The recent death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, USA while in police custody follows similar, well publicized events in Ferguson, Missouri, New York City, and South Carolina. We are sick at heart to learn of another African American young man whose life has been ended violently and prematurely. Columnist and resident of Baltimore, Jennifer Mendelsohn, writing in USA Today this past Wednesday morning, observed that according to research at Johns Hopkins University, not many miles separate Baltimore affluent and poor neighborhoods, but there is a 20-year difference in terms of average life expectancy between specific neighborhoods. She goes on to say that yes, in their own particular Baltimore neighborhood, “a few miles—but many worlds—away from Monday’s unrest”, they are OK. But also, they are not OK. Mendelsohn says that can’t happen until all fellow Baltimoreans are OK. A brave first step towards this goal in term of equal justice was made on Friday by Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby.

But the same attitudes concerning racial injustice, the impossibility of poverty eradication, and suspicion of community organizing and social participation are once again being rolled out. In fact, it is similar to the situation I wrote about in a previous blog: leaders of all sorts and all ethnicities are immediately jumping in to promote their longstanding, well known, warring solutions. President Obama actually captured both sides of this enduring solutions debate when he first observed that ‘the young people causing unrest were not protesting, they were stealing’, and then in later remarks stated: “we consider those kids our kids and they should not be living in poverty and violence”. I think we all agree that this latter statement sounds good, but in this situation of warring solutions, how can we even begin to make sure that all of “our kids” in this country do not have to live in poverty and violence—how can we accomplish that?

Oddly enough, the New York Times (April 26, 2015), uses one element of the deep participation process—critical thought and reframing—which can provide a start and show the way to a much needed social integrative power. Collaborative critical thinking and analysis provide the elements by which we can “reframe” any situation under consideration. When we join this with ‘resonating emotion’, new social knowledge is created and shared. In this instance, the NYT took one basic research fact and then analytically reframed it in a new and different way.

An analysis in The Times—“1.5 Million Missing black Men”—showed that more than one in every six of black men in the 24-to-54 has disappeared from civic life mainly because they died young or are locked away in prison.

Normally, when an article or editorial begins with this kind of fact, it goes on to explore the various aspects of law and order. Instead, The Times editorial explored this situation in terms of the social and economic consequences. They noted that the “astounding shortfall in black men translates into lower marriage rates, more out-of-wedlock birth, a greater risk of poverty for families and by extension, less stable communities”. The editorial goes on to explore the effects of deindustrialization and resulting joblessness in poor neighborhoods; the enormous obstacles facing even young black boys; and the fact that a criminal record carries less stigma for whites than blacks. It concludes by saying that the recent capturing on video of the “many grievous cases of unarmed men and boys who were shot dead by police…show how the presumptions of criminality, poverty and social isolation threatens lives every day in all corners of this country”.

It seems to me that there are three factors to learn and remember—and the editorial indirectly spells out each. The first is the ‘revelation of connectedness and mutual responsibility’. The reframed analysis illustrates how young African American men are directed to a life of poverty, no-work, and too often prison not through the faults of their culture, but through the perceptions and policies of the majority policy makers with their perhaps unintended, but very real consequences. The second is the ‘understanding of the criminal justice consequences of these policies’. This focuses on how minority communities are required to deal with a type of policing that involves ‘subjugation and fear’, as compared to the ‘security and assistance’ offered by the police to those who live in majority communities. The third is the ‘passing interest only’ displayed by the majority of people in this country who live in comfort. In other words there is little questioning or acknowledgement by the rest of us about what affect our lack of involvement may play.

So, yes, Taking brave and required stands for justice as the Baltimore State’s Attorney did this past week, and hopefully beginning a long overdue reform of the criminal justice system and policing, is necessary and laudatory as well. But pushing it off to the criminal justice system and police alone is horribly insufficient.

We need to recognize that racial injustice is institutionalized in our society at large. This doesn’t mean that people want it that way, but it means that the institutional apparatus too often runs on past history and values, not present ones. And we need to understand that poverty is not only entrenched, its roots are also institutionalized. And their interactions create a formidable enemy.

What does this mean? One of the best explanations of ‘institutions’ was formulated by Nobel Prize winner Douglass North. His statement that “institutions are the rules of the game” while “organizations are the players” has become the standard definition. It is these underlying “rules of the game” for both racial injustice and poverty, which we rarely recognize or think about, that need to be changed—-not simply the organizations and its player members. So the key people and organizations that wield legitimate political threat power and economic coercive power in these situations find themselves in difficulty. This is because they don’t have the necessary social power to change the underlying responsible institutions.

For that they need us— all of us—to formulate a collaborative, peaceful and altruistic, social integrative power which allows societal groups to re-image and re-invent their guiding social institutions. In other words a new kind of social participation and community organizing—for It is only social integrative power that can accomplish this task. Using this new prototype of community organizing will be necessary to create a different perspective on what it takes to create racial justice and begin to eradicate poverty. We will talk about that the next time.