2020 will go down in history as not only the year of the coronavirus pandemic but also as a year of racial reckoning. Reporting from Iowa, just a few hours’ drive from Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed by the police in May, host Donna Cleveland grapples with the state of racism in the Midwest. While Midwesterners are known for being neighborly, with slogans like Iowa Nice, it turns out that flyover country harbors a history of racist policies and practices, the legacy of which we’re still living with today. The result is that racial inequality in the Midwest is greater than anywhere else in the country, even the South. This episode explores what it’s really like to live in the Midwest if you’re a person of color, how we got here, and what we can do about it.
Expert Guests:
Dr. Tameka Cage Conley, Literary Artist, Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oxford College of Emory University & Iowa Writers Workshop graduate @drtameka_cageconley
Colin Gordon, author of Race in the Heartland: Equity, Opportunity, and Public Policy in the Midwest, Professor of History at University of Iowa & Research Consultant at the Iowa Policy Project
Personal Stories:
Zone Cashus, chef and owner of Cashus Italian Cuisine in Burlington, Iowa @zonecashus
Alejandra Girón, Guatemalan immigrant and resident of Fairfield, Iowa @allalliegiron
Vuda Lynn Herman, resident of Batavia, Iowa
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Thanks to Molly Bloom of American Public Radio for mentoring this project!
Host and Executive Producer: Donna Cleveland
Theme song by: Meara Oberdieck
Original music by: Taylor Ross
Episode artwork by: Chosie Titus
Audio mastering by: Nicholas Naioti
Episode 7 transcript:
DONNA CLEVELAND (host): Zone Cashus ran the only restaurant in Batavia, a tiny town in southeast Iowa with a population of 500 residents. In this quiet farming community, people generally act nice and neighborly to one another. When driving through, tidy rows of homes quickly give way to rows of corn, you could easily mistake the City Hall building for a garage, and you’ll miss the downtown if you blink.
Zone is Black. As of the last census, Batavia is over 99% white. Growing up in Chicago, Zone had experienced his fair share of racism. But even so, he wasn’t prepared for the reception he received in this small Iowa town.
ZONE CASHUS:
That racism is a hard pill to swallow here, cause it exists, and it exists really strong.
CLEVELAND:
A BP truckstop was the only other option for food in the town, and Zone said he watched the townspeople go there, instead.
CASHUS:
The town doesn’t support me. Right here in this town, the people right across the street go to the BP gas station and buy a $6 burger, but won't buy my fresh $3 burger. The mayor of the town has not been in my restaurant and I've been here almost two years. So yeah, that's what I experienced here. They want to see me fail. They want to.
CLEVELAND:
You’re listening to Thread the Needle, a podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of our lives. I’m your host, Donna Cleveland. 2020 will go down in history as not only the year of the coronavirus pandemic but also as a year of racial reckoning. My hometown in Iowa is just a few hours’ drive from Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed by police in May.
Over the summer in the midst of the protests, I came across a study that found the Midwest to be one of the worst places in the US to live if you’re Black. While Midwesterners are known for being neighborly, with slogans like Iowa Nice, it turns out that flyover country harbors a history of racist policies and practices, the legacy of which we’re still living with today. The result is that racial inequality in the midwest is greater than anywhere else in the country, even the South.
In this episode, I look at what it’s really like to live in the Midwest if you’re a person of color, both in rural settings like Batavia and in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, and what the historical context is that got us here today.
This story begins in 2018 at Cashus Italian Cuisine in Batavia, Iowa. It was summer and Zone had just opened his restaurant after moving to southeast Iowa with his wife to be near her family. That night, he’d overheard a conversation from the kitchen.
CASHUS:
A woman came into my establishment and was asking my 16 year old server why she's working for a Black man, you know, like, why are you working for this guy? You know, they don't know how to treat people, and they treat their own people like crap. I hear this in my kitchen, I hear this. She's not intoxicated. Uh, she's just voicing her opinion. Um, so after she was, uh, asked to leave, she basically went in my restrooms and just peed all over my walls and on the floor and, you know, yeah, it was a bad experience. My 16 year old actually offered to clean it up. So she said, you know, you shouldn't have to deal with that kind of stuff.
CLEVELAND:
Growing up in Chicago, Zone had experienced everything from white people throwing rocks at him when he walked through their neighborhoods to police beating him when he was 12 years old.
CASHUS:
I got bald spots, you know, from getting hit in the head with Billy clubs by the police. We got handled differently. It became normal to get grabbed by the police and thrown on top of a car at the age of 12 and put in handcuffs to sit in the back of a car while they run your name. And, you know, it almost became normal.
CLEVELAND:
Iowa, on the other hand, has a reputation for being nice. But it wasn’t exactly nice to Zone. While he didn’t experience outright violence like he did as a kid, the racism was overt.
CASHUS:
I'm so conditioned by it because I've seen this all my life. So it's like, Oh it's just white people being white people.
CLEVELAND:
Last summer, the sheriff was notified of suspicious activity because there were Black people loitering outside of Zone’s restaurant. It turned out they were friends visiting Zone when he was recovering after having a heart attack. Vuda Lynn Herman, a longtime Batavian, said she wasn’t surprised by the lack of support from the town.
VUDA LYNN HERMAN:
Farmers don't do a lot of fine dining. So I laughed and said, Oh, well, darn it. We ain't going to have him long. And then he's a Black man on top of it and small town Iowa. I didn't think he was going to have a snowball's chance in hell, so to speak.
What I told him when he came was oh, boy, you got a hard Hill to climb in this town. One other Black family have I ever seen in this whole town? And I have lived in this area on and off all my life. It's a prejudiced area.
CLEVELAND:
Vuda has worked as a janitor at factories around southeast Iowa, and says she’s encountered racism against Black and hispanic workers on a regular basis.
HERMAN:
I usually don't last more than a couple of years because I won't let people use the n-word.
CLEVELAND:
And so Vuda put it together when she saw Batavians avoiding Zone’s restaurant. While Zone had customers from neighboring towns, few locals showed up. Vuda had seen restaurants come and go and said this was different treatment than she’d seen in the past.
HERMAN:
There’s one restaurant in town. When white people opened it up, there was that rush to be there. And people are, the town came out. They didn't do that with him. And I felt like it was partially because he was Black. Did they verbalize it? No, but it was quite telling.
CLEVELAND:
Last month, a couple of weeks after I talked to Zone, he closed down his restaurant in Batavia for good. Now he’s working on opening in Burlington, a bigger city a couple of hours away, where he’s hoping for better luck.
In a few minutes, we’re going to hear from a historian who published a study last year on the state of racial inequality in the Midwest and who will put Zone’s story in context. But first, we’ll hear more experiences of Midwestern racism.
I met literary artist Tameka Cage Conley, a graduate of the University of Iowa writers workshop, at a poetry reading in Iowa City a few years ago. I remember her describing what she called the “demure white supremacy of the Midwest.” That term stuck with me. And so I called her up to ask her more about it.
TAMEKA CAGE CONLEY:
I think we need to get over ourselves and say, first of all, why do we have such a homogenous culture? If I think about the Midwestern white person as a character, this is how I would describe the character. I would say that the character is neighborly. The character is a good Samaritan. The character is oblivious, the character is safe, right? That, and none of those things, quote, unquote, look like a racist, racist, aren't neighborly, racist, aren't thoughtful, right? Racist. Aren't good Samaritans. But when you really start getting underneath there, what happens though, when I'm living right next door to you, what happens when whatever privileges you believe that your whiteness affords you are also available to me the way when people start moving into your neighborhood, that’s when you really have to start thinking about who you are.
CLEVELAND:
Like Zone observed in Batavia, Tameka noticed Midwesterners keeping a comfortable distance, a form of racism that was less up front than what she experienced growing up in Louisiana, but no less harmful. And then just like with Zone, there were times when she didn’t have to read between the lines to see it.
CONLEY:
My best friend and I had the police called on us at a snow cone shop here in Iowa City two summers ago, because he had inadvertently leaned on this woman's car. He's really a fantastic gentleman.
If she would've just said, “Excuse me, you leaned on my car.” He would've said, “Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to do that.” And you know, I, I intended, but she was extremely rude and, and she shooed him away as if you would do an insect. And what I heard that she did not say was, would you get off of my car n****r? She did not say it, but it was understood. And I heard it and being a Black woman from the South, I know when somebody thinks of you as a reduced human being.
And so I walked over to her, I was extremely cordial. And I just simply said to her, I do not like the way you spoke to my friend. And you know, we had words, and I went on to say, “Lady, you’re a racist.” And because I called her a racist, she proved the racist in her by calling the police on us. There was so much fear between the time she called the police and when they arrived, because my three year old son at the time was in the car.
CLEVELAND:
Tameka and her family made it safely out of that situation, but it left a lasting impression. The bottom line? The Midwest wasn’t such a friendly place, unless you were white. It was also a place that became friendlier the more you conformed. That’s what Alejandra Giron learned when she immigrated to Iowa from Guatemala when she was 8 years old.
ALEJANDRA GIRON:
I used to tell my mom, I always, I feel like I'm in a hospital and was like, why do you feel like you're in a hospital? And I was like, cause everything is white and sterile.
CLEVELAND:
As she learned to speak English, she began to discover ways to fit in with the other kids.
GIRON:
I was the only person of color in my class at the time. The parents didn't really address me and neither did the teachers because I just wasn't in that group. Um, but the way that my friends kind of tried to get me to be part of their group or to emphasize that I was part of the group was cause they would make jokes like, “Oh, you're a coconut. At first I was like, “What is it, coconut? I've never heard of that.” And they were like, “Well basically you're Brown on the outside, but white on the inside.” And I think that was like their way of like trying to relate to me. Cause I obviously didn't look like them, but if I acted white, then I was allowed to kind of be part of their front group group. I never talked about my culture or where I came from. Any of that. I knew I had to bring out quote unquote the whiteness in me to be able to be part of the group.
CLEVELAND:
Alejandra’s little sister was in Kindergarten when they immigrated.
GIRON:
There were kids that would pull her hair and tell her, go back to your country, you’re dirty kindergarteners don't think that that is something that probably their parents or the teachers ignored. . . . that like really broke my sister. It was really hard for her to deal with that afterwards. And she was just really quiet afterwards cause she didn't want to be told that she wasn't good enough to be here.
CLEVELAND:
As an adult, Alejandra is proud of her Guatemalan roots and makes sure to embrace more of her culture. But she said it’s still a struggle to do that when people are constantly making comments. She said it’s not uncommon for people to ask her questions like.
GIRON:
Do you guys have bathrooms in your house and your country? Do you guys have cars? Um, do you guys speak Mexican or Guatemala? Lid and I feel like it's Spanish, but yeah. You actually don't really look that Latin, you look like you could be from Egypt and in their mind that's a compliment, but I don't think they mean anything by it, but it's kind of like, what are you trying to say though? Um, or I don't know, like your English is really good for an immigrant, you know, stuff like that. I don't want to like to stand out and I don't want to like give people a reason to like make a stereotype out of me or push me out of the social group.
CLEVELAND:
Stories like Zone’s, Alejandra’s, and Tameka’s fit into a larger story about race in the Midwest. Historian Colin Gordon has made it his mission to understand this story as a professor at the University of Iowa and as a research consultant for the Iowa Policy Project. In a report he published last fall for the Iowa Policy Project, Gordon found profound levels of racial inequality in the Midwest and uncovered two main causes—a long history of residential segregation and the collapse of economic opportunities. These two factors have made racial inequality worse in the Midwest than anywhere else in the country, even than the South, Gordon reported, despite a cultural narrative in the Midwest that tells a different story.
COLIN GORDON:
When Money Magazine or Forbes or whatever does a where are the great places to live? They always pick Midwestern college towns, right? They're overwhelmingly white, you've got good healthcare systems or, you know, what's a good place to retire, that sort of thing. But if you look at that list of metros, they're almost all the very worst places to live if you're African American.
I have been struck by how stark the racial disparities are across the board. Across almost any sort of educational or economic or social measure, the disparity between Black and white Americans is starker in the upper Midwest than it is anywhere else in the country.
CLEVELAND:
Gordon says his study focuses on the history of African Americans specifically in the Midwest, but that that history also informs how other racial groups are treated in the Midwest as well.
GORDON:
The assumptions and policies that affect African Americans are imported onto other groups.
CLEVELAND:
Gordon said he was shocked to see just how bad things are to this day.
GORDON:
It was a slap in the face, not just to see that the disparities are still there, but just to see how wide they are.
CLEVELAND:
Here, Gordon will take us through the history of the migration of African Americans from the South to the Midwest starting after the Civil War. He’ll share the key findings of his study so we can understand how we got where we are, and what we can do about it.
First, let’s get a lay of the land.
The Midwest comprises 12 states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
According to 2019 US census data, 81% of the population is white, compared to a national average of 76%
A little over 10% of the Midwestern population is Black, compared to 13.4% for the whole country. And in the Midwest, much of the Black population is clustered in big cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee. That means the Midwestern states without big urban populations have much lower Black populations, down to as low as 1 to 2% in states like South and North Dakota.
There’s also less immigration in the Midwest. 7.2% of the population is foreign born, whereas the national average is almost double that.
As you can see, the Midwest has a more homogenous population than the rest of the country. And up until the early 1900s, it was even whiter than it is today.
GORDON:
African Americans, historically concentrated in the Southern States, start to move North in what's known as the great migration in response to a sort of a series of factors, one of which is just the horror of living in the Jim Crow South in the wake of the Civil War. Um, and so African Americans who can get out often do, but more importantly, the sort of opportunities offered by the urban North, particularly during World War I and again, in World War II, draw African Americans out of the South and into Northern cities.
The population of cities like Detroit and Milwaukee and Chicago, the African American population is minuscule at the beginning of the 20th century, but it grows very dramatically, especially between about 1920 and 1950.
CLEVELAND:
So during the Great Migration, nearly 7 million African Americans living in the south made the journey north seeking a better life.
GORDON:
There were particularly strong opportunities during the mobilization for world war I and world war II. At those times, not only was the economy booming, but so much of the regular workforce was overseas that this opened up much better jobs for African Americans and for women as well in those war time economies.
CLEVELAND:
Gordon said job opportunities ranged from factory jobs in meat packing plants to auto manufacturing to construction to transportation jobs. Though the Midwest had better job opportunities than the grueling agriculture conditions of the South, Gordon found that they were met with similar levels of discriminaiton and segregation.
GORDON:
The white homeowners and developers and, and city leaders respond to what they view as the threat posed by the great migration and erect a sort of elaborate architecture of segregation. So a city like Chicago or st. Louis is much more racially segregated in the sense that African Americans live in one part of town, whites live in another, then even cities in the South. If you look at any sort of, you know, aerial view that part, not aerial view, but any sort of map that shows the racial distribution, you'll see in any city as sort of stark line, even today, between predominantly, uh, white neighborhoods and neighborhoods that are predominantly people of color, African American or African American and Latin X
CLEVELAND:
As Gordon dug deeper, he found no effort from Midwesterners to welcome African Americans into their communities. Instead, he found the opposite.
GORDON:
The evidence is pretty clear that the .mechanisms of segregation in some respects almost came first, like African Americans came into, um, uh, segregated settings. So, you know, st Louis for example, which is more sort of a, like a border city on the border of the South had a small African American population before the turn of the century. But almost as soon as they realized that African Americans are starting to move North, they started putting together all of these mechanisms. They passed a racial zoning ordinance in 1916, which says that African Americans can only live in small, a few small neighborhoods in the city. And another good example of this is cities like Minneapolis, um, put in those obstacles to African American settlement before long before any African Americans in significant numbers settled in the city, same in Milwaukee.
CLEVELAND:
And this is at the heart of Gordon’s findings—planned and enforced segregation even before Black communities began to settle in Midwestern cities is the root cause of why racial inequality is worse in the Midwest than in other places.
GORDON:
The patterns of segregation in the South are not as stark because Southern cities developed in a system where white families had houses that face the street and Black families had houses that faced the alley and they worked in the white family's houses. Um, so you don't get the sort of stark pattern of segregation because of this pattern of domestic and agricultural labor. So whites and African Americans are much more likely to work in close proximity to each other, historically in the South, even if the relationship was nowhere near equal.
CLEVELAND:
In the Midwest, Gordon found a second form of residential segregation as well, hypervisibility. As we covered, most of the Midwest’s Black population is clustered in big cities. That leaves rural communities predominantly white. Gordon reports that of the 1,055 counties in the Midwest, nearly two-thirds are over 95% white. If you’re Black and find yourself living in a smaller city in the Midwest, that means you’ll likely be surrounded solely by white people.
GORDON:
There's really two kinds of segregation within the Midwest. One of which is what we've been talking about those fonts so far is that within all these big cities, if they're divided up by neighborhood Black and white, but it's also true in the region as a whole that 90% of African Americans in the upper Midwest live in those cities. Um, and so in much of the rural and small metropolitan areas of the upper Midwest, there are very few African Americans at all, and that leads to a different pattern of discrimination, um, what sociologists call hyper visibility. And so you're, you're one of one or two African American families in a town. Um, and so that leads to results that we're familiar with, for example, where I live in Iowa, where there's not a large African American population, but where African minister Americans do show up, uh, to discrimination is pretty stark. So on things like school, discipline, incarceration, uh, police stops, uh, unemployment that the gaps are really wide at the state and local level.
CLEVELAND:
One of the many problems with the Midwest’s segregation is the cascading effect it has on all other areas of life. And Gordon explains how that works in detail.
But first, you may be wondering what I wondered. Since the great migration lasted all the way up to the 1970s, surely it wasn’t legal all that time to enforce segregation? The answer is both yes and no. Sickeningly, it was legal for longer than you might expect. And even after that, Midwesterners found ways to continue strategies of segregation.
In 1896, before the great migration, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was constitutional. This allowed cities to create zoning laws with white-only neighborhoods.
But in 1917, after the great migration had begun, in Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court found such zoning to be unconstitutional. But the reasoning didn’t have to do with equal rights of all people, it was because it interfered with the property rights of homeowners. And instead of ending residential segregation, after this ruling, cities just found more covert ways of controlling where Black communities lived.
GORDON:
So a number of cities tried to do these actual racial zoning ordinances, but the Supreme court threw those out in 1917 said, that's, that goes too far. So what took its place where it wasn't a number of sort of public private, um, strategies? Uh, one of which was to attach a covenant to a property deed or to a subdivision that said this house can never be sold to an African American. And those were enforced by the courts into the late 1940 days. And so that was a private, private contract that the courts upheld.
What the courts held was that because it was a private contract, the constitution didn't apply, you know, because two private individuals can engage, can enter into any agreement they want.
CLEVELAND:
Gordon didn’t only find these agreements in bigger cities either.
GORDON:
I just did a project with some students here, um, looking through the, um, the old County records in Johnson County, where Iowa city is, um, to see if there are any of these race, restrictive, deep agreements. And we found a whole lot of them, even though there were no African Americans living in Iowa city at the time.
And, and not necessarily the most exclusive or expensive neighborhoods, but like, you know, little pockets of white working class housing where everybody just where the developer just said, uh, I'm going to make a rule that, well, they would make a series of rules in that setting where, you know, your house has to be pulled out to wood. It has to be this far back from the street and you can never sell to an African American.
CLEVELAND:
The Supreme Court took another step in Shelley v. Kramer in 1948. In a case argued by an attorney from NAACP, the Supreme Court ruled that the court would no longer enforce white-only real estate covenants.
GORDON:
What the court said was, we're not going to enforce those anymore because we don't want to be involved, but it wasn't until 1968 that the Supreme court said you can't even do that privately. And that's relatively recently, you know, in our history.
CLEVELAND:
Gordon’s talking about the Civil Rights Act, which was passed in 1964 and expanded in ‘68 with protection concerning the sale, rental, or financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and sex. Finally, white-only deeds were deemed unconstitutional. This was a huge win. But was it enough to put an end to residential segregation? Not exactly.
GORDON:
Every time the courts strike down, one of those formal forms of segregation, people find a way around or another way of accomplishing the same thing.
CLEVELAND:
The legacy of white-only deeds had cemented racist ideas into the professional wisdom in the real estate industry.
GORDON:
This was quite consciously an invented idea. It was not true. And so they began propagating the idea that your property values are going to go down the drain. And of course you repeat something like that, often up, you make it an article of, you know, sort of professional wisdom and people start to believe it.
CLEVELAND:
And here’s why housing segregation is so harmful. For one thing, where we live is how we determine where we go to school, and this system just contributes to further segregation.
GORDON:
Neighborhoods segregated where people live, but what that meant was that schools were also segregated and schools are almost always more segregated than the neighborhoods they were in because some of the white kids would go to private schools or use other options. And the fact, and then school segregation became, became an excuse to fight for residential segregation because people didn't want their kids going to school with Black kids, um, or they, or vice versa. They didn't, they sort of reinforced one another.
Residential segregation tends to sort of spiral out and affect other domains because it's the way we pay for public services. But also when you concentrate people that are, that, uh, are relatively poor in one part of the city, you also shape the distribution of private services. You get food deserts, for example, cause grocery stores don't want to put a chain in the midst of a, of a group of poor people. And so that creates downstream problems because then the people who live in that neighborhood have to rely on the local gas station as a place to buy their food and the quality of their food consumption, drops. And, um, you know, it, it comes at the hosp cost of their health. Meanwhile, you know, things like hospitals have also left the neighborhood for the suburbs. And so they have less access to healthcare. They're also less likely to work in jobs that give them a job based healthcare coverage. And so everything begins to sort of fit together in this, uh, you know, interlocking system of concentrated disadvantage.
CLEVELAND:
Gordon has helped us connect the dots between the history of housing segregation in the US and access to things like quality education, public services, and healthcare.
Now there’s a second factor beyond residential segregation that Gordon discovered while conducting his research. The collapse of job opportunities.
Good jobs is initially what drew African Americans to the Midwest. And up until the 1950s, job opportunities actually were better. There were even good union jobs, which allowed Black workers to use collective bargaining to protect themselves against discrimination.
But in the second half of the 20th century, just as the Black population began to see some gains with the passing of the civil rights amendment, good factory jobs began to dry up due to globalization and lower-wage competitors in the south.
From 1974 to 2016, Gordon found that the midwest lost more than 2.5 million manufacturing jobs, a drop of more than 40 percent. Since the ’80s, the Midwest has lost over 70 percent of its membership in manufacturing unions. These losses hit the Midwest’s Black population the hardest.
Together, Gordon found that this lack of economic opportunity and the effects of housing segregation that we just went over, has resulted in the Midwest having some of the worst racial inequality in the nation.
African American unemployment rate is nearly double the rate for white workers. 10 midwestern states have the largest ratio between Black and white unemployment in 2017.
In Education, nationally about one in three white adults (32.2 percent) and one in five Black adults (20.6 percent) have a BA—a gap of 11.6 percent. In the midwest, all but three midwestern states fall into the bottom third of the distribution, and in 5 states less than 20 percent of Black students get a BA.
In the US, the gap between Black & white home ownership is wider than it was in 1900, at about 72 percent for whites and 42 percent for Black people. In the Midwest, 6 states roughly match national averages, but the other 6 crowd the bottom ranking states for home ownership disparities.
In the US, African American adults are imprisoned at five times the rate of white Americans. All midwestern states have higher rates of incarceration for Black adults to white adults than on the national level, and in In Iowa and Minnesota, Black men are 10X more likely to be imprisoned than white men.
wage gap - due to deindustrialization and union decline, the wage gap fell from nearly equal in the ‘80s to just 75 percent of the region’s white median. Median wages for white ($19.99) and Black ($14.93) workers in 2018 were lower than those in any other census region.
Income - Nationally, Black median household income is just over $38,000; in every Midwestern State it is below $36,000.
Gordon pointed out how important it is for people to understand the historical context that has led to the racial inequalities we see today.
GORDON:
I think a lot of the current racial attitudes are created by the bad policies in the past. And so, you know, for example, we, um, segregated African Americans into particular neighborhoods. Um, we, uh, our economy, uh, eventually lost the good industrial jobs that those African Americans relied on at a time when they couldn't really move out to the suburbs where the jobs were disappearing. So those neighborhoods became poor and poor. And so the schools closed and became even poor still, but the sort of dominant explanation at the time was that of those people, their neighborhood, and that idea has sort of stuck. And I think it sort of feeds contemporary racial assumptions about, you know, being safe around African Americans about the willingness of African Americans to take care of their property and keep up neighborhood values about whether they can be good students and that sort of thing,, I don't think that racist attitudes, um, you know, just, uh, bubble up, you know, on their own they're, they're created by what people see around them and what people see around them is created by those policies.
CLEVELAND:
As part of Gordon’s report, he recommends policy solutions to address these injustices.
GORDON:
Raise the floor for everyone, what we often call sort of universalism. So a good example of that is, you know, if we had a minimum wage that was $15 instead of seven 25, that would make a big difference for everyone, but it would make a bigger difference for those at the bottom of the labor market, right. Or those who are already in low wage jobs. Um, another example would be a Medicare for all, you know, if everyone had a health insurance, regardless of where they worked, then that would set a much higher floor of wellbeing for people and erase at least some of those inequality, but then to accompany that sort of universalism, we also need some targeted policies because even, you know, even if you raise the wage store, for example, that's no guarantee that employers won't discriminate against workers.
So, um, you know, within that, within that higher wage economy, we need to, to lessen the ability of employers, do we engage in that discrimination by fully enforcing our civil rights laws and that sort of thing. And on something like housing, we need to both sort of raise the floor, uh, for everyone, but also target those neighborhoods that have been so much left in the dust by a century of policy. We obviously need to spend more in those central city neighborhoods, uh, that are suffering so badly than we do. Um, you know, in places like the neighborhood where I live. So, you know, they're universalism would be a mistake because not everyone needs the same kind of assistance. So we need to, uh, redress some of the dominant damage we've done in the past by targeting particular populations and particular places.
CLEVELAND:
The problems that have led to the racial inequality we see today are big. They’re deeply entrenched, and they’re deeply troubling. And as Gordon has pointed out, they’re not going to go away without a serious and concerted effort on a policy level. And until we do this, Gordon says the Midwest’s reputation for being nice and neighborly is little more than a facade.
GORDON:
I sorta think it's bullshit. I mean, if you look around the country, every region of the country claims has a version of that claim, right. That this is a great place to live because people look out for each other or, um, that sort of thing.
I think it's universally true, that, you know, some people are nice and some people aren't, and some people are nice to some people or people who are like them, and not the people who aren't like them.
CLEVELAND:
In fact, Alejandra says passive aggressive would be a better description for Iowa than nice.
GIRON:
There's definitely a lot of like the overly nice sometimes where it's like, I kind of just wish you would just say whatever it is that you are trying to say.
CLEVELAND:
It’s going to take a lot more than people being nice to solve these problems. But Alejandra says people can start on a personal level by working on being less racist, for starters.
GIRON:
Racist people are nice, racist people don't have bad intentions, racist people don't think that they're racist and that's honestly the problem. Like they don't recognize that within themselves. They think that they're just, you know, making a joke or making a little comment and there's some truth to it. So, you know, what's wrong and they get defensive about it. And like, I think it's important to tell them like you're not bad for thinking those things. Like it's totally human nature to have thoughts like that. But it's also like within human nature to act in an empathetic way and choose to express yourself in a way that's not going to be hurtful . . . it just kind of like continues the problem because if we ignore it, you know, I'm nice, I'm not racist, then you're not going to catch yourself when you might hurt someone else's feelings, you know, and that doesn't make you a nice person that just makes you ignorant.
CLEVELAND:
Alejandra can attest to what a large difference it can make when people take a little extra care and thoughtfulness. When she was 11 and still learning english, she felt thrown in the deep end at school. As she struggled to keep up, one teacher made the difference between her sinking and swimming.
GIRON:
It just took that one teacher to kind of put in the effort to try and make sure that I was included in the class. Um, like she had this little dictionary that she always had on hand and she always called me pumpkin and I didn't understand what that was until I realized it was pumpkin. And it was, I just made me like her so much more cause she was so sweet to me and she would go out of her way. She would pause the class. Cause if I looked confused or he didn't know what I was doing, she would pause the class, talk to me in half English, half Spanish until I understood what was going on. And that way I was able to participate in the class. She definitely made like a huge difference. She even had me read green eggs and ham in Spanish in front of the class. And that really meant a lot to me back then. Cause I was feeling like I'm getting involved, I'm getting to share who I am. So she made a huge difference for me coming here.
I was the only person of color in my entire grade at that time. Um, so I don't, I think it just came from like the goodness of her heart. That's just kind of the type of person she was. She kind of imagined what it would be like to be, you know, someone that can't speak to anybody, especially as a child. And I think she put herself in my shoes a little bit and was able to help me in that way.
CLEVELAND:
Zone closed down his restaurant in Batavia, but he’s not giving up on the Midwest just yet. He’s just opened up his restaurant in Burlington, a town of nearly 25,000, where he’ll continue to serve fine italian cuisine. Zone’s aware that all he can do is keep going and focus on what’s within his control and on creating a great life for him and his family. But he says it would be a lot easier without having to fight all the little messages he receives throughout the day that threaten to bring him down.
CASHUS:
We have been conditioned. My skin is not a detriment to society. It's just exhausting, like you said, but we've been conditioned. You know, we've been conditioned to feel that we are inferior, we're not valued, you know, we don't, we don't really matter in the scale of things, to them—to some—we just don't matter. We've got a long way to go. We really do, We've got a long way to go.
CLEVELAND:
Thanks for listening to Thread the Needle, a podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realiteis of our lives. I’m Donna Cleveland, the host and producer of Thread the Needle. The theme song is by Meara Oberdieck, original music is by Taylor Ross, and episode artwork is by Chosie Titus.Thank you to Molly Bloom of American Public Media for being my mentor.
This is the last episode of season 1 of Thread the Needle. I’ll be taking a break and will be back next spring for season 2. If you have a topic or story you’d like me to cover in season 2, please email me at podcast@theneedle.co.
Also, if you feel to, please leave a review of Thread the Needle and share it with your friends. This is an independent podcast and a passion project, and I’m relying primarily on word of mouth to spread the word about the show. Leaving a review, sharing it on social media, or telling your group of friends all makes a huge difference. Thanks and I’ll be back next spring with season 2.