PEA Principal Steve Brigham has just published his book, It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field: Overcoming 8 Racial Myths to Even the Field, and our Public Engagement Associates family could not be more proud and impressed. As you will see in the opening to his blog post below, he worked steadily on this for four whole years! The book is live on Amazon (Link). Steve has built a website for the book - - and is launching a Substack newsletter today titled “Leveling the Field (finally!)” – you can subscribe Here.
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Four years ago, once the pandemic arrived (March 2020), I sat down to write a book that at first was just as much for my own discovery and education about our troubled history on race in the U.S. as it was for public consumption. It took four years to finish it!
As a white man, I have struggled for decades to understand why our nation is still in a problematic state with regard to race and why we have created a playing field that continues to result in profound racial inequities.
I have also been raising, with my ex-wife, two biracial children (now 16 and 21) who must live in a society where it is not always a safe and welcoming space for them an their friends of color as they shift into young adulthood.
The book has been a way of not just making sense of our appalling racist history that continues in more subtle ways since the days of enslavement and Jim Crow but why improvement in many of our policy areas have resulted in relatively minimal progress in the last six decades.
As I publish It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field: Eight Race Myths We Still Believe & Strategies to Even the Field, I have come to realize that writing the book should only be the first step along this journey.
How should I promote the book as a way to start conversations?
How might I facilitate a dialogue around the content that has taken years to wrap my head around?
How would I ‘find’ readers who want to read the book, yes, but also engage in challenging and open contemplations about our troubled, racist history? A history that has not - despite significant gains here and there - leveled the playing field in any sustainable way?
And, without chasing windmills – how might I move those conversations to a genuine, collective reckoning with our history and current state? And to muster the collective courage to push for more impactful … no … transformative change? To truly make the playing field far more level?
An impossible dream for me, for sure. Yet, I still contemplate what change, if any, these conversations might lead to.
So, who wants to engage? Anyone?!
Speaking of engagement, I want to explain how I see the book connecting to my community engagement work over the past two and a half decades.
My colleague, Ebony Walden, uniquely positions her life’s work as critically examining the intersection between race (& racism) and place. As an African American urban planner, such a focus makes imminent sense.
When she shared this with me some years ago, I realized that although my consulting work has not served as a critical examination of that intersection, the legacy of racism, discrimination, and oppression has shown up in nearly every important community engagement project I’ve done. Those legacies were not always acknowledged or named and weren’t addressed in ways to repair past and current harms. But the painful legacies persisted. What do I mean?
Most of my projects with Public Engagement Associates (PEA) in the past ten years have occurred in the metropolitan Washington, DC, area. As you know, in our work, we facilitate constructive conversations with community members and other stakeholders to provide input and guidance to locally elected officials and policy-makers as they craft new policies, develop new plans, or look to pass new legislation.
Many of the legacy issues in these urban areas connect directly to redlining—and its predecessors—that made racial, residential segregation a permanent fact of life for nearly a century in America. The Black ghettos that White leaders created across the nation in the early 20th century hardly dissipated once the Fair Housing Act outlawed redlining in 1968. Thus, cities in my region like Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD, and Richmond, VA—and many of their inner suburbs—wrestle with a host of issues that this ‘ghettoization’ set in motion.
They continue to set too many African American members back. Food deserts (also known as food apartheid), health care deserts, close proximity to polluting and toxic waste facilities, low-quality and low-performing schools, neighborhoods with few of your standard, quality amenities (e.g., parks), not to mention higher areas of crime all hold these communities back.
The book is available on Amazon
Public Engagement Associates has worked on projects where these legacy issues show up prominently, including:
In the District of Columbia
Washington D.C.’s comprehensive plan efforts in 2006 and the 2018 update focused on creating a more inclusive city. The vision for the 2006 plan was for “growing an inclusive city,” focused on developing successful neighborhoods, increasing access to education and employment, and connecting the whole city. Yet, by the time the city was ready to update the plan 12 years later, implementation had not only fallen far short of those goals, but the wealth and income divides had grown wider, and more than 20,000, predominantly lower-income, Black residents had been displaced from the early 2000s to the late 2010s. District leaders looking to implement Mayor Vincent Gray’s One City agenda from 2011 to 2014 found great difficulty deploying the right strategies to bridge the economic and social divides between Wards east of the Anacostia River (7 and 8) and the rest of the city. Even when we helped the Mayor to convene two economic development summits, one with Ward 7 residents and the other with residents of Ward 8, the priorities set there found limited fertile ground in a city accustomed to ignoring the realities “east of the river.”
In a project we did with the D.C. Bar Foundation, we facilitated meetings to help multiple pro bono legal aid organizations provide a more coordinated and systematic approach for tenants facing eviction-related, court-related proceedings. It became clear how many lower-income residents—almost always Black or Latino—faced such proceedings throughout the calendar year, primarily due to ongoing economic and financial constraints they experienced as rents rose annually.
In Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties, Maryland
In our work with the Purple Line Corridor Coalition (for a new surface transit line connecting these two local Maryland counties), we’ve seen the risks of displacement that many underserved communities face along the line (primarily immigrant, but also African American). Many of the neighborhoods throughout the corridor are poised for near-term gentrification. The coalition is working aggressively to ensure significant new affordable housing is built along the line while directly supporting dozens of BIPOC small business owners to deploy strategies to survive (and hopefully, eventually, thrive). But it’s far from guaranteed that a cross-sector coalition can prevent displacement in any significant way.
We’ve seen a similar dynamic in our engagement work with stakeholders along Prince George’s County’s Blue Line Corridor. The many working-class neighborhoods are girding themselves for significant redevelopment activity that will lead to gentrification and displacement pressures for African American residents and minority small business owners alike.
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