Rethinking Thanksgiving Traditions:Β A Grateful Gathering
The prolonged challenges of Covid have led many individuals and organizations to examine their core values.Β Consideration of what is most important evokes fundamental life-style changes, moving toward living in harmony.Β
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At The Mountain, striving to live ourΒ core values, we are examining roles and responsibilities related to Thanksgiving traditions.Β Please join us for aΒ Grateful Gathering, a long weekend event Wednesday, Nov.Β 24 through Sunday, Nov.Β 28.Β This intergenerational event will include activities like making corn husk dolls, and shared meals featuring traditional, locally farmed, and ethically-sourced-food.Β Learn more and register here.
On October 15, 2021, at the invitation of Congresswoman Maxine Waters (yes, the Maxine Waters!), law professor and acclaimed author Sheryll Cashin testified before the Subcommittee on Housing, Community Development, and Insurance on Friday at noon about exclusionary zoning and what to do about it. She led with her book, White Space, Black Hood, and her theory of residential caste. She submitted the following testimony that is now part of the Congressional record.
~~~
Good afternoon. As a law professor, author, and former White House staffer in the Clinton Administration, I have spent nearly three decades grappling with the issue of US residential segregationβits origins, persistence, and calamitous effects in producing racial and economic inequality. My most recent book, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, reflects these decades of examination and analysis. It argues that we have a system of residential caste, in which government over-invests and excludes in affluent white spaces, and disinvests, contains, and preys on people in high-poverty Black neighborhoods. These are the extremes of American residential caste. But everyone who cannot afford to buy their way into high-opportunity neighborhoods is harmed by this system. People of all colors who are trapped in concentrated poverty are harmed the most. They are systemically denied meaningful opportunity for social mobility, no matter how hard they work to escape. In the book, I show that residential caste is animated by three anti-Black processes: boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance.
Boundary maintenance is a polite phrase for intentional state action to create or maintain racial segregation. The dominant response to at least six million Black βGreat migrantsβ moving north and west to escape Jim Crow in the twentieth century was to contain them in densely populated Black neighborhoods and to cut those neighborhoods off from essential public and private investment that was and is regularly rained down on majority white areas. In addition to racially-restrictive covenants, mob violence, mortgage redlining, and racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals, exclusionary zoning was a key tool for creating and insulating predominantly white neighborhoods. Exclusionary zoning was first sanctioned by the US Supreme Court in 1926 in the case of Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty. The Court explicitly endorsed the idea that certain uses of land, like duplexes, were βparasiticβ on single-family homes and the people who lived there. In ensuing decades, thousands of new suburban governments would form, enabling middle- and upper-class whites to wield the zoning power to exclude certain types of housing, particularly rental apartments, and therefore exclude unwelcome populations. Fast-forward to today and where high levels of Black segregation persist, researchers have found that it was actively promoted by zoning laws that restricted density and by high levels of anti-Black prejudice, particularly in places with large numbers of Blacks with lower incomes and education levels than most whites. And, according to a stunning, geographically mapped analysis produced by the New York Times, β[i]t is illegal on 75 percent of the residential land in many American cities to build anything other than a detached single-family homeβ (emphasis added). That figure is even higher in many suburbs and newer Sun Belt cities.
This hearing is about exclusionary zoning, which necessarily concerns local zoning power. But it is important to recognize the singular, outsized role of the federal government in creating and continuing Americaβs separate and unequal residential landscape. The federal government mandated redlining, marking Black neighborhoods as βhazardousβ and cutting Black residents out of its largest wealthy building subsidies (HOLC, FHA, and Veterans Administration-insured mortgage lending). The federal government, through its mortgage underwriting rules, insisted that lenders insert racially restrictive covenants in deeds. The federal government spent billions for βurban renewalβ to displace Black occupied housing and paid cities to build high-rise public housing that intentionally placed Black and white tenants in separate and unequal housing projects. These policies created iconic Black βghettosβ that exacerbated white flight and resistance to having Black neighbors. The federal government paid for and acquiesced in an interstate highway program laid to create racial barriers in cities and facilitate easy exit from cities to majority white suburbs. (For a detailed overview of this federal history see Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream, Chapter Three.)
The federal government still invests in segregation. To date, George Romney, Sen. Mitt Romneyβs father, is the only HUD secretary to have pressured and penalized communities for exclusionary zoning laws and for refusing to build affordable, non-segregated housing. For decades, both HUD and local governments regularly violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 requirement that communities βaffirmatively furtherβ fair housing. For decades, HUD has distributed about $5.5 billion annually in grants for community development, parceled among more than 1,000 local jurisdictions nationwide, with no meaningful accountability for promoting inclusive, integrated housing. The federal government also continues to concentrate poverty through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, its largest subsidy for affordable housing. Each year, the LIHTC funnels about $10 billion for affordable housing construction, and only seventeen percent of those units get built in high-opportunity neighborhoods with high-performing schools, low crime, and easy access to jobs. That keeps Americans who need affordable housing concentrated in the same low-opportunity areas.
This history and present of federally-backed segregation inform the legal and moral case for congressional action to disrupt exclusionary zoning and residential caste. Intentional segregation of Black people in the twentieth century shaped development and living patterns for everyone and put in place an infrastructure for promoting and maintaining segregation that lives on. Racial steering by realtors who nudge homebuyers into segregated spaces; discrimination in mortgage lending; exclusionary zoning; a government-subsidized affordable housing industrial complex that concentrates poverty, local school boundaries that encourage segregation; plus continued resistance to integration by many but not all white Americansβall are forms of racial boundary maintenance today.
The negative effects of systemic exclusion are clear. As demonstrated by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and others, segregated communities tend to rate low on social mobility for poor children. And the gap in life expectancy between Blacks and whites in very segregated cities can rise to more than twenty years because of increased exposure to trauma, lead poisoning, allergens in poor-quality housing, fast-food βswamps,β and healthy-food deserts. Meanwhile, residents of exclusionary affluent spaces rise on the benefits of concentrated advantages, from excellent schools and infrastructure to job-rich social networks to easily accessible healthy food. Less understood is the fact that the government-created segregation facilitates poverty-free affluent white space by concentrating poverty elsewhere.
In considering policy options that Congress might pursue, it is important to acknowledge that the main reason exclusionary zoning persists is the vested interests and expectations of people who live in poverty-free havens. Government at all levels has catered to these expectations. And again, another reason for persistent exclusion, at least in some places, is high levels of anti-Black prejudice. In California, a so-called blue state where ostensibly liberal Democrats are in charge, despite a grave housing crisis and abundant problems with homelessness, the state was only able to take the baby step of opening single-family neighborhoods to duplexes. So, if Congress wants to disrupt a near century of exclusionary zoning, serious pressure and accountability are required. Congress and the executive branch also must atone for the federal legacy of promoting segregation.
It bears remembering that, in the face of Southern massive resistance to school integration, school districts did not begin to desegregate with alacrity until the Johnson Administration threatened to withhold federal education funds pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (or they were ordered to do so by a federal court). I recommend not just spending incentives to deregulate or repeal exclusionary zoning ordinances but serious pressure on localities to adopt locally designed inclusionary zoning ordinancesβlike the highly successful mandatory ordinance Montgomery County, Maryland, has had in place for five decades. Because Montgomery County requires that all new development above a certain size include affordable units and sets aside some of those new units for residents of public housing, this extremely diverse, wealthy suburban county has no pockets of concentrated poverty, and poor children have more access to integrated, well-resourced schools.
In conclusion, I recommend that federal housing and community development and infrastructure funds should be conditioned on localities adopting inclusionary zoning ordinances and/or actually βaffirmatively furthering fair housing.β
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Watch Sheryll Cashin give her testimony.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwsnvsvZirU?start=930]
About the Author
Sheryll Cashin is an acclaimed author who writes about the US struggle with racism and inequality. Her books have been nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, and an Editorsβ Choice in the New York Times Book Review. Cashin is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University and an active member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. A law clerk to US Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, Cashin also worked in the Clinton White House as an advisor on community development in inner-city neighborhoods. She is a contributing editor for Politico Magazine and currently resides in Washington, DC, with her husband and twin sons. Follow her at sheryllcashin.com and on Twitter (@sheryllcashin).
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The 14th Dalai Lama suggests that “True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason.” His Holiness teaches that the heart of compassion is to genuinely want for an end to suffering for all sentient beings. Many of the world’s respected religious paths have compassion as a tenet. We’ll explore some of these teachings this month.
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On July 16, 2020, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted rules to establish 988 as the new, nationwide, three-digit phone number for Americans in crisis to connect with suicide prevention and mental health crisis counselors. If you or someone you know is struggling right now, share this number so you and/or they can get the support you/they need.
– With care, Rev. Wendy and Rev. Lynn
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Rev Diane Dowgiert is accepting nominations for the Joan and Joe Moore Award.Β Details on the criteria for nominations (which include work at the Regional and Denominational level) and the nomination submissions form can be found here.
We accept nominations for this prestigious award until December 1.
Miracles represent freedom from fear. βAtoningβ means βundoing.β The undoing of fear is an essential part of the Atonement value of miracles. T-1.1.26:1-3
There is nothing to fear because God loves you unconditionally. It is the undoing of our fear of Godβs wrath for our separation from God which is the meaning of atonement. All it takes is a choice for the world of the spirit instead of the world of the ego. Jesus taught that the way to the kingdom is to βlove as I have loved.β As kids say, βEasy peasy.β
In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step eleven, that we improve our conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation. This is a choice we have and actions we take. Do it or not, God is always there for us. All we have to do is listen.
In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning and this search takes us ultimately to the unconditional love of God which is found within us in our hearts as our natural inheritance once we get past the fear. When we do this, it seems like a miracle.
Today, we bypass the fear deep in our hearts to find the unconditional love of God which the Universalists have taught is there if we pay attention to it. Setting aside the fear we find the love of God which is our natural inheritance.
Iβve got an old mule and her name is Sal
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal
Sheβs a good old worker and a good old pal
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal
Weβve hauled some barges in our day
Filled with lumber, coal, and hay
And every inch of the way we know
From Albany to Buffalo
Chorus:
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for weβre coming to a town
And youβll always know your neighbor
And youβll always know your pal
If youβve ever navigated on the Erie Canal.
βThomas S. Allen, 1905. Original lyrics written to commemorate the 15 years of construction on the Erie Canal.
The Erie Canal opened October 26, 1825. Few innovations in American history had such immediate and far reaching consequences as the public works projectonce derided as Clintonβs Folly.
A canal linking Lake Eriewith the Hudson River at the New York capital of Albany was first proposed by Thomas Eddy, a businessman with interests in a failing canal digging companyand sponsored in the New York State Assembly by Jonas Platt, leader of the Federalists in the Senate. To gain bi-partisan support for the ambitious project, Platt proposed a commission carefully balanced between leading figures in both his party and the Democratic-Republicans.
On March 13, 1810 the Erie Canal Commission was created with the assignment to do preliminary feasibility studies, explore possible routes, and come up with plans to finance what would be by far the biggest engineering project yet undertaken in North America. Gouverneur Morris, a distinguished former Federalist Senator and one of the principal authors of the Constitution, was named as President. The other commissioners were Federalists Eddy, Stephen Van Rensselaer, and William North plus Democratic Republicans DeWitt Clinton, Simeon DeWitt, and Peter Buell Porter.
DeWitt Clinton. the man most responsible for guiding the Erie Canal to reality, in a portrait by George Catlin.The driving force on the Commission quickly became Clinton with strong support, despite their different political connections of Van Rensselaer, the heir of the greatestof the Patroon dynasties of semi-feudal landownersin Up State. The Commissioners quickly went to work and several of them explored the route as far as possible by water and on an arduous cross-country trek via unimproved roads and trails. Clinton kept a detailed diaryof his adventures on this trip.
The following March the Commission issued a report that dismissed competing plans for a possible canal to Lake Ontario and proposed that a totally manmade channel be dug straight west from Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. Morris dissented proposing instead a physically impossible schemeto deepen existing rivers and have Lake Erie βempty into them to fill them.β Little wonder that his leadership on the Commission was by-passed. Perhaps most importantly, the commission acknowledged that the project was too big to be financed by private capitaland recommended public financing by the State.
In April 1811 the Legislature responded by authorizing the Commission to take all necessary steps to finance the entire project and granted $15,000 to begin its work. It also added Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston to the body. Fulton had launched a commercially viable steamboat service between New York City and Albany with Livingston, a member of a powerful political family, as his partner in 1807 which had spurred interest in a western canal. Both men were Democratic-Republicans, giving Clinton extra clout in addition to lending their enormous prestige to the project. Fulton would actively work with Clinton on engineering aspectsof the project until his death in 1815.
The War of 1812 ground progress to a halt. Van Rensselaer was appointed General incommand of the New York Militia. The frontier with Canada around Buffalobecame a major theater of operations in the war and was a jumping-off point for attempted invasions by both sides. The lack of reliable transportation to bring artillery, arms, powder, and supplies to the front crippled American efforts and provided a national defense justification for a canal.
Meanwhile Clinton, then serving as Mayor of New York City and Lt. Governor, was reluctantly draftedby a dissident Democratic-Republican rump and backed by the Federalists to run for President against James Madison in 1812. It was a close-fought election and Clinton took 47% of the popular vote while losing by a wide margin in the Electoral College. The run strained his relations with loyal Democratic-Republicans, notably the powerful Livngstons.
At the conclusion of the war, Clinton revived interest in the project by holding a large public meeting in the New York City. He promised residents that the project would bring about a boom:
The city will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations. And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city.
In 1816 the Legislature reformed the Commission with explicit authorization to supervise acquisition ofland and the actual constructionof the project. Clinton was named the new President and Van Rensselaer, who now abandoned the dying Federalists to become a Clintonian Republican, were held over. Joseph Ellicott, an agent for the powerful Holland Land Company which donated 10,000 acres of land to the project; Myron Holley, a state Assemblyman and political ally; and Samuel Young, who had written the influential book A Treatise on Internal Navigation: A Comprehensive Study of Canals in Great Britain and Holland.
In 1816 outgoing President James Madison vetoed a bill that would have contributed Federal funds to the construction. Madison supported using Federal funds for internal improvements but doubted that barring an authorizing amendment to the Constitution that the government had the authority. But there must also have been satisfaction to slapping back at Clinton.
1817 proved to be a big, break-out year for the canal. Clinton became the beneficiary when Daniel D. Tompkins was elected as James Monroeβs Vice President. Despite the bitter opposition of the growing Tammany organization in New York City, Clinton was easily elected to serve out Tompkinsβs term as Governor. With his support in April Legislature created a Canal Fund which was authorized to spend $7 million for construction of a canal 363 miles long, 40 feet wide, and four feet deep. Commissioners of the Canal Fund was made up of the state Constitutional officers.
The route of the Canal across Upstate New York from the Hudson River to Lake Erie.Construction began on July 4 at Rome. The first 15 miles to Utica took two years to build due to the difficulty in felling trees through the virgin forest, excavating and removing earth by hand. An innovativestump puller was used, but at best three man crews with mules could only build a mile of canal and adjacent tow path in a year of arduous labor.
Also holding up construction was the fact that in the entire United States there was not one trained civil engineer. The surveyorswho had laid out the route, James Geddes and Benjamin Wright were in over-all charge of construction and learned by doing. They were aided by Canvass White, a 27-year-old amateur engineer who traveled to England at his own expense to study canal construction there and Nathan Roberts, a mathematics teacher. Despite the inexperience they laid out an impressive record of achievement, carrying the βCanal up the Niagara escarpment at Lockport, maneuvered it onto a towering embankment to cross over Irondequoit Creek, spanned the Genesee River on an awesome aqueduct, and carved a route for it out of the solid rock between Little Falls and Schenectady...β according to Canal historian Peter L. Bernstein.
The eventual arrival of thousands of Scotch-Irish laborersgreatly speeded construction. These navies, although Ulster Presbyterians, were the first of a wave of hundreds of thousand Irish laborers who dug the canals and built the turnpikes and railroads of their new country. Conditions were brutal. Over a thousand men died of swamp fever at Montezuma Marsh, the outlet of Cayuga Lake west of Syracuse. Work there ground to a halt until winter when the marsh froze over. But work in the frigid weather by men without adequate coats was almost as lethal. Soon Catholic Irishmen were replacing the Ulstermen. In 1825 Father John Raho wrote to his bishop that βso many die that there is hardly any time to give Extreme Unction to everybody. We run night and day to assist the sick.β
Despite the hardships, year after year the work pressed on. The middle section from Utica to Salina(now Syracuse) was completed in 1820 and traffic on that section started up immediately. The eastern section, 250 miles from Brockport to Albany, opened in 1823 to great fanfare as did another 64 mile section from Watervliet on the Hudsonto Lake Champlain.
Construction a Lockport where the canal needed to raise boats up the Niagara Escarpment was the most significant engineering feat. Powder was used to blast through the rock and cranes used to hoist blocks but most of the labor was still dangerous pick and shovel work. The mostly Irish canal diggers suffered and died on the job.Next, climbing the Niagara Escarpment up though an 80 foot wall of hard limestone was the great challenge. Generally following the course of a βwildβstream pouring over the cliff, a series of five locks were carved out so that bargescould be lifted to the level of Lake Erie. This is the only section where wide-spread use of blasting powder occurred, predictably with fatal consequences for many workers.
The step locks at Lockport pictured in the early 20th Century post card have been preserved and still are operated for tourist exhibitions.On the west end the village of Buffalo they dredged a channel of Buffalo Creek to make it navigable and built a port facility on Lake Erie. That secured the village as the terminus of the canal over neighboring, and much less enterprising, Black Rock on the Niagara River. In doing so Buffalo secured a futureas an industrial powerhouse and the economic center of the region.
Despite the apparent success of his great project, Clinton was in political trouble. Tammany politicians in New York City allied themselves with the Albany Regency, a masterfully assembled Up State political machine created by Martin Van Buren. Together they became known as the Bucktails faction of the Democratic Republican Party and declared war on Clinton and his supporters. Gaining control of a state Constitutional Convention in 1821, the Bucktails shortened the term of governor to two years and moved the term from a July 1 start to a January 1, thus shaving a year off Clintonβs term. They also passed a 2 million dollarappropriation for the canal attached to a measure that stacked the Canal Board with Clintonβs political opponents. The governor was forced tosign the measure or jeopardize funding of his pet project. In 1822 Clinton, despite huge personal popularity, was denied re-nomination by the Democratic-Republicans and he was out of office at the end of the year. In 1824 the Legislature ousted him as President and a member of the Canal Commission.
The last act proved a step too far for his opponents. With the Canal nearing completion, voter indignation over Clintonβs shabby treatment propelled him back into the Governorβs chair that fall.
Gov. Clinton Mingling the Waters of Lake Erie with New York Harbor.It was with understandable glee that Governor Clinton got to preside over the ceremonies opening the canal in October 1825. He sailed on the packet barge Seneca Chief along the Canal from Buffalo to Albany then transferredto a steam packet for the trip down the Hudson to New York City. He poured two casks of Lake Erie waterinto the harbor in the City making a symbolic Marriage of the Waters to officially open the whole waterway system.
The economic and social effects of the Canal quickly surpassed the most optimistic predictions. The vast resources of the Great Lakes basin were immediately accessible in the east as they had never been before when the Allegany and Appalachian Mountains presented a substantial barrier to commerce. Freight rates from Buffalo to New York went from $100 per ton by roadto $10 per ton by Canal. In 1829 3,640 bushels of wheat were transported down the Canal. By 1837 this had increased to 500,000 bushels and four years later it reached one million. In nine years short years Canal tolls more than recouped the entire cost of construction.
Equally, if not more important, the Erie Canal became the great highway to the West for hundreds of thousands of settlers who were eager to claim land and begin to ship their crops east for good hard cash money. Previously growth of the trans-Appalachian West was limited to the heartiest pioneers who had to stay close to the great river systems to ship their produce to market via the long tripdown to New Orleans. The younger sons of New England and New York farmers, craving land and with the resources to buy it flooded the Old Northwest transforming Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and even distant Minnesota from frontier wilderness to prosperous, populous states by 1850.
A Canal passenger packet circa 1850.Not only did the mostly farming settlers find easy access to market, others began to ship the endless lumber of the Great North Woods, iron ore to feed the smeltersand furnaces of an industrializing nation, and other resources. Within 15 years New York City had fulfilled Clintonβs dazzling prediction. It had leapfrogged its competitors, Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans and was handling more freight than all those cities combined. The Canal also spurred development in towns and cities along the route from Buffalo on down the Hudson. Many cities developed industries that fed manufactured goods into the interior. New York State communities along the path of the canal, the lateral canals built to feed it from the more remote interior of the state, and the Hudson River became boom towns.
The Canal was deepened and widened twice in the 19th Century to accommodate larger bargesand greater traffic. Between 1905 and 1918, engineers decided to abandon much of the original man-made channel and use new techniques to βcanalizeβ the rivers that the canal had been constructed to avoidβthe Mohawk, Oswego, Seneca, and Clyde plus Oneida Lake. A uniform channel was dredged; dams were built to create long, navigable pools, and locks were built adjacent to the dams to allow the barges to pass from one pool to the next. When it opened in 1918, the whole system was renamed the New York State Barge Canal.
Today most of the traffic on the New York State Barge Canal is private pleasure boats, canoes and kayaks, tour boats, and on some sections reproductions of mule drawn canal boats.. Here boat await entrance to the Canal at Buffalo during an annual Canal Fest.The system remained an economic engine for New York State until the St. Lawrence Seaway was completed in 1959. Traffic then dropped to a trickle. In recent years the system has experienced arenaissance as recreational corridor. Abandon stretches of the original canal have been preserved in many places, including a 36 mile stretch in the Old Erie Canal State Historic Park from the town of DeWitt near Syracuse to Rome.
βWe pray for any among us who have not yet discovered
our own power to bless the world.
We pray to find the courage and grace
to move one step closer to healing, and to the sacred potential of our lives.
We pray for strength, grateful for all that is not lost,
for the ever-renewing powers of life,
for our chance to play our part in this life
we have been given to share with one another.β
-John and Sarah Gibb Milspaugh
Find the courage and grace to move closer to healing today.
On Oct. 17, NOAH held its annual public meeting. Well over 500 people were a part of the event. Mayor Cooper was in attendance and made commitments to each of NOAH’s 4 Task Forces. Also in attendance and making commitments to the Nashville community: school board representative as well as some of Nashville’s judges. Thank you to everyone who attended.
In case you missed the meeting, you may watch a video of the meeting on YouTube here