Frontline Conversations: David Bowers Discusses Race, Anti-Racism and Community Healing
David Bowers, Enterprise VP and Mid-Atlantic market leader, joined Leadership Greater Washington (LGW) on June 8 to discuss race, anti-racism and community healing in LGW’s Frontline Conversations. Bowers is also an ordained minister and the founder of the all-volunteer No Murders DC movement, a coalition of concerned residents working to end murder in D.C.
In the course of the discussion, Bowers shared a list of sample actions created for those who have asked, “What can I do?”
“You don’t build a wall all at once. It’s one brick at a time.”
15 Sample Actions to Help Dismantle Racism and Its Impacts
- Pray for the nation to confess and repent for its original sin of slavery.
- Have conversations with friends and family about what steps they can take as individuals to deconstruct racism and its impacts. Challenge racist assumptions and actions.
- White and Blacks share meals together at home.
- Workplaces require anti-racism and bias in education and training.
- Eliminate or curtail qualified immunity protections for police in abuse of force cases.
- Require all police that interacts with the public to wear body-worn cameras.
- Companies set targets and create systems to increase the recruitment, retention and promotion of Blacks at all levels of employment. Also, expand numbers on governing boards. Include accountability mechanisms.
- Companies and governments set goals and systems to increase the use of Black-owned businesses in their supply chain (e.g., banks, lawyers, title companies, food service providers). Include accountability mechanisms.
- Congress pass and president sign H.R. 40 – Commission to study and make recommendations regarding reparations to Black Americans.
- Local governments enact local versions of H.R. 40.
- Federal, state and local governments create action plans to eliminate the wealth, health and education gaps between whites and Blacks.
- Increase funding and enact policy changes (like limits on risk-based pricing for home loans) at all levels of government to support increases in homeownership for African-Americans.
- Federal government strengthen the community reinvestment act.
- Increase federal, state and local support for community land trusts, cooperatives and tenant-organized purchase of for-sale rental buildings.
- Municipalities create “peace room” structures to institutionalize the work to end murders in their jurisdictions – requiring performance benchmarks for all municipal agencies related to the prevention of homicide and also engaging private sector stakeholders.
More from David Bowers: So What, Now What? A Reflection on the Ongoing Movement for Racial Justice in the United States