By Ben Terzi
Special to The Baltimore Watchdog
The term “equity” is only shown through actions, not discussions, a Towson University audience was told Tuesday during a discussion about racial equity in Baltimore and the role everyone plays in strengthening Black neighborhoods.
Towson hosted Lawrence Brown, author of “The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America,” for a virtual conversation. Brown contends there is a connection between America’s history of racist housing and zoning policies with the nation’s current racial crises.
“The way in which the city, the municipality and the metropolitan area have been laid out plays a key role in how we think about community engagement with universities today,” said Brown who discussed Baltimore’s long history of redlining and segregation, as well as the role that higher education has in exploring racial equity to strengthen Black neighborhoods.
Brown opened the event discussing a variety of ideas before going in-depth about the historical and current segregation in Baltimore. He explained how past and current policies perpetuate ongoing historical trauma in racial and ethnic neighborhoods. Using the definition of ongoing trauma, he rationed how equity is only shown through actions, rather than discussions.
“Equity means doing more for those communities that have less wealth and health due to ongoing historical trauma,” Brown said, citing page nine of his book. “People have equity discussions, they bring in equity speakers, like me, people talk about an ‘equity lens’, ‘equity perspective’—none of that is equity—if you’re not doing more [for those communities] then it’s not equity.”
Professor Matthew Durington moderated the event, which was hosted by BTU- Partnerships for Greater Baltimore.
“Our goal today is to utilize the expertise of Dr. Lawrence Brown to focus our attention on how we take lessons in the book [The Black Butterfly] and utilize them for our praxis, taking this knowledge as an ethos for the toolkit we use in community engagement work in the Baltimore region and beyond,” Durington said before the event began.
Brown touched on the topic of racial equity through putting communities, once redlined and segregated, in power of organizing themselves as a means of remedying ongoing historical trauma.
In his book, Brown describes racial equity as it “starts with a reckoning.”
During the event, however, he explained how that statement means to acknowledge how racial discrimination cultivated Baltimore into a category-five segregated city. It is a call-to-arms on understanding how Black neighborhoods have been consistently fragmented, over time.
Brown said racial equity is more than a “lens” or “perspective” but halting all and any policies and systems that manifest ongoing historical trauma.
As founder and director of the Black Butterfly Academy, Brown uses data, maps, and storytelling to offer mini courses on strengthening Black neighborhoods for local residents and policymakers. He was honored with the Bold Thinker award by OSI Baltimore in 2018 for his discourse on Baltimore’s racial neighborhood segregation. Three months later, he was named in The Root 100, which is an annual list of the most influential African Americans ages 25 to 45.
Brown, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta, served as an associate professor at Morgan State University where he launched the #BmoreLEADfree initiative, a lead poisoning awareness campaign where his students worked to eradicate exposure levels in Baltimore neighborhoods. Last year, he directed the U.S. COVID-19 Atlas work and response for the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps program in partnership with the University of Chicago Center for Spatial Data Science. His book was published this year.
At Towson, Brown pivoted to displaying multiple maps throughout the 20th Century that showed, not only racial groups affected by redlining, but also how certain ethnic groups were affected by yellow lining, as well.
The maps demonstrated how primarily Black neighborhoods were purposely segregated by the Homeowners’ Loan Corp., during the 1930s, and denied capital because of “high risk” in these communities. These risks were measured by race and ethnicity and resulted in minority groups being denied housing loans to move outside of segregated neighborhoods.
Brown said that the results of these practices still impact those communities today. He pointed to a 2018 Baltimore Business Journal study of financial data. He said Black people in the Baltimore area were twice as likely to be denied a home mortgage by a bank compared to whites.
“Redlining is not just a thing from the past,” Brown said. “Redlining is still going on.”
Brown concluded his presentation with a 2018 data chart from Zillow, which measured median home values for areas the government designated best, still desirable, declining, and hazardous. The data showed the growing gap between redlined and non-redlined neighborhoods by $200,000 in 2017, compared to a $50,000 gap in 1997.
“[The gap] is getting bigger,” Brown said. “It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse—and we all know that the value of people’s homes determines their wealth in America.”