Last week, BPRC’s Charles Brown launched a new webinar series in partnership with America Walks. Walking Towards Justice is a webinar series that integrates literature into a discussion regarding the intersectionality of mobility, race, class, gender, and politics.
The first discussion explored the intersection of walkability and residential segregation. It included a special guest, Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Government Segregated America.
If you missed the webinar, you can listen to the recorded discussion on this page.
Additionally, Streetsblog has you covered with a great summary of what was discussed.
For those that haven’t read The Color of Law, it addresses the myth that the current forms of segregation we see in our metropolitan areas evolved naturally and therefore cannot be remedied through policy. Instead, Rothstein argues, segregation is the product of explicit federal, state, and local policy designed to both insulate whites from blacks and other non-whites and give whites a leg up in the process.
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Over the course of the hour-and-a-half-long webinar, however, it became very clear that determining exactly what the full scope of those wrongs were and how we might go about confronting them is complicated. And that one’s positioning in relation to those wrongs can have a significant impact on how one defines them as well as the kinds of solutions one might deem appropriate.
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Uncomfortable conversations are about more than validation of communities’ experiences, however. They are essential to our ability to arrive at better solutions, as seen in an exchange about integration.
Stay tuned for news on future episodes in the coming months.