BRATTLEBORO — We support Selectboard members David Schoales and Brandie Starr, who first brought up the issue of active recruitment of people of color for town jobs here in Brattleboro at the May 2 Selectboard meeting. We also encourage a broader dialogue to recognize and understand systemic racism and racist push-back in our town.
Our position is best stated by paraphrasing Mr. Schoales, who during the May 2 meeting did a very good job of explaining why concerted effort is necessary to ensure a diverse town workforce.
Justice and diversity will not simply descend upon us if we wait long enough; racial injustice against people of color in this country is so deeply and structurally ingrained that addressing it requires deliberate action by individuals and public institutions.
We should, as Mr. Schoales stated, “purposefully and consciously” seek qualified candidates of color for town offices; it's not about meeting quotas but about casting a wider net to find applicants that represent the diversity of our community.
We also believe that misconceptions about racism often hinder our efforts to increase diversity.
A useful definition of racism is prejudice combined with power. Put another way, prejudice exists in many forms, but racism can be directed only against people from historically and currently oppressed groups.
Racism reflects a structurally created and maintained form of prejudice. To quote the Huffington Post, “At its core, racism is a system in which a dominant race benefits off the oppression of others - whether they want to or not.”
Here in Vermont, people of color have been treated with blatant unfairness in many ways. As recently as the 1970s, Abenaki women underwent forced sterilization in Vermont; the incarceration rate of African Americans in our state is one of the highest in the country, despite an extremely small population size; migrant workers of Latinx descent in Vermont face inhumane working conditions and the threat of illegal detentions.
Some examples of systemic racism are extreme and clearly intentional, such as Ku Klux Klan–style demonstrations of hatred or violence by whites against those of another race.
Others are subtle and pervasive, such as subconscious or implicit bias, small acts of aggression or dismissal, or unchecked assumptions about people of color.
Both forms exist in Vermont, and both serve to uphold an underlying structure of discrimination and inequality. As stated in The Commons, 100 percent of the 191 Brattleboro town employees are white, despite 9.6 percent of the population identifying as persons of color. This is a symptom of ongoing systemic racism.
We are seeing some progress towards addressing systemic racism in our state, and we hope this will continue.
We are encouraged by the recent passage of the Racial Justice Reform Bill (H.308) by the state Legislature with the support of more than 30 Vermont organizations.
We look forward to the governor signing H.308 and to supporting its implementation here in Brattleboro.
The Commons also highlighted the important work being done around the state by Curtiss Reed and the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity, and we hope the Selectboard will take advantage of this expertise.
We commend the Selectboard for having a discussion about the lack of diversity in our town leadership, and look forward to continued dialogue about how best to confront this reality. We encourage the board to commit to an examination of employment policies and workplace culture in town government in order to understand and correct barriers that may exist to attracting and retaining people of color. We also hope the board will reach out to people-of-color-led organizations with experience on these issues and make sure they are invited to be part of the conversation.
We understand that racism is a hard issue to acknowledge and navigate - especially for white people - and it can be awkward sometimes to discuss it. We hope this letter can serve as encouragement to continue the discussion, as it is only through open and honest dialogue that we will be able to continue the healing process.