Sacramento County leaders declared racism a public health crisis. Advocates want action
.JPG "Sacramento County Supervisor Rich Desmond, the board chair, speaks during a meeting on Tuesday. Desmond asked county staff to report about efforts undertaken by county agencies to address racism after a group of advocates challenged the county’s efforts to address the issue.")
A group of advocates made impassioned pleas Tuesday to the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, urging them to earnestly comply with the county’s 2020 declaration of racism as a public health crisis.
Toward the close of off-agenda public comments, board chair Supervisor Rich Desmond called on county staff to make a report to the board about efforts undertaken by county agencies to address racism.
In the 2020 resolution, the supervisors declared “that racism, and the health inequities therefrom, constitutes a public health crisis affecting our entire community.” Among other action items in the resolution, the board agreed to “identify and implement solutions to eliminate institutional, structural and systemic racial inequity in all community services provided by the County.”
Eleven protesters at this week’s meeting said the board had shirked that obligation in favor of a diversity, equity and inclusion-based strategy that largely ignored systemic racism and did little to materially change living conditions for the most vulnerable county residents.
“If we believe this — that systemic racism is a problem — then we need to pursue approaches that explicitly name race as the root cause and aim to heal that problem specifically,” said April Michelle Jean, a policy director at Public Health Advocates. “People have used diversity, equity and inclusion to de-center race and racism.”
Many of the advocates asked that the board seek local consultants who are experts in both racial equity and public health; engage residents — particularly residents of color — in the process of changing county policies and procedures; and evaluate county budgets with race and racism in mind.
Liz Blum, a co-founder of Decarcerate Sacramento, pointed out that a disproportionate number of inmates in Sacramento County’s jails are Black.
“Sacramento cages Black people at four times the rate of white people,” Blum told the board. “Centering racial equity means asking why, getting to the root causes of this inequity and implementing intentional solutions.”
The day after the meeting, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office reported that 1,258 people incarcerated in the jails were Black, while 967 were white. According to the U.S. Census estimates, only 11% of the county’s residents are Black; 61% are white.
Public comment in the morning has typically been cut off at 30 minutes during Desmond’s tenure as chair, but public comment continued for nearly an hour at the beginning of Tuesday’s meeting. Most addressed the board about either the 2020 racism declaration or about ongoing contract negotiations with in-home supportive services workers.
Those workers have demanded during nine months of negotiations that their pay gradually increase from their current wage of $16.50 an hour to $20 an hour, over a three- or four-year contract.
Some speakers linked the two issues, because a disproportionate number of recipients of in-home services are low-income seniors and disabled people of color, and because the workers themselves are also disproportionately non-white. The service providers’ chief negotiator, Marcus McRae, confirmed that 70% of the union’s members in Sacramento County are people of color.
“Racism is a public health crisis,” said a tearful Kula Koenig, senior local policy director at Public Health Advocates. “You can see it because the people that are asking for more money are the Black and brown folks who take care of our people.”
