Growth & Justice Blog

Labor Day, economic justice, and progressive capitalists

For a second consecutive year on Labor Day Sunday, I had the privilege of delivering the sermon at my Unity Church in St. Paul (Unitarian Universalist).   I focused on the the great tradition of progressive capitalism in Minnesota,  embodied by people like William Drew Washburn, the founder of the forerunner of General Mills and the founder of the First Universalist Society of Minneapolis, and the subject of a new biography, "Prairie Ligthtning.''    Reviewing Washburn's enormous contributions and his serious shortcomings, I made this point: 

 There are a couple of key points in all this on Labor Day weekend, when we celebrate the vast majority of Americans and Minnesotans who labor for a living, and who mostly don’t OWN OR INVEST for a living, and with whose perspiration our  civilizations have been built.     The first point is a reminder, that some of our direct (Unitarian Universalist) intellectual and spiritual ancestors valued the “me’’ every bit as much or more than the “we.’’   They were intensely self-interested people, empire builders and capitalists, who also tried to balance that side with a conscience and recognition that public stuff, the things we do together for our common good with our  democratic governments, were every bit as valuable as the things we do for ourselves for own profit and enrichment.    Elites like the Washburns and Pillsburys and the Daytons passionately and personally invested in public interest,  and as the decades wore on Minnesota’s capitalists earned a reputation as among the world’s most generous and enlightened, unafraid of social experimentation and democracy, generally supportive of the idea of public-sector growth and  intelligent and humane distribution of an often unfair redistribution imposed by capitalism and the marketplace, on the sound theory that more sharing would be good for private-sector growth in the long run.

 Among the most eloquent and authentic Labor Day op-eds during  the last week was Janice Thurn's excellent commentary ("America Can't Rise Without Its Workers")in the Star Tribune Op-Ed section, and this very clear and compelling  answer to the question "What Does Organized Labor Want?", by AFSCME Council 5 Executive Director Eliot Seide.

It will take a few days to process my latest Unity Church  sermon so that it's available online,  but here is a link to "She Works Hard for the Money (So You'd Better Treat her Right)", the Labor Day sermon I gave last year, focused in particular on the struggle for justice by women workers.

Solidarity Forever!

Dane Smith 

The "coloring" of Minnesota

As we prepare to choose our state leaders this fall, it’s time we reflect on an issue that seems to be non-existent in Minnesota’s political discussions: Racial inequalities.

As Minnesota’s communities of color become a larger part of the working age population – and the nonworking population of aging retirees remains very white – the need to address these inequalities is vital to ensuring our state’s continued economic vitality.

There’s no doubt about it: Minnesota is a very white state. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that about 85% of Minnesotans are white non-Hispanics, nearly 20 percentage points higher than the national average of 65%. Thirty-nine of the 50 states are more diverse than Minnesota.

But Minnesota is becoming less and less white. The State Demographer’s Office projects that white non-Hispanics will drop to about 75% of the population by 2035, with nonwhites and Latinos accounting for the other 25%.

Disparities and Implications for Policy

The “coloring” of Minnesota should be a concern to policymakers because, if left unaddressed, disparities we see today will affect more of the population and place a greater drag on the state economy. We must start paying attention to the differences across racial and ethnic groups, which manifest themselves primarily in the form of drastic inequalities.

Did you know, for example, that the annual unemployment rate in 2009 for white non-Hispanics in Minnesota was 7.1%, but the rate was 22.5% for Minnesota’s African Americans and 15.5% for the state’s Latinos? Indeed, the Twin Cities has the worst racial disparities in unemployment among the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.

Did you know that the 2008 median household income was about $60,000 for Minnesota’s white non-Hispanics, but about half of that for the state’s African Americans, at $30,000? Median household income in Minnesota that year for American Indians was about $32,500, and for Latinos was about $41,000.

In the realm of education, these inequalities are pervasive. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, I am one of but a handful of Latinos in my class. I’m not placing blame on the institution for that situation, but rather citing it as a symptom of the state of education for communities of color.

To be sure, the share of young Minnesotans of color that enrolls and graduates from schools of higher education is very low. For Latinos, for example, only 40% enroll in a Minnesota post-secondary institution, while about 50% of whites do.

An educated population has been a staple of Minnesota for decades. The state economist and state demographer for Minnesota both say that education has been a key contributor to the state’s success. But with the expected growth in the number of Minnesotans of color, we will lose this competitive edge unless we address racial inequalities in education.

Going Forward

For Growth & Justice, the issues of educational achievement and attainment for Minnesotans – and especially for Minnesotans of color – stand out as vital to our quality of life and our economic outlook. The Growth & Justice investment proposal for Smart Investments in Minnesota’s Students identifies evidence-based approaches and programs for boosting by 50 percent the share of students who finish a post-secondary education, with greater attainment needed for Minnesotans of color and American Indian students in order to reach that goal.

A recent series of short issue briefs from Growth & Justice offers key facts about why education matters, highlights challenges for Minnesota, and recommends public policies and approaches. And Growth & Justice has called upon candidates for office to set a goal of dramatically increasing higher education completion levels over the next decade, focusing especially on the achievement and attainment gap for minority populations in the state.

We can no longer ignore the inequalities, dismissing them because they impact only a small portion of our population today. If Minnesota is to depend upon its educated residents and workers, we must ensure the success of all Minnesotans when it comes to education. This is a critical point of fact for all of us – politicians included – to address as the “coloring” of Minnesota proceeds.

- José Pacas

Round-up of good news and commentary for practical progressives

Here's a round-up of some particularly good fodder for practical progressives in the news recently:   

• Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus is continuing to develop as a thoughtful centrist heir to David Broder and she really hit the mark with her recent commentary (headlined in the Star Tribune, "If taxes never go up, we go down''). Marcus nailed Gov. Tim Pawlenty for his recent statement implying that the U.S. has higher taxes than most other nations, pointing out that our overall effective federal tax rate is much lower than it was a decade ago, and lower than all but Mexico, Turkey and South Korea among the 30 major world economies. Marcus skewered conservatives for continuing to claim that tax cuts actually produce more revenue and for their perennial complaint that "whatever level taxes are at, they are too high.'' Just a couple weeks ago, Marcus took on liberals and Democrats for refusing to acknowledge that some entitlement programs might have to be trimmed.
• One of the most refreshing "good that government does'' stories in recent memory landed on the St. Paul Pioneer Press front page over the weekend. An article headlined "Minnesota air pollution:  It's not as bad as you think,'' emphasized the rather astounding good news that since the landmark Clean Air Act of 1970, emissions from industrial polluters and vehicles have been slashed by 62 percent nationally and by half in Minnesota.
• Refuting a lot of conservative anti-Europe propaganda recently, author Steven Hill placed an op-ed in the Star Tribune pointing out that Japan and Europe and their more egalitarian market economies are doing quite well compared to the United States. Hill is the author of "Europe's Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age.''
• Finally, we think we offered a strong rebuttal to the false claim by some conservatives that government can't create jobs, or more broadly, that government is a net drain on the economy and can only consume wealth. Our Star Tribune "Counterpoint'' piece reviewed a long history of business-building investment and job creation in the U.S. and Minnesota.

— Dane Smith

Duncan declares an "absolutely historic'' moment in Minnesota, SHEEO and CCSSO together at last

U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, addressing a hotel banquet room in Minneapolis packed with the nation's top state education officials, said Friday morning that college leaders and K-12 leaders "have frequently acted as if they occupy different universes.''

Duncan said both have to work much more closely together if the United States expects to achieve the goal set by President Obama of regaining its standing  as the most educated nation in the world. In recent decades, about 10 other industrialized democracies,  mostly in Europe, have surpassed the U.S. in the percentage of population with higher-education credentials.

Duncan went on to praise as "absolutely historic'' the first-ever joint national meeting  of the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), which met in coordination this week at the Graves 601 Hotel.  

The moment was especially sweet for James H. McCormick, chancellor of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system (MNSCU), who is nearing retirement and serving as chairman of SHEEO this year.   McCormick by all accounts in his decade as chancellor has made a mark improving Minnesota's public college system, in part through better alignment of curriculum for careers and the workforce. Integrating primary and secondary school systems with higher-ed systems has been a "hot idea'' for at least a decade, McCormick said, and "we can't succeed if we don't work together... I'm excited this first meeting is here in Minnesota.''

McCormick gave credit to the top staff officials of the two national organizations, Paul Lingenfelter of SHEEO and Gene Wilhoit of CCSSO, for the complex planning that made the historic joint meeting possible. 

In an intriguing public conversation between those two leaders, preceding Duncan's address, Lingenfelter noted that in the early 1970s, about 70 percent of the U.S. workforce had a high-school diploma or less.  That minimally educated segment has been reduced to about 40 percent, but it's not nearly good enough for the knowledge-based economy of the future. "We're going to have to change, and we're going to have to change a lot'' to achieve further progress, Lingenfelter said. (Growth & Justice has advocated a goal of 75 percent higher-ed attainment in Minnesota by the end of this decade, meaning only 25 percent of the population will have a high school diploma or less.)

Wilhoit called for more reliance on "evidence-based research on what it is in K-12 that leads to success in higher-ed'' and added that "what we do in higher ed has to be consistent and aligned with what we're doing in K-12.''

Duncan urged more collaboration and promised that he and other federal Education Department officials would do everything they can to hasten and increase coordination between systems.  

"We'll be there... This is a big, big deal for us,'' Duncan said.

— Dane Smith

"Nancy'' awards for Kretzmann and Rolnick build momentum for "babies investment'' in 2011

In Minnesota's public policy circles, the late Nancy Latimer is widely considered a pioneering statewide leader,  one of the most respected influences on the conscience and direction of our state.    Latimer, who died in 2006, worked hard and effectively and quietly over three decades,  at the McKnight Foundation and in other roles, building a case and a network for more and better investment in early childhood development,  and also to advance and protect the interests of  rural Minnesota.  

Annual awards granted in Nancy's name don't typically  attract much mainstream media attention.  But the fourth  "Nancy'' awards by the Minnesota Early Childhood Funders Network generated palpable enthusiasm last week among a growing network of advocates for investing amply and wisely in the crucial childhood years, and getting off the dime in the new decade.

Watch for continued strong leadership and new directions from these two veterans of the early childhood cause, each of whom were awarded  a "Nancy'' at a conference of community leaders at the Wilder Foundation campus in St. Paul..

Jane Kretzmann,  a former program officer for the Bush Foundation, also former state refugee coordinator, and a key leader for the Minnesota Community Foundation and the St. Paul Foundation.   Kretzmann is heading up a promising new "Project for Babies''  with the help of those foundations, and she promised in 2011 and beyond to "bring the voice of babies'' to the public policy debates over budgets and priorities in Minnesota.

Art Rolnick is practically a household name as one of the state's most respected and oft-quoted economists, and he already is recognized as one of the formeost authorities and advocates for  early childhood education.  He is retiring this summer as senior vice-president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and beginning a new career at the University of Minnesota, heading up a center focusing on research and policy studies in  early childhood.   Rolnick's award was the second in a week for his early childhood work, picking up a "Leaders in Public Policy'' award from the Politics in Minnesota media group. 

Students of the subject should check out these presentations at the event,  by U of M Professor Megan Gunnar on "The Impact of Toxic Stress on Brain Development and Health'', and by Richard Chase, Wilder Research consulting scientist on "Closing the Early Childhood Opportunity Gaps -- What Are We Waiting For?'' 

Rolnick got one of the bigger laugh lines of the morning, noting the presence in the audience of Nancy Latimer's much more famous spouse, former St. Paul Mayor George Latimer, and their son and daughters in the audience.   After briefly reviewing George's illustrious career and  credentials, Rolnick said that in marrying Nancy, George had definitely "married up.''

Dane Smith

P.S.  The awards, the research and the issue got media coverage this year from Minnesota Public Radio, MinnPost, and the Twin Cities Daily Planet. 

Unconscionably bad math on government growth

The 66th anniversary of D-Day got me to ruminating on the tremendous sacrifice and the high tax rates that we imposed on ourselves during arguably our finest hours as a nation. It also got me to thinking about the funny numbers flying around these days about our governmental costs and obligations.

The way Gov. Tim Pawlenty and other government-bashing politicos would do the math, our nation now has spent between two and three times more on our war in  the Middle East than we did on World War II.  And using this same childlike finger-counting, the average American family today is 20 times richer than the average family was in 1950. 

This is the falsehood you get if you only count actual nominal greenbacks to make your case. In physical dollar bills, we spent some $300 billion on the largest war in our history, between 1941 and 1945. On the much smaller conflict since 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have spent $809 billion in actual dollar bills. Similarly, average family income in 1950 was less than $4,000 and now is about $80,000.

Even amateur students of history and economics knows that this method of counting is ridiculous, and that you have to account for inflation and the size of the economy to get a true perspective of costs and benefits. During the peak year of World War II, total military spending consumed a staggering 37.5 percent of our total GDP. And during the peak year of our Middle East War,  the total military spending as a percent of GDP was 4.2 percent, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service.  And we all know very well that a family making $12,000 a year these days is living in poverty, and is not three times richer than the average family in 1950.

And yet Pawlenty and other anti-government operatives have been going around the nation and the state using nominal dollars to claim that state government was growing  on average 21 percent between 1960 and 2002, when he became governor, and that since then  he's heroically got the growth rate down to  2 percent a year. The increasingly strident and unreliable  Wall Street Journal editorial page has reprinted these claims. 

Pawlenty typically cheats, by double,  with artful phrasing on this 21-to-2 claim, and by using biennial growth to describe the previous growth rate. MinnPost's Eric Black has written a superb and detailed piece  explaining how badly Pawlenty is distorting the numbers, including the wry observation that by this way of reckoning, Minnesota National Guard spending alone on Middle East deployments probably would exceed the amount we spent on the entire Revolutionary War (what a bargain, $100 million, according to CRS). Black notes that because of a dreadful decade of economic decline, low inflation and revenue shortages, almost every governor in America these days could claim to be the most fiscally conservative in their history. (Black also refers  to our own excellent op-ed on the subject, several months ago, which makes the case that much of the ACTUAL growth in government through the 1990s was good for Minnesota people and good for business too.)

The ultimate irony is that even without the gross distortions, Pawlenty does deserve to be known forever as Tightwad Tim, the most ideologically pure penny-pinching governor in our recent history.  If you look at the  most comprehensive measure of government cost, the Price of Government figure from Minnesota Management and Budget, state and local government revenues are down from roughly 17.5 percent through the 1990s (a level we think is about right for sound investments in people and infrastructure) to about 16 percent in the aughts. That's about $3 billion less per year — for hospitals, schools and highways — than if we had NOT cut income tax rates permanently in 1999 and 2000 and if Pawlenty had NOT adhered to a rigid no-new-taxes ideology since becoming governor.

But here’s the other shoe dropping, a question that begs asking. 

Are we better off than we were in the 1990s? By almost any measure that is applied for quality of life and business conditions, and for most of the population in the middle and lower-income realms, the answer is "no". The exception, until very recently, might be those at the very top of the income scale. They have a larger share of income and wealth than when the decade started and their state-local effective tax rate is lower, according to the Minnesota Tax Incidence study.    

The Bush-Pawlenty tax-cut decade overall was the worst in memory for most people, with two major recessions, no gains in actual wages for the vast number of families in the  middle incomes, and real losses for those in the bottom two or three deciles. As the Bible says,  a tree should be judged by its fruit, adjusted for inflation and economic growth, of course.

—Dane Smith   

 

Renowned economist links global economic crisis to vast piles of unrecorded transactions

In an extraordinary conversation at the U of M last week (somehow completely missed by the Minnesota news media) renowned economist Hernando de Soto delivered a fascinating and disturbing theory about the root cause of the continuing global economic crisis.

When the crisis exploded in the closing months of the Bush administration, de Soto said, he was stunned to hear the very top American financial regulators admit that they simply did not and could not know how much  "unrecorded paper'' and undocumented financial dealing  had been going on in the national and world markets.

Regulators basically were saying, "We don't really know what's going on,'' said de Soto. Developments in the world of derivatives and credit default swaps somehow resulted in western capitalism abandoning one of its most valuable characteristics and the true secret to its success. In de Soto's view, that secret is the fact that almost nothing is really secret, and "everything of value is recorded.''

Recurring crises and aftershocks, like those in Dubai, Greece and Spain, can be expected to continue, de Soto said. "You don't know who's next because you don't have the documentation.''

De Soto is a Peruvian, director of the influential Institute for Liberty and Democracy, by all accounts a brilliant thinker and theorist. He is an admirer of western capitalism, but also a promoter of capital formation in developing nations to benefit the poor. It's hard to imagine an economist who is more in sync with the idea that  business growth AND social justice must be pursued simultaneously. He's been highly praised by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. His Holy Grail is convincing developing nations to build truly democratic and legitimate governments while getting their economies to abandon informal and corrupt systems and emulate western models of transparent and documented transactions.

The mainstream Twin Cities news media, partial victims of the crisis, continues to miss important developments in its own backyard on the global and national economic crisis. A couple of weeks ago, two substantive speeches in the Twin Cities by U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, a chief architect of the financial reform package in Congress, went uncovered by larger mainstream media, newspapers and broadcast.  

Fortunately for us, de Soto's entire dialogue with Brian Atwood, dean of the Humphrey Institute and a longtime friend of de Soto's from Atwood's days as director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, now can be viewed on the College of Continuing Education's "Great Conversations'' webpage.

It's great stuff. DeSoto's view of the West from a Third World perspective is enlightening and at times encouraging. He seems to be saying we have the right idea, and that we've been a role model, that democracy and markets work well for all people as predictably as "aspirin or an MRI," but we can't regress to developing world standards and turn our economy over to corrupt outlaws who operate in the dark.

— Dane Smith

Witness to the possible: Good outcomes for students with challenges

My oldest daughter spent her first six years of classroom education at a school where some 85 percent of the kids spoke English as a second language and more than half qualified for the free and reduced-price school lunch program. 

Lucky her. Seriously.

Her school in Dearborn, Michigan, achieved terrific educational outcomes for a student body made up primarily of immigrants and first-generation Americans, most of them from low-income families. At the time that she finished the fifth grade, the school’s standardized reading scores from the Michigan Educational Assessment Program outpaced the state and school district averages.

Clearly the school succeeded with its challenged students, but with my daughter — the native English speaker — McDonald Elementary really excelled. She was reading at a high school level by the fourth grade and loving it.

I think about that experience when I hear Minnesotans talk about how some kids just can’t be expected to hit the mark in school because of language issues or income levels. As a group, we Minnesotans seem quick to make excuses for why students of color, in particular, lag behind. Or maybe we’re just quick to write them off.

As a researcher and analyst, I know by heart the numbers describing the standardized test score gaps by race and income for Minnesota’s students. I know we do worse than we should — and worse than many other states — when it comes to educating kids from the racial and ethnic groups other than “non-Hispanic white.”

With kids of color now constituting about one-fourth of Minnesota’s student population, that’s a problem for us all.

But since returning to my home state of Minnesota, I have found the numbers do not carry the same power as the story of the school my children attended.

The first year that Michigan’s schools participated in the state’s educational assessment program, our neighborhood elementary school did poorly. That was a few years before my daughter entered kindergarten, but I heard the story from the principal and the teachers.

School staff knew they had smart kids, but kids with challenges. The poor showing on the standardized test that first year, however, shocked the school into action.

The teachers and the principal overhauled the school’s approach, honing in on language as the key building block for education and organizing the school day so that students could cross over from their grade to another in order to learn reading and writing with other kids at their same level.

The teachers used the test scores to analyze where they were succeeding or not and to help them identify why — something that was done every year thereafter, too. It wasn’t a question of blindly teaching to the test but of using the test to guide effective education.

The results were startling. The experience — seeing my children succeed in an outstanding public school alongside so many English language learners and kids from low-income families — is unforgettable.

It was a fascinating demonstration of the possible.

Remarkable, really, that instead of finding excuses for the test scores, the crowd in Dearborn found solutions. We could use more of that. We could use that here, in Minnesota — from policy makers, district administrators, school staff, parents and voters.

— Matt Kane

Barney Frank makes case for financial reform, predicts late June passage, warns against populist rage, but who knew?

I was privleged over the weekend to witness a high-quality, high-road debate over the sweeping federal financial reform initiative in Congress, featuring none other than its most powerful and informed  congressional advocate and some of the smartest  business leaders, bankers and economists in Minnesota.

And  it's kind of a shame that most news consumers in Minnesota apparently won't ever know about it.  

Congressman Barney Frank, the brainy Massachusetts Democrat who is leading the reform advocated by President Obama, was featured at an event at the Minneapolis Radisson sponsored by the Caux Roundtable, an international group based in Minnesota that focuses on business ethics.   (Growth & Justice was a co-sponsor of the event).   

Frank predicted that a financial reform package in some form would pass by late June.   He was impressive in laying out the case for the most thorough reform since the Depression, acknowedging that the U.S. is a "private-sector society'' that depends on capitalism for wealth creation, but affirming also that the government has a proper role in "setting the rules.''  Frank outlined the chronology that led to the 08-09 collapse, allowing that there was some government and consumer culpability, but he pinned primary responsibility on the "securitization'' of the financial industry,  and the unhealthy fact that people making loans were not the same people who would end up trying to collect on those loans.   Frank said it was Bush administration conservatives, not liberals, who pushed hardest for maximum home ownership and rebuffed efforts to put the brakes on the mortgage craze or to pursue alternative policies that helped low-income families.

 Almost as impressive were three leading Minnesotans who grilled and challenged Frank strongly on the particulars of the bill.   They were:  Karen Grandstrand, chair of the Bank & Finance Group at Fredrickson & Byron and formerly with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis; Roger Conant, Chief Investment Officer for Magni Asset Management and a prominent Minnesota conservative; and David Reiling, CEO of Sunrise Community Banks.

Conant, in particular, challenged the reform bill for reaching too far in some areas, not doing enough in others, and creating an illusion that regulation can ever effectively harness a dynamic market economy.  Frank listened to the panel, and delivered a spirited counter-rebuttal, arguing at one point that bankers and their free-market champions say they want  flexibility, but then press up against the limit of the law in seeking profits, then claim they did nothing "illegal'' when their behavior creates economic damage or collapse.

Frank also urged the group of about 200 bankers, lawyers and accountants to understand the roots of  populist rage, to work for reforms that regain public trust and result in more equality, and perhaps even to pay their employees more.

 "The average American is right to think that this is not fair at all,'' Frank said, and things could get a lot worse "if we don't do a better job of easing unfainress and inequaltiy.'' 

 It was the kind of civil, spirited, respectful and deeply informed debate that we see far too little of these days.   And I'm still looking for even a hint that it happened from the  Twin Cities mainstream media.    A couple of respected on-line journalists were there, veteran  business columnist Dave Beal from MinnPost,  and Bill Clements, from Politics in Minnesota/Finance & Commerce. 

Here was perhaps the leading national player on the top-of-the-agenda issue in Congress, at two events in the Twin Cities (he also spoke at the DFL Humphrey Day Dinner) and there was nothing in the Star Tribune or the Pioneer Press or Minnesota Public Radio or any of the television stations.   Instead, we had the umpteenth story on yet another Tea Party (one-sixth the expected turnout according to STrib reporter Bob von Sternberg) state capitol rally, blaming the government for private-sector failure and holding up those "Atlas Shrugged'' signs.   More on Ayn Rand's pernicious influence later.

Dane Smith

Naomi Tutu lays it on the line, about facing race

It's often been said that greatness skips generations,  but clearly this is not the case with  Archbishop Desmond Tutu's  daughter,  Naomi Tutu.   Her delightful sense of humor and ebullient optimism about improving race relations in the world inspired a  Prom Center audience in Oakdale Monday night.

  Tutu was there as the featured keynote speaker at the St. Paul Foundation's Facing Race Ambassador Awards Celebration and Minnesota Public Radio featured Tutu and her uplifting advocacy in its programming this week.

  Notwithstanding President Obama's election, America still has a major race problem, startng with our discomfort at even acknowledging we have a problem, Tutu said.   And a disturbingly large percentage of Americans are uninformed  about the history of discrimination and slavery , white privilege and advantage, and the de facto and de jure apartheid (we beat Tutu's South Africa in outlawing segregation by only about 30 years) that existed in the United States until 1965.

  Tutu exhorted the racially diverse packed ballroom to get face-to-face with each other and "tell our stories.''   Her memorable closing words:  "We are greater than how we act toward one another today...A just world is not just possible but probable...We speak of justice because we are determined to have justice.'

So what can we do?   At Growth & Justice, one of our top priorities is closing the so-called achievement gap and dramatically increasing performance and higher-education attainment levels for our fast-growing minority populations, and our Smart Investments in Minnesota's Students project shows the way.    But lots of other things need to be done, in the way of starting conversations and working our head around the pervasive ways that racial animosity and ignorance pervades our community.

  And the St. Paul Foundations' "Facing Race Initiative'' website page provides a wealth of infomation and suggested community involvement that will help us first "face race,''  and then dispel racism and the toxic economic inequality that comes with it.

Dane Smith