Difficultly of fomenting institutional change not just a problem for minorities

I joke that half the entries I write are about best practice, the other half about worse practice and poor decision making.  Plus to be fair to elected officials even in the best circumstances change takes a long time.

I joke that I didn't start understanding patience within community organizing until my 40s, when I realized a "fast tracked" transportation project takes 10 years.

Lately too I've been thinking about how "ur academic literature" that is really important for interpretation is kind of lost to history and not referenced by current pundits.

The three big examples for me are Exit, Voice and Loyalty, about how people stay or leave organizations in the face of conflict, Diffusion of Innovations about exactly that (and the spinoff work by Geoffrey Moore, which Rogers disavowed), and Alexander Gerschenkron's papers on "The Economic Advantages of Backwardness in Historical Perspective."

The latter writings are particularly relevant to the take up of electric vehicles, and how China is overtaking the US in terms of having the preeminent position in electric car productions.  (This will be the subject of a later blog piece, along with some issues.)  In the case of China, they don't have the same investment in legacy technologies, so they can leapfrog the countries that do.

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon has a piece, "We are facing limits from diversity," about the difficulties minorities face in trying to "change" organizations.  As someone who has worked on such issues for 30+ years, it's hardly an issue exclusive to minorities.  From the article:

... I once assumed that greater inclusion would inevitably lead to equitable policies, because people from groups that had been unfairly diminished would see injustice more clearly than others and be more motivated to address it. I don’t think that anymore. 

 ... It’s rarely directly stated that, “If we add more people of color or women to institution X, that will move it leftward.” But that assumption is embedded in a lot of discourse. Democratic politicians who are White women or people of color often emphasize their connections to those groups, hinting they will be particularly strong advocates for those who share their identities. For example, in his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama argued his candidacy was an extension of the 20th-century Black freedom movement. 

... Here’s the problem: Individuals, whatever their identity, usually don’t change powerful, established institutions, for several reasons. First of all, the minorities and women tapped to join such institutions are often chosen because they have signaled that they won’t disrupt the status quo too much. Many Black Democratic mayors and Black police chiefs have blocked efforts to increase scrutiny of officers or meaningfully reform police practices; they wouldn’t have gotten those jobs if they were going to push for major changes. 

... Second, even minorities and women who favor more progressive change are caught in a bind: Challenging the values of the institutions they are a part of would likely reduce their ability to advance, or even remain in their current roles. 

 ... The third and biggest problem is that minorities and women often simply don’t have enough internal power to change these institutions, even when they try. 

 ...Progressives should push institutions to fundamentally change, not just put more people of color in high-profile roles. The path to a consistently progressive Democratic Party is for the left to win primaries, particularly the presidential contest, and take over the party from within. A more diverse administration run by a centrist figure such as Biden isn’t enough. And when change is impossible, progressives should look to create or revitalize alternative institutions.

WRT institutional change, welcome to the club.

I did figure out some fundamentals when I did a bike and pedestrian plan for Baltimore County.  

(1) my job wasn't to be a bomb thrower but to figure out how to wend my way through the existing system and build support (at the first multi-agency meeting, a guy doing streetscape work did just that, criticizing all the other agencies--it was a good lesson) 

(2) build on existing best practice, reference it, building support across agencies.  

(3) work with advocates disappointed about not seeing progressive action from previous efforts, acknowledging that work, and how it led to the work that we're doing today.  Build on it.

(4) focus on preferred outcomes and look backwards at the system processes producing non-desirable outcomes as routine, and work on rebuilding the processes (process innovation) to generate preferred outcomes as a matter of course.

(5) make recommendations on elements like a Pedestrian and Bicycle Committee and sub-committees for political districts that were practical, and "opportunities for appointments" by elected officials.  

I was super proud of #5 and the sub-committees.  Because it would bring the executive and legislative branches together, with citizens, and a foundational agenda (from the plan).  The council districts did this have had way more progress on bike and pedestrian improvements than the council districts that haven't.

But one thing I didn't figure on... the County Executive gets to appoint the chair.  And he appointed a flunky, someone who worked for the Executive Branch, and therefore the Executive overly shaped the agenda and reduced the independence/objectivity/advocacy capacity of the group.

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That being said, systems aren't about improvement, but about maintenance of the system.  See Planning in the Public Domain and to some extent Social Psychology of Organizations.

Washington Post editorializes about Purple Line cockups, fails to attribute them to Larry Hogan

The Purple Line is a great lesson for me in how long projects take to achieve from conceptualization to realization.  

I first read about the idea--intended at the time to be heavy rail--in December 1987, shortly after I had moved to Washington, DC, as a cover story in the Washington City Paper.  40 years later!!!! a section of it, maybe about 25% will have been built, and zero planning for extension is underway.

 

The concept: graphic by the Sierra Club Metro DC chapter, c. 2000 

 

 The section underway is from Bethesda to New Carrollton.  Washington Post graphic.

 Given that it will take this long for one section ...

The Washington Post has an editorial, "The Purple Line is in the news again — for the usual reasons," about continued failures with the Purple Line light rail project in Montgomery and Prince George's County Maryland, which means it won't open until 2027.  From the article:

As The Post’s Katherine Shaver reported, the start date for the 16-mile light-rail link between Montgomery and Prince George’s counties could slide another seven months, into mid-2027 — or about five years after the completion target of March 2022. The culprit for this latest glitch is the relocation of utility lines. ...

... when its administrators blunder through years of bad contracting and project-management decisions. Those decisions have bloated what was to be a five-year project with almost $2 billion in construction costs into a nearly 10-year, $3.4 billion undertaking. The lowlights include a shortsighted effort by former governor Larry Hogan to pinch pennies on construction costs; timeline-extending litigation from NIMBY groups and others; and a rupture in 2020 of the Purple Line’s public-private partnership in which the original construction team abandoned the project, delaying it by more than a year and adding nearly $1.5 billion in costs.

While the Post does attribute some of the delay to former Governor Hogan, it's basically his fault, although there was a lawsuit simultaneous with part of it.  

Hogan threatened to shut the program down as soon as he came into office--and he did cancel a similar effort in Baltimore (which the new Governor wants to revive, 8 years later).  And came up with the design-finance-build program to get some of the money to build it.  But this added great complexity.  And a general unwillingness by both sides to act as partners ("A Purple Line update: the downside of Public Private Partnerships" -- they are contracts, not partnerships," 2017), ended up with the original contractor bailing out, leading to even more delays.

But the Post thinks Hogan would make a decent President ("Larry Hogan won over Democrats in Maryland. Could he do it nationwide?").  When, Hogan sucked on most of the issues that matter to urbanites, especially transit (+ spending $8 million on covid tests from South Korea that didn't work).

The Post is acting like the Takoma Park resident who wrote a letter to the editor stating he'd be voting against all the politicians in office because of the failures in building the Purple Line, even though all the failures are basically the fault of the former Governor, not local elected officials, not state legislators.

-- "Takoma Park resident vows to vote against all local public officials this fall, because of the failure of the Purple Line light rail, but the failure is because of the Governor, who is termed out" (2022)

Black History Month and the New Jim Crow

Normally at the outset of Black History Month I run a piece that I modify a bit each year, last year's entry was "African American History Month and Urban Planning."

A chalk outline at a rally to protest the acquittal of George Zimmerman, Damon Winter, New York Times.

The January piece in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, made me realize that instead I should be reading her book as a way to acknowledge and celebrate African American History Month.

-- "The Injustice of This Moment Is Not an ‘Aberration’: From mass incarceration to mass deportation, our nation remains in deep denial" is adapted from the book

Although the hard truths of the US as the ultimate "carceral state" are not easy to digest.

-- "Booked: The Origins of the Carceral State," Dissent Magazine
-- "The Third Reconstruction and the Carceral State," The Atlantic

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Past blog entries:

-- "Racism in the United States is not an artifact of history, but remains deeply embedded within society," 2015
-- "Police killings, demonstrations and emergency management," 2014

Racism in the United States is not an artifact of history, but remains deeply embedded within society

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Reprinted and re-dated because of the addition of a link to and quotation from a column by Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post. I meant to include this originally but couldn't remember who wrote the piece and it took me awhile to track down.
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Emanuel African Methodist Church, Charleston. CNN photo.

As would be expected, there has been a great deal of media coverage of the tragic hate crime in Charleston, South Carolina, where 9 people were murdered by a 21-year-old racist during their regular bible study class.

This happened at the Emanuel African Methodist Church, a church with 200 years of prominence within within the story of African-Americans and civil rights.

The major reaction and response has focused on states and retailers removing the Confederate battle flag.  I think it is sick that 9 people have to be murdered to get states like South Carolina to reconsider their enamoration of this emblem of the Confederacy.

Separately, many commentators have pointed out the hypocrisy of calling people like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev terrorists, while terming race-motivated killers like Dylann Roof as troubled.  They ask a legitimate question:  Why isn't race-based killing considered terrorism?

I can't think of a better way to avoid addressing racism in our alleged "post-racial" society by excusing race-targeted killings to mental illness.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., has a great column on the subject, "A racist hate crime, pure and simple."

But in fairness, others have written equally good pieces. For example, the Associated Press story "Confederate, Jim Crow tributes go well beyond battle flag," discusses how deeply embedded in Southern political and social culture are the symbols associated with the Confederacy.

For example, I always write about how Monument Avenue in Richmond is great because of the continued use of asphalt block as a visual, aural, and physical cue for motor vehicles to slow down, but I rarely mention that the majority of the monuments, other than a more recent statue erected to honor Arthur Ashe, highlight Confederate War "heroes."

From the article:

Many of the commemorations were established in the early decades of Jim Crow segregation at the behest of groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Sons of Confederate Veterans and their forerunners.

Confederate heritage leaders say political leaders' statements this week worry them.

"First it's the flags, then the monuments, then the streets' names, then the holidays. I feel like it's open season on anything Confederate," said Kelly Barrow, commander in chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Barrow says his organization shouldn't be tainted by Roof's actions and apparent racist philosophy.

The Sons organization calls the Civil War "the second American revolution." The United Daughters of the Confederacy states in one of its creeds that "the War Between the States was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery."

Deaton, the Georgia historian, said those views, often reflected in the monuments, are part of how elected officials avoid potential controversies over the displays. He called it "the lost-cause narrative" that obscures the reasons for secession that Southern leaders plainly stated at the time.

"The monuments are never about slavery. They're never about treason," Deaton said. "They're always about noble virtues like honor and valor. They didn't have a problem acknowledging the reasons for the war in 1861. Their descendants have a problem with it today."

The reality is that terming the "War between the states"--the Civil War--as being about "state's rights" in the context of a federal nation, and not solely about preserving the economic, political, and social institutions supporting slavery is a mis-direction.  It war was about slavery and maintaining the structure of racism that was constructed around slavery in order to justify subjugation.

Sally Jenkins, normally writing about sports for the Washington Post, has a great column, "Unraveling the threads of hatred, sewn into a Confederate icon" where this is discussed in artful language.  From the article:

All wars are romanticized by those who have never felt bullets fly through their coats. But there is something deeply pernicious in the continued attempts to soft-focus the causes of the Confederacy, its aftermath and its lingering effects. South Carolina’s part of the Declaration of Causes of Seceding States, also signed by Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia and Texas, stated that secession was the direct result of “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.” The Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, said, “Our new government is founded . . . its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition.” ...

We will have truthfully reckoned with our racial history when high school and college students quit going to Heritage Balls wearing butternut military tunics and sashes and understand that Jeff Davis and Bobby Lee should have spent the rest of their natural lives in work camps, breaking rocks with shovels, instead of on their verandas — and the fact that they didn’t was a profound miscarriage. And when they understand that the South was in fact deeply divided along class as well as racial lines.

Even though "the South" "lost" the war, it is still being fought today, and despite the many successes of the Civil Rights agenda, there have been and continue to be many setbacks.  Dylann Roof is just one more soldier of terrorism fighting against racial equality.

P.S.  Maybe 1,000+ people will have to be murdered in a terrible incident before politicians will be willing to take up "the reform" of federal gun control laws.

P.P.S.  in the context of cultural heritage tourism, I have written about the need to update our understanding of history and historiography and interpretation of historic sites, especially around the Civil War ("(Public) History/Historic Preservation Tuesday: Museums and Modern Historiography" and "Parochialism and historiography") and the relationship of the nation's civil rights story to transportation.