Ramping Up for 2007: Part 1

Coming off of sabbatical I am trying to refill my head with the sorts of ideas and information that I need to shape my courses for the spring - especially Fundamentals of Enviromental Planning.

One thing I've been doing is revisiting the basic problems plaguing so many of our communities at the intersection of environment and race. How is it that decade after decade, so many minorities who try to improve their lot in life seem to end up in dangerous, unsustainable positions? Even when government offers them solutions, they never seem to work out as planned. Certainly my interest in groups like Future City Inc. and the Green Map System are an effort to dig into this a little more. But there are other folks who grapple with this stuff every day.

One of those folks is Majora Carter, who leads Sustainable South Bronx. Having received a MacArthur fellowship in 2005, she was a featured speaker at Google's TED in 2006. In a great 20 minute video, Carter talked about the need to get grassroots groups to the table during the decision making process rather than after the fact. More importantly, she made an impassioned presentation about how SSB is making its impact with visionary projects like teaching area residents skills so they can be engaged professionally building green roof projects - employment and environmental improvement are wrapped in one. She says, "Green is the New Black".

This weekend the NY Times ran an op-ed guest column called "The Last Race Problem" by Orlando Patterson. As a sociology professor at Harvard, Patterson starts with some strong credentials for his exploration of how the black community continues some of its struggles with segregation. He points to the ways that schools are even more segregated than in the 1960s and that black neighborhoods often remain self-segregated. "[B]lacks generally prefer to live in neighborhoods that are at least 40 percent black." Additionally, "we learn from repeated polls that whites say they are comfortable living in neighborhoods that are approximately 25 percent black." His final suggestion is that if the black community wants to get serious about improving their own situation, the black middle class may need to follow the lead of other minority groups and sacrifice their automonomy and force integration through changes in their own lives. Its a short column and hard to know the specifics he has in mind, but it shows a very different way of looking at some of the same issues that Majora raises. (It also dovetails with another recent news article that detailed the challenges for a middle class black family to hire a nanny that can work in these segregated neighborhoods.)
The Times also maintains a web page on Race that I had not before seen.

A little provocation goes a long ways on an issue like race. It isn't about A solution as much as vigilently continuing to work towards improvement and always studying what is working and what isn't.

Watch the video.
Read the op-ed piece.
Think about the future.

UPDATE: On 1/2, the Star-Ledger wrote about Corey Booker's one-kid-at-a-time approach to dealing with urban issues. We also watched the movie about Booker's first run at Mayor, Street Fight. Booker's approach is not at all inconcsistent with the things these other approaches, but it certainly has its own style and flavor. And, the movie really reminds you of how many issues are woven into the tattered urban fabric of a place like Newark.