Conceived in 2019 by urban planner and consultant Ebony Walden, the Richmond Racial Equity Essays project was put on hold last year during the pandemic. Now, in the wake of last summer’s protests, monument removals, continuing activism and increased awareness of racial inequities, the project is more relevant than ever.
“I think people are more interested in the conversation now,” says Walden, who was inspired by a similar project, The Just City Essays, published in 2015. She enlisted the help of Meghan Gough, associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, to solicit essays from a cross section of 27 Richmonders who wrote about their visions of what a racially equitable Richmond would look like and offered their solutions for how we can get there.
Walden, who consults with a variety of organizations, says she is constantly engaged in conversations with people who want to make a change but aren’t sure what to do. “I am in rooms where people talk about equity a lot, but there is not a lot of concreteness to it,” she says. “The essays give you a perspective from real people working on this. … What I am pleasantly surprised about is how people were able to be concrete and clear about what they thought were the inequities and what needs to be done. … Representation is not enough. We want to dismantle and reimagine our systems, our city and the way we do things.”
Here, we present excerpts from three essays. The complete essays can be read at richmondracialequityessays.com, and all will be available as a downloadable e-book. The website will also feature video interviews hosted by local activist Duron Chavis and a virtual discussion series on racial equity in Richmond. Plans are in the works for a discussion and program at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU in October. —Jessica Ronky Haddad
Damon Jiggetts
Reframing Equity: The Gift of Being a Giver
By Damon Jiggetts, executive director, Peter Paul
Equity is achieved by ensuring that once we all have what we need, we are willing and able to contribute the best of who we are back into the world. Giving should not perpetuate patronizing or patriarchal systems of power but support the bringing forth of gifts we all have, realized and unrealized.
How do we serve or give in ways that empower the recipients to do the same? That question was answered for me by the Boys & Girls Club parents during our annual Thanksgiving dinner event.
Each year, the staff and volunteers from outside of the community would plan, sponsor and host this event for our families. Each year, the event was well attended, and afterwards we all patted ourselves on the back for having carried out another event for our families.
I always had a problem with such events but could not figure out exactly why I felt that something was missing or that we didn’t quite accomplish the impact I had envisioned. During that year’s dinner, a solution was presented by our parents. I had scheduled a guest speaker for the event, and at the last minute he had to cancel due to a family emergency. The staff and I were scrambling to figure out how to fill this space on the program and were too flustered to figure out what to do.
I stood at the podium and let the audience know that our guest speaker had canceled and that we would be back onstage with a solution. Less than a minute later, one of our parents came onstage and picked up the microphone. I had no idea what was about to transpire, but I was so glad that it did. She went on to share how thankful she was for the Boys & Girls Club and what the staff meant to her children. She was then followed by parent after parent sharing their appreciation for the club and for each other. This went on for approximately an hour and resulted in many hugs, tears and even more laughter. This was the impact I was missing.
During the dinner, we all talked about the next year’s event and how they would plan and host it themselves. They didn’t ask for a speaker, or for us to set up the event for them. What a disservice it was that we had not asked what they wanted or how they would like to contribute. That night, they asserted agency over their experiences and were designing how they would serve during the next event.
They had given themselves the gift of self-worth and accomplishment. That is equity as I see it. Equity is when we walk alongside, not in front of or behind. Equity is when those who are always standing take a seat so that others who are persistently held down can finally stand with pride. Equity is the sharing of power, not the evidence of one’s capacity to assert it.
Our greatest gift is the ability to give. That gift should not be reserved for the most affluent but experienced by all who have the spirit to share. Our assets far outweigh our deficiencies, yet we dwell on what we lack instead of giving the gift of ourselves to the world.
Ryan C. Rinn
Spaces to Breathe
By Ryan C. Rinn, economic development business services manager, City of Richmond Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities
Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Think back to the last time you were outside under the shade of a tree enjoying the breeze, the chirping birds and the fresh air. Did your shoulders drop? Did some tension leave your body? Did you feel refreshed?
If you were like me and many in the Richmond region, you have spent a good amount of time in public parks during the pandemic. In the 2020 calendar year, Richmond Parks saw an all-time record for attendance, proving that our parks are a treasure for the public good. They’re free places to experience nature, relax, recharge, meditate, exercise and enjoy the company of friends and neighbors. They’re places to just be, spaces to breathe. In an equitable city, green spaces should be accessible to everyone.
A special report from the Trust for Public Land, “Parks and the Pandemic” highlights just how important access to walkable green space is for quality of life. Ready access to parks and green spaces leads to better academic performance, improved cognition, better concentration, reduction in stress hormones, sound sleep and faster recovery from injury, to name just a few health benefits. Sadly, yet predictably, this report also discusses how inequitably urban green spaces are geographically distributed based on race, with fewer acres of walkable parkland available to Black and Latino residents in comparison to white residents across the country.
The story is no different in Richmond, and this is linked to our racist history. During the 1970s, when Richmond annexed a large postwar residential suburban section of Chesterfield County, they weren’t doing so to acquire existing public amenities like parks. Instead, annexation was used to increase the number of white residents in Richmond to maintain a white-majority City Council. This unconstitutional strategy resulted in a moratorium on annexation that still applies within Virginia today. White flight took hold, and industrial facilities shut down in these newly annexed areas. Residents with means moved farther into surrounding counties. A decreasing city tax base led to fewer resources for public services, from schools to infrastructure to parks. This lack of public amenities persists to this day and remains most concentrated in our census tracts inhabited by majority Black and Latino populations, especially neighbors in the South Side. Currently, our 8th and 9th council districts, which are majority Black and Latino, have the most residents who cannot access a park within a 10-minute walk from their home; over 25,000 people lack this public amenity. That needs to change.
A racially equitable Richmond looks like every resident having the mental and physical health benefits of green space easily walkable from where they live. Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Hong Kong and the City University of Hong Kong showed how equitably distributed urban green spaces promoted greater resiliency to COVID-19 for all races. Green spaces assist in faster recovery from all types of trauma, too. From centuries of not being able to breathe, and the collective trauma faced by our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) community at the hands (or knees) of institutions, spaces to breathe are a necessity. Lower rates of diabetes, asthma, hypertension, anxiety and depression all correlate with access to green space.
Achieving a racially equitable Richmond requires us to make parks accessible to all, especially Richmond’s Black and brown communities, by focusing funding on the historically marginalized and engaging in a community-centered process. Racial equity requires focus and dollars in historically marginalized places first.
Ebony Walden
Black- and Brown-centered Placemaking
By Ebony Walden, owner and principal consultant, Ebony Walden Consulting
Growing up, I was considered “disadvantaged,” because I lived in a single-parent household where we struggled to make ends meet and I was enrolled in a low-performing school district. In order to flip my “disadvantaged” status on its head, I strove to become the epitome of success by graduating at the top of my class and going off to Georgetown University.
Now, as a successful Black entrepreneur who “beat the odds,” I am considered an exception. I, however, am not satisfied with being an anomaly. Even under the worst oppression, there were some Black people who were successful. What if we had a system that encouraged Black and brown prosperity? What if we had a system that valued and invested in it and removed the greatest barriers to it: systemic racism and economic inequality — both of which feed into each other? What if we had neighborhoods and communities that displayed, supported and celebrated Black and brown prosperity rooted in property and business ownership and a robust cultural identity?
I went into urban planning because I wanted to create these types of communities, where Black and brown prosperity was written into the landscape. I wanted to see more Black and brown communities with renovated buildings, grocery stores selling healthy food, quality housing, and successful businesses and commercial buildings owned by the people who lived in the neighborhood. Neighborhoods where Black and brown presence and culture are celebrated, not seen as signs of degradation.
This is still my hope; to help create a racially equitable Richmond that is absent of stark, visible differences in streets and streetscapes, parks, housing, services, schools and business districts between the mostly Black and brown communities in the East End, North Side and South Side and those in the West End, which are wealthier and whiter.
To do this, we must intentionally acknowledge and address the racial inequities that have become the norm in our community. Data outlined in Richmond 300 (the city’s master plan), Insights Report and RVA Green 2050 (the city’s Climate Resilience Planning Process), and the Equity Index show that the wealth, health, school performance, housing and homeownership, and environmental disparities are racial, economic and geographic — the neighborhoods that are not thriving are Black and brown and in certain sections of the city.
We have to be diligent and vigilant in unmasking and disrupting white supremacy and the ways it has shaped our urban environment. We know the history of redlining, highway construction through Jackson Ward, concentrating public housing, and how Black and brown communities were targeted for subprime lending and experienced the greatest impact on wealth, foreclosures and homeownership from the Great Recession. Black wealth is at an all-time low; we have lost 3,600 Black homeowners in Richmond, and our city is gentrifying.
We are far from “ONE” Richmond. We are, like most places, a tale of two cities, one prospering and white, the other mostly struggling and Black and brown. I am not sure what we need is unity. We need to be comfortable with difference, celebrate diversity, make sure those who are marginalized are at the table and have power, and work to upend disparities that have for too long been associated with our differences. My equitable Richmond includes thriving Black and brown communities centered on and celebrating cultural identity and ownership in intentional, neighborhood-centric ways.
