This Was Not a Civil Rights Statement. This was Anti-Social Behavior

 

On Friday, December 31,2020, I did the rare thing and check my private email on my phone to see if Dominos had gotten my order for my department's pizza party and I got an email from Sabra Lynne notifying me that the mural had been defaced. 

I decided immediately that we needed to go to the media.  We needed to make a statement.  Over the past several years I have seen news stories on the vandalism of the Castleman statue, the King Louis statue, and the Clark statue on the Belevedere.   I am mixed on what to make of those previous acts of vandalism.

However, it is my opinion that Metro Government has essentially given those acts of vandalism a pass or a license to express anger given the current state of race relations in light of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor deaths.   

Concession: Yes Louisville Has a Race Relations Issue. 

As a professional social worker and a December 17, 2008 graduate of the University of Louisville School of Urban and Public Affairs, I have been interested in race relations for most of three decades.  

Warning: I am going to get egg-head here but there is a point to it

The statistics cannot be denied, there is a slanting of the negative on minorities and there have been different descriptors to explain it.  In my MSW days in the early 1990's it was called "Institutional Racism."  For most of this decade, it has been called "White Privilege."  In the past year, it had been called "Systemic Racism." 

My thinking on race relations has been greatly influenced by the "Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis" by Holzer, Kain, and Ihlanfeldt, which focuses on how African Americans are spatially disadvantaged in ease of getting to jobs.  The "West End" area of Louisville Kentucky fits this theory.  It is more challenging for the residents in this area to get to where the jobs are at the edges of the metropolitan area.  

That being said, the growing economic sector in Louisville is Internet retail.  Large warehouses have been built at the edges of the area to take advantage of the economic locational advantage of UPS World Point. World Port has been a "Growth Pole" of development.  

 Do residents in the West End have ease of access to these job opportunities?   That depends on who you talk to?   

I do think Louisville has an inherent race relations issue in the way economic opportunity is planned in the metro.   My theory is that progress can be greatly made in both race relations and growth of the Louisville Metro economy by facilitating at least few of these warehouses in the West End that can provide more job opportunities.  That allows for the improvement of the economy of the West End upon which can be a spring-board to address the other issues such as the food desert and the dearth of hospitals in that area. 

Therefore, I think that the powers that exist in Louisville need to connect economic development with race relations harnessing the locational advantage of the shipping sector. I know that this is not as glamorous as Silicon Valley or the Delhi-Mumbai Economic Development Corridor, but it is real in what Louisville has now.  Theoretically, as time goes by, the economic activity in the West End should diversify with positive economic externalities for more and more individuals, especially those of color.  That is what Mayor Fischer, Louisville Forward, and the Metro Council should be doing. 

Going back to the defacing of the mural.  I doubt any of the parties who did this will read this, or probably see my statements on TV stations, but what they did is not an intelligent, civil-rights statement of any redeeming value given the state of affairs.  It is an immature act of anti-social behavior, and any such graffiti of public art going forth needs to be refuted as such. .