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Explore how the social construct of race and racial oppression operates at multiple levels with a rotating focus on different social systems. Connect with Austin-area justice movement organizers and everyday people with relevant lived experience to lay out historical context, current affairs, and creative possibilities for a liberated future.
Hello, dear listener. You're tuned in
Speaker 2:to Racism on the Levels, interpersonal, organizational, cultural, and systemic levels within and beyond Austin. With the focus on creative possibilities for the emerging future, 1 that is free from oppression, We're creating that right now. My name is Stacey Fraser. My pronouns are she and they. In addition to hosting this show, I am a proud mama, a Kenyan nonviolence trainer, and a racial equity facilitator.
Speaker 2:Racism on the Levels is part of the Reflections of Community Outreach Rotation, a collection that gives voice to coop community organization members, as well as folks doing great things in the greater Austin, Texas community. The views expressed on the show are not necessarily those of the coop board of directors, staff, volunteers, or underwriters. I create this show while dwelling on the sacred ancestral lands of the Tonkawa, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Sauna, and Humanos. I invite you to join me in acknowledging their inconceivable losses and attempted erasure due to violent settler colonialism. This show centers justice, and that requires connecting with with ancestors and grounding in historical truth and accuracy.
Speaker 2:You can find the original stewards of the land you're on by visiting native hyphen land dotca. Now let's dive in.
Speaker 1:Executive director of go Austin, Vamos Austin. Carmen, thank you for sitting with me and having this conversation.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for the invitation, Stacy.
Speaker 1:Thanks. Please tell us a little bit about who you are and what you're about.
Speaker 3:Well, these days I have the privilege of serving as GAPA's executive director. That's go Austin, Vamos Austin. We are a community organizing nonprofit, working specifically in North Central Austin and Southeast Austin to break down barriers to healthy living. So we organize and mobilize community power, to break down barriers to health, while increasing institutional capacity to respond to the people most historically impacted by health inequities. Which is a lot of words to say, you know, we want neighborhoods, we want all our neighborhoods in Austin to support people to live long, healthy, active lives.
Speaker 3:And so we know that there are a lot of structural issues that impact that. So we do community organizing on everything from, climate resilience, and heat, and flooding, and infrastructure equity, to early childhood education and care and making sure we have care for the caretakers and fresh healthy foods to eat, and neighborhood stability. So that's my day job. I am honored to do that. I'm a second generation community organizer.
Speaker 3:Of course, I'm the 1st generation to be doing that in a nonprofit career mode, owning that. But I am proud of what our organization has been able to model in the city of Boston in terms of doing that work. And then, aside from that, I, you know, I've been a community organizer in a number of different issues, paid and unpaid, with lots of networks here in Austin and across the southwest and across across the country, particularly around environmental justice. I used to work with Poder, People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources, which I always support because of their leadership development long term. And I've also served as a city of Boston commissioner on 3 different commissions for the last decade.
Speaker 3:Which commissions? I served on the inaugural independent citizens redistricting commission, which is also known as the 101 commission that drew the very first city council district maps. I then served on the Latino Quality of Life Commission, where I eventually vice chaired and chaired. And that commission makes recommendations to the city of Boston City Council around budget and other initiatives, to benefit quality of life of Latinos and other people of color. And we made a variety of of recommendations when I was on that commission from about, I think, 2015 to 2019.
Speaker 3:And then I joined the planning commission where I have served since the summer of 2019 during some of our code rewrite conversations and many other very intense planning conversations. I'm finishing out my term now, and so I'm just serving my last couple of meetings.
Speaker 1:You mentioned second generation. Your father laid some of the groundwork, I'm guessing, for some of the work that you're doing now. How important is that continuity, the the weaving of the thread for you?
Speaker 3:I think all of this work runs on relationships and networks, and I certainly was born into and brought up in some really powerful networks of neighborhoods and environmental justice advocates and artists and academics. My parents were among the many who came to Austin for different artistic and educational reasons. My mom came for UT. My dad came as a traveling artist from San Antonio. We have long deep roots in San Antonio longer than our roots in East Austin.
Speaker 3:If you look generationally, even though we've been there now for, for a good 40, close to 50 years in East Austin, I look at some of my counterparts in East Austin. There are 4 or 5, 6 generations East Austin. So, you know, like many of my parents were attracted to the culture here in different facets of that. And so my dad's entree into politics actually was in the cultural arts scene. And in busting up cultural arts funding to actually go to different artists, including artists of color and artists not affiliated with, you know, the status quo, Ballet Austin or Laguna Gloria in those days.
Speaker 3:So that was actually where he first got involved and then later got embedded in the environmental justice movement in the East Austin. But really, you know, once it got into the later part of neighborhood planning and anti displacement and planning future growth, which really became, like, 1 of the highest stakes conversations, in the city. And so I kinda got brought up into that just because it was connected to my family, but it was certainly my dad becoming involved culturally and politically with East Austin that I became exposed through both there to learn my history and start having an environmental justice perspective on all the work that I ended up doing. And I also grew up in East and West Austin. So it's not like I was just in the east side.
Speaker 3:I was born in Old West Austin, just east of Clarksville. And I had exposure and was kind of on both sides of the highway. So I had a privileged experience, but I also was exposed really directly to some of the stuff he saw some was going through. And so all those things combined, I think, equipped me to have, you know, to have an analysis, but more importantly, in a network and a community to support me and guide me as I started doing this work.
Speaker 1:So the you mentioned network, which you're right, this is all about relationships. Are some of those folks still here? Or did people leave? Like, are there some? And who is still around?
Speaker 1:Who's been in the fight for a long time that people didn't know about?
Speaker 3:I mean, a lot of us are still here. And I think 1 of the things we struggle with like, yeah, we've let me not just let me not downplay the trauma of displacement, like the loss of community over time, especially from all of central Austin. Okay. But like East Austin from a more concentrated, like a racial perspective, because the way communities were segregated. But, like, all over central Austin, all of old Austin that we love, all of Austin that created the culture that is attractive here, that's been, like, commodified.
Speaker 3:There is a great loss, but there's also still a lot of us still here. So, you know, like, I I bristle at the term unicorn. My Austin friends and I have, you know, our own jokes about that term because that's the name that's my friend Cynthia Pizzit has been bestowed upon us by the gentrifiers. You know, like, we're so rare. And the reality is that if you go into an institution like AISD or you go into Austin Public Health or you go into the library system, like, you find a lot of people who are multi generational Austinites who have been here.
Speaker 3:And we've always had a changing population with people coming in and out. But we've also always had the attraction to people of being a long term place to stay. So actually, like so much of Austin runs on these local relationships in a way that a small town generally does. And I think that's the feeling that we've maintained even as we have these growing pains and become a big city.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was here 98 to 03. I went to UT and then moved back 20 years later, moved back to raise my son here. So for those reasons that you mentioned. So, good reminder that, you know, nothing and no 1 no situation is a monolith.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:So tell me a little bit about Golosin Mamas Austin. What was the what was its origin? What's the creation story?
Speaker 3:It's very interesting. Golosin, Bamas Austin started as an initiative of the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and it was a childhood obesity intervention. So if you think about where philanthropy goes, there's usually a buzzword or 2 that really take the scene for, like, 5 to 10 years, and then it kinda moves into a different buzzword. And oftentimes, we find ourselves reaching the same themes in everything and, like, the real, like, to do of what we need to do because, you know, we don't live single issue lives, even though these issues become buzzwords. So if you think about the mid to late odds, 2000 odds, childhood obesity and obesity in general became really peak issues of interest.
Speaker 3:And if you recall, you know, Michelle Obama beginning her term as first lady took a lot of initiative in reforming school lunches and championing school gardens and home gardens and all of these different fitness and nutrition initiatives. And so there's a lot of momentum there, a lot of data being, collected there. The Dell Foundation has a US health portfolio. They do work all over the world. They do work in India and South Africa, but they also do work in various US cities.
Speaker 3:And so they had an idea, and it really came from doctor Aliyah Hussaini, a pediatrician, who is still practicing 1 day a week as a pediatrician and seeing the childhood obesity epidemic in her doctor's office and noticing that all these children were coming from the same neighborhood. And knowing enough from her experience that it wasn't enough to just tell people, you need to eat well and exercise. You need to make your kids are getting make sure your kids are getting this amount of activity and eating this amount of fresh vegetables and reducing screen time, pre pandemic expectations, right? Reducing sugar sweetened beverages, etcetera, etcetera. And understanding that in some neighborhoods, it's just really difficult to get those things to happen in your daily life.
Speaker 3:And the life the peer people are living is not conducive to exercising and eating well enough to prevent chronic disease. And as such, we're seeing these massive hot spots of type 2 diabetes, of childhood obesity, and other chronic health diseases and, risk factors in Southeast Austin, North Central Austin, Northeast Austin, areas of what we now call the Eastern Crescent. Right? Which is where working class Austin has really expanded and where, quite frankly, inequitable planning and land management decisions have led the built in environment to be much less healthy. You know, park deficient, very hot, concrete covered, and not pedestrian friendly in North Central Austin.
Speaker 3:And then in Southeast Austin, you know, very suburban. You need a car to get everywhere. Not a lot of food retail. No healthy food retail, etcetera, etcetera. So that's why our initiatives have largely been around creative ways to increase healthy food access and physical activity opportunities in the neighborhood.
Speaker 3:Really impressive first 5 years, lot centering around BMI, weight body mass index, which now is, like, considered antiquated and not even politically correct to really use as a public health measure. But what was really interesting for us is that we were able to stabilize adult BMI's among people who were most exposed to GAVA's efforts. And that wasn't through any kind of food measurement or diet program or fitness program. Nothing individual. This was entirely population health.
Speaker 3:So think pedestrian infrastructure, park lighting, park infrastructure, food options, meal plans, etcetera, etcetera. Child BMI as we saw go way up. Now with the Dell Foundation didn't necessarily consider is that there were in that 5 years of beautiful longitudinal studies that they equipped us with through the UT School of Public Health. There were 2 catastrophic floods in Dove Spring Southeast Austin, lower Onion Creek. 1 of the elementary schools we were looking at, we're working with lost 200 students overnight.
Speaker 3:So you can imagine the level of community wide trauma combined with the increased cost of living in Austin and, you know, the fact that people are doubling, tripling up in houses on work, and what are those stressful impacts. And so we knew as organizers, we really needed to take a more holistic approach. And mind you, you know, over time, this became programmatic partnerships between different nonprofits that the Dell Foundation funded to a core group of community organizers supporting this whole coalition to eventually in 2018, we spun off as our own independent nonprofit. And so, we unapologetically look at issues of zip code in 1 of 2 ways. You can have help people get healthier or you could completely replace the population, which is happening in a lot of Austin.
Speaker 3:And a lot of our nonprofits are having asked themselves, you know, what is the future of our work when working class people can barely make it in Austin? But I can tell you that in every sector of our work, whether it's food justice, where we have a resident led pros delivery program that takes fresh produce from Urban Roots Farm all over North and South Austin and a pay what you can model to peer networking circles of early child care providers, to climate navigators who are training themselves and each other how to navigate extreme heat and flooding and inform the city so they can do better, to neighborhood stability strategies all the way across. People are invested in their neighborhoods. They wanna stay. They want to see the long term fruits of of their labor, And they want to continue to live in neighborhoods that are hospitable to families and people of all ages and abilities.
Speaker 3:We have a tremendous amount of people with someone in their family with special needs, physical or otherwise. Really tremendous disproportionality, whether it's because of, you know, the various socioeconomic layers or the environmental justice history. That's a whole other conversation. But, you know, we're really talking about the ability of working class people and people who live as caretakers to live in Austin, period. And I've had the honor to work in those ecosystems for the last 15 years that I've been back in Austin, and I'm determined to continue to, you know, make space for, for us to continue to exist as communities that have all of those folks in them.
Speaker 1:That is lovely, Carmen. What role does you know, I I moved back. I joined my neighborhood association meetings, and ours is struggling a little bit just because of capacity. And Sure. What is the role of neighborhood associations in this in this movement?
Speaker 3:I think it's a great question about neighborhood associations. We do interface with them, at varying degrees in different parts of our neighborhoods depending on where people are at. I will say neighborhood association it's it's 1 of those difficult things. I feel like even at home. Like the cobbler son has no shoes or what however that saying goes.
Speaker 3:My neighborhood association like, I don't go to my own neighborhood association meetings more than maybe once or twice a year unless something's really happening. I mean, that tells me the degree of privilege in my neighborhood. You know, we're about to get gobbled up by part of I 35. But, you know, other than that, we have not had to struggle too much. You know, we've advocated for some housing.
Speaker 3:But in our neighborhoods of focus, like, these neighborhood associations play a huge role and have in some situations, either in proactively supporting, like, a school's activity, like a neighborhood farm stand, or park projects or things that required more partnership across the neighborhood or in following zoning cases, which in our neighborhoods has become a bigger and bigger deal. It was like more and more in intense development that left unchecked really doesn't include any kind of community benefit. So that is like a calling for neighborhood associations. And I think it's important to distinguish them from homeowner associations, because neighborhood associations have the freedom to assemble, and they really represent 1 of the first most accessible steps in that First Amendment right of the freedom to assemble and influence government, that we have accessible to us. And many people don't realize that it doesn't cost anything.
Speaker 3:You know, it just is a few people getting together at a regular, you know, on a regular basis to look at what they wanna do for their neighborhood.
Speaker 1:You basically describe the dynamics of systemic racism in your explanation of food access issue, the environmental justice, or interlocking interconnected systems, and they all are they're racist systems. Right? And so how can you speak to that for a minute? Like in your own lived experience with systemic racism in this city?
Speaker 3:You know, there are a lot of things I've reflected on. 1st, on the the history of the neighborhoods that I've been honored to work in as an organizer for the last decade plus, then also as my own personal experience in Austin growing up. I've reflected on this a lot from an environmental justice perspective. Part of it is that, you know, a lot of us talk about the 1928 Master Plan, and the division of Austin along I 30 what became I 35. And what we don't talk about a lot is how much Austin has grown since then.
Speaker 3:So, the neighborhoods that were impacted by the 1928 master plan were really a small portion of Austin, central Austin. And when you look at neighborhoods that were developed in especially after the GI Bill in the sixties seventies and even eighties in Austin, what you see is a lot of naturally integrated or I should say, systemically integrated military neighborhoods, or neighborhoods that were naturally integrated under some other federally touched development plan. And so I'm thinking of
Speaker 1:What are a couple of those neighbor sorry. Don't don't mean to interrupt. What are some of those neighborhoods?
Speaker 3:Sure. In the northeast, you would think of, like, University Hills, Windsor Park, which for a long time had a 30, 30, 30, black, white, and Hispanic slash Mexican American predominantly neighborhoods. Right? And what you see the same thing in Southeast Austin, GAVA's initial neighborhoods of focus, including Franklin Park. These are all neighborhoods that were developed for Bergstrom as an air force base.
Speaker 3:So this air force base has a tremendous impact on the history of Austin, but in particular, Southeast Austin, as well as the IRS building and number of other industries that come in there. But there's really this dramatic military effect. What's interesting is that in South Austin, west of 35, which is also an area that GABA is organized in, do you have a lot of areas that were agricultural, then industrial and other sort of pocketed developments that were not part of the city of Austin until much later? So an area like Pleasant Hill, which if you think like, William Cannon and South Congress, for example, was a Freedman's town. This is something I learned pretty, you know, like in the last 5, 6 years that this was a freedman's town that then later was part of Austin that was annexed, you know, much later.
Speaker 3:And so you had pockets of communities of color. Of course, there's a long history of Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in South Austin, both before it was part of the United States and after, and also as part of the migration from East Austin. So my point being that the area south of Ben White 71 historically is a fairly multicultural integrated history. And yet, over time, what we see is a permeating, impact of that I 35, that racial segregator over time as a result of a couple things, the closure of Austin Bergstrom Air Force Base, and especially its closure in that time before it became the new international airport. We saw massive changes in the neighborhood and many white homeowners left the area.
Speaker 3:Many ended up renting their houses out, but many left the area. Many, black homeowners left the area. Dove Springs, for example, in 78, 744 became predominantly people of color, but most predominantly Hispanic Latino. Whereas, 78745, that area West of 35 South of Ben White, over time becomes more and more expensive. And we see decreasing communities of color, decreasing renters and decreasing long time homeowners.
Speaker 3:And so it's interesting that the area then becomes again more racially segregated along that I 35 line. But that is just to show you the informalities and sort of layered impact of these other policies, practices and economic factors when the master plan is no longer enforced on the books. And then more communities are constructed around the base. And it's particularly the ones that are constructed in the late seventies and early eighties, where homes are built in the flood plain because of decisions that were made by FEMA and local engineers that were absolutely profit driven, and these are still issues we're dealing with today. There's a very interesting environmental racism history in Austin.
Speaker 3:I was brought up on the East Austin history, but having learned more about the South and Southeast Austin history, what I see is that the same forces that harm disproportionately people of color, disproportionately black, Latino, Native American, and Asian American communities in the United States We're also blatantly harming military communities, period. And that's true in San Antonio with the Kelly Air Force Base. I'm learning more about the contamination associated with Bergstrom and how that impacts people's health. Like, I don't think that's a chapter anyone at Dell Foundation or any of us in the public health sphere have really been looking at is what is the long term impact of military based contamination? That's its own issue.
Speaker 3:But certainly the aspect of, you know, you had a natural you had an integrated community here. So you had white military families, but they were not the majority. And what does that say about the kind of risk that we systemically or institutionally are willing to expose certain families to, especially when for many of them, it's their first investment and their largest investment, as this is, like, 1 of the largest areas of low income homeownership.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing that information with everybody. There's a lot of focus on tech sector, which has been here for a while now. In your mind's eye, Carmen, do you see that being an asteroid of equal weight to something like the master plan I 35 or the the military base?
Speaker 3:Tech is a big 1. It certainly tech plays a huge role in the shifting landscape of Austin. Of course, it has for a large part of my life. We should remind everyone that the comedy film office space is based on the expansion of Dell and IBM in Austin's northwest suburbs. So, you know, we've been living with that boom and Texas Instruments before them.
Speaker 3:And it's been a source of revenue and and jobs for diversifying our economy in a good way to an extent. And now it's become, you know, a tremendous influx of demand for high income high income earners, high income, housing. And so we're feeling the pain from that. I mean, I think, you know, part of the problem is that our politically, our housing conversation has been co opted in large part by higher income interests, I think, and, you know, middle class interests trying to keep their foot in the door when high income interests come in. And we forget all about working class and poor people, who's actually who we need our government to intervene on behalf of.
Speaker 3:So the market is going to cater to the highest income earners. And that's what we have coming in with the tech sector in vast numbers. So if we're gonna disrupt our market for, you know, people who are not favored by the market, then we need to be looking at working class communities. And some of the folks that I was talking about, not, you know, middle class and nonprofits sector advocates, you know, myself included. I, you know, I can feel the pain of Austin's rising cost of living.
Speaker 3:I'm feeling it to an extent, but I'm not feeling it like many of the people I serve. And I certainly am not in the business of trying to get the government to help me out. But I can see that's the direction of where the programs and safety nets are going. So I think we have we have a big obstacle there, even in our own, quote, side, but even in our own allyship and coalitions.
Speaker 1:I am newly freed from the nonprofit in Mexico complex. I like to say, you know, it's about interest. It's about power and interest. And so you mentioned government for a second there. We have an equity office here.
Speaker 1:We have actually a search open for the chief equity officer position. What do you hope to see there and how would the role in that office interface with Gava and other community leadership group?
Speaker 3:Oh, I think being with GAVA and just in general, working on various community organizing efforts in the city and anti racist efforts, I have seen what an asset that office has been and the leadership there thus far. I think specifically because of the people who have been there and because of not just them, but the momentum of a variety of community coalitions that found synergy to create that office and fund it to have staff. Even people who don't get along. I mean, that's how we really do the things we mean the most and we love. We have to work with people we don't get along.
Speaker 3:We have to come together in big tents and really find the things that really, really, really, really matter to us the most. And I think, you know, despite whatever disagreements or frustrations or slowing of resource flow, we can point I can point to tens of 1, 000, 000 of dollars that flowed differently because this equity office was created, including to the neighborhoods that GABA works in. And that's just from having departments take an honest and close look at where they were allocating resources and where things were needed and what were the outcomes. The Dove Springs Community Health Center is a result of that $16, 000, 000 on a bond election, you know, through 1 assessment that the public health department did. Completely changing around decision making processes, bringing the Latino quality of life, commission together with the African American Resource Advisory Commission, the Asian American quality of life, the LGBT quality of life commission, having us all make budget recommendations together in the same room with department heads, bringing history, bringing lived experience, bringing the perspective of directly impacted people into bureaucratic conversations.
Speaker 3:These are not quick fixes. They're not things that happen overnight. They're not things that the system is set up to facilitate coming to fruition. So much of what I think the equity office pulled off, has pulled off, is unseen. It can be quantified if you really follow the trail that, you know, dedicated across dollars spent in many, many dates and processes.
Speaker 3:But much of this is a mental model shift. A lot of it is shifting the paradigm, shifting the frame, shifting the analysis so that our people are actually relating in a way that humanizes us and each other in the communities that we're supposed to serve. And it makes us deal with some really uncomfortable, systems. But, I have huge gratitude to the people in those roles because I know there are a million things every day that make them feel like it's not getting better. But we can certainly point to a number of things that have been better because they've been there.
Speaker 1:Cool. Yeah. And everybody, there's a monthly, like, open. Anybody can come. It's catered, events.
Speaker 1:So check out City of Austin's, Equity Action team.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's a beautiful space, and it always you always feel better after you leave.
Speaker 1:It's important. Sustenance. Alright. We're almost at time, Carmen. I wanna have this 6 part conversation.
Speaker 1:The next 6 months will be with Carmen Yawn. What are we what's exciting? What are we what are we gonna do the next, 20 years together in the city? What are we doing? How are we making it better?
Speaker 3:We have some serious emerging work on the horizon. There's some proactive things we wanna do. We've been doing a lot of surviving in the last few years. You know? We've been doing a lot of adapting, a lot of getting our bearings.
Speaker 3:I think we're ready to start emerging with some community led work at the forefront of survival. So, that includes the feasibility of a community led grocery store, at least some kind of grocery co op that serves the Eastern crescent. And we have some community stakeholder meetings coming up. March 7th, we have 1 coming up, in the evening. People can find out information at our website or online and our social media.
Speaker 3:We also are have a screening tonight of Through the Night, a beautiful documentary, about childcare and the people who care for the backbone of our workforce. So we'll have a community expert panel of some of the women who have been caring for generations of working austinites, and their babies, talking about what is really going on with them right now. We have some very exciting climate events, and we'll be showing some films at South by Southwest and throughout the year. So keep an eye on us. We're around.
Speaker 3:We're raising money and trying to leverage capital that goes directly in the community to address some of these issues that, keep us healthy. Certainly, invite your venture capitalists, investor friends to anything we've got going on for sure.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much for your time and look forward to being in community space with you and coming back on anytime onto the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Stacy. I really appreciate you making the space for the conversation. And, yeah, I'd love to come back anytime and maybe bring a friend.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for tuning in. The music you heard was from Shoyinka Rahim's 2016 album, Bebo Love. This, along with previous episodes, are available anywhere you listen to podcasts by searching for racism on the levels. I'd love to hear from you. Please reach out with show ideas, collaborations, comments, and questions.
Speaker 2:My email is stacie@coop.org. I give enthusiastic thanks to Michelle Manning Scott and Nabil Azerhouni for production support. My son, Rumi, provided motivation. Remember in all things and always, love is the highest level.
Speaker 4:To. And let your light shine like the sunshine. A celebration, no separation. You got a love song. I got a love song.