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A Letter to the Glendale City Council

Dear Councilmembers and City Manager,

Thank you for the progress report on the Emergency Rental Assistance Program. If more than 6,000 renters have already applied after just one round, that means at least 5,620 renters who need assistance are not going to receive it. This is hardly “going well.”

If you had a tenant on the Housing Authority board, this fact could have been brought to your attention right away, during your meeting. But that is perhaps why you are in no rush to put a tenant on this board. When I told my fellow tenants that this board meets at 3 p.m. on Tuesdays, they all started laughing. Tenants are working people and generally not available on Tuesdays at 3 p.m. “Unless they work the graveyard shift,” as one friend noted.

This is one way in which the City can set up a structure that is technically inclusive, but in a way that practically guarantees that tenants will have no voice. You might say, “Of course I’m not anti-tenant,” but continuing and defending this structure says otherwise.

This is also how structural racism works. You can be non-racist in your personal lives, but if you maintain and defend the existing power structure you are enforcing structural racism. I would be happy to explain this to you at length, together with specific immediate, intermediate, and long-range changes that can correct this problem, in case you ever set a date for this public forum on systemic racism that you have talked about.

So far, I have seen a few small gestures from the City on the subject of race and heard a pile of empty words, some of which are on the City’s website. This might come as a surprise to White people in power, who are uncomfortable talking about race, but we BIPOC – Black, Indigenous, People of Color – have heard it all before. Over and over again, and nothing changes. If you intend to do better this time, after seeing George Floyd’s murder, we need to see some action.

Discussion of structural racism needs to be a lengthy dialogue, not a one-and-done deal. This problem has plagued this country for over 400 years and will not be solved overnight. Yes, you are going to feel uncomfortable during these discussions. That’s too bad. BIPOC are made to feel our race every day; unlike you, we cannot choose to avoid it.

Another reason why your boards and commissions fail to include the diversity of this city: You are looking for people who think exactly like you and will remain obedient to you, but merely have slightly different skin tones. This is indeed a difficult task because most people with non-white skin tones have different experiences of life and therefore think differently. We say things that you do not want to hear but need to hear – things that disrupt the self-congratulatory echo chamber that you are fond of living in. That is, you are going out of your way to find the Clarence Thomases of the world, to whom you can point and say, “See, I appointed a Black man to a seat of power” – but who will change nothing.

That’s not going to work anymore. Black Lives Matter protesters in LA are chanting “Jackie Lacey Must Go!” – note that incumbent DA Jackie Lacey is a Black woman who maintains the existing power structure.

Karen Kwak

Glendale

  Karen Kwak