After the YWCA of the City of New York sold its uptown Lexington Avenue headquarters — its home for nearly a century — and moved downtown in 2005, the organization was looking to reinvent itself. Enter Danielle Moss Lee, a former teacher and administrator with a doctorate in education and decades of experience in nonprofit leadership. After taking the reins as the YWCA’s CEO in 2012, Moss Lee expanded the nonprofit’s after-school and summer programs while redoubling efforts to reach out to girls of color in underserved neighborhoods. NationSwell spoke with Moss Lee about the new direction for a 158-year-old charity at the YWCA’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
What’s the YWCA’s biggest need right now?
Ensuring the future sustainability of the organization. We’ve been out of the game for a little bit. How do you make something that’s 158 years old new again, so that people care about it and want it to continue, in terms of manpower, woman-power, volunteerism? We’ve got 2,500 kids whose lives we hope to impact in some way. It’s not all the kids in the city, but we can do our best to do our part.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I like the questions that young activists are asking, because it positions us for a different America. We can say without a doubt that all of our lives have been materially and visibly changed by the civil rights movement. But now we’re addressing issues around institutional and structural racism that I don’t think prior generations fully understood: Health services, education, the police and the banking system all really conspire together to advantage some and disadvantage others. I’m excited about these new movements. Protesting and social media campaigns are important. I hope that, at the end of this, the way we live and experience our daily lives will be similarly transformed like they were with desegregation and all of the access and opportunities that civil rights opened up.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
The best advice I’ve gotten over my career was to be someone that I would want to follow myself. It’s been important advice because it’s made me more conscious that who I am and how I show up is really important to the people around me when I’m in a leadership role. It keeps you honest and conscious.
Where do you find your inner motivation?
It’s always different, but one thing I think about is all the kids I’m not serving. I hear lots of folks in this sector say of college-access or girls’ programming: “We have 200 girls” or “We have 1,000 girls,” whatever the number is. But then when I think about how many girls actually live in this city, that’s what keeps me going.
Years ago, I was teaching a graduate course on urban youth policy, and one day the discussion got really personal. A young woman getting her master’s degree told this story of how her family’s apartment had burned down in Brooklyn. At first, friends and family were willing to house them. As the months dragged on, they went into a homeless shelter. At some point, her mother, in a desperate attempt to provide for her kids, made the decision to join the Armed Forces. The student said, “Do you realize we lived in that shelter with no adult and nobody noticed?” And then she said, “I didn’t know that there were middle-class black people. I didn’t know for a long time that something else was possible for my life.” A lot of mentoring is focused around Manhattan. Let’s be real, people aren’t going out to Coney Island (where the YWCA has programming) or other far-flung Brooklyn neighborhoods like Flatbush, East New York and Brownsville. It’s always at the convenience of the volunteer, but that’s not necessarily where the greatest need is. I can always recall that student’s voice asking, “Where were you?” — to which I didn’t really have an answer. She said, “All these civic organizations are always talking about all the work they do in the community, but I never saw them.” Nobody asked her if she wanted to go to college. That’s our job.
[ph]
What’s on your nightstand right now?
“Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently” [by Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur]. It’s really about how you develop teams with people who just think differently. I started to think about this because there’s been a lot of emphasis in some new progressive nonprofits in the sector around organizational fit and building a specific kind of culture within their organizations to drive results. There’s a value in that. But a lot of those organizations have challenges around having a diverse staff.
I was listening to two managers have a semi-debate. A young white woman was talking about two of her staff members: Her white staff member was really great with data, Excel spreadsheets and metrics — things she really valued — but this staff person wasn’t as good at relating to young people and doing outreach to families. And so while the person of color was much more relatable with the young people in the organization, it was almost like her skill set wasn’t seen as a value. We all operate predominantly with different sides of our brain. How can we tease away some of the judgment that comes with very different strengths and make sure that we’re not using this idea of “fit” really to only work with people who look like us, share our experiences and perspective? You’re probably not growing if everyone agrees with everything you say.
What’s your perfect day look like?
No bad news, and a big check in the mail — in that order.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I recently had the opportunity to have a reunion with students I previously worked with at another organization. First of all, to see them now as college-educated adults and hear all the amazing things they were doing was a reward in itself. Back when I was working that job, I was also raising my daughter and going to graduate school. I remember one of those kids saying, “I didn’t know anybody else who had a doctorate. When I came into your office and saw your degrees on the wall, I knew I couldn’t just get a bachelor’s. Tell me: What do you have to do to get a master’s degree? What’s a dissertation?”
I’m just blown away by the number of students, many first-generation college students, who have graduate degrees. That changes not just the trajectory of their lives, but also their families’ for years to come. It was nice to know that I had that kind of impact.
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Homepage photo courtesy of YWCANYC.
Tag: Race
Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
Gazing out from the columned manor of Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, S.C., visitors can admire green gardens, footbridges over burbling canals and moss-cloaked cypress trees. When the azaleas bloom each spring, one can almost forget that these 500 acres (originally, it was 2,000 acres) of Lowcountry Field were once a working plantation where dozens of slaves toiled growing rice. Staring the brightly colored flora, it’s difficult to comprehend the majestic home hasn’t always been a place of beauty and was once a site of exploitation, whippings and sexual violence.
Out of sight from the main residence, stand four extant wood-sided cabins, painted white. Here, slaves slept and ate and prayed and sang, raising families in single rooms. Amid the lovely Southern grounds, these dwellings stand as a reminder of the captive men and women who lived and died on the land they were forced to cultivate.
Across the country, these shacks and cabins are under threat. Unlike the mansions where slaveowners displayed their wealth, these dwellings are far from magnificent. Housing fieldhands, many were built from the cheapest material available. Most resemble tool sheds, which, some might say, is effectively what they were. Among the catalog of historic homes, battlegrounds and memorials worthy of recognition, these hovels rarely make the list.
That’s why Joseph McGill, a Charleston native, began sleeping overnight in these crude shelters in 2010. Now nearing 80 overnight stays in 16 states, McGill says what started as a kind of publicity stunt to draw attention to the structures has grown into a movement. After the election of our nation’s first black president, the conversation around daily violence in urban communities and the retirement of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, McGill hopes the preservation of these makeshift homes will play a part in how America comes to terms with its racist past. Without the buildings, he argues, what’s there to remind us of the institution of slavery?
“One of the things that we need to understand is that 12 of our former presidents were slaveowners, eight of whom owned slaves while they were in office. Even those who contributed to those major documents that we live by today — you know, the Constitution’s ‘We, the people.’ It should have read, ‘We, the people,’ comma, ‘here in this room,’ because otherwise that document meant nothing to you,” McGill tells NationSwell. “Even after emancipation, there were obstacles put in place to deny those recently freed people their pursuit of happiness. Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow laws and white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings. We’re still being denied opportunities to pursue that happiness. We’re dealing with the residuals of that today.”
McGill always loved history. In his prior day job at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, he safeguarded America’s iconic buildings. And on weekends, he dressed up as a solider for Civil War reenactments. (As a black man and descendant of slaves, he “fought” for the Union.) But he began to notice that African-Americans’ place in history, especially antebellum history, was often glossed over. It’s undisputed in textbooks that landowners held slaves and a bloody conflict erupted over their freedoms. But outside of, say, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, there’s little public knowledge about the everyday lives and traditions of the enslaved. Across the South, McGill felt like he had a much easier time spotting statues of Johnny Reb (a personification of Southern states) than seeing plaques about early African-American figures.
McGill slept in his first cabin — on the oak-lined Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, S.C. — in 1999, as a way to get footage for a documentary about war reenactors. He didn’t think of the meager buildings again until 2010, when he was asked to consult on the restoration of Magnolia Plantation’s slave cabins. After his second overnight stay, he realized these places had to be preserved. “When the buildings aren’t there, it’s easier to deny the people who lived in those buildings,” he says. “The fact that they exist is an opportunity to let the world know that these people not only existed, but contributed highly to the fruits of this nation.”
McGill started contacting historic sites and preservation groups across the Palmetto State and soon, up and down the entire Eastern seaboard (including several in the North, where, we often forget, slavery persisted through the late 18th century), asking to visit their slave residences. Because of their enthusiastic responses, he created an official organization — the Slave Dwelling Project — that works to protect the homes that remain standing more than a century and a half after being erected.
Soon, people started reaching out to him (both individual families researching their lineage and established historical societies hoping to broaden their offerings), wanting to join his overnight visits. “I’m seldom sleeping in these places alone anymore.”
Putting together a group isn’t always easy. McGill has to fend off ghost hunters and treasure seekers. And some private hosts worry that descendants of slaves will knock on their door asking for what McGill calls the “r-word”: reparations. And interestingly, McGill says blacks can be hesitant to participate. “There are a lot of us, being African American, that don’t even want to set foot on a plantation,” he says, explaining that they don’t want to go to a place where their family was held as chattel. “I express to them that they are part of the problem, not the solution. As long as we continue to be afraid to even want to come to these places and have the courage to tell that story, [others] are going to tell it the way they want,” referencing tour guides who say masters were kind and treated their slaves well, calling that narrative, “junk history.” Once that message is delivered and it becomes clear that these stays are about African Americans and their history — revisiting history, not revising it — most agree to participate.
Once others started accompanying him, the project’s aims subtly shifted from an external campaign for recognition to an internal dialogue about race in America. Bringing together descendants of slaves and slaveowners in the very place where one group once shackled the other inevitably prompted soul-searching and candid discussion.
One night in Stagville, a historic North Carolina plantation, for example, young black men spoke by glinting lantern-light of the anger, fear and frustration they live with. In Mississippi, one female college student asked McGill if he had ever met a descendant of slaveowners who is proud of his family’s history. On South Carolina’s Daufuskie Island, a young black man, whose family had been enslaved there, stared at a wall built of tabby concrete, made from broken oyster shells, sand and ash. “I’m allergic to oysters,” he said. “I wonder if my ancestors were.” And in the coachman’s quarters on a Hillsborough, N.C., plantation, a 100-year-old matriarch told stories about her ancestors, who had been born into bondage on the property.
McGill’s stays are not just for African Americans; whites who want to revisit their history as a way of making amends often join him. Prinny Anderson, a leadership coach descended from Virginia slaveowners, has joined McGill on 22 stays to date — all within driving distance of her Durham, N.C., home. When descendants of slaves are sharing their family history, she’s largely silent, preferring to listen and absorb. But when the group is largely white, she says she’s an “instigator,” asking critical questions.
Anderson’s most moving trip was a visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s hilltop estate in Charlottesville, Va., where she has family connections. She fell asleep in the basement (where the slave workplaces were constructed, hidden from sight), thinking about her distant cousins, white and black, and what it meant to revisit their shared home.
“That really felt like getting the blessing of my ancestors. You came home and slept where your great auntie slept,” Anderson says. “Nobody who lived in the big house during that day ever came down to the [slave] quarters and slept on the floor. In that sense, it was like crossing the bridge.” Spending the night there, it was like Anderson had atoned for something.
Part of the Slave Dwelling Project is to recover slaves’ individual narratives, finding personal stories amidst the black mass in chains. “I think the general perception is that enslaved people were brought here for the ability to do grunt work or heavy lifting: the physical labor. But there’s a lot more to their skills and abilities,” McGill says. From the engineering feat of “taming those cedar swamps” to growing rice and constructing building frames, ironwork, bricks and tools, slaves were vital to the plantation’s production, arguably much more so than any master lounging in the big house.
While the conversation at these places steeped in history may be the most candid talks you’ll hear these days on the subject of race, McGill knows it’s not the only forum for the issue. If anything, he hopes the talks will overflow into guests’ neighborhoods and university dorms. And there, discussion will be led by people who are better informed of their place in the long march for racial equality.
Above all, McGill wants his guests to remember that black history does not begin at a Montgomery bus stop in 1955 and end at a Memphis hotel room in 1968. It spans lifetimes, back to the auction block and long past when Obama leaves office. The recent conflict at the University of Missouri, which ended in the president’s removal, did not begin when these students arrived on campus or even when the school was ordered to integrate by a court order in 1950. Anyone who has listened to Billie Holiday croon “Strange Fruit” knows Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance featuring dancers in Black Panther uniforms was not the first to push the envelope. These victories, whether from the Civil Rights movement or Black Lives Matter, all date back to one common source: slavery, a period we cannot forget, McGill insists.
“Historically, these are some times we have not yet overcome. There’s still things that we have not yet dealt with, rooted in the institution of slavery,” McGill says. “If we should let these buildings go away, then we are going to allow this nation to continually perpetuate that false narrative. We shouldn’t allow that to stand. We shouldn’t let that narrative carry the day. The record needs to be corrected.”
Through McGill’s work, the authentic story is now being told.
Correction: This article originally stated that Magnolia Plantation was 390 acres in size and that slaves worked in cotton fields and later on as freed sharecroppers. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.
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Fighting Prejudice in America: One Woman’s Battle to Change the Rhetoric Surrounding Race
Can a person, by their very existence in this country, be illegal? Or is an action to cross a border without proper documentation the law-breaking act? On the flip side, does using the terms “illegal immigrants” or “anchor babies” mean a person’s entire viewpoint is clouded by racism? Broadly speaking, are we all responsible for an unequal system that justifies racial profiling, even if we don’t overtly employ the practice ourselves?
Race is a fraught topic in American politics. There are no easy answers to its age-old questions, and the discussion is all too easily derailed by accusations of ignorance or racism. Rinku Sen, president and executive director of the New York-based nonprofit Race Forward, is attempting to change the dialogue about race in the United States. Bringing her immigrant background and a journalist’s reliance on facts to the conversation, her seminars and stories in Colorlines, Race Forward’s daily news publication, teach people to see the structural inequalities — in education, law enforcement, housing and employment — that are an everyday reality for minority populations in America.
“People have a really narrow definition of what racism is. In most Americans’ minds, racism is always individual, it’s intentional and it’s overt. The thing is, that racism takes on an astonishing number of forms. Many of them are unconscious, and they’re systemic and they’re hidden,” she says. “The question that we start with isn’t, ‘Who’s a racist?’ The question that we start with is, ‘What’s causing racial inequity?’”
Sen’s family arrived in the States from India in 1972, when she was only five years old. They settled in Ellenville, a small community in upstate New York. “There were no other Indian immigrants. It was a really white existence,” she recalls. “In order to survive and make it through, I had to suppress most notions of myself as a person of color.”
That self-effacement of her ethnicity lasted until her sophomore year at Brown University, when a racial incident the first week of school in 1984 sparked her interest in activism. “My friends wanted me to go to the rally [the day after the incident], and I said no. They said, ‘Rinku, you’re not a girl anymore; you’re a woman now. And you’re not a minority; you’re a person of color,’” Sen says. “The next day I went to the rally, and for the first time since we had immigrated, I felt like I was with people that I belonged with.”
Sen translated that energy — and her newfound pride in her culture — into three decades of work focused on race. For half that time, she worked as a community organizer before beginning to feel that her work focused on the wrong areas. “Even though I was proud of many of the things that we had won locally, I felt like we had really lost influence on big issue areas: policing, education, housing,” she says.
She became more involved in Race Forward, where she was already working as communications director, because so many issues seemed to link back to structural inequalities based on race. After attending journalism school to hone her ability to “change the way the public thinks about something,” Sen instituted her theories of social progressive action — focusing on equity, rather than diversity.
“Diversity only speaks to variety and the kinds of people that are in the room. It doesn’t actually speak to power and what people are able to do once they are in the room,” she says. “We are in a strategy where we really have to reboot how the movement talks about and thinks about racism.”
Can a Video Game Really Reduce Racial Bias?
As the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown stir sentiments over race relations and social divide in America, one game is aiming to discuss the subject through a mathematical model from more than 40 years ago.
Multimedia online storyteller Vi Hart and game developer Nicky Case created a game that’s an “explorable explanation,” looking at how segregation easily creeps up using a simple game of shapes. Parables of the Polygons turns Thomas Schelling’s 1971 mathematical model of neighborhood segregation — demonstrating how small preferences among individuals for neighbors to be like them can transform into big social divides.
“We never thought our project could get more timely than when we started,” Hart tells CityLab. “Yet it just keeps getting more relevant.”
Using personified polygons, players learn Schelling’s model by interacting with different shapes in different communities and “how harmless choices can make a harmful world,” as the game states in the beginning. It introduces the polygons as “50% Triangles, 50% percent Squares, and 100% slight shapist. But only slight! In fact, every polygon prefers being in a diverse crowd.”
Sarcasm aside, the game points out that even with the preference that 33 percent or more neighbors (aka, shapes) looking like them, the polygons are actually not happy until divisions are pretty drastic. When a player increases individual bias, things get even more divided while lowering the bias in a community that’s already segregated doesn’t change much either.
“In a world where bias ever existed, being unbiased isn’t enough! We’re gonna need active measures,” the game explains.
Which is where Hart and Case diverge from Schelling’s model to prove that we can reverse the effects of segregation through encouraging more individual “anti-bias,” as CityLab explains. In a community that begins with 33 percent individual bias, if shapes demand to move if less than 10 percent and more than 80 percent of their neighbors look the same, the world becomes more inclusive.
“There’s a weird mindset that people have, that by giving special consideration to including someone who is a woman, or who is black, is somehow sexist or racist by itself,” Hart tells CityLab. “There’s no need to feel guilty for seeing people for who they are. That’s how we’re going to make change.”
The game is meant to illustrate how people can affect change even as they feel unnerved by taking the first “anti-bias” step.
“All it takes is a change in the perception of what an acceptable environment looks like,” the game poignantly points out. “So, fellow shapes, remember that it’s not about triangles versus squares. It’s about deciding what we want the world to look like, and settling for no less.”
That’s a lesson we can learn in shaping our own society.
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Can the Use of Virtual Reality Reduce Racial Bias?
How can you change a person’s view of race? Try changing the color of his or her own skin.
Researchers discovered that making white people feel that they are wearing brown skin is associated with a decrease in racial bias. Researchers Lara Maister, Mel Slater, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Manos Tsakiris write in Trends in Cognitive Science, “Ownership of an outgroup body has been found to be associated with a significant reduction in implicit biases against that outgroup.”
How did researchers convince study participants that they were in an “outgroup” or minority body?
In the first technique — the “Rubber Hand Illusion” — participants watched a screen that showed a brown-skinned rubber hand being touched while their own hands were touched in a similar way. In the second, called the “Enfacement Illusion,” white participants watched a video in which the face of a dark-skinned person was being stroked with cotton, while having their own faces touched in a similar fashion. In both of these scenarios, test subjects showed signs of reduced racial biases.
In the third experiment, “Full Body Illusions,” participants played virtual reality computer games in which their avatars either had brown, white or purple skin. Those that played the game with brown-skinned avatars demonstrated reduced bias against black people in a subsequent test, while those who’d played the game with white or purple skin showed no change.
Researcher Slater tells the Huffington Post, “Generally using these techniques, it is possible to give two sides of a conflict an experience of what it is like to be a member of the ‘other side,’ This should help to build empathy.”
Unfortunately, real world applications have yet to be developed. But in light of all the recent civil unrest in this country, organizations such as police departments and schools could definitely benefit from these findings and any subsequent usage of them — leaving a lasting impact on this nation.
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