Emma Hughes

Welcome to today's Part 2 portion of our episode: On the corner of homelessness and Race. I'm Emma Hughes and we are lucky to continue the conversation with special guest Claire Jefferson Glipa. As a reminder, Claire is the executive director of Family Promise Riverside Down in California and she is just an incredible person. I'm excited to continue that conversation, but do want to again just give a content warning. This podcast and this episode in particular does include discussions of the mistreatment of peoples and cultures, and as you are feeling heightened, please engage that. Do the self-care needed, engage with your community questions, do the research and allow your curiosity to continue to drive you to deeper empathy, deeper compassion, and to being a better neighbor.

Oh, and before I forget, if you haven't listened to part one of this I would encourage you to do so. We're going to continue to talk about analogies that were explained in part one of this episode. And so just to get a better understanding of the content that Claire and I are going to talk about, it helps to go back and listen to part one without further ado, Part 2 of today's conversation.

Claire Jefferson Glipa

Right? But the idea now of protecting our community, ensuring our safety, has to do a shift from othering to a “we” and the ability to bring our community and redefining our community as everyone. Right? And that makes takes a really distinctive shift in our paradigm of community.

Emma Hughes

How do you see, how do we see racial disparities affecting who does and even doesn't access services when they are experiencing homelessness?

Claire Jefferson Glipa

Yes. So, there is in the work of bias, there are kind of two paradigms it's called the halo effect and the horn effect, right? And so ideally the… what we hope is that when we look at someone in a crisis, we see someone who needs help, right?

Emma Hughes

Right, that's the hope.

Claire Jefferson Glipa

That’s the hope, right. And I think most of us would say, yeah, if I saw somebody who has dropped their shoe, I would be the one to pick up the shoe and say, “hey, shoe.” Right? Right? “Come get your shoe!” Right? I think all of us would put ourselves in that category.  Oftentimes when we see people in a crisis, whatever our previous experience with that way in which we would define that person, right, whether that be gender, whether that you know be racial description.

We put that person in a category and so when we're talking about supporting our unhoused neighbors, we have to check our own assumptions about that person before we walk in. If we understand that about our brains, then we can assign our value to our brains natural reaction.

Emma Hughes

How would we do that? Keep going. And this is super helpful.

Claire Jefferson Glipa

I can recognize what resources I have to give, recognize my assumption in the moment and act through those things.

Emma Hughes

And I hear you also saying, “ask.” You are going to say, OK, here's where I am. Here's my own internal recognition of what I do and don't feel safe doing like you're not going to just go up to that man and be like you just look like you need a hug.

Claire Jefferson Glipa

When we're dealing with our unhoused neighbors, largely our house neighbors would. I will say 9 times out of 10 when I am out in the world asking for support. The first question I get is do you guys provide financial literacy and job training? There's an assumption, right? Do you drug test? Do you background check? Do you do a myriad of things based on your assumption about this population? Right? And so if I've had, back to the Halo experience, if I have had positive experiences with this demographic when I see someone that needs help that matches that demographic, I will attach a positive assumption about why that individual is in crisis. If the horn effect, I have had a negative interaction with the representation of this individual when that individual is in crisis, I will attach that negative association with that individual.

So when we are talking about caring for unhoused children and their families and we know that a larger proportion of those individuals are black and brown, and we acknowledge the tea that we have been steeped in. We need to recognize the way in which we interact with those individuals. The assumptions that we make about that those individuals are pre decided as a result of our own experience. And in order to help, we must first check where we are as a result of this observation. And then ask if and how we can help.

Emma Hughes

When and I love what you're saying is you're not saying and just change your assumption, which I think sometimes can be the advice which when given doesn't feel very doable because you're right, the assumptions are made so quick that to dart there. Almost as just like impractical. Like it's a, we want our assumptions to change, but what I'm hearing you say is if you recognize the assumption that already has been made and before acting bring an awareness and a curiosity to that so that you can act from a place of your values, not your assumptions. Then all of a sudden, now you're acting. Now you're slowly, overtime through interaction, changing your assumption exactly. Then it's that cycle all over again. Now my assumptions might be a little bit more positive, a little more gracious, a little more, whatever. So then it can get quicker and quicker and quicker. The goal is not hey, change your assumption right now. The goal is, be mindful of the assumption you have made so that you can act in accordance with where you want to go.

Claire Jefferson Glipa

Exactly because I don't think, I think the majority of people in the world would we're just going to use the big oldest word would say I'm not racist. I think most people would say that, right? Most people would say, “if I saw a kid on the corner that was hungry and I had a piece of bread, it wouldn't matter what representation that little itty bitty little precious person is.” I believe the little people should eat, period, right? Like, that's a value that we have, right? And yet the approval for, let's say something like EBT, some people call it food stamps, some people call it myriad of different food support is far different across racial lines.

So when we're talking about race and homelessness the opportunities to exit the cycle of homelessness in a world that has been steeped to believe that certain people are deserving of opportunities and certain people aren't. We have a responsibility to recognize at the very least, the assumption that we come to serving this population with in order to truly solve the issue. What assumption be really connected to your metacognition?

Emma Hughes

What's metacognition?

Claire Jefferson Glipa

So metacognition is the thinking about your thinking while you're thinking, right? So when we're thinking, let's head back to the Apple analogy, right. When we're looking at something benign as apples and we grab in my family, we like crisp, tart apples, right? I had a friend in college that actually, family grew apples. You're always eating unripe apples, Claire. That's what I grew up with, because for her, fresh picked, fully developed apples with all of their flavor and juiciness were best in my family. Growing up in an urban setting, getting a crisp apple determined that it would last and be edible throughout the week and not go bad before my mom could get back to the grocery store.

So now when I think about apples. I have to think about do I naturally choose the apple that my mom told me over the years was best? Or do I maybe take a risk and say I see and recognize that this apple is what my family would have said was a good apple because of our experience? That's metacognition, thinking about the apple, my history with apples and what assumptions I might make with apples and then making a conscious choice.

Emma Hughes

And it's the intention. It is, why do I want what I want?  So you can choose accordingly. So much of what is harmful and hurtful in society is because of a lack of awareness, a lack of intention because, to your point, most people would be like I'm not racist. Because nobody wants that. And some unquestioned assumptions, some mindless can create racist actions. It's because you are like, not because you're a racist, but because your quickness and unquestioning mind was steeped in that reality definitely.

Claire Jefferson Glipa

To actively choose to build your community and take responsibility for your community. How you define that community? I happen to be a resident of Riverside and I think it is appalling in the community that I love the community where I pay taxes and regularly vote that children sleep in their car. It is unacceptable to me. It is an abomination to my community and I will personally take responsibility for it. I will see in my lifetime an end to child homelessness, family homelessness because this is my community, I give a damn. I see every single child in my community that does not have housing community as my shortcoming. My communities lack of opportunity for children to experience the base need of housing.

Emma Hughes

There's an African proverb that I love to that point, which literally says a child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warm.

Claire Jefferson Glipa

Girl. Amen. Everything we see about disparities, right, like just laying everything on the line, right, like we see national disparities in so many areas. Education, acquisition of wealth, ability to build businesses, right, college enrollment, health, maternity death. Like there are so many disparities that we see in the country that we all say we love. At some point we each need to take ownership of this. We are a democracy. We were built on the foundations of we, “we the people.” Now I will acknowledge that that was a very specifically defined we and yet in 2024, let's truly define the “we” as everyone whose feet are on this land.

Emma Hughes

One of the realities, the narratives that we've heard here in our Spokane community is, “I'm tired from all backgrounds, all populations, all like government individuals, church, everybody.” I'm tired and what I hear you saying is, essentially, I mean and correct me here if I'm wrong, you're going to be tired either way. You're either going to be tired fighting back and being afraid and reconciling within yourself, your assumptions, or you're going to be tired helping and you're going to be tired caring for members in your community. So instead of saying, well, I'm tired, I can't do anything. It's almost like, yeah, you're going to be tired. So pick how you're going to be tired.

Claire Jefferson Glipa

So yeah, here's what I'll say. I will, I like to tell stories. I would think about a mother.

Right? The experience of being a mom is really a violent one, right? Like it's fun getting into the gig, but getting out of it? It’s not for the faint of heart. Right? Nobody is going to say that childbirth is, nobody's gonna say that childbirth is enjoyable, and most women would love some type of medical intervention just to like put us under and just wake up to a cute little bundle. And yet 4 centuries, knowing that women have engaged in the work of childbirth, it is hard, stinking work. It is painful and it is body altering.

And yet there are quite a few women that do it multiple times in their life. It is tiring. It is exhausting. It is excruciating. And yet we have deemed on the other side of bringing a person into my family, into my community, that that labor, quite literally, of love is worth it. There is nothing about bringing a new person into our community, into our family that should be assumed would be done without excruciating, altering, loving work. And if we shift our paradigm to truly think about what it means to build the America that we love from that founding document of “we the people,” if we kept those 3 words at the forefront of our minds, the labor would be worth it.

Emma Hughes

But Claire, I'm not an expert in “insert X issue”and you're telling me I have to do all of it?

Claire Jefferson Glipa

All that you can, yes. Here's the thing that, again, I will say that I saw in this community that we are blessed to live in, right. I will just say it on our very entrance into our community. We had a good old NIMBY fair, not in my backyard fair. Right? Homeless folks. We care about it. We love the homeless people, just not in my backyard, right. We don't want to see no child sleeping on the street. We believe that children should be cared for. But can you do it on the other side of town while I don't see it? I am not asking any individual to go take doctor, you know Ingram Ibram X candies, you know course and get a PhD in race. I'm not.

What I am asking you to do is get a PhD in your own doggone community. If you happen to live in a community that is blessed to be next to a Native American reservation, how dare you not know the names of that tribe and the language they speak. They are your neighbors. If you live in a community with a ____ and ______ population, how dare you not know their national foods and flavors? That's your community. We as a society have decided that it's OK for me to sit in my little circle and we have taken the erroneous belief that keeping my tiny circle homogeneous, whether that is of race or socioeconomic status, equal safety. And I'm here to say, look at your town. That belief has got people sleeping in tents in your community, that belief has got children sleeping in cars in your community that has women exiting from the hospital after giving childbirth, sleeping with their brand new newborns under bridges. It is time for us to decide that our community is everyone that lives within the jurisdiction of our city, our county, our state, and for us to do whatever we can do to ensure that everyone is housed. And the road to that future is understanding our implicit bias, opening up our hearts and minds to new experiences and cultures, and redefining the word “we.” At our core we are steeped in racist thought. We are steeped in toxic capitalism. We are steeped in it to our core and it is destroying us as a nation. The fact that 1 in 30 children are homeless in this nation is an abomination. That there are more homeless children today than there were homeless individuals during the Great Depression is ridiculous.

The lack of understanding that if we understood our community we could fix that. That this country has enough wealth to ensure everyone sleeps indoors. There is no excuse/ There is no ignorance, there is no fear. There is no concern that is more important than securing the future of this nation. We are at a Nexus moment in so many areas of our lives. However, ensuring that unhoused children are able to reach their full potential in this nation should be our top priority of every pundit running for from school district to the president. Every PTA, every Rotary Club, every church, mosque and synagogue. This is not a blue or red issue. This is not a Jesus versus a Buddhist issue. This is a human issue that we have created as a result of not dealing with our demons. The reason we are seeing the influx of homelessness in our country today is a result of sticking our heads in the sand for centuries. If this country wants to see the promise for two generations that we have been blessed to receive from generations before. This is the issue that we must each stand up and take on personally.

Emma Hughes

What gives you hope that we will do that? Where do you find the motivation to continue to get up every day and work towards this?

Claire Jefferson Glipa

So there are a few things. First, I come from really Hardy stock. I'm just going to be honest. I am the result of a flower child mom and a Black Panther father, and so watching them live in a world where they continually fight for what is good, despite quite literally being spit on, for asking for equal treatment, makes my struggle laughable. I can walk into any doggone store. I have multiple degrees. I own my own home and despite still experiencing bias, I get to call it out loud without the fear of being lynched. So for me personally, I owe a debt of gratitude to those who have come before me. I am my ancestors wildest dream and I will fulfill that dream every single day without question, without pause.

From a global standpoint, for those that don't come from my experience, I would say look at where we sit. In every other indication, we should be happier, more thriving, more connected community. We are more connected technologically. We are more connected via transportation and yet, the loneliness in this generation is documentable, palpable. Why is that? I would put forward it is because we continue to hold on to these erroneous silos. The hope is that we could literally change it in a blink. The blessing is that, as a Caucasian woman in any place in the world, you could literally get in a car, get in a plane, and shift your perspective. That it is within reach. In the 1950s, there was no way that a Caucasian woman in the South could pick up the phone and talk to an African American person and understand have an honest discussion and experience about race and culture. Go pick up your doggone phone, shift your algorithm. The opportunity that we have in this moment in time to truly be the dream that our ancestors set forward is infinite. We can be the change that we want to see. We have to just decide that it's more important than our comfort.

We have to decide that it's more important than acquiring wealth. We have to decide that the safety of our children and grandchildren is more dependent on our circle and Nexus of interconnectedness than it is on the ability to have a ring camera in front of our door. But it can. This generation has the ability to shift our nature, nature's future in a generation. Our nation's future could literally be shifted by the acts, choices, and investments of this generation far more than any other generation in our past. People want to get excited about FDR's generation and building the infrastructure. Do you know how long that took? Right? People want to be excited about, you know, Reconstructionist, you know, redrawing of lines. People want to hail the electoral system. All of these things, yes. Mind blowing but took generations to truly see the full promise of.

We have been gifted freedom. And that freedom extends outside the ballot box. That freedom extends outside of our gated communities. We have the freedom to decide that the “we,” the people of this nation, is a true promise. The generation before us decided that everyone gets to sit at the table. We get to decide that people's voices get heard at that table included at that table and can thrive at that table. But we have to do the work. We have to step out of our comfort. We have to decide to learn and be curious. We have to open our eyes and not ignore the injustices that we see and I can't imagine a better place to do that than ensuring that unhoused children get to sleep indoors. I can't imagine anybody that thinks it's OK for a 2 year old to delay their ability to learn to walk because they're living in a car in the winter and never get to practice to toddle. I can't imagine anybody thinking that it's OK for a senior in high school not to go to their prom because their momma just can't afford a prom ticket and address.

If we ask people those specific questions, the answers are clear. What is clouded is our understanding of the integral system that quite literally creates that reality and if you're within the sound of my voice and you believe that it's not OK for kids to sleep in your car, in your community, then you owe that same thought, the work behind making sure that we fix that problem in this generation and you cannot do that without understanding the tea we're steeped in.

Emma Hughes

Yeah. Gosh, that's so good. So good. We talk often, here in Spokane, and this is maybe my final thought and then give you kind of the mic for any final thoughts on your side is. The issue of homeless individuals that we see today is what we did not do as a community 10 to 15 years ago. Like we would not see the amount of people who our community has chosen for various reasons to not embrace had we 10 to 15 years ago done the work to embrace them? Because yes, we will always have crises, but crises only become long term chronic issues when there are no community interventions. Crises are inevitable. Chronic issues are not. Yep, we can do something about that. And so, you've talked a lot about the importance of intervening with children now. What if and what, what do we say? How do we engage this conversation? Expanding this conversation to individuals? Individuals who have made choices, who have been hurt, who have hurt others who are experiencing homelessness. How do we expand what we've talked about to them?

Claire Jefferson Glipa

I think they are equally a part of the “we.” Right? Like, I don't want someone to be hungry in my community. Some of that is just natural goodness of my heart don't theoretically want people to be hungry. But I'm going to be honest. Hungry people are desperate people and so if I want to live in a safe community, I don't care whether you're hooked on drugs or not. I don't care if you're a sex offender or not. I don't care if you're a murderer or not. I don't want you to be hungry in my community. This is an issue about the Community that we want to see and if I see you as a human, maybe you are jacked up human. Maybe you are evil human. Maybe you are mean human. Maybe you are ugly human. You're still human, and you should get to eat, and you should get to live inside. You should have the protection of shelter. Period.

Emma Hughes

Period. Period. Final questions? Thoughts? Stories?

Claire Jefferson Glipa

I think my final thought. Two folks listening to this podcast. You're clearly listening to this podcast cause you're curious and interested about homelessness and maybe you have a little nugget in the back of your head that says you know what I want this problem to be solved. The larger problem, problem, challenge, issue, whatever word you want to define it as, of homelessness will only stop when we individually decide it is an unacceptable option in our individual communities. Once you decide that it's unacceptable, unraveling the system, the funnel, the pipeline to homelessness is only by extension your next focus. And you cannot look at that pipeline of homelessness without understanding the creation of a racial conundrum that this country was built on. I would challenge each and every person to do their own work, to do your own digging, to look at your community. I'm not asking you to look at the whole world, even the whole nation. Look at your city and make the city that you want to see.

I know in Riverside I tell my board and my staff all the time our answer is hell no to homelessness. All day, every day, that we are dogmatically committed to ending homelessness in our lifetime period. I do not care the obstacle. I do not care the challenge. It is unacceptable in Riverside for people to not have housing. Housing is a human right. Full stop. The reason that you feel uncomfortable when you look at that chronically homeless individual on the street with one shoe whose mind has protected them by disassociation from the reality of this world, it's because ultimately you see yourself. Ultimately, you see a community that wouldn't come to your aid if you struggled with those same challenges. That's why you want homeless organizations in the corners and outskirts of the community because you were looking at your own personal, basest fear.

I would challenge you to take a deep breath, dig in and do what you can to help to dive in and understand the problem and join me in saying hell no, not in my community, not in my city. Not as long as I have breath. And then begin unraveling that pipeline. Thank you.

Emma Hughes

Thank you. That was incredible. Claire, listeners, we got work to do.

Claire Jefferson Glipa

Amen.

Emma Hughes

Let's do it. I like want to like drop the mic and like run out of this room and be like, yeah, let's do it.