The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Mapping Systemic Racism in the Diocese of Long Island

The Episcopal Diocese of Long Island will soon have a new and groundbreaking tool for helping its congregations, leaders, and people grapple with the pernicious issue of systemic racism. This public, data-grounded, map-based platform will reside on the diocesan website and be available for free to all who want to engage systemic racism in their neighborhoods.

The idea for this project was born when the diocese’s Canon for Ministry Support, the Rev. Canon Claire Woodley, attended a FaithX webinar entitled, “I Can’t Breathe: Mapping Systemic Racism in Your Community” last November. According to Canon Woodley, she immediately saw how this would fit perfectly into the diocese’s evolving approach to engaging systemic racism strategically rather than reactively and incrementally. Or as Canon Woodley put it…

“Spurred on by the death of George Floyd, the demonstrations in Brooklyn, throughout Long Island, and around the world, our diocese came to realize that unless and until we can develop a clear understanding of how systemic racism works in daily lived reality in our neighborhoods, we’ll just keep throwing money at it and trying tactical changes. 

This kind of learning, seeing the “red lines” and visually experiencing the specific impacts of underfunded schools, predatory lending, and other embedded structural problems helps us move past the divisions and into relationship. Seeing where our people live, move, and what limits their being, is powerful and can lead us into authentic transformative action as a whole Diocese moving towards wholeness.”

[Read more…]

Mapping Systemic Racism in Rural America

A Reflection and a Webinar

by Ken Howard

Click here to register for the webinar

Why is FaithX offering webinars on systemic racism?
I thought y’all did data-grounded missional discernment and demographic mapping.

We at FaithX get this question often these days. 

And my own first, somewhat snarky response is usually, “Exactly!”

But I then offer a somewhat longer and more serious explanation: That we at FaithX felt we had to bring our expertise and experience to bear on Systemic Racism because it is the frequently-unnoticed ‘base map’ underlying all the work that we have done since we launched in late 2016.

Of course, the more obvious thing revealed in visual form by our mapping was the clear, continuing, and pernicious segregation of race and ethnicity. But as we dug down deeper into various issues affecting neighborhoods, we also saw the impacts of systemic racism visually revealed there as well. We saw historical evidence of how in places where “redlining” was imposed, actions taken in the aftermath of the Great Depression had reverberated down the decades with impacts that continue today. Not just an almost one-to-one relationship between official redlining in the 30’s to the unofficial patterns of segregation we see today, but a relationship between the patterns of racial and ethnic predominance today and a host of negative impacts from chronic-diseases, to access to health care and insurance, to local government educational spending, to educational attainment. And we believed that the visual evidence that was so emotionally convincing to us that it would not only be equally compelling to others but would define for them concrete issues in their own communities that they could take concrete actions to address. Rural America may not have experienced official “redlining,” but the presence and the impacts of Systemic Racism are as real there as anywhere else.

[Read more…]