Dear ones,
On Tuesday evening, as I rallied and marched with family, friends, and people I haven’t met yet, I kept replaying a sentence in my head from something I’d read:
Justice demands systemic and enduring transformation — something that younger generations will see and trust as authentic.
According to an analysis by Mapping Police Violence, despite only making up 13 percent of the US population, Black Americans are nearly three times as likely as white Americans to be killed by the police. The group also found that “levels of violent crime in US cities do not determine rates of police violence”.
A further analysis performed by policeviolencereport.org found that Black people were more likely to be killed by police (27 percent), more likely to be unarmed (35 percent) and less likely to be threatening someone when killed (36 percent).
Still, many Americans are in denial. According to recent polling data:
Just under half of U.S. adults, 48%, currently hold favorable views of the Black Lives Matter movement, down from 61% last May, the poll found
Police violence is a “serious problem” in the U.S., 69% of respondents said, down from 79% reported right after the death of Floyd last year.
While marching, I fell into conversation with a young acquaintance who is active with Teens Take Charge. We talked about the mayoral race and the candidates who have been disingenuous about ending school segregation. School segregation is one tentacle of the systemic problem that leads to the dehumanization and death of Black people.
That same young activist, Isa Grumbach-Bloom, was quoted in an article about school segregation that was published last night. Of her experience at Brooklyn’s Millennium High School, where she enjoys most of her courses, she remarked:
I think the main thing that’s missing is a diverse group of students in my classes.
Millennium is part of the John Jay campus, and nearly half of Millennium’s students are white, while Park Slope Collegiate, in the same building, is just 10 percent white. The problem of discriminatory admissions goes beyond the SHSAT, the admissions tool for specialized public schools.
New admissions data obtained by The Markup and THE CITY shows how Black and Latino students are regularly screened out of high schools across New York City—most strikingly, the city’s top-performing schools. While Black and Latino students do apply for admission to these schools, they are consistently admitted at much lower rates than white students and students of Asian descent.
At Millennium Brooklyn, which has been consistently ranked “far above average” in multiple metrics the school system uses to measure success, 24% of the more than 5,700 applicants in the 2020 admissions cycle were Black, but Black students made up less than 10% of those ultimately admitted. White students? They made up 23% of the applicants but more than 34% of the offers. That disparity extends across the top high schools in the city.
This is appalling, but not surprising. Everyone loses out when schools are segregated. If we’re going to build a society in which Black Lives Matter — which is why Isa and I were marching with our families — then systemic and enduring transformation is what we need, in our schools and in our communities.
This is the season to educate ourselves about the candidates. The People’s Plan NYC has done some homework for you. The Education Scorecard, for which I did research, ranks the mayoral candidates based on the alignment of their education policy statements with the progressive goals articulated in the People’s Plan.
Review the Education Scorecard and find out which candidates have plans to desegregate the schools, end the school-to-prison pipeline, and make schools inclusive and culturally responsive.
A few weeks ago, I noted that work from home for justice is our project, not mine. So, it won’t surprise you that I’m now calling on you to contribute. Proper preparation for ranked-choice voting is harder than jury duty (maybe because they never pick me for a jury). I will be ranking for my own district (CD 40), which I will share, of course. If you are researching your city council candidates anyway and would like to be a guest contributor, please get in touch! I’m thinking that this is a new kind of mutual aid.
Email me at esalynn@gmail.com and include your district.
Here’s some labor-intensive citizenship: a grand jury was convened yesterday to consider criminal charges against the former president and the Trump Organization. They are going to meet three days a week for six months. Hopefully, their civic duty will give us an indictment for Christmas this year.
Thanks to those of you who joined Tuesday’s call relay to get the CCIA passed. Divest NY, a group working for a fossil-free New York, has reported that
the teachers' pension system has more than $300 million in coal investments, totaling stock in 36 companies in the Carbon Underground Coal 100 List.
Fortunately, there’s a bill before the state legislature called the Teachers' Fossil Fuel Divestment Act. Jabari Brisport, who sponsored the bill in the Senate, has perfectly articulated my feelings:
As a recent public school teacher, I can tell you just how devastating it is to work so hard every day to protect our community’s future and its children, only to have your pension invested in an industry that’s actively harming that future and those children.
Contact your state representative and senator to ask for their support of the Teachers’ Fossil Fuel Divestment Act A6331A/S4783A.
Raise your hand if you didn’t see this coming:
The success of the campaign, led by a tiny hedge fund against the nation’s largest oil company, could force the energy industry to confront climate change and embolden Wall Street investment firms that are prioritizing the issue. Analysts could not recall another time that Exxon management had lost a vote against company-picked directors.
As I understand it, eight of the 12-member board are ExxonMobil’s nominees and there are two seats still in the balance. The big takeaway is that investors are finally starting to recognize that climate change is a catastrophic threat and thus, bad for business. I’m not prepared to stand up and cheer for a hedge fund, but I’ll whoop it up for a reality check.
The mayoral race is in flux. Dianne Morales’s campaign has been rocked by an internal ‘imbroglio’, replete with staff changes and drama. An unnamed source described a staff member who mistreated Black and brown campaign workers. Morales’s campaign manager, Whitney Hu, left the campaign after she found that Morales did not respond to the concerns she raised.
On her way out, the person added, Hu urged staffers to consider forming a union. She had previously raised concerns about wages and lack of health care for employees on the upstart campaign. The work conditions that trouble some people on Morales’ team threaten to cut against her own pledge to address inadequate workplace treatment of people of color.
Morales herself acknowledged mistakes, but, regrettably, she used the passive voice:
Our campaign works to intentionally center the voices of those who are excluded from politics and we acknowledge that mistakes have been made in our attempts to do this.
I’m disinclined to reject people who make mistakes (that would be ALL of us), and I am interested in how people comport themselves when they do fuck up. I guess we’ll see what shakes out in the coming days.
Because ranked-choice voting is still new, and a June primary may catch many voters off-guard, pundits are not sure what poll data mean in this race. A recent poll puts Kathryn Garcia ahead of Adams and Yang.
This is good news, because she is a far better candidate than either of them. Garcia is committed to building green infrastructure and has a record of highly competent management of the Sanitation Department. But Garcia’s positions on education and policing are problematic.
If you have stayed with me this far, thank you. Citizenship is a demanding business, as the newest citizen I know — sworn in this week! — will learn soon enough. I get the sense that T somehow already knows.
with love,
L