out that our struggle to protect Blacks' rights was seen by other countries and used in propaganda campaigns.
• [26:52] - One of the ways the Civil Rights Movement was resisted was to label institutions as communist. The NAACP was attached as communist and outlawed in many states.
• [28:45] - The myth that these problems were only in the south has been deeply ingrained for a long time. The state department marginalized the race problem as only in the south to demonstrate that it was not an American problem. They claimed it to be only a regional problem with culture.
• [30:40] - When we think of Jim Crow, we tend to only think about drinking fountains and seats on a bus, but this is a way to narrow the race problem.
• [31:26] - Dr. Boyle illustrates the current race problem in his town of Chicago, comparing the reaction to segregated drinking fountains and housing.
• [32:44] - Dr. Uffman quotes the book A More Beautiful and Terrible History by Jeanne Theoharis that illustrates this myth on a more personal level. Her point is that to whitewash our past and maintain structures, we've had to create a culprit of stereotype: the redneck.
• [33:42] - Using Nixon's campaign moves to illustrate, Dr. Uffman explains racists were redefined. A racist isn't that genteel moderate politician that is signing the Southern Manifesto. The only racist is the redneck.
• [35:27] - There is a lot of argument surrounding an end date for the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle lists several ends that have been suggested.
• [36:29] - Regarding federal legislation and policies in the 1970s, Whites stepped away from progress, stating they had done enough. Dr. Boyle uses the series of court cases in the 70s to illustrate this.
• [37:01] - Dr. Boyle explains how we have moved backward in segregation, especially regarding schools, poverty, and incarceration.
• [38:44] - Dr. Boyle also shares how we are currently experiencing another Civil Rights movement because of this backward movement.
• [40:06] - "I don't think democracy works without hope. Democracy is built on a faith in each other and a faith in our possibilities. Even in very dark times, I think what we risk by abandoning hope is we risk the very experiment of democracy." - Dr. Kevin Boyle
• [40:54] - Dr. Boyle believes that Blacks are the most devout Americans in many ways because, despite our history, they continue to believe and demand that America believe. This is demonstrated in the last election.
• [42:03] - Vice President Kamala Harris as the first biracial and female vice president is another step forward and grounds for hope.

Links and Resources

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast
  

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

"What King says is that White America has embraced the sin of racism - especially the White South - and what African Americans are going to do is that they are going to walk into the face of that sin. And they are going to take that sin on their shoulders. And they are going to suffer for that sin. And they are going to die for that sin. And by that blood sacrifice they will redeem the soul of the nation." - Dr. Kevin Boyle

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and more!

In the last episode, we began a conversation about our Civil Rights era's struggles and fruits. With our guest Dr. Kevin Boyle, we discussed the efforts to obtain equal opportunity housing and began a discussion about the segregation and desegregation of schools.

Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others.

As we begin to shift our focus to voting rights, we need to cover more ground and discuss why there was such a struggle. In today's episode, we take a few minutes to recap the events we've already talked about that laid the foundation for this struggle, and we dive a little deeper into the segregation of schools and public places.

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. How did the Southern states enact their strategy of “stall and defy”?
2. How did the Northern states enact their own version of “stall and defy”?
3. What was the context that led to the sit-ins at Woolworth’s in Greensboro and Nashville? How were ue everyday practices used to enforce notions of caste?
4. What strategy did civil rights leaders pursue in their efforts to eliminate these government-sanctioned traditions and practices of caste? Why was the example of the Beloved Community so powerful for many Americans?

Show Notes

• [3:18] - Dr. Uffman refers back to a previous episode with Dr. Kate Masur. They talked about the national economy fueled by the commodity of cotton and US dominance of this market by exploiting Black labor.
• [4:19] - When Black leaders were asked what they wanted most that would enable them to prosper as newly freed people, they named just two things: land and education.
• [5:01] - Especially in the South, in many ways, Whites denied Blacks land and education, giving them little option but to sell their labor for low wages.
• [5:48] - For two centuries, Blacks were denied education to prevent them from rising above their racial hierarchy station. For generations, the United States would not invest in the education of Blacks.
• [6:34] - Dr. Uffman describes the measures taken by southern Whites to prevent Blacks from migrating north.
• [7:11] - In the 20th century, Dr. Uffman explains white capping as running Blacks off the land by extralegal means through terror and intimidation.
• [7:47] - Whites continued to invent ways to block Blacks from gaining space and education, specifically restrictive covenants in housing and segregated schools.
• [8:31] - Through government-initiated redlining, Blacks couldn't get a mortgage or live in areas outside their designated and segregated neighborhoods.
• [8:57] - The cycle of progress followed by backlash continued from the Civil War onward.
• [9:16] - After decades of obtaining incremental rulings, great American heroes like Thurgood Marshall proved to the Supreme Court that states couldn't provide separate but equal educational opportunities.
• [11:42] - In May of 1954, there was a period where Civil Rights activists thought that change would come right away. Five hundred school districts voluntarily desegregated their schools. There was a sense that real change was coming.
• [12:43] - "And then what started to happen was that many of the white politicians of the south, the white democrats who had a real vested interest in maintaining the Jim Crow system, mounted this full-throated attack on the Brown ruling. They said that it was an abomination." - Dr. Kevin Boyle
• [13:12] - The Supreme Court did not say how fast the states must comply with the Brown ruling. Many southern states refused to comply, which caused a constitutional crisis.
• [14:10] - The opposition that Southern leadership put in place filtered down into the business class who created a White Citizens' Council network. Dr. Boyle describes what this did to intimidate Blacks through their economic standing.
• [15:03] - To benefit from the order to desegregate schools, Blacks needed to appeal to their school districts for permission to attend a White school. The point of the White Citizens' Councils was to intimidate Blacks so that they would not press for desegregation in their community.
• [15:44] - From the business class, the opposition trickled down into violence. Dr. Boyle uses the story of Emmett Till to illustrate the level of violence during this time.
• [16:29] - Bringing the Southern Manifesto into the discussion, Dr. Uffman lists some prominent senators and representatives who did not sign, including Lyndon B. Johnson.
• [17:12] - Dr. Boyle explains the feedback loop created by the initial opposition of southern politicians that led to the Southern Manifesto.
• [17:58] - Dr. Uffman compares the Southern Manifesto language to the language we hear today regarding the Supreme Court's overreaching.
• [18:41] - After the Brown ruling, Southern Whites increased efforts to suppress Black votes. Dr. Uffman points out that the state of Georgia changed its flag and passed a resolution repealing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
• [19:56] - Dr. Boyle explains that Whites had doubled down on Jim Crow as a defense of what they had come to see as their way of life. It turned already rapid racism into something deeper and more explosive.
• [21:19] - Dr. Uffman lists the states that by 1963 did not have a single black child attending school with white children.
• [22:09] - The state of Delaware voted to take a 12-year delay before they even thought about desegregating schools. Many districts in the state of Virginia shut down their public school system completely for years.
• [24:37] - The implementation order that came a year after the Brown ruling, called Brown II, decreed that states would need to desegregate schools "with all deliberate speed." The vague language created the possibility for states to ignore the ruling, and they did.
• [25:44] - Later, part of federal aid qualification to public schools was to comply with Brown. Then schools tried to find ways to avoid compliance without appearing to.
• [26:33] - Dr. Uffman illustrates just how long it took for his hometown to adopt any solution to comply with the Brown ruling.
• [27:33] - Most people may not realize that the Brown decision did not apply to the northern states. It applied only to states where schools were segregated by law. In the north, although schools were segregated, they were not segregated wasn't by law.
• [28:26] - The NAACP then launched a series of court cases that lasted many years in an attempt to get justices to see that northern schools were also segregated.
• [30:03] - The northern states got around this because children attended their neighborhood schools. Because neighborhoods were segregated, they didn't need to enforce segregation of schools by law.
• [32:00] - The segregation of space served two purposes. One was economical, and the other was about humiliation. Dr. Boyle uses the examples of separate drinking fountains and seating on buses to illustrate how Whites reminded Blacks symbolically that they were of less value in the social hierarchy.
• [33:08] - Dr. Boyle shares a story from a colleague not being allowed to try on a hat in a Woolworth's in the 1960s because of the color of her skin. This was so humiliating for her that she remembers it decades later.
• [34:40] - Access to public spaces was all symbolic. It was about imprinting that caste system into people's minds, both Blacks and Whites.
• [36:18] - Dr. Boyle describes the start of the sit-in movement and tells the story of Reverend James Lawson as an organizer of nonviolent campaigns against racial segregation.
• [38:50] - Shifting to Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Boyle explains how King took the Christian story of redemption and infused it into the movement.
• [40:44] - Before the sit-ins took off, Lawson preached and trained young men and women, including John Lewis. The goal of sit-ins during this wave of activism is to create "The Beloved Community."
• [42:09] - Dr. Boyle describes the beginning of the sit-in movement that led to Martin Luther King Jr.'s creation of SNCC. SNCC became the "shock troops" of the Civil Rights Movement.
• [42:54] - Next episode, we will welcome back Dr. Kevin Boyle to discuss voting rights.

Links and Resources

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast
  

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age