Panel Wrestles With Racism and Inclusion

“The majority of people who come to council meetings, and are engaged with local government, tend to be white.” 

Sarah Graden

Swarthmore Borough council member Sarah Graden made that observation at Swarthmore’s Human Relations Commission (HRC) July 9 meeting. “How can we engage everyone, make them feel safe, and include them?” she asked.

HRC has been wrestling with these questions since early June. Feeling a sense of urgency, they have been meeting biweekly, and sometimes even weekly.

Graden, borough council’s liaison to the HRC, spearheaded the 2019 expansion of the commission from its original mission — extending anti-discrimination protections to LGBT residents not then covered by the commonwealth’s HRC — to a more expansive one. The reconstituted Swarthmore HRC’s charge now includes “educat[ing] the public in order to prevent discrimination and foster equal opportunity, and to address incidents of bias that may lead to tension between racial, ethnic, and other groups.”

As the country wrestles with racial justice in the wake of the May 25 killing of George Floyd, the HRC is attempting to finalize a mission statement, draft a diversity and inclusion statement for the borough, and identify concrete steps to improve Swarthmore’s racial climate.

Yes, in Swarthmore

Members spent much of the July 9 meeting voicing frustration and sadness at the racial climate both locally and nationally.

Council member Lauren McKinney attended the meeting in part to convey a friend’s response to Swarthmore’s July Fourth parade of fire trucks and police cars. In an email, the friend called the parade “tone deaf for what our nation is going through” and said the noisy procession looked like “a show of white supremacy.” She added, “Old ways of doing things may not be the best path for a healing and healthy civic society.”

“I could see that it would be frightening and alarming to people of color,” McKinney said. “Sometimes we think Swarthmore is really different from other places.” She called that attitude “complacent,” saying, “we can have big blind spots.”

Members of the commission shared their own thoughts about race and Swarthmore. HRC chair Melissa Kennedy alerted members to an Instagram account, Black at Haven (@blkathaven), where Black Wallingford-Swarthmore School District students and alumni post stories of racism experienced in school.

Shaun Eyring, the commission’s longest-standing member, noted that the current racial climate in the borough stems from a long racist history extending back to the beginning of the twentieth century. She called the July Fourth parade “typical,” adding, “There’s a larger thing that’s happening in the United States today — a moment in history that is pretty powerful and pretty overwhelming. And we missed it. We didn’t insert ourselves and say, ‘You know what? Maybe it’s not appropriate to have the police and fire departments celebrate this Fourth of July.’”

Eyring said it was important to move beyond putting out diversity statements.

Beyond First Steps

One concrete step the HRC is considering is establishing a borough-sponsored mechanism to collect information about hate crimes, hate speech, and other bias incidents. The idea was introduced at the June 4 meeting by members of SRS Big IDEA, a group of WSSD teachers, staff, students, and families pushing the school district to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Such a repository would facilitate a clearer picture of the racial climate in Swarthmore and provide a way of tracking changes year to year. Still in an early stage of development, the proposal would have to be approved by borough council.

Toward the end of the meeting, HRC member Jasmeet Ahuja shared an anti-racism slideshow used at her law firm. She suggested this illustration of racism’s pervasiveness could inform potential anti-racist responses the HRC might pursue. 

The slideshow, which defines anti-racism as “the practice of identifying, challenging, and changing the values, structures, and behaviors that perpetuate systemic racism,” summarizes various studies of implicit bias.

One 2013 study by the Chicago-based consulting firm Nextions, which specializes in the issue, asked 60 partners at 22 law firms to analyze a legal memo. Half the partners were told the memo was written by an African American, while the other half were told the memo was written by a white man. The average rating from those who thought the writer was white was 4.1 on a scale of 1-5. Those who thought the writer was Black rated the memo 3.2 out of 5.

That study, and others like it, demonstrate that racism is endemic in society. “The results empirically bear it out,” Ahuja explained. 

Ahuja said she hopes people in the Swarthmore community will become more intentional in their actions, and will support their neighbors of color. She suggested, for instance, patronizing Chinese restaurants to tangibly uphold the Chinese community when it is harassed and attacked, as occurred when the pandemic hit. 

Kennedy agreed on the importance of moving beyond talking. She also believes that conversations are a good first step in community education and outreach. The HRC’s discussions are “just scratching the surface,” she conceded. “But at least it’s a scratch.”

The next HRC meeting is Thursday, July 23, at 7:15 on Zoom. The meetings are open to the public.