Black History Month

In honor of Black History Month and the commemoration of Black achievement, we were thrilled to host Yale sociologist and legal scholar Dr. Monica Bell and Yale historian Dr. Elizabeth Hinton at our New York offices today for a talk with Team VB. These two inspiring and influential experts add to our roster of incredible women who #MAKEITHAPPEN. 

Here, read a few excerpts from our conversation, which was moderated by our President Stephanie Unwin and Yaseen Eldik, FIXER’s Executive Advisor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Yaseen and the FIXER team work to support VB’s diversity efforts. 

MB: Allyship can't just be moments of “saving” and intervening. It has to be working alongside over a sustained period of time. This means asking, who are we in relationships with? Who do we view as experts on things? Who do we invite into our spaces and also, beyond that, what spaces are we willing to go into that we normally wouldn’t? It’s about totally repositioning yourself in the racial hierarchy.” 

EH: Go out of your comfort zone and read and listen to podcasts and documentaries on issues that might be uncomfortable. Do the work within your communities, social circles, and based on your commitment to allyship. If we're really going to move the needle on justice, it's going to take an army of people, educating themselves and educating others, and working together to make that change happen.

EH: The question is why, especially in a nation as affluent as the U.S., that we have such persistent and such deep poverty and inequality. It comes down to a history of social policy administration. If you want a racially-inclusive society, we need to begin to invest in public schools, mobilize public and private sectors for job creation programs, or completely overhaul public housing. That's not what has happened. The long-term response to unemployment and failing public schools, dilapidated housing, has historically been more police and more surveillance, and more frustration—so that people who are low-income are more likely to come into contact with police, and more likely end up being sent to prison. The buzzword has been mass incarceration, but one way to think about it is that it’s really mass criminalization.

MB: There's been a long trajectory of changes in how policing operates that coincides with a certain sort of political moment. In the Eighties and Nineties, you had things like broken-windows policing, where you just saw more police on the streets. Broken-windows is the policing of really low-level offenses in a pretty aggressive way and, nonetheless, because of the breakdown of other resources, the police have to be a kind of go-to, even if you don't want that. So, for example, if you want to relocate to low-income housing, you might need to get a police report to show that you're in danger in your current housing in order to be able to move. There are all these different ways that policing is embedded in everything, because of the lack of alternate resources. Many of us take for granted what we’re able to access.

EH: Pushing ourselves to encounter cultural moments or engage in history or social thought or conversations that are out of our comfort zones is so important. We can break down these divisions and come together and can realize that things like sexuality and race and class and gender—the extremes that divide us—aren't really extreme divides at the end of the day.

MB: I’ve found that, in my own experience, what really helped is letting people find the ways in which we can connect. Having that kind of foundation then makes it easier to talk about ways that I might feel marginalized. It’s easier to have those conversations once we’ve connected in other ways.