In Support of Black Students and Communities

June 10, 2020

From Faculty and Staff in the School of Planning, Public Policy and Management, University of Oregon

Black Lives Matter! We in the School of PPPM denounce the long history of Black people being subjugated, abused, exploited, and killed in our country. The horrible killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd—as well the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Dreasjon “Sean” Reed, and Black transgender people like Nina Pop and Tony McDade—are recent examples of that injustice and a potent reminder that we as PPPM faculty, staff, and students need to strive to end racism and work for a more equitable society. The PPPM faculty write this statement to support Black students, the Black Student Collective, and Black communities whom we serve. We acknowledge that in order to fully achieve racial justice we must work harder to improve our efforts to support all communities of color.

Our fields of urban planning, nonprofit management and public policy have played a key role in creating and perpetuating the institutional racism that has shaped our cities, towns, and society in general. There is no doubt about the role our disciplines of planning, public administration, and nonprofit management have played in purposely creating racially segregated neighborhoods that are disinvested in and highly policed. Urban Renewal, for example, was an urban policy carried out by planners and public administrators to maintain the color line and displace Black people from the center of cities. Market-based discrimination, such as redlining, is also a part of the history of White supremacy in our country, while private consultancies and foundations predominantly operate through concentrated White wealth.

This structural history of racism carried out through federal, state, and local policies and practices must be challenged and stopped. Additionally, the nonprofit sector (in particular those organizations that are not led by and for people of color) while often attempting to respond to the harm done by institutional racism through programs and services, itself lacks diversity among its boards of directors and staff leadership. It often fails to demonstrate inclusive organizations, and lags behind in advocating for the necessary reform of our institutions. This failure is often perpetuated by funders who themselves lack the leadership diversity to include under-represented and vulnerable communities in decision-making, and who often impede efforts by nonprofits to take on projects that push for systemic social change for their communities. This is a major failure for the sector tasked with elevating the voices of under-represented and vulnerable communities. Consequently, many of us in PPPM are directly benefiting from racist and discriminatory policies. As public servants, we need to understand how we benefit from this unjust history, how these racist policies were established, how to understand institutional racism better, and how that structure influences our privileged positions.

PPPM needs to do better. We need to ensure we fully address racial justice issues throughout our curriculum, not just have a few courses that focus on power, access, race, ethnicity, equity, and inequality. We will strive to ensure that all courses in the PPPM curriculum address how these issues relate to the core content area. We need to do better in prioritizing funding to support Black students. We need to do better at recruiting—and communicating with—Black students regarding the climate they experience in our classes, in our school, in our university, and our city. PPPM needs to better integrate racial justice issues into the applied community-based projects that nationally distinguish our school.

Part of PPPM’s mission is to offer students training in rigorous, professional programs. If racial and economic justice are not at the center of our practice and professional education, we are failing to accomplish our mission. PPPM and our interdisciplinary backgrounds should be a vehicle for positive social change, for supporting Black communities, and for dismantling social, political, and economic structures of inequality. After all, the reason most of us decided to study an applied field like PPPM is that we want to make a positive difference in all of our communities. PPPM needs to resist structural and institutional racism, challenge current policies and organizations, and better support Black students, staff, faculty, and other minoritized Indigenous and People of Color communities.

Signed, PPPM Faculty and Staff