WMU-Cooley hosts speaker on racial inequality, vigil for Charleston victims

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– LEGAL NEWS PHOTOS BY CYNTHIA PRICE


By Cynthia Price
Legal News

It would be difficult to find an academic more engaged with his or her research topic than Timothy Ready is with the subject of racial inequality and its consequences.

Ready, Director of Western?Michigan University (WMU) Lewis Walker Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnic Relations, spoke Tuesday to a roomful of students and faculty at WMU-Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s Grand Rapids campus.

Discussing mass incarceration rates in the United States, Ready said, “We’re ranked worst in the world overall, but if you look at black communities, particularly low-income black communities, we’re off the scale. How can we allow this to happen? How can we intervene to create change?”

As Director of the Walker Institute, Ready, who received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University, has not only designed a program for a minor in race and ethnic relations and developed WMU’s Office
for Service Learning, but also hosted community events and lecture series, and participated in local and statewide initiatives to address racial, ethnic and income disparities Initially interested in medical anthropology and health disparities, particularly among Latino populations, his background includes serving as Research Director for the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame; as the Senior Program Officer for the National Research Council, directing studies on the education of minority and disadvantaged students; and as Assistant Vice President for Community and Minority Programs at the Washington, D.C.-based Association of American Medical Colleges, including work on Project 3000 by 2000, a national diversity campaign for U.S. medical schools.

His biography says, “My goal is to engage in research and to use research-based information to promote community well-being and the common good.”

In his brief talk Ready presented a number of statistical charts tracking the negative outcomes associated with racial and income inequality. As just one of many examples he gave from his own research and that of others, Ready noted that on the Michigan school ranking chart, 76% of the time there was a correlation between low-ranked Kalamazoo County schools and the schools’ free and reduced lunch participants percentage, and oft-used poverty indicator.

The same statistical patterns emerge from studies on health, which is where Ready started out — his first research was on the health and health care of agricultural migrant workers in Michigan — and in the incarceration rates, as mentioned above.

When Associate Dean Tracey Brame asked about the impact of incidents such as the shooting of nine people in Charleston last week and the role of the stress inherent in facing discrimination every day, Ready responded, “The issues with regard to racial equity are really troubling. There are these high profile incidents that are finally breaking through people’s consciousness, but even concerned people are not attuned to all the indignities and slights, the thousand little stressors associated with race that African-Americans face all the time. Of course that has a tremendous effect on health, and I think about this as a need for cultural change.”

Ready does have a proposed solution. “I worked in Washington D.C. for 22 years, and I’m not very optimistic that Washington is ever going to get it right. But working at the local level with a communitarian sense that we are all part of one community, these folks are our neighbors, getting beyond the essentially dehumanizing rhetoric by working with people who share your community... I think that has the potential to work.

“It’s in everyone’s enlightened self interest, because it’s damn expensive to put people away, for example, so getting together with your neighbors and working on these things is not only the right thing to do but it’s also the smart thing to do,” he continued.

He recommended reading The Spirit Level by Katie Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, which is subtitled Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.

At Ready’s presentation, Gwyne Thomas, Vice-President of WMU-Cooley’s Black Law Students Association (BLSA), noted that even today very few institutions are comfortable talking about racism.

The following day Thomas and BLSA hosted an on-campus candlelight vigil for the victims of the Charleston violence. About 20 people showed up at the campus event Wednesday evening, and some of them plus other Cooley students joined a community-wide vigil at Rosa Parks Circle right after.

Thomas, who spoke briefly and prayed at the vigil, issued the following statement: “It is disheartening that our nation has become so accustomed to gun and racial violence... that we no longer flinch when the media alerts us of tragic events. We cannot allow that to be the case in the instance of the horrible tragedy in the killing of nine black members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of which was a state senator. As a country that has fought tooth and nail for freedom..., we are somehow oblivious to the racial bondage we have never quite overcome.  June 17, 2015, is a day that will not be forgotten... As we continue to grapple with the events in Charleston, we must remember that unrecognized and often covert racial tensions exist to this day...”

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