In times of emerging anti-DEI legislation, the pressure to “prove” the necessity of anti-racist programs and policies is mounting. As Living Cities convenes leaders from cities across the country who are committed to implementing anti-racist government policies, practices and operations, one of the most frequent requests we receive from city leaders is for data capturing the state of wealth distribution in their cities. Data is a powerful tool for understanding our lived realities and placing them in a broader context. It informs program and policy design, and provides metrics for tracking impact. Leaders designing programs and policies to address racial wealth disparities face backlash, looming threats, and political barriers. In these cases, data can also serve as a protective tool.
And yet. We don’t want to reinforce bad-faith calls to “justify” anti-racist programs and policies. When Black, Indigenous, Latine, and other people of color aren’t taken at their word and experience knowing the necessity of anti-racist programs, data becomes a prerequisite to build rationale for these programs to exist. While working with six Closing the Gaps cohort cities to build BIPOC wealth through homeownership and entrepreneurship strategies, we partnered with the Urban Institute to support us with gathering data to understand the current landscape in the cities. We embarked on the journey of data collection, weary of the pitfalls that can emerge.
Data repeatedly illustrates that white people have amassed the most wealth in the United States, while Black and Indigenous folks have amassed the least wealth. These wealth disparities can be attributed to centuries of racist systems – programs and policies designed exclusively for the wealth accumulation of white people, at the cost of labor and wealth extraction from Black and Indigenous people. At the surface and without thoughtful framing, data visualizations of these wealth disparities can walk us into the pitfall of seeing white wealth as “the standard” that all others should aspire to. The data can also be reductive, anchored in a lack of BIPOC wealth, without telling the full story about how wealth was stripped or the abundance that exists in BIPOC communities beyond financial wealth.
When we presented the quantitative data about the racial wealth gap in cities, anti-racist city leaders responded along the lines of, “Yes, we know. How do we get people to care?” The numbers on their own aren’t enough to shift people into supporting anti-racist programs and policies. We need to also tell the stories behind the numbers. Our lived realities are data itself, and they serve as an input into how we as individuals experience the data. And our stories hold more depth, meaning, and intersections than numbers on a graph can illustrate. Stories carry more opportunity for connection and resonance that can move people towards action. Thus, storytelling is among the strongest organizing tools we have to offer.
To tell the stories behind the numbers, we partnered with Gumbo Media, and shifted to ask different questions: What other forms of wealth and abundance do BIPOC people have beyond financial capital – wealth in community, culture, connection? How can we look to data without setting the financial wealth of whiteness as the standard or aspiration? How can we set new standards? What emerged from these questions is Toward an Abundant Future: A New Foundation. This collection of six editorial pieces are authored by writers of color living in the six Closing the Gaps cohort cities, and they weave quantitative data throughout, grounding in dynamic and nuanced storytelling. The writers are residents who are impacted by our work in their city, and their stories can inform how we approach our work.
As Living Cities supports the City of Memphis with developing a community land trust in the historically-Black neighborhood of Orange Mound, we can look to Orange Mound native Amanzi Arnett’s piece, Orange Mound, as an input for understanding the neighborhood’s pride in its history and complicated relationship with more recent development. This story, paired with qualitative data and community-member’s strategy recommendations, can offer us a bridge toward meaningful connection and transformational relationship building with residents to co-create solutions.
We are practicing the same values in our storytelling that we are applying to our work with cities. Both our stories and city initiatives ought to be data-informed, human-centered and led by the folks most impacted. This necessitates upholding accessibility by implementing language justice throughout the stories and initiatives – including providing translations and access options for how folks engage. And it necessitates getting creative! As racial equity efforts are threatened across the country, we’ll need to get into the practice of dreaming up creative options for how we can implement our work. Community members most affected by wealth disparities are the best equipped to identify necessary solutions and the stories required to build support for implementing them.
May these stories invite us to reckon with the United States’ history of racist violence in order to implement targeted programs and policies to address the current wealth disparities. They can guide us toward achieving the full of Living Cities’ vision, where “all people in U.S. cities are economically secure, building wealth and living abundant, dignified, and connected lives.” Perhaps storytelling can also help us imagine what it will look and feel like when we get there.
