“No More Status Quo:” A Brookings-LISC Report
As the pandemic and the nation’s focus on racial injustice shine new light on long-standing structural injustices, a new report, co-authored by LISC LA's ED Tunua Thrash-Tuk and researchers from Brookings, describes the imperative of upending the intentional policies and practices that laid the groundwork for today’s crises. The authors examine how LISC's investment and work in South Los Angeles, thanks to robust community engagement, serves as an example of equitable local change.
Introduction
Over the past several months, headline after headline has invoked the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic “lays bare” our society’s deep inequities. Whether it be devastating public health disparities, wide unemployment rate gaps by race, or police violence in the midst of a pandemic already disproportionately impacting Black communities, one overlapping crisis after the other has made this country’s uneven geography of structural harm increasingly apparent. Such conditions have long existed, but it seems that the convergence of multiple, interlocking crises at once has— finally—made them difficult for many to ignore.
In this moment when each new crisis is deemed unprecedented, it is important to understand how intentional policies and practices laid the groundwork for those crises’ devastating effects. Discriminatory housing policies and environmental racism created the conditions for Black neighborhoods’ heightened risk to the coronavirus. Inequitable public school systems, the systematic devaluation of property assets and small businesses in Black neighborhoods, and long-standing economic exclusion are making its economic effects that much more damaging. Law enforcement agencies created to enforce structural racism are furthering a policing system proven to kill more people in neighborhoods of color and those with higher poverty rates, even in the midst of a pandemic.
These historical and contemporary inequities can be tied back to place and, more specifically, to the spatialized distribution of structural racism that enables a ZIP code to shape a person’s life outcomes.
This paper argues that to mitigate COVID19’s economic harms and begin to eradicate the persistent inequities that have long impacted places, relief efforts must account for intersecting harms created by discriminatory policies that have segregated communities and systematically denied them the public and private investment needed to thrive. To this end, community, city, and regional leaders must work together across multiple levels of governance and policy domains—bridging community, economic, and workforce development efforts, among others—to not only address the symptoms of discrimination, but to holistically tackle its root causes and expand community wealth and opportunity in the long term. This requires taking shared ownership and accountability for a community-led strategy that is actionable, equitable, and answers directly to impacted communities.