Good morning, RVA: 951 • 17; we got the votes; Downtown? I can hardly bear it

Good morning, RVA! It’s 72 °F again, but, today, highs should stay out of upper 90s. Expect at growing chance of rain throughout the afternoon and into the evening. Saturday looks hot, but Sunday looks pretty A+.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 951 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 17 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 106 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 60, Henrico: 13, and Richmond: 33). Since this pandemic began, 195 people have died in the Richmond region. Remember that today most of the region moves into Phase Two of the Governor’s plan for recovery. This means a lot of things, but, mostly, that 50 folks can gather together with the proper social distancing and masks and sanitization and so on. After the Governor announced the move into Phase Two (which still, at this moment in time, has not made it to the State’s recovery website), I was pretty confused about what business were supposed to do who could now open to 50% of their capacity but that 50% capacity was more than 50 people. Turns out, I’m not the only with questions! Lane Kizziah at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says the Dominion Raceway in Spotsylvania was also confused and had planned to hold a race on Saturday with upwards of 1,200 folks. Turns out, they’re only allowed 50 spectators not 50% of potential spectators. I don’t blame them for misunderstanding the guidance. It’s a 41-page PDF, and, despite what you read in this email, people generally don’t love looking through massive PDFs. I think this quote from the racetrack’s sales manager also speaks to the lack of lead time businesses were given before the upshift into Phase Two: "We had a plan on Monday, and it changed on Tuesday…The governor’s information came out on Wednesday, and we changed again. Now it’s Thursday, and it appears we’re changing again.”

Yesterday, the Governor gave a speech about why he’s now ordered the removal of the Robert E. Lee monument, which you can read as prepared here. Listen, I don’t think it’s always super helpful to criticize folks on how the end up doing the right thing, but this speech from the Governor didn’t do it for me. Northam continued veneration of Robert E. Lee, calling him “wise,” quoting him in a positive light, and perpetuating the myth of the kindly General Lee. Here, for context and so we remember, is a quote from Lee on slavery: “I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things.” Whitewashing Lee, even just a little, does not help destroy the Lost Cause narrative and gives space, even just a little, for White supremacy to work. The rest of the Governor’s speech was fine, although this bit makes me wonder what changed for him over the last seven days: “What do you say when a six-year-old African American little girl looks you in the eye, and says: What does this big statue mean? Why is it here?” Take a minute to read Michael Paul Williams’s column which is both more and less cynical. I enjoy this quote from one of John Mitchell Jr.’s descendants about what Mitchell Jr. would say today: “I think he would say ‘I told you so.’” Anyway, the Department of General Services has been asked to come up with a plan to get rid of the thing as soon as possible—which, if I were to make an uneducated guess, would be measured in weeks, not days.

Locally, it looks like we’ve got the necessary votes on City Council to approve Mayor Stoney and Councilmember Jones’s ordinance to take down the rest of the Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue. 1st District Councilmember Addison’s announcement that he’d join as a co-patron to the paper made the YESes a majority, and Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says that 3rd District Councilmember Hilbert will also join the supporters. That leaves Councilmember Larson (4th District, undecided), Councilmember Gray (2nd District, supports a “thoughtful and deliberative process that is inclusive and unifies people” aka undecided), and Councilmember Trammell (8th District, did not return Robinson’s calls).

Pandemic, Confederate monuments, and yet each night still people take to the streets to protest and demand police and criminal justice reform. It’s been seven consecutive nights! The RTD’s Sabrina Moreno has a good thread of last night’s protest at RPD’s Fourth Precinct on Chamberlayne Avenue and, also with the RTD, Chris Suarez has a few shots from Carytown. At any other time, hundreds of people sitting in front of the police precinct—heck, hundreds of people on Chamberlayne Avenue for any reason at all—would have made for headline news. As we work through the civic process to make these protestors' demands into laws and policies, do not forget that they are still out there each and every night.

Last night, I hopped on a wonderfully helpful call set up by the Richmond Transparency and Accountability Projectabout two of the reforms sought by protestors that you’ve probably heard about: the Marcus Alert and a Community Review Board (or, Civilian Review Board, but, like, aren’t cops civilians, too?). I’m still trying to wrap my head around CRBs, but you can read about how RTAP—the local experts on this—views the issue over on their website. Two things I heard loud and clear on the call: 1) the Richmond community, especially those who suffer the impacts of over and inequitable policing, should decide for itself the details of any future CRB, and 2) if the CRB needs subpoena power (a massive difference between Oakland’s and Charlottesville’s), the General Assembly will have to change some state laws. Both of those two things will take time, and I’m interested in how to balance that reality with the demand for immediate action from the Mayor. Your homework for the weekend: Learn more by reading through the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement website.

Richmond Animal Care & Control, which found a cow on the Northside a couple days ago, found an actual bear downtown yesterday? /r/rva has a video of it chilling on the Northbank trail before it found its way down to 5th Street. NATURE IS RETURNING ETC.

This morning’s longread

The Antiracism Starter Kit

I found this Antiracism Starter Kit helpful, especially the four stages of becoming antiracist: 1) Awareness, 2) Education, 3) Self Interrogation, and 4) Community Action. Here’s an excerpt from the Self Interrogation stage and a bit about why it’s important to do this internal work first before rushing out to get involved.

In this stage, you start to ask yourself the hard questions that start the process of you identifying, unpacking, and dismantling the ways in which your past and present behaviors are perpetuating white supremacy in the same ways that relate to what you’ve seen manifested during the education stage of becoming antiracist. You do the work laid out in this stage because there is no way for you to stop engaging in these behaviors without identifying them within your personal patterns of behavior in the first place. And there is no way for you to actually enter into the community action stage without potentially causing great harm to Black, Indigenous, and People Color with your continued perpetuation of white supremacy due to your unchanged behaviors.

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