Angela Glover Blackwell is Founder in Residence at PolicyLink, the organization she started in 1999 to advance racial and economic equity for all. Under Angela’s leadership, PolicyLink gained national prominence in the movement to use public policy to improve access and opportunity for all low-income people and communities of color, particularly in the areas of health, housing, transportation, and infrastructure. Angela is also the host of the Radical Imagination podcast and Professor of Practice at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley.

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Transcript

Angela Glover Blackwell:

Transformative solidarity has us owning the issues that sometimes seem like the issue of the other, because we deeply understand that their issues are our issues.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Welcome to The Measure. I am your host and moderator, Leon Andrews, president and CEO of Equal Measure. Equal Measure partners with foundations, nonprofits, and government organizations to apply new ways of thinking and learning to advance social change. On The Measure, we’ll have conversations about centering racial equity and how to design, implement, evaluate, and communicate efforts to disrupt inequitable systems.

For our first episode, I am honored and thrilled to welcome Angela Glover Blackwell, attorney, civil rights advocate, author, and founder of the national research and advocacy nonprofit organization, PolicyLink. Angela, thank you so much for being here today.

Angela Glover Blackwell:

Leon, it’s absolutely my pleasure.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

I’d like to start with more of a personal question. A lot of our focus at Equal Measure is on place-based work, investments that try to transform systems for health, education, and economic mobility that disproportionately impact our Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, Asian, other people of color. We think a lot about places, their culture and context. I think it is also important to personalize this work, so we better understand and appreciate the impact we are trying to have in communities. How do you think about place, culture, and context as you think about your own life’s journey?

Angela Glover Blackwell:

I grew up in a segregated St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1950s and the early ’60s. I was in St. Louis at the time that Brown versus Board of Education was decided, and I saw what changed and what didn’t change after that. But because I grew up in that community, I have a deep personal connection to what it means to grow up in legal segregation, and what it means to remove the legal part of it and still have it be completely segregated.

There was positive to it and there was negative. I grew up in this wonderful, warm, supportive community that was all Black. St. Louis is this huge city at that time, ninth largest in the city, almost a million people. And there were wonderful things in St. Louis that even though we had a sense of being segregated, we participated in anyway. There was this wonderful outdoor opera. And the Black adults would take the Black children in the community to this outdoor opera, but they would sit all around the perimeter so that we were protected from the sting and burn of anything that anybody was trying to say or do to us. And we just enjoyed it in that little cocoon. Because the entire Black community lived in the same neighborhoods, and they were huge neighborhoods, because all the Black people lived together. So the doctors, the lawyers, the ministers, the people who worked in the school cafeteria, the teachers, the postal workers, the women who were raising children alone and receiving welfare, all lived together. That was the positive part of it. And that positive part left me with something. I have never forgotten the importance of community and that community matters.

And so, it matters for me because race and place are so tied together in this country because of racial discrimination in housing and what the communities became. But there’s been a low point, and we are still in it. Deep disinvestment. The middle class moving away from lower income Black people, extreme surveillance of police coming in the wake of those changes. That has to be dealt with through policy, through action, through practice. But we can never forget the power of community when we’re doing our advocacy. How important it is to build community voice and agency with the communities that are there. The culture of community, the fabric of community. We have to invest in that. We learn something in segregation, which is the power of knowing that no matter how horrendous your circumstance, you are not alone, if the people who live around you are committed to making sure the best can come forward.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Well, thank you, Angela for sharing that. There’s so much that you named that I just appreciated you opening your life story for people to be able to hear that. As we talk about place-based work, I said it’s important to personalize this work. I think each of us have a personal story or however it shows up for you. It may not be the exact same way as our audience had a chance to hear from you, as you shared your journey in St. Louis. There’s the good, there’s the bad, there’s the ugly, but it’s an acknowledgement that that story, that personalized story, is so important in understanding why we need to do this work.

And as I think about you telling your personal story, I’ve appreciated your leadership over the years about how intentional you’ve been about naming equity, whether it was talking about equity as a superior growth model or challenging all of us to approach this work with radical imagination. And more recently, you talked about the need for transformative solidarity. Can you describe this concept for our audience?

Angela Glover Blackwell:

The neighborhood that I grew up in changed. The grocery stores vanished. The schools weren’t as good. The parks were no longer maintained. The amenities went away. The neighborhood itself lost some of the cohesion that it had. And my mother sent me in an article that a woman wrote who grew up across the street, who was about 15 years younger than I. I did not know her. And she described that same block that I talk about with such fondness as being like growing up in domestic apartheid. I paid attention to that because I knew that was real and I couldn’t let my positive experience overshadow her negative experience or negate her negative experience. I had to be able to figure out how to own it all. And by owning it all, it transformed my way of thinking, and I was able to incorporate it into the work.

And that experience actually is something that I try to apply every day to every issue, in every circumstance. And that is to value everybody’s humanity, everybody’s point of view, and to use the insight, the gaze that people can provide when they give you their point of view, to expand the strategy, the frame, the goals of the liberation movement.

And so, when I talk about transformative solidarity, what I am talking about is how we all have to be in this struggle together and not allow ourselves to become transactional when we think about who else we want to work with. Transformative solidarity has us owning the issues that sometimes seem like the issue of the other, because we deeply understand that their issues are our issues. That it’s not until we understand the plight of people with disabilities as being an extension of what it means to be discriminated against because of race or because of gender, that we can actually come up with strategies that not only solve a particular entry point to oppression, but solves the problem of oppression.

So, transformative solidarity is actually a way to be able to move on the insight that when we talk about racial equity—just and fair inclusion into a society in which all, all, can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential—that we are not talking about something for a special interest group. We are talking about how do we create a society that is so full of opportunity and supports and acknowledgement that I do not succeed if you do not succeed, that we have actually moved to something different. And that equity, while it will always be the moral thing to do, is actually an economic, a national, and a global imperative. Equity is the superior growth model because if we get equity right, we understand that we have to think of growth not in an extractive way, but in a way that it respects the planet, respects the people, respects everybody.

I began to think about those curb cuts in the sidewalk that are there because of the advocacy of people with disabilities in wheelchairs, who—no matter what gains they were able to make in terms of legal access to housing, to employment, to public spaces—could not fully realize their rights because they couldn’t move around the community. So, those cutouts in the sidewalk enable people with disabilities to be able to have more access, but we know they helped us all. To me, I call that the curb cut effect, because what it shows is that when you solve problems with nuance and specificity, having in mind the gaze, the experience of those who have been rendered most vulnerable and marginalized in society, the benefits cascade out enormously.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

So, I love the way you just framed that. So, how do you look at transformative solidarity, not just around curb cuts, but around all of the issues that we’re talking about around place-based work. Measuring progress, not just looking at this as the moral thing, but that this is good for business, it’s good for communities, it’s good for accountability. There’s a business case that you’re naming here, as well, that I think it’s important as we talk about this work, how we think about different ways of messaging. And we know, as we talk about centering racial equity, that race is in this country, the strongest predictor of success.

The evidence seems to suggest that more people and institutions in philanthropy, government, in corporate recognize the importance of this, of centering racial equity, considering what was revealed from the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 during the pandemic and the racial injustices and uprisings that were sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others.

You talk about the importance of understanding the centrality of genocide and bondage in our nation’s history. How does knowing this history help us understand how to move forward with social change?

Angela Glover Blackwell:

We are at a moment in which everything has been brought into sharp relief and it’s on the table. And history is certainly one of those things. The pushback that is being experienced in this country against the movement toward a thriving, multiracial democracy is very painful. But in that pain, one has to acknowledge that the pushback represents the reality that we really are going there. We really are becoming a multiracial nation that will be defining itself in that way going forward.

I know, and probably many of the people who are listening to this podcast know, that this is all positive. It is all positive. There is nothing more exciting in a global economy than to live in a world nation that is connected to the globe through kinship, through language, through custom. So, this is the future. Some people are afraid of it, a lot of people are afraid of it. They are afraid that the privileges and the positive things that have made for a thriving white middle class will not be available to the white middle class anymore. People are afraid of that. Because we know that as the people who are becoming the United States of America thrive and start businesses and educate and build community and begin to infuse into democracy the reality of the democratic ideals that have attracted people from all over the world, that the United States will flourish and prosperity will grow and it will be shared.

But in order to be able to have a democracy that really works, we have to start off by understanding the history. We have to understand that history. We have to go back to the framers, the founders, and understand that they really did have important insights, that the values that they espoused were great values, even as they lived their lives in opposition to those values, even as they owned slaves, they could talk about freedom in ways that were exciting.

I say that the framers of this nation punched above their moral weight. We need to understand that history and put it in a real context, not celebrate people as if they had no flaws, celebrate them despite their flaws. And then we have to understand how the country was started. We have to understand genocide for the purpose of stealing land. We have to understand human bondage for the purpose of slave labor and how those were tied to the economic growth and prosperity of the nation, and the stories and the myths, the stereotypes and the horror that people developed to be able to justify that.

But there’s something else that’s important to learn out of looking at that history. And that is to understand that out of that inhuman, immoral system of slavery began the protocols of oppression for the nation, in terms of how Black and white people live together in this most unnatural of circumstances and the way that we develop, the way that oppression would operate in this country. And those protocols of oppression operate on you, no matter what your race, what your gender, how you come to be feeling marginalized and left out.

I believe that we have to go back and look critically at history. We have to learn from it. We have to build on it. But in the end, we will have created something that is sustainable and thoughtful and impactful because we didn’t shy away from history. We didn’t hide ourselves from it. We understood it, so it could guide us to the right strategies and help us to be able to understand the real measure of our progress.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Thank you for sharing. You named so many things there, Angela, that I wish we had time to fully go deeper in. We work with many large foundations, and I would love to hear your thoughts on what investments you would tell them to make to truly center racial equity, understanding that history and the work to really disrupt those systems.

Angela Glover Blackwell:

I am so pleased that foundations have leaned in to racial equity, because philanthropy really is the place where the nation in civil society has been asking itself for decades, how do we help with education and health and housing and poverty and so many issues that impact us negatively in the nation? And so, it is absolutely appropriate that philanthropy should finally, and I must say finally, because this solution has been there for the picking up for a long time, but philanthropy has finally understood that it has to focus on racial equity. That if it is concerned about education or incarceration or the development of young people or vibrant communities or environmental sustainability, you have to understand that racial equity is at the center of all of that.

One of the things that I think philanthropy really has to do once it has this realization is educate itself about the root causes of what it’s trying to address. Part of the strategy of developing strategy has to understand the root causes and then use that information to think about, what are we going to focus on? How are we going to develop effective interventions? How are we going to measure them? How are we going to measure our progress? And how are we going to think about the sustainability of what we have done into the future?

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

So, there is so much work still to be done. People could look at this and feel like it’s overwhelming. And we’ve had such a conversation about both you sharing your personal story and the work and the journey you’ve been on, and the engagement and opportunities that are still in front of us. And so I’d like to end with this question. What gives you hope?

Angela Glover Blackwell:

I am hopeful, but Mariame Kaba, she’s an abolitionist, and she has a statement that hope is a discipline. And I ask myself, “What is in that discipline for me?” And I had some answers. One is that discipline requires that you stay angry, that you stay impatient, that you maintain a sense of urgency. But the next thing we have to do is that we have to really work on solving the problem with the people who understand it. You got to stay close to the issue with the people who are experiencing it, learning from them, translating that learning into strategy, into advocacy, into voting, into conversations. And I went beyond just me as an advocate because I have a way to turn it into action. But sometimes all people have is a vote. Sometimes all they have is the opportunity to talk to people who are saying something outrageous at a dinner table. But the last thing that I think is part of the discipline is that don’t stop with a vision of solving the problem. Extend your vision to something that is joyful.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

I love that. Hope is a discipline. Stay angry, impatient, urgent, stay proximate, but have joy. Love that. Have joy in the midst of all of this. Thank you, Angela. And thanks to our audience for joining the inaugural episode of The Measure. You can learn more about Equal Measure’s work by visiting us at equalmeasure.org.

I’d like to leave you with a quote inspired by Angela’s conversation on transformative solidarity, by Desmond Tutu. “My humanity is bound up in yours, where we can only be human together.”