Chairman Neal, Ranking Member Brady, Members of the Committee, it is both humbling and a great responsibility to be asked to testify at today’s historic hearing. Thank you for the opportunity to do so.

The United States is the largest and most robust economy in the world. That economic strength has been built on world-class productivity, innovation, energy and agricultural production, an impressive service sector, and strong consumer demand. The policies that have enabled our strong growth economy, particularly those that have built a thriving middle class, have entailed choices. Those choices, made over the last century and a half, were made in a context in which the value of a human being living in the United States was evaluated against a hierarchy of skin color and cultural references. And the policy choices that were made in that context conformed to that hierarchy of human value. Our Indian Removal Act of 1830, Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1875 and 1882, Japanese American internment camps, and Jim Crow laws are all examples of policy choices that enshrined racist assumptions in public policy with consequences for children that have spanned generations. As a result of those choices made under those assumptions, the United States is also a place where a child’s future is currently determined by skin color and ZIP code.

As the wealthiest country in the world, it is paradoxical that we have not trained sufficient resources on investing in blighted neighborhoods or rural communities, not to gentrify them, but to provide children living there with activities, yards, parks, great schools, ubiquitous broadband, stable housing, and access to affordable mental and physical health care. Our patchwork of social service programs acts to blunt the worst effects of poverty, but in a nation as wealthy as ours, those social programs are not designed to put families on the path to economic mobility. In fact, as we sit here today, we are mere minutes from southeast Washington, D.C., an area where thousands of potential Benjamin Bannekers and Kizzmekia Corbetts live, but for whom those aspirations are highly likely to remain unrealized.

Read the full article about overcoming racism by Camille Busette at Brookings.