September 2000 · City Council 1999-2007
Bridging the Racial Divide
Kansas City has a race problem. Every American city does, but Kansas City's is written into its geography. Troost Avenue divides the city by race and income.
In the words of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Troost Avenue is “the city’s historic dividing line between more affluent white residents and lower-income black residents.” The city lives with this divide every day, and most politicians treat it like weather: something to acknowledge and move on from.
I did not move on from it. I hosted public forums specifically designed to confront the racial divide and create space for honest conversation about what it means, how it happened, and what we can do about it.
The Forums
Working with my council colleagues, I sponsored forums that brought residents from across the city together to discuss race, diversity, and the structural inequalities that shaped Kansas City. These were not academic panels or political theater. They were community conversations where people said what they actually thought.
The Kansas City Call covered these events because they were unusual. Elected officials do not typically create spaces for uncomfortable conversations about race. It is easier to give a speech about unity and move on to the next agenda item. What we did was harder: we sat in rooms with people who had fundamentally different experiences of the same city and facilitated conversations that were honest, sometimes painful, and always necessary.
Students spoke about their experiences with racism in Kansas City schools. Residents and panelists at the forum spoke about how racial and ethnic labels divide the city. The panel included Jake Mascotte, CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield. And council members listened.
Why This Matters
Racial equity is not separate from community development. It is the foundation of it. You cannot build affordable housing, invest in transit, revitalize commercial corridors, or transform neighborhoods without confronting the racial dynamics that created the conditions you are trying to change.
As the Mid-America Regional Council has written, the region’s unequal housing reality is “not by accident, but rather lies in the region’s history of discriminatory practices.” Redlining denied mortgages in the neighborhoods where Black families were confined to living. Restrictive covenants determined where they could not. Interstate highway construction displaced Black residents. Urban renewal displaced Black residents. Exclusionary zoning played a part too: HUD notes that “exclusionary zoning laws limiting the creation of low-income housing were not uncommon through the 1940s and 1950s.”
If you do not understand that history, you cannot do effective development in these neighborhoods.
Talking about race in public is politically risky. I talked about it anyway because the alternative, pretending that race did not shape every aspect of Kansas City's development landscape, was dishonest. And dishonesty is a poor foundation for community transformation.
This is what we mean by community engagement.
Not a meeting series. Presence, on their schedule, until something changes.