We Need Action to Advance Anti-Racist Policies. Here Are Some Ideas.

“I can’t breathe.”

We know this simple phrase as the last words of George Floyd and Eric Garner, both while being slowly asphyxiated by police officers 1,200 miles and six years apart. That truth alone is devastating. But it is so much more than that.

It is the words the children of my neighbors in West Baltimore tell their parents when their asthma acts up. Why do they have asthma at nearly triple the rate for the rest of the state? Because we have decided that because they are Black and poor, it’s okay to put pollution into their air and not require landlords to fix mold, bug, or rodent problems. Freddie Gray, the man killed by a spinal injury while in Baltimore Police custody in 2015, suffered from asthma and lead poisoning, as did many of his neighbors.

“I can’t breathe.”

That simple phrase is what I imagine I would feel if I had to send my children to public schools that don’t meet their needs. My kids are young enough that we haven’t had to make that decision yet, and I’m lucky that my work involves trying meet the needs of all kids across the state. Yet today that is reality for many of my Black, Brown, and low-income friends and neighbors. More than half of the Black students in Maryland attend school in a substantially underfunded district.

“I can’t breathe.”

Rent is due. How would you feel if walking to the mailbox meant getting another past-due mortgage statement or rent bill? Would your chest tighten and your airway constrict? How would you decide between paying rent and putting food on the table? What would you do if you become homeless?

“I can’t breathe.”

I worked for many years in retail, and if I was still a low-wage essential worker during this pandemic, I’d be saying this to myself as I held my breath passing the customer not wearing a mask, hoping against hope that I don’t get sick so I can keep bringing home my meager paycheck that puts a little bit of food on the table and pays the rent. But maybe that isn’t much of a change, considering how many low-wage workers lack adequate sick leave and health insurance and have to guard against sickness leading to financial ruin even when we’re not in a global pandemic.

“I can’t breathe.”

I imagine Black parents must feel this when they have to have “the talk” with their children about the dangers of interacting with the police, or even random White people (see Ahmaud Arbery, killed for jogging while Black). Or when they themselves get pulled over on a false pretext, and wonder if this will be the time they get shot or if they’ll ever see their kids again. Can you imagine having that talk, then worrying every time your children go out in public?

None of these moments of breathlessness are inevitable. Each of them is created by the decisions we’ve made and continue to make. And each of them is racist in impact, regardless of whether or not race is explicitly mentioned by policymakers. We are outraged at specific moments of police violence but, as Robert Kennedy said, we also need to be outraged at:

“another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly and destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.”

It’s well past time to reverse course, change our institutions, and give our neighbors and ourselves some oxygen. Here are some ideas:

  • Require policymakers at all levels to consider the racial, ethnic, and gender equity implications of proposals.
  • Reduce police budgets, increase community control of police, and invest the savings in proven crime-fighting strategies like conflict mediation, social workers, good jobs, and entrepreneurship programs.
  • Extend the eviction moratorium, and freeze rents during this economic and public health disaster.
  • Release incarcerated Marylanders who aren’t a risk to their communities from prison and jail.
  • Reinvest savings from the reduction in prison population in housing, health care, nutrition assistance, eliminating barriers to employment, and creating family-supporting jobs.
  • Advocate for federal fiscal relief for states to prevent cuts to community-supporting programs and public sector jobs.
  • Extend the recent unemployment insurance expansions responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and make permanent the waivers that allowed freelancers, gig workers, and others to qualify for unemployment for the first time.
  • Expand benefits to those who don’t currently qualify, such as ITIN filers.
  • Address racial inequities in our education system by overriding the governor’s veto of and fully funding the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.
  • End the school to prison pipeline by continuing to reform school discipline practices.
  • Clean up our tax code, remove special interest tax breaks, and otherwise improve our upside-down tax system that currently asks the least of the wealthiest Marylanders.
  • Override the governor’s veto of the $500 million settlement to compensate our historically Black colleges and universities for decades of state discrimination.
  • Invest in community health programs that address environmental racism, as well as mental health.
  • Help small landlords and low-income homeowners remediate the health hazards in and around their properties
  • Legalize marijuana, tax it, and invest the revenue in the Black and Brown communities most impacted by the racist “war on drugs.”