To spark constructive conversations tied to the larger issues that August 9th, 2014 brought to the forefront, we originally documented the personal perspectives of FTF commissioners and everyday folks in St. Louis for the Ferguson Commission report. Since then, we’ve told stories in collaboration with FTF to ask how 25 years later, a generation after the killing of Michael Brown and the events of Ferguson, would a racially equitable St. Louis look, feel, and sound like? And most recently, we’ve generated stories for Still Separate, Still Unequal, an FTF community accountability and advocacy tool examining inequities while serving as a call to level the education playing field in St. Louis.
“The assumption is always that I’m Mexican or Indian. I get a lot of ‘Holas.’ I really can’t be mad. A lot of Mexicans think I’m Mexican. The first interaction is usually, ‘Are you from Mexico?’ ‘No, I’m from Yemen.’ ‘Where’s that?’ ‘It’s in the Middle East.’ People are curious. A lot of times, the next question is, ‘Are you Christian or Jewish?’ Which, I’m neither. I was raised Muslim. But I’m a humanist more than anything, really. They want to ask me questions, but they’re always nervous or worried about offending me. I see myself as an ambassador for Arabs, and I’m not just talking about Muslims. Regardless of religious practices, there are many Arabs like me that are open. We want to change your view, and we want to have the conversation with you rather than you just watching one perspective on the news. So when people ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ I’m not offended. I’m happy to share. Maybe certain questions can be offensive, but if we don’t ask the offensive questions, how do you change the stereotypes you have? I mean, it’s uncomfortable for me to ask a stereotypical question. It’s uncomfortable for you to answer it. But if you don’t answer it, then where do we go from here?”
Buthaina Noman, Sales Professional
“There are certain folks who have accepted that St. Louis is a town whose glory days are behind it – that it’s a smaller, less successful region that it once was. That the forces that set us back are not forces that we have any control over. That it’s just how the city is. It’s not going to change. The people are the people who’ve always been in power. Whether people talk about old money or political dynasties, there’s this sense of stasis or, ‘Yeah, we were once great. But we’re not now.’ I don’t really know what it’s going to take to move us forward. Sometimes it’s outsiders who come in and say, ‘No, this is a great city. There’s so much history here and the people are great.’ And even though some of the smallness of communities and how interconnected everything is can seem a little obnoxious, it’s also a huge value. Investments can be made to move us forward. There is a future that looks different than its most recent past. Understanding how Racial Equity fits into that, there are all sorts of tangible economic and social benefits for being a more equitable, inclusive St. Louis.”
Paul Sorenson, Founder and CEO at GoodMap, and Former Director of Strategic Communications and Planning at Grace Hill Settlement House
“Starting from my earliest memories of school, I was told by teachers, ‘You’re so great. You’re so smart. You’re gonna do great things. We have high expectations from you, we’re certain you will meet those expectations, and we’re going to provide you with the resources, the nurturing, and the love that you need to meet those expectations.’ So to think that that’s not the experience that Black students encounter from their education was infuriating and heartbreaking. I’m staying in St. Louis, I’m in school, and the topic that it looks like I’m going to be studying for my dissertation, and for the foreseeable future beyond that, came out of my work for the Ferguson Commission in the area of educational equity has has to do with the discipline gap – the racial disparity in the rate at which students are removed from the classroom. That gap, in Missouri, is larger than it is in any other state, at least at the elementary school level. For every White student that’s suspended out of school per 100 White students, about 15 more Black students are suspended out of school. As a public health practitioner, you know that kids that are suspended are put on a track to end up being more likely to end up in a juvenile justice system and incarcerated. But, I wondered if there weren’t other behavioral health and even physical health outcomes that resulted from being told, ‘You’re a troublemaker, and the best thing we can do with you is to kick you out and keep you out of the way of other students.’”
Karishma Furtado, Forward Through Ferguson Data & Research Catalyst
“When we’re making the assumption that no progress has been made, we have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This is a movement for Black lives, and this issue of the dehumanization of Black lives has existed for over 400 years. So, one year responding to Ferguson – or if you take it back to when the Black Lives Matter organization was created after the shooting of Trayvon Martin – two to three years of organizing is not going to unravel everything that’s been happening over the last 400 to 500 years. So, I think there has to be a space for grace, and a space for patience, and a space for resilience if we’re all going to get through these moments in this movement.”
De Nichols, Co-Founder of Civic Creatives, Senior Product Inclusion UX Researcher at YouTube and Core Organizer of Design As Protest, and past Forward Through Ferguson board member,
“Are you familiar with Jane Elliott? She was a teacher in the 60s who did this fascinating experiment: the brown-eyed, blue-eyed video. You have to watch it. There’s another great video clip that’s about 60 seconds. She is in an auditorium of White people, and she says, ‘If you want your experience to be like the experience of Black people on a day-to-day basis, stand up.’ Nobody stands, of course. Then, she says, ‘Wait, I do not think you understood the instructions.’ She asks again, and no one stands. She basically goes on to say, ‘That tells me a lot. That tells me that you know what is going on, you know you would not want it to happen to you, and you are not willing to do anything about it.’ Then she says, ‘I do not know why you are willing to allow it to happen to other people if you know.’ There is something to the idea that once you have your eyes opened, then you are going to have to do something different. As a White person, you are going to have to play a different role.”
Claire Schell, AVP, Employee Experience, U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corporation
“We were at Target two Halloweens ago and one of my sons noticed one of these superhero costumes with muscle arms, but the muscles were his color skin. So he said, ‘Well, what if you have brown skin and you want to be that character?’ It wasn’t prompted by anything other than his brain. I’m like, ‘Yes! That’s how you think because that’s not fair.’ The other thing is that the boys use the terms brown skin and tan skin to describe people. They don’t use White and Black, and I don’t correct them because I like their way better. It’s an objective description and not a racial connotation. Yeah, I’ve definitely talked to them about history, and segregation, and whatever I can whenever it comes up. It’s hard being a parent, dealing with your own kinds of anxieties and grief because of national and local events and then helping your children not be too sheltered. I think about that with my 7th graders that I teach, too. They’re all coming to me at different levels of awareness, and different levels of exposure and experience to the ‘real world,’ or to issues of racism, oppression, or prejudice. I can’t expect them all to master the same things at the same time because they are in different places. I try to make them cognitive of respecting that and to keep that in mind now as I facilitate conversations. Some of us aren’t there and aren’t going to be there for a long time. Some of us are already there and we’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ That’s the hard part on all levels with students, with staff, with the district, with the world, with adults that my children interact with, with everything.”
April Fulstone, Teacher at Wydown Middle School
“I want to make good use of my time and I want to show people how it’s your daily practice. It’s not something you read, or somewhere you go, or a conference you attend. It’s your daily practice of how you think about yourself and how you think about other people, and how you think about the world. It just takes slowing down and making it important. I’m influenced by what I read and what I listen to. We talk about financial literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy. Why? Because those are big systems that are hard to understand, we have to make important decisions in them, and we don’t know everything that’s involved. Race operates the same way. So why don’t we try to get racially literate? We have to get fluency in the language. We have to learn that behavior. We have to learn the interactions. How do I interact with other White people? How do I interact across race and get out of the Black and White paradigm that is so St. Louis?”
Mary Ferguson, Racial Justice Consultant, YWCA of St. Louis, and Rudy Nickens, Director of Equal Opportunity and Diversity, Missouri Department of Transportation in Jefferson City
People ask, ‘What do your eight-year-old and five-year-old know?’ My eight-year-old was at his baseball game, and two of the young men explicitly would not high five him and the other black children after the game. Some people might say, ‘Oh, he’s too young for you to engage him in this,’ but if he’s not too young to be treated in a racially hateful way, he’s not too young to start to understand the systems that we’ve created. We have white people in our family. We have interracial marriages in our family. Rather than let them make sense of it themselves, in their own growing brains, we’ve been conscious about talking to them about racism. They know about our country’s history of slavery and that we’re all the same, but there are these differences in terms of melanin, we’ve created these – we talk about race as a social construct – we’ve created this construct around race, and if we don’t like it, that’s why we work to try to make things different. Sometimes, you wonder though. You feel like you’re putting too much on your kid. But I’ll tell you, when my eight-year-old experienced those boys not high fiving him, I was like, ‘No. We did the right thing.’ Because how hard would it be at that moment to explain to him all of these issues and dynamics? And not that he gets it all, because he still cried. It still made him sad. But I don’t want him to ever internalize that that’s something about him.”
Dr. Kira Banks, Associate Professor of Psychology and Founder of Raising Equity
“We have the Forward Through Ferguson (FTF) definition, and there are a few other definitions, locally and nationally, of what equity means, but it’s hard to define something that you don’t have a frame for. We, in the U.S., don’t really grow up thinking about equity. We feel like we reflexively know a lot about equality, or diversity, or inclusion, but equity can seem so foreign. The key thing is that equity, unlike equality, brings in this idea of justice, of not just giving everybody equal resources or access, but it challenges us to dig deeper and think about what is just, or what is fair. That means taking into account historical implications and current outcomes. It’s so much more profound than equality. I have almost completely removed the word equality from the way I talk. I will almost never use equality in my everyday language, because it’s not my goal anymore. I remember starting to work with FTF, and there was definitely a moment where the former commissioners who were serving on the interim board expressed, ‘It’s great that you all are looking at these different priority areas and people that are implementing in the various spaces, but FTF needs to own this Racial Equity piece, and put that at the core.’ For me, that was difficult to reconcile. I’ve since realized that that’s the North Star of it all.”
David Dwight, Executive Director, Lead Strategy Catalyst, Forward Through Ferguson