Pastor calls out City Council’s “water is wet” resolution on "racism as public health crisis"
Rev. Jawanza Karriem Colvin, Senior Pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, at a meeting of the Greater Cleveland Congregations, earlier this year. Photo courtesy of GCC
On the surface, the measure passed by council last week tracks similar resolutions and declarations by public officials, civic, business, and political organizations across the nation. But Colvin, citing council’s meekness, reactivity, and lack of any substantive activity, denounced its members as do-nothing money changers who should be driven out of City Hall.In a scathing denunciation of Cleveland’s political leadership, both black and white, the Rev. Jawanza Karriem Colvin, senior pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, lambasted City Council’s passage of a resolution declaring racism to be a public health crisis as a well-meaning but empty public relations reaction to the twin public crises facing our community and the nation.
“You cannot say that you are against systemic racism on paper when your practices demonstrate otherwise.”
Asking what have our council and mayor done either to initiate new policies for police accountability or to address the disparate impact of the coronavirus on Cleveland’s black population, Colvin recited a litany of swift actions taken by mayors, city councils, and police chiefs across the country, including Chicago, Houston, Denver, Phoenix, Broward County, FL, and others. In many of these locales, policies were announced to change police practices immediately.
Colvin said people in other places “are taking real substantive action while we make empty statements.” Noting that Cleveland’s resolution was issued with no budget and no plan, he said it had “no bite, no meat, no substance; it was a p.r. action.”
Colvin’s remarks were delivered during his weekly hour-long radio program, “Freedom Talk”, which airs every Wednesday at 5pm on community radio station WOVU-FM/95.9. His remarks, evocative of an Old Testament prophet, went well beyond his criticism of the resolution, which he called “so much sounding brass and tinkling cymbals”.
The pastor gave due praise and credit to many of Cleveland’s nonprofit and groups and its religious community for their leadership on public policy matters. He said every major move by city council in recent years originated somewhere else, from institutions like the YWCA, United Way, and the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland.
Colvin credited council, the mayor and the police chief only with having a “keen sense of the obvious”. He said even the impetus for the resolution — whose principal sponsors were Blaine Griffin and Basheer Jones, African American councilmen who represent eastside wards — came from nonprofit groups external to the council. The nonprofits did the research work on the resolution, Colvin said. All Council had to do was say “Aye.”
"Legislators are not doing their basic duties and the mayor is silent."
Colvin bemoaned the prevailing culture of the city’s political establishment and its impact on both Cleveland’s performance and standing. There is no leadership coming out of city council, he said, and that there was no balance between City Hall’s executive and legislative branches. “The city council doesn’t move without the mayor’s approval”. He compared Cleveland to other communities that have younger leadership and more dynamic economies.
One point in particular stuck in the pastor’s craw: council’s failure in the past several months to have a single meeting of its health and human services committee, which Griffin chairs. Colvin said social distancing and the closing of city hall were no excuse. Council members had found ways to meet on other matters, but not to address the fact that black people are sick and dying in the streets of police violence, and elsewhere from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I don’t know whether to be disappointed or disgusted,” he said. “These are the people we are looking to to lead change.…Legislators are not doing their basic duties” and the mayor is silent. “You cannot say that you are against systemic racism on paper when your practices demonstrate otherwise.”
Colvin devoted the entire hour to this topic, which he called “Communities in Crisis”. In addition to excoriating what he called council’s lack of integrity, insincerity and hypocrisy, he offered his insights on the systemic and structural racism that are currently nationwide topics of discussion in the wake of the public lynching of George Floyd by four Minneapolis policemen and numerous other recent murders of innocent black people while jogging or sleeping.
Colvin addressed white supremacy as the imbedded nature of white privilege in every facet, form and fashion around the world. And he observed that not only white people are its practitioners and defenders.
“You don’t have to be white to still reinforce systemic racism …You can be operating systemic racism by not dismantling the operations that support systemic racism.”
While not equating Cleveland’s structural racism with the city’s poor standing among its peers, Colvin’s jeremiad could be seen to make the implicit connection. As he credited the civic leaders who have publicly pledged to work towards ending structural racism, he took issue with the part of their statement which attempted to position Cleveland as a progressive standard bearer.
It is a moral blind spot on this city that we think we can get by with mediocrity. … The more we accept mediocrity, the more we gon’ get what we got.”
“We are not a progressive city … We are more concerned about charity than we are about justice.”
Colvin described the city’s culture and absence of leadership as “a shame. It is a moral blind spot on this city that we think we can get by with mediocrity. … The more we accept mediocrity, the more we gon’ get what we got,” he said, slipping momentarily into a vernacular that belied his education at Morehouse and Columbia. He then referenced Einstein’s definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Notwithstanding his dismay, despondency, disappointment, discouragement and disgust that while other cities — even suburban Beachwood — are taking action, Colvin said he thought that council would finally have a hearing on the devastating effect the coronavirus is having on black citizens, churches and businesses.
He implied that he expected pushback to his remarks and invited those who had his phone number to give him a call if so moved. And he closed by paraphrasing the activist Gloria Steinem:
“The truth will set you free, but first it’s gon’ tick you off.”
“Freedom Talk” is scheduled to repeat at 1pm today. It will be livestreamed here.
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Originally published June 11, 2020 on The Real Deal Press companion site. Reposted April 19, 2020.
