In this June 14 event organized by our Democracy & Belonging Forum and the German Marshall Fund of the United States as part of our (Un)Common Threads conversation series, we explored the strengths and challenges of city governments pursuing anti-racist policies with civic leaders from Europe and the US. They discussed opportunities in learning from each other internationally, and the trends, patterns, and differences from the perspective of European and U.S. localities. Speakers included Candace Moore, Chief Equity Officer of the City of Chicago; Claudio Tocchi, Turin-based human rights activist and consultant focused on intercultural and anti-racism policies; Julie Nelson, Founding Director of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) and Senior Vice-President of Programs at Race Forward; and Evein Obulor, Coordinator of the European Coalition of Cities Against Racism. It was moderated by Míriam Juan-Torres, Head of Research at the Democracy & Belonging Forum.
Transcript
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone. Welcome to this new event of the Uncommon Threads Series, called Creating Societies of Belonging. For those of you who don't know our series, it is a series of conversations that features like diverse advocates, scholars, artists, business leaders, and other thinkers who shared a commitment of ... to strengthen belonging. If you enjoyed this conversation, I would encourage you to sign up to our E-news, which is available on our website, democracyandbelongingforum.org, and also to follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Before we begin, I would like to thank our wonderful ASL interpreters, Antonio Burkett and Laura Crespo Montoya from Interpret, Educates and Serve, as well as to LiveCap for providing live captioning.I would also very much like to thank my colleague, Evan Yoshimoto, thanks to whom, all of you guys know about this event, and is also running all of the tech behind the screens. This event is hosted in partnership with the German Marshall Fund, so before we get into the conversation, I would like to invite Tarsi Dunlop, a senior officer at GMF to actually tell us a little bit about a program they're running, which ties very much into the conversation we'll be having today. So Tarsi, if you could come into the room. Welcome.
Tarsi Dunlop:
Thank you so much. It's so wonderful to be here today. We're thrilled to be part of this event. GMF, the German Marshall Fund strives to champion democratic values and the transatlantic alliance by strengthening civil society, forging bold and innovative policy ideas and developing a new generation of leaders to tackle global challenges. At GMF Cities, a program at GMF, we bring together cities and practitioners from North America and Europe on shared challenges across a range of topics including democracy, equity and inclusion, and affordable housing among others. We're working with some cities and speakers on this panel and we've been exploring and engaging in shared learning around race and equity so that cities can really lead in this space.Through this work, we're supporting cities to strengthen democracy by highlighting richness of diversity, opportunities and strategies for inclusion, and to better understand the harms of discrimination and othering in local communities. We've really enjoyed putting this program together in partnership with OBI and we're looking forward to the conversation today. Thanks, Miriam.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thanks Tarsi, and I would encourage everyone to follow all of the work that they're putting out as well. There's much to learn from, from their efforts and some of the publications that have come out of this joint enterprise. I was thinking a lot about how to introduce this event, but at first, I was going to say this is a very timely conversation, but the reality is that this conversation obviously has always been timely. So that would not be an accurate way of representing the need for understanding this particular topic, how to tackle racism, but particularly how to do it as well from the local level, the role that cities and localities can play into addressing this huge challenge. We have seen, however, in recent years how there has been an increasing efforts in coordinating amongst local actors.Actors that sometimes want to transcend the national politics that are being imposed at a super local level. We also know that there's increasing cooperation amongst far-right actors, who mainly have nativist projects that are exclusionary and don't believe in belonging. So doing these work at the local level, of course, to counter that, but also learn how to coordinate and strengthen each other's efforts becomes even more and more important. The local level is most more proximate to citizens. It's more familiar perhaps, and I hope that the speakers will be able to illuminate on this question, more effective in addressing some of the challenges.
And of course, local authorities and people working at the local level as well at the front lines when it comes to responding to incidents that may emerge on the ground, but also to effectively implement policies. So to help us learn about how city governments in Europe and North America are leading the way in fighting race-based discrimination and to understand the role of cities in fighting racism and what we can learn from each other, I think we're very interested in what are the trends and patterns that are common across places, but also the differences across different localities. We have four wonderful speakers. So we have Candace Moore, who is the chief equity officer of the city of Chicago. We have Claudio Tocchi, a freelance human rights activist consultant with a focus on interculture and anti-racism.
And Claudio formerly head served as the chief of staff of the deputy mayor of Turin for human rights and youth policies. We have Julie Nelson, the founding director of the US Base Government Alliance on Race and Equity, and who recently went on tour to explore how European cities were advancing just multiracial and multicultural democracies, and I would encourage you all to actually read the findings that she put together. And we also have Evein Obulor, the coordinator of the European Coalition of Cities Against Racism. So welcome everyone.
Julie Nelson:
It's great to be here.Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thank you. Julie,Evein Obular:
Welcome.Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Hi Evein. Hi Claudio. Hi Candace. So it's our usual practice actually in this series of events to get us started with a bit of a personal question. So we would actually like to learn what led you to do this work, but not only what led you to do this work against racism, but also why you think or why you came into this work through the local level or through the local lens. So I don't know if there's any of you that wants to get us started. Go ahead, Evein.Evein Obular:
Yes, of course, I can. So thank you so much for the question. I think for me, it's very easy to answer. So I have been working actually in community organizing and grassroots activism quite some time in the city of Heidelberg on a local level. So I spent a lot of time working with racialized communities to understand what are the demands, what do we need to actually transform the city we live in, and probably all of you know that, that when we talk about racism, we very quickly talk about the need of institutional and structural change, not only talking about the individual level, but really taking into consideration the institutions that are built to represent all of us in our diversity.So for me, that actually made me join as a very logical next step, the ECCAR but also the city of Heidelberg because I felt, while the city is the institution that is closest to its citizens, that knows best about ongoing crisis, challenges and the situation of the people affected by racism. So if we talk about institutional and structural change, for me, the city is the institution where I start, where I see a lot of potential, even though it's an institution, it's a smaller institution than a ministerial governance state level. The city still somehow provides it with a framework that is flexible enough sometimes.
So for me, this is why I took this path and I was very much critical towards cities before city administrations, a lot because of course, also their structure of racism forms part of city structures. You cannot deny that, but still and I think at least for me, people forget the crucial role that cities have as service providers for all their citizens. I think to do this service in an adequate way, you need to take on an anti-racist lens. So for me, cities really are this motors of change from where you can shape inclusive societies and coming from Germany, but also coming from Europe, we see of course that right-wing governments are rising on a national level, but also on EU level.
So it is in the cities where you can still work with alliances. So this is why we as European coalition of cities against racism have this crucial role at the moment because we can give our member cities that European back up that many of them don't get anymore from a national level. For example, one of our Polish member cities. For them, being part of ECCAR means to have these communities of cities but still have this international backup. So just to bring in some points on what motivates me, I think I could go along more for that, but I think it's really this understanding of the city as a structure that is very close to its citizens. I hope that that helped, Miriam.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Yeah, definitely. I'm curious if I may follow up one second as well. Is there something at the personal level as well that took you to this road particularly? I'm curious, you're quite young as well, did you go straight into this kind of work as you were coming-Evein Obular:
No, not at all. It was the last place I imagined myself working in and I thought I will be more freelancing, community building, activism. That was where I saw my future, but people saw me. So we had within the city of Heidelberg, people that really see who is organizing the communities, what people are visible. And it's one very long cup of coffee and a very long personal conversation that made me do this job. I would've never applied if I would have seen it, right? Because for me also as a Black person, talking about representation, city administrations are not yet fully there. So it wasn't really a direction I was looking at.So for me, it really was this very personal conversation that made me understand that for me as a former activist, it's also logical consequence to somehow see how actually can I change these structures that I'm going to the streets against for? So it's only due to that, and I think I'm very grateful for this person that took me in and that opened this door for me at the municipality level because really, I wouldn't have done it without that, but I don't regret it at the same time and now, I do the same. I keep seeing people and asking them if they could imagine to do this kind of work also on an institutional level.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Right, so I think we'll cross the pond and Candace, maybe we can go to you. I think you wanted to go next.Candace Moore:
Yeah, and I'm trying to think about how to tell this personal story in an amount of time that doesn't have us on here all day. So I think on one end I'm thinking through the part of why did I choose to get into this race work? Then, the second question for me is how did I end up at the city? So I think for the first part, when I sit and think about it, it's rooted in my identity as a Black woman in America. I'm living, breathing the experience of racism all around me in big and subtle ways. I think there's a common story that I think I hear amongst my friends, peers who are also Black about these phases that we go through. On one end, you're a kid and you're starting to see things that just don't seem to add up with what adults say is fair and just and you're trying to figure out why.On another end you come into this learning where you learn that a lot of what has been taught to you is not true. It is not telling the whole story of history. I think you kind of go through this angry phase, why did all these people lie to me? The for me, that converted ultimately into, "Well, if this isn't right, if this isn't true, what can I do about it?" And I am a person, I have the gift of gab, the gift of argumenting, the gift trying to a thing, big ideas and really break them down. So, of course that landed me to being a lawyer and decided to go to law school and I wrote an impassioned personal statement about how I was going to change the world. And the thing is, I'm stubborn too.
So I decided to hold to that idea and I ended up at a civil rights organization, and there I was able to begin to exercise my passion for trying to get justice, trying to address racism in a very explicit way, but I also began learning that in the quest for anti-racism and combating racism, there's another question that we have to ask is, so what are we trying to build? There's a lot that we want to break down, but at the end of the day, if you have these sort of philosophical ideas about what a society is and what a community is, something has got to be there, in the social contract that we have as communities. So what is it going to be? How are we going to build it?
And as a lawyer, although I was able to do very powerful work, I was able to do it in reaction to problems that had happened and I was able to take one shot and maybe be a ripple in a system, but there's a thousand decisions that are made every single day that ultimately contribute to the results that we see that are racialized, unfair and unequal. So I think there started to grow inside of me, this question of is it actually possible to create the change that I'm so passionate about fighting for, right and is it possible in my city? I see some other cool cities, Seattle kind of taking on, some of this work with Julia started. So I'm starting to learn about these other cities, and I was like, is it possible here?
And then something happened in our city that I think pushed me to city government in a way in which I never thought I would end up in government. We had an election, and in that election there were lots of themes about the kind of change that we as Chicagoans wanted to see. Race was at the center of that, and addressing racism was at the center of that. The mayor, as they took office, decided ... as she took office, decided to create a chief equity officer position for the city of Chicago. And very long story short, I was asked if I wanted to take on that role. And I think it's one of those moments where you have to decide, or at least for me as an advocate, I had to decide was I going to step up into something that was very different for me. Uncomfortable, a big learning curve. I had never worked in government before.
My identity was wrapped in being an advocate and step into what could it look like to try to usher and build the change that I am so desperately fighting for on the outside when given the opportunity, can I help be a bridge to organizers that I have been representing communities that I believed in, to all of the things that I believe so desperately could and should happen? Is it possible? Can I be someone to help try to build that? And so I said yes to the role and I said yes to taking this role as a city and kind of fueled by that belief. There's more to the story, but I'll stop there.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thank you so much, Candace. And I have to say there's two things at least that we have in common. One, I ended up in law school, not sure how yet, as well, and my husband may say that I'm a bit stubborn, disputed, but I have that, but it's claimed that I have that too. So I think we'll actually take a plane back to Europe and we'll head to one of my favorite countries in the world, to Italy. Claudio, do you want to go next?Claudio Tocchi:
Yes, Miriam, thank you a lot and hi everyone. And by hearing what the other speakers just said, and also what I will add on, I wonder if everyone, anyone had ever wanted to work in a municipality, because I also ended up in their, by sheer luck or-Miriam Juan-Torres González:
By show of hands, who envisioned their lives like this when they were teenagers?Claudio Tocchi:
Whoever wanted to do that? Well, I mean, I'm happy I did it, but I never actually thought I would have. I have to say in my case, if I can split the question in two like Candace states, how did I start working in the field and now I ended up doing that in the city? I have to say it was because of ... it was actually because of two persons that I met and that brought me in. Actually, I was a trained journalist. During my bachelor, I was training as a journalist in Italy. Then, I realized that I was sold, that I wasn't fit for the job because I wasn't objective enough. Somehow I couldn't keep to these two opposite parts narrative where you always have to interview one of the guys and then the other one.Then make it completely equal and neutral and you just report what they say, and it didn't really actually make any sense to me because there is ... sometimes there are two position sometimes why it's just blatantly fake or wrong. And that was what made me not being a journalist. Then, I started working as a communication advisor and communication officer for NGOs and social movements and in general, human rights. That's where I met my mentor Luciano, who was 40 years old. No, he had already been for 40 years, an anti-racist activist in Torino, is a very known person in the field and he just brought me in and started teaching me everything that he knew. And that's how I actually started working on that.
Realizing only later how much the history of my family was actually related to that. My mom is a refugee from Eastern Europe, but she's a White refugee. So it was actually never a point that I needed to take into consideration by growing up. The history of my families and what I've heard from my grandparents and the family of my mom and my mom, and myself when she arrived in refugee camps was somehow ... I hope it helped me to relate to the stories I was hearing by working in the field in Italy. That's how somehow some ... things that kept on going. I started being an activist on the field. Then, I was also as much as Evein and Candace asked to join a new administration in the city of Torino, long story short, because I strongly trusted the person that we're trying to do the job at the Deputy Mayor for Human Rights, and my former colleague Marty.
We decided to just jump in and try to do that. And that was incredibly harsh and very, very high learning curve and changing identity and realizing everything that happens when you're on the other side of the field, but that's maybe something we can go deeper in later on.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Yeah, I think we'll definitely want to get to that because I think there's this trend that I'm picking from all of you as well, like the different perspectives of ... between being in the activism side perhaps, or on the outside versus the inside or working with localities, not necessarily on the inside. So I think that that's something that we will definitely want to unpack, and I think that we're getting some questions from the audience that go in that direction as well. I wanted to move on to the West Coast of the US. Hi, Julie.Julie Nelson:
Hi. Yeah, I could sit here and listen to everyone's stories all day long. This has been beautiful. So my personal story, I'll start on the race side. I'm a white woman that grew up in a family that didn't teach me about race, and in fact was given messages that it's best not to talk about race. This idea that that's not the sea color, just be nice to people. And it turns out that actually ... and I didn't get it from the educational system either, any sort of understanding of the history of racism in the United States. So, as a young person, there was a lot that didn't make sense to me either. I became politicized through another movement. I started doing work to prevent violence against women, and it was based on a personal experience of having been sexually assaulted. So I wanted to give back to try and prevent violence against women.The thing that I found in doing anti-violence against women work was just that there's a whole bunch of women like me, young White women who were wanting to work to prevent violence against women, but totally lacked skills when it came to race. So, it went through ... to be on the crisis line, you had to go through a two-week, 80-hour training. Two days were on racial justice and systemic racism, and when it came to those two days, just a whole bunch of dysfunctional behavior where there was all sorts of emotions, there were tears, there was guilt, there was shame, but there was really no skill in doing the work to address racism. So for me, that was a real pivot point in my life.
From an intersectional perspective, knew that if we can't address racism, we're not going to be able to address sexism, that all of the isms really are connected. So at that point I said, I'm going to do a little bit of pivot here and started doing work on racial justice. I initially did it from a community perspective while I was a student within my path as a grad student, my path into local government was I went to local government to get data to do my dissertation, had no intention of getting a job, but lo and behold, I got my data, I did my project, they offered me a job, and one thing led to another. I ended up working for the city of Seattle for 23 years, and I worked for a bunch of different departments. As others have said, did not expect to work for government.
I had all the same ideas around government, bureaucracy, government not being a place of innovation, like all of those stereotypes about government I held. Then, the experience of actually being in government and seeing such smart people, such dedicated people. People really working for the common good. It made me get excited about government. It turned out I really liked the public sector, when the public sector is working for the public good. So, I had worked for the city of Seattle, two main departments. The first one was human services department, and then I became the director of the office for civil Rights.
That's where we started the Race and Social Justice Initiative for city and the United States to start an effort to try to end systemic racism and that ... I'll stop there just because I could go on for a long time, but that's my personal story.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thank you, Julia. And part of me wish is like we could just keep going along these lines. I think we could just have set up a conversation on this because it's interesting to see the richness and the process as well. I guess one thing that I wanted to understand and for our audience as well is how, how the cities, what is the power in cities? What can cities do? Where is the potential or the strength of doing this work at the local level? Then maybe also on the other side of it, what are the maybe difficulties or limitations of working at this level as well? So I don't know if anybody wants to pick up that question first.Julie Nelson:
I don't mind going first. Yeah, I think Claudio started to touch on it, just the reality that local government impacts everything. Every single indicator for success, local government plays a role, whether we're talking about jobs, education, housing, everything, criminal justice. We also know that there's deep and pervasive racial inequities across every single indicator for success. So thinking about where there's leverage points and where there's history, there's a history and a current reality of local government having played a role in creating inequities. And so for us to actually get to different outcomes at the community level, we need to be able to use local government as one of those leverage points.Now, it's never going to be local government that does it by itself, have to work cross sector and work in collaboration with community, but the thing that gets me excited about it is just that. The fact that there's huge leverage and there's the positionality to drive change.
Candace Moore:I'm happy to pick up one because a lot of the work that I do here in the city of Chicago is rooted in things that I learned from Julie's work and the Government Alliance on Race and Equity. So when I thought about how do you start building an office of equity in our city, I utilize a frame that they have that really is about both visualizing what you're trying to do and what a vision for racial equity is. Normalizing a conversation and the language that we used to talk and to build around racial equity, organizing ourselves, our people, and our money in order to do different kinds of work, rooted in what our core beliefs are. Then, ultimately operationalizing building plans, working plans, but also being prepared to iterate our plans.
Because there is no perfect solution and we're not going to get it right all at once. So specifically some of the things that that has looked at ... so that means we're doing a lot of stuff, right? I had joked that, when people are like, "What do you do?" I was like, "How much time do you have? What are you going to do?" Because both the challenge, but for me, the joy is that I do lots of different kinds of things. On one end, I am teaching people, and I mean something like straight up, thinking about what does adult learning look like because the reality is so often many of us have not been prepared and really taught how to think about race, how to talk about race, and certainly then not how to build that into our practices. So there is some learning work that we need to do.
There's some unlearning work to do. We assume that because we have a common experience that we're all on the same page or it's so obvious what is right and what's wrong. The language that we're using, and I don't care who I work with. The first thing I always start with is building common language, defining things, being very clear about what I am doing and what I am not doing so that we can actually work together. On the operationalizing side, it is getting people to think about their resources differently. We're not going to get equity doing the same things or just applying the same structures and strategies to now people of color, right? In many ways, those structures didn't work for people of color, which is why we're getting the results that we're seeing.
So what does it mean to rethink about the teams that we have, rethink about how our resources are set up, rethinking about the partnerships that we need to have in order to get there. So a good chunk of our work is helping to set up different kinds of teams, different kinds of strategies, building partnerships that do not exist, and preparing people basically for a change process. In many ways ... sometimes I simplify it and say we're going up, think about organizational change. Everything that you learned in every business school about it is that, but is rooted in the values of racial equity. Then, ultimately, we have to build plans. This work is not going to happen on a whim or just because we all agree what the problem is.
We have to set a goal, we have to operationalize that goal. Those goals need to be rooted in results. What is the result that we're trying to drive to? What are the populations that are not being served by our existing structure? So often I'm reminding people when I say racial equity, I'm not ... most of the time, I am not talking about a new program or a new initiative. I'm asking you to look at your core work, whatever you are tasked to do, whether that is picking up the garbage, planting a tree, providing public health service, and look at your data and your results and ask the question is this working for everyone? If it's not, who is it not working for?
What can we be do doing differently? And being able to look at that unapologetically around race and understanding the histories and the structures that created that, but then tapping into what levers of power, you have to do something different.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Yeah, I'd love to hear from Evein and Claudio as well, particularly thinking of this last point you made, Candace, because in Europe, in a lot of European countries, we do not have data because a lot of our countries do not allow for the collection of data disaggregated by race or by ethnicity. So I would love to hear one, on the one hand on the question like, what are the potentialities, what's the potential at the local level in the places that you guys have worked? Evein, I know that you coordinated a lot of cities, I think more than 150 cities across Europe. So I'm sure there's a lot you can say as well. Also, from the Italian perspective too, and particularly now in a moment when there is a far-right government and well there has been far-righting government for a long time. So we'd love to hear from you both too on this question.Evein Obular:
Should I start?Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Go ahead.Evein Obular:
Yeah. Well, I think one aspect, also, Candace mentioned it, it's very important to do this work in a city level in a structured way. So this is why for us as ECCAR, we have our 10 point plan of action. In this 10 point plan of action, so cities, when they decide to join the ECCAR, they decide to implement action around the 10 point plan of action. What this plan does is it defines the different layers where a city can get active for the fight against racism, race equity, depending on wording. I think in Europe the wording is a bit different still, but the important aspect for us with this plan and why, if a city wants to enter the ECCAR, we put it ECTAR, at the beginning, it's the first thing that they need to agree on is that we see that sometimes the work around racism is not yet mainstream through different departments.When we talk about health, we need to talk about racism. When we talk about education, we need to talk about racism. When we talk about housing, we need to talk about racism when we talk about security, but cities are organized in different departments, right? And still sometimes it's very difficult with topics like racism to really have them within all the departments. This is why we have our 10 point action plan, and this is why we invite, or at the moment we are also doing a new project. We invite cities to build their own local action plans against racism based on the 10 point plan of action. Why do we do that? Because this work, it takes time and it's important to set clear goals to evaluate them.
And to not get lost somewhere micromanaging. So for example, Claudio, you know that, with the super project, you did something similar in Torino but we see that having ...
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
I think we've lost her for a second, unfortunately. Claudio, I think you're on muteEvein Obular:
If you have this kind of ... You didn't hear me.Miriam Juan-Torres González:
We've lost you for the past 30 seconds or so. So if you could back for a moment.Evein Obular:
Yeah. So I was talking about accountability in a way that these plans also support communities and people affected by racism to hold cities accountable to tell them again and again, well, you have the strategy, you agreed on the strategy in your city council, but what are you actually doing? So I think it's very crucial to have this kind of structured way in working on the issue of racism. So this is one point I wanted to make, and we see that on a European level as well, right? With the first EU anti-racism action plan, it's historic, it's a milestone. It's the first time in the history of the EU that they appointed an anti-racism coordinator. In this anti-racism action plan, they specifically mentioned to role of cities.So I think there, it becomes quite clear why it is important, and one other maybe a more practical example regarding data collection. So this issue around, okay, we need data to develop policies, we need data. We cannot do that based on what we think that people need. I think there's a reason why, for example, in Germany you aren't allowed to collect data around race. I think it's a good reason, but what we see is all across Europe that people are doing community based ways of data collection. So for example, in Germany, we had the Afrozensus. It's the first time in the history of Germany that there was a study done on the life realities and racism that Black people face.
This Afrozensus has been developed together with IOTO. It's like one of the biggest Black community foundations in Germany. And they had also the power to decide the framing, the wording. So I think here what we need for data collection is innovative community based ways on data collection to not have people not affected by racism decide how and why data is collected, but to have communities in this processes from the beginning on, so the Afrozensus for example, was done community based together with different universities. So it's not that there's no scientific background, but in Germany for example, Black studies doesn't exist. We have some great scientists, they go to the US to get a guest professorship because there's more study on Black life in Germany than in the US then in Germany.
So for us having this Afrozensus for example, it's really crucial because now we have numbers. We can't tell our member cities, well, Black people, 90% of them say that if they experience racism, people don't believe them. This is not just something that we make up in our head, but we have a study and these issues around collection of equality data, we see that in all our member cities. One other great example is Barcelona. They have a great anti-discrimination report and together with them at the moment, we're developing a project to develop a toolkit for cities on how to do equality data collection because we see this is something that many of our member cities are dealing with and that they need support with.
So with our toolkits, we have many of them, you can imagine them like a cookbook, directed towards people working in city administrations, that really guides them step by step through a certain policy measure. So with the equality data collection, we plan to do the same, and I think it's really, really important to have this data and from a European perspective to learn what it means to collect data, community based and taking into focus the people we are collecting the data for.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Right. Claudio, anything to add from your perspective?Claudio Tocchi:
Not too much, actually. Everything has been said so far. Well, I mean just to add a few of the specific Italian contexts, as much as Germany, Italy does not allow for registration upon neither race nor ethnicity. The reason is the same as it is in Germany because it has been used by fascist regime before World War II and during World War II to perpetrate the holocaust. So ever since after World War II, that is a no go area or there has been a no go area, in Italian civil society and government as well. It's interesting to notice the fact that Italy has a pretty recent history of immigration. Italy has always historically been a country of immigration until a few years ago, you could have just used nationality as a more or less accurate proxy for race because most of the people who were not White would've been not Italian nationals.Not everyone of course are exceptions but I mean, I talk in general terms and since the Italian law for becoming an Italian citizen is one of the strictest in Europe, it takes about 10 years to become naturalized citizens. Until very few years ago, you could have just counted foreign people and you could have just more or less found reliable data on race, racial discrimination as well. This is changing a lot because in the last about 10 years, 1.5 million people acquire the Italian citizenship, plus you have all this so-called, second generations who aren't foreigners but aren't White either. The demand for more refined data is growing. I think the solutions that has been just presented by ECCAR in Germany could work in Italy as well.
Italy and Germany have a strong history of intercultural approach, which has been focused on involving communities, foreign communities or ethnic communities or religious communities, whatever community you want to frame, and bringing them into the co-design of local policies or national policies, regional policy. This has been working and involving rationalized communities in shaping the new pattern to collect data. I think it could be an option that it could work in it as well, but it will take time. It's not something that's going to happen from today to until tomorrow, and I don't see this government as willing to do it, which is again interesting, let's put it this way, is that the eventuality of collecting data, according to race will be dismissed by this majority in government as a mean to now protect these communities from racism.
So I don't see this happening soon, but this is definitely a discussion that has to start among civil society and progressive policy makers as well, and academia and scientific centers, and think tanks as well.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Yeah, the conversation on data is incredibly pressing in Europe as well. I know the anti-racism plan mentioned that there needs to be data collection, but it also seems quite unlikely given the politics of a lot of the European countries, but I love this idea of co-designing and co-creating with communities racialized as others as well. That's a very interesting approach, and I think that in this sense as well, there's a lot to learn from the US in terms of how it's being done there and what works and what doesn't and the different levels of aggregation and so on, because there are challenges as well in terms of how groups are defined in the data. I wanted to ask you all about the most effective strategies or if you have seen any strategies that have been particularly productive or any projects that you would want to maybe highlight as examples.Also thinking maybe if you have any examples from the comparative perspective. Before we do that, we have a question from the audience as well asking us how you guys understand anti-racism at the local level. So I don't know if that's something that any of you could speak to or if you all want to have a couple of points on that.
Julie Nelson:
I can say a few things. I think the primary idea of anti-racism is that there's not a possibility of being race neutral. So, either we're working against racism or we're participating in a system that is racist. And so for us to actually get to a racially just society, we've got to take actions that are anti-racist.Candace Moore:
And I'll just add in my work, especially as we talk about equity, one of the things that was really important to me when I started this office is that, yes, I'm the chief equity officer, but our office is called the Office of Equity and Racial Justice. I wanted to be very clear that the lens in which I approach the equity work brings an explicit racial lens in talking about anti-racism and the constructs of anti-racism. Because equity work is a ... equity is broader term for sure, and it is a larger concept of are our results working for everyone, if not who? In my line of questionings, the part of that is disaggregating the results by race and asking, now let's think about racialized groups and what is and isn't working and asking ourselves why.So I mean that's part of why in my earlier comment, I say it's really important to start off a lot of these conversations with clarifying what we are saying when we use words like equity, anti-racism, anti-discrimination, justice, fairness. I think we have to unpack what we mean because oftentimes, we are carrying different meanings to these words and it has the effect of us talking right past one another. So in many ways in my work, it's not about saying, you're right, you're wrong. I have the right answer fully, like what Candace says is equity is like the one and only way we can think about it. Let's put all of our frameworks on the table, let's make sense of them and let's be clear for the ... because we will need this language as the tools and the currency to help us build something.
If our language is getting in the way, if we are saying one thing meaning another, and that becomes a source of our conflict, then it is detrimental to the massive work that we're undertaking.
Evein Obular:
So I can just bring in maybe some European perspectives there. So what we see, of course, in our network, adding on what Candace just said, is that people choose different languages. So for example, the offices that I work with, some of them are called Office for Equal Opportunities. Others are called Offices for Social Cohesion, others are called intercultural Departments, others are called Office for Integration. Others are called Department for Participatory Justice, and I could continue for a very long time and I think this shows that the discourse in Europe and even in each country, it's on very different levels, on very different levels.I for example, I talk a lot about anti-racism to make it clear because I grew up in an environment Germany, where people are afraid walking or talking about racism because they're connected to the Nazi path, and it's very hard to see the colonial continuities and the structure level of it because people don't want to be racist. So let's not use this word, let's talk about integration or intercultural work. So that's why for me, and also at ECCAR, we decided to keep our name as European Coalition of Cities Against Racism, just one remark on that. So we are part of a UNESCO network of cities. It's a global network. Previously they have been called International Coalition of Cities against Racism.
Then they changed their name to International Coalition of Inclusive and Sustainable Cities, putting it together with the SDGs. And there has been a lot of discussions also going on within our network, should we do the same change? Should we have in our title this more positive what we are working for, and we very clearly said no. At the moment, it's very necessary to call it racism and to work with that because the different concept concepts of race ... so the fact that race is a social construct in many, many European cities, this is not yet fully there. Even in the German context, the English word is used because in German, the word race didn't really have this racial turn that it had in the US, right?
So we are at a different level in this discussion. I think there's a lot we can learn from the US, but I think it's also very important to take our own path, especially regarding wording, to see how can we frame these discourses and race racialized communities, for example, if we work with Eastern European cities, there aren't many Black people living there, right? There, we talk about racism against Sinti and Roma, for example. So for us as coalition, it's crucial to accept this diversities within our network that it means different things to work on racism on a local level. For myself before I joined ECCAR, I was announced the first anti-racism officer at the city of Heidelberg.
And it's the first one of its kind in Germany because city administrations aren't yet used to clearly name that. So I hope that was a bit helpful to broaden the view on names and words and how this topic is being engaged with on a local level.Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Yeah, and I see that we are unpacking a little bit of the trends and differences already among cities too across the US and Europe as well, where there's availability of data and perhaps a more open conversation, whereas a lot of European countries are in a different stage. I was wondering, I think Candace, you were mentioning structures and strategies, so I wanted to get us back to that conversation as well. In all of the work that you guys have done, whether it's within the city government or outside of it, and also in the research, I know Julie, you've done a lot of research work as well, whether there have been any strategies that have been particularly successful or that you've attempted to implement as well, that seem promising.Candace Moore:
Yeah. One thing I'll share with the group was sort of a ... I mean, I guess it's yet to be determined how successful it will be, but it was I think a big step for us as a city. So given the experience with COVID and the sort of aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, it felt really important to rethink of how we do our equity work. I didn't doubt that we were going with the right frameworks and strategies. I believe those, but it felt like it wasn't enough for the moment that we were in. And that feeling came from a lot of engagement with communities and just listening. The word that became really pervasive for me from what they were saying kind of unprompted, was healing.A lot of folks were thinking about how they heal their communities, what practices can they use to support people as they navigate these moments where a lot of active harm is happening and just healing. Then, what I was hearing was all of the different ways in which community was thinking about healing. On one end they felt like they were not connected to each other. They felt they were in on an island and it was only them doing the healing work, and they weren't seeing the other neighborhoods across the city that were also wrestling with the same question. So that convicted me to say, I'm the chief equity officer. I have the power and the privilege of listening and talking to all of these people.
So what can we do to, at a minimum, create opportunities for people to see each other, to be inspired by one another, to build with one another, but then, what is the role of the city in healing? In many ways, many people would point to the city as a big source of harm, and so we have to own that and acknowledge that. At the same time, there is a part of it where people want to see different things happen with the city. So they want it to change. They want it to actually be a vehicle and a support for healing, but there's that tension. So, that's the background to an effort that we did called Together We Heal, which was just ... it's just kind of an exploration in many ways of what can the city do to support healing in our communities?
What are our levers for change and power? I mean, the short answer is we can do healing work in convening communities, bringing communities together. We are uniquely positioned to do that. We can do healing work in our policies, really rooting them and being honest about harm that has happened and working alongside communities to build a new way forward. We built a framework called "Reflect on the Past, Reclaim the Present and Reimagine the Future" because we see these as necessary elements to think about healing. We got to have honest conversations about the past, but we don't just want to rehash the past and not move. In order to move, we've got to ask ourselves what needs to be different and true today?
What values and principles are we going to hold to what is going to propel us and be a vehicle for change? And then ultimately, what is the re-imagining of the future? And that can happen in our policy work, that can happen in our grant making. What does it look like to resource healing work and to resource artists and communities to actually build some of that cohesion? And we've done that work, so a lot of that is built into this ... I call it an exploration. I didn't know where we were going to go with this. I didn't know where we were going to lead, but we were committed to centering, healing, documenting it. In a way that is both a tool for our community members, but also, a tool for the kind of change that we need to take on in the city.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thank you, Candace.Claudio Tocchi:
So it's always very difficult to speak after Candace. It's like playing after Jim Hendrix at Woodstock. No one wanted to do that, but Miriam asked me to, so I tried to jump in and be at least a bit less evocative with what I'm going to talk about. The reality of ... what we really focused on during our five years of mandate in the city of Torino was to opening the gate of the public administrations to having conversations, cooperating, co-designing local policies with local communities and when I say communities, I realized this was being tricky with my American friends. When we use the word communities in Italian, we always mean or would mostly mean foreign communities or religious communities. So just that to be clear, that's what we are meaning right now.Bureaucracy in Italy are extremely closed, extremely classist. The language they use is complicated that they don't ... they're not trained to work with local civil society. For most of the reasons that I mentioned earlier, I would say 95 or 99% of the public offices at the city of Torino are White and they don't have any foreign background at all. So that there was no use or very little habit to relate work here, listen, see representatives of foreign communities in the city of Torino when we started working. So most of our work was to go ... at the beginning, very practical, even organizing community events together with the representative of the communities was a way to bring some of the offices of a very divided and complicated bureaucratic structure that is the city of Torino to work with communities and to relate and to cooperate with persons they've never actually worked with before.
Starting on that, starting to hear the needs ... that this representative of these communities were bringing in and trying to work on that. That has been done starting with very practical activities, but on most of the offices of the city, from the social services to the offices that they're working with, the environment and the gardens from the health services, especially during COVID, of course. Urban regeneration and reconstructing, the whole idea behind our mission was that you cannot implement, evaluate a policy without involving everyone living in the city, which includes foreign communities, which wasn't the case early on. I wouldn't say that is now fully the case and always the case, but I think some work has been done into that direction.
You cannot do anything about me without me, that was the main catchphrase. And I think that was ... partially, there was mutually empowering and learning for public officers, were actually getting an intercultural training on the doing, but also for the representative of the communities. This is something that we put a lot of effort into because empowering them into dealing with the public administration meant getting a hack on what your rights are, and what the public administration can do and what should do and when is able to say no and when cannot say no to your request. This is something that isn't always well-known among the civil society and the person that are not part of the machine and the structure, and this was something that we really try to improve because that is rebalancing the asymetry of power between institutions and citizens.
And this is something that historically in Italy has been a really big, big, big problem. There's lots of studies and novels if you want to read about them for the past two or three centers, and this is something that has to be rebalanced, and I think this is actually ... right now probably what anti-racism and feminism and anti-classism work is, as a public servant and policy maker in Italy, at least at local level.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thanks Claudio.Evein Obular:
I think we need to invite Candace to our ECCAR meeting to tell us more about the healing year you did. I think it's really inspirational for European settings because here, the discourse, as I said earlier, it's on a different level. So if I talk to my city councilors here or also in other European cities about healing, they're not fully there yet. What this actually now, has to do with the topic of racism. So for me, listening to you and hearing that also cities can work in such a way, for me, it's very innovative and I think it would be really great to see how this can be transferred to European context. Because for me, what Claudio said, for example, I can relate a lot to that because this is the situation that many of our ECCAR member cities are in at the moment.And I think there really we can learn a lot from the US while still trying to see the very different heritage that people of color in European countries have. So I'm talking about, I don't know, it's another big topic, people who hate me, but just very quickly, talking about colonial remembrance culture for example, and this whole debate around street names, cities are of course crucial players, but also there in Germany for example, but also in other European cities, it's very difficult to find a narrative that also works politically outside of activist spaces, so to say, because just talking about, for example, I think in the chat, someone asked talking about White supremacy culture, we're not there yet.
So in city administrations in the European context is talking about White supremacy culture, we're not there yet. So talking about healing, we're not there yet. Finding a political way that enables us, for example, to work on street names and to leave no one behind. We need to learn a lot. So I really hope that maybe Candace, you're interested to join us to share more because for me at least, that sounded really inspiring.
Candace Moore:
You just tell me when.Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Yeah, just the other thing ... Sorry, go ahead Julie.Julie Nelson:
I was just going to say that the thing that I particularly admire about the way that Candace and Chicago approached that was the centering of community that I have [inaudible 01:06:23].Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Is Julie breaking for everyone? Julie, I don't know if you can hear us. You're unfortunately broken a lot.Julie Nelson:
A conversation about healing. Is this any better?Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Okay. Yeah, that's better. Thank you.Julie Nelson:
Sorry. All I was saying is that some cities have started to try to do healing work without that connection with community and it's really ... fundamentally, it can't happen to have a healing conversation when a city is still causing harm. So for the conversation to ... Candace, I was taking notes, we need you not only to go to Europe to have that conversation, we got to have that conversation and Garrett too.Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thank you Julie. And we have only a brief amount of time until we have to wrap up. So I would like to invite you very briefly, you could share maybe a couple of comments on the lessons you learned from the research you were doing in Europe. And let's see if the connection is good enough and then, we will transition to a final question.Julie Nelson:
Yeah, I think the language thing, language and data are the two things that actually we've talked about in the past hour, that big insights around the importance of data and the differences between the European context and the US context. Even though the US has, on the one hand you could say more data, we have our own data challenges. So, that has huge differences when it comes to data and then, the language around race [inaudible 01:08:21].Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Sorry, Julie, you're breaking. I think we'll have to-Julie Nelson:
Wanting to talk about and ...Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Maybe let's try without video for a second. Yeah, let's see.Julie Nelson:
Okay. Yeah, so differences around language and understanding of systemic racism, and there's a lot of conversation around anti-discrimination that tended to focus on individual [inaudible 01:09:00].Miriam Juan-Torres González:
You're breaking again, so we'll ... Sorry Julie. Hopefully your connection will get better with the final question. One last question that I wanted to touch on and I think you can all speak to it, but it's something that the audience was also asking based on Evein's questions, is this idea of the inside or outside, what are the perspectives having been both on the outside in activism and perhaps being critical of administrations and now also working with administrations or within them. So I don't know if you could speak to that reality and what you have learned about how to straddle both words or having those perspective, whether there's any bridging possible or what are the challenges knowing ... being capable of both approaches, I would say.Candace Moore:
How do you kick it off and I'll give ... and I also saw someone in the comment, ask for a more concrete example. So I'll do this via an example of work that we did around COVID and for background, just as a reminder, I started ... as a civil rights attorney, I started on the outside. I started working with organizing groups and community-based organizations. So I felt a lot of affinity there to coming into government now and trying to think about what does it mean to implement, to respond, et cetera. So the challenge that we saw as many places across the world saw during COVID is that it exacerbated our foundational inequalities. So especially around deep inequalities that we knew existed already around health disparities, when COVID kind of took up, it just made it worse.It fell right in areas that we knew were the most vulnerable. So the challenges, we understand that those vulnerabilities are deeply structural. They concern disinvestment in communities, environmental injustices, all sorts of things that have been producing these inequalities. So the question for us, and I think for a lot of people around the world was what do you do in the middle of the crisis about that, if you believe and are committed to something different, it's not like you can snap your fingers and all of a sudden change structural inequality. So we held that question and the answer really for us was that on one end we did not know we were doing all of the things that we could possibly think of. We were still missing the mark.
So what that meant is that we actually needed to be in relationship with the communities who were most impacted by the problem to come sit with us around the problem, not around a set of solutions that we had already decided were option A, B and C and just pick one but instead say, "This is what we're doing. Here's the data that we have. Here are the constraints that we have. What can we do differently?" I mean the first reaction from community members, just to be completely honest, they were like, "Well, what the heck are you talking about? You all are supposed to be navigating us through this pandemic. What do you mean you don't know what you're doing?" So that just taps into the historical distrust that communities have.
So at first, we were met with righteous anger and rightly so, there's lots of harms that had happened, but through being patient and remembering that this work is a process ... now in a pandemic, that process meant we were meeting every single day and holding ourselves accountable to rapid action, but through talking community actually needed to learn how government worked. Community needed to understand more intimately some of the constraints that government had. Government needed to acknowledge some of the assets that community had outside of government. And so when crafting strategies, actually using both of our powers. The last example I'll give, because I know we're short on time within this is so on one end folks were ... we were thinking that we had an outreach problem.
We were not getting to the right communities. They were not hearing us. When we sat at the table with our community partners, they said the issue is not that you're not getting there. The issue is that nobody is listening to you because they are more concerned with how they're going to get food on their table. They just lost their jobs. All of these things. So no one is prioritizing what you're saying. So until you can solve the food challenge, you're going to have a real problem trying to get people to be six feet apart and wash your hands for 20 seconds and all of the things that we needed them to do. So working with community, one of our first actions was to set up food pantries in places that needed them the most in partnership with our community partners.
And what happened is when people go to pick up the food, it's also a great place to get them the information and they're also more willing to listen to you because you're actually providing them something that they need. Just that very simple example showed that if we actually leaned into our communities first, they can guide us with real strategies, and this is a theme that we kept following throughout our COVID response to produce a lot more equitable results and actually move the charts that we were all following as amateur epidemiologists and actually, trying to close some of those gaps that we were experiencing. I think that was a real lesson in government actually partnering with folks on the ground.
And shifting the power to make decisions so that communities can actually really drive and inform what we need to do so that we can reach the results.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thanks Candace. So we're at time. I'm going to take a couple more minutes if everyone's okay with it. I don't know if anybody has any final remarks or any final comments that you would like to add to the conversation, maybe from a comparative perspective as well, or I'm also curious to know about whether there is a point in actually connecting across borders and across cities given the specificities of each place. So I'll pass the floor to you for any final remarks or if you want to address this last question.Claudio Tocchi:
If I can jump in because there's something ... I mean we have very specific issues and challenges depending on the country or maybe even depending on the state or the cities. This is true in the situation in Italy. It's completely different than the one in Germany and the one in US, from the demography of the persons we're talking about or to the ... how the institutions are shaped and what their purposes are or what their powers are, but it struck me how similar the way Chicago and Torino dealt with the COVID emergency because we had exactly the same issue Candace. And even worse, it was not only that the communities were not listening to us, they told us you are not listening to us. What we are having are other problems that you're not counting on. And we keep on repeating that, but you're just not listening.So we had ... just to take an example, because of the mistrust between institutions and some of the communities that are living in the country, lots of people did not want to rely on the social services of the cities because they didn't trust what they would do if they found out they're poor. Now, there is this common myth I would say, but it's now a painful reality for some families and a very now, well-known urban legend that if the social services of the city find out that you're poor, they take your kids away. This is not happening of course, but this is something that a lot of communities fear. Then, therefore, even during the COVID pandemic, when institutions were providing foods to the families in need, a lot of persons without nationality would not go to the social services.
So the networks that we had built also with very trivial things like organizing a common event with the representatives of the communities created the trust so that the institutions could provide the food directly to the associations of the community to representatives, and they would then ship them to the families in need without the institutions to know exactly to which families, which was an emergency, a contingency solutions, but which weren't. This is doable only if you have a honest relationship with the communities, if you listen to them and then you provide what they need and then, you can build up the work on that. So in that case, the kind of process that you can build up despite all the differences is actually very similar.
And that's something that we can actually learn from each other and keep exchanging even across the Atlantic. Thanks.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thank you Claudio.Julie Nelson:
In closing, what I would say is that this idea of building power, that it's not just building power to disrupt, but building power to govern. It's not that we want to influence government, we want to own government and that we want government to work for racial justice. So when we're talking about building a bigger we, that has to include a just multiracial democracy and a bigger we is also a better we.Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thank you, Julie. Evein, Candace, I don't know if you want to have any final points.Evein Obular:
Since COVID, I respect so much timing of online meetings, so I try to make it short. So our network is based on the belief that it's crucial for our cities to learn from another, right? That's what guides us and I think what particularly is interesting is how can we create moments of learning that really help on the ground, right? How can we do this exchange like we do it today? And I think for us, for example, we found different manners from peer to peer exchange, from exchange of bad practices, exchange of good practices, toolkits, discussions, panels, reporting. There are many things, and I think it's crucial to be open to this wide range of what it can mean to learn from one another.I think city administrations in certain European countries, they're not so used to that because you work in isolated departments, there are some bureaucratic procedures. So to break with the stereotypes that city administrations cannot learn from one another, I think it's crucial and it's crucial for all topics, but I think especially for the topic of racism, because their corporation is crucial, city administrations need to work with and for communities at all times. This is something they need to learn, that it's okay as you did in Torino but also, I think in Chicago, to give resources to the community. And in this moment, you don't decide anymore, right? You need to build on this trust.
So I think for city administration to trust communities, it's crucial in the work against racism, and I think that in the US context, there are bigger communities. So for example, in Heidelberg, the Black community, it's very small. Imagine in Bavaria or in some city in Poland, so building communities, it's a different ... it's a task we have because as cities we are not used to work in this way yet, but we need to learn, but we also need to understand how diverse communities are. So I hope that this somehow helped and I'm very thankful for all the inspiration that the three of you gave today. So I think it definitely shows how important it is to exchange already by seeing this conversation.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Thank you so much. Candace, final word?Candace Moore:
Yeah. I'll just say and pick up on this idea of just being grateful for being in community with you all and so many others. So often I think this work in cities, can feel very isolating. It can feel like you're fighting kind of a never ending battle, a big mass of problems. As the equity folks, sometimes, you got to be your own cheerleader or trying to power through and you realize you need a life source. You need folks who are inspiring you, pouring into you, giving you ideas. I think one of my biggest learnings from the trip that we took to Turin but also, kind of thinking about this within the European context is how important history is to the work that we're doing today.And that I can learn ... even though I'm in a big city with lots of large populations, I can learn from small cities that are doing innovative work, that is just rooted in a basic question of how do we survive? How do we make sure that everyone in our community has what they need? So I find a ton of inspiration in just the different ways that people come at this to think about then, how do I show up day in and day out for my city? So just again, incredibly grateful for the space and for the learning and looking forward to future opportunities. Definitely still open to take you up on that trip to come and support.
Miriam Juan-Torres González:
Euro trip for all of us. Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate all of you taking the time to be in this conversation and also, to all of the audience for being here today and staying with us for a little bit longer. Thank you, and we'll see you soon. Have a good summer.
