Matlock, that tick tack board of your’s is brilliant. Any teacher who can think like that is worth their weight in gold. In return, I would like to share with you a project similar to yours.

Back when it was so new, no one had even heard of it, I worked on a GIS mapping project for our region. We mapped data sets including race, age, income, educational attainment, health insurance, life expectancy, housing stock, churches, hospitals, banks, transportation, services and businesses.

The resulting maps exposed a stark pattern of inequality throughout our region. However, to our surprise, our first presentation found decision makers blaming the patterns on the choices people in each area had made for themselves. Comments followed the line of “if they don’t like it, they are free to change it or that’s they way they like it.” Resentment. Denial. Blame. Clearly, we had more work to do.

A KPMG accountant saw the problem in our work and asked to join our team. This time, we mapped public investments. We focused on local tax dollars because these allocations are individual choices and decisions made exclusively by our elected officials and politicians — NOT the people they represent. We also mapped tax revenue contributed throughout the region.

Systemic racism was far worse than we’d known.

Systemic racism was literally shrinking the budgets of every local government entity in the region, including every police and fire department, every hospital, school and water district and every city and county agency. There were NO exceptions!

In other words, it costs a fortune to keep systemic racism in place.

Insurance companies, financial companies and global corporations use actuaries to measure and manage risk. The result of applying the same actuarial analysis to our project was terrifying.

Our entire region was less than 10 years away from bankruptcy.

Simply put, if systemic racism continued, local government would go broke. Even the state and federal government together could not afford to bail out an entire region. If our local government entities went broke, every frigging public employee would lose their jobs (including elected officials, policemen, firemen, teachers, sewage system workers, road repairmen, city planners).

This time, our presentations changed the conversation. Suddenly, we were searching for the means to change the systems.