Shaun Wiggins said Saratoga Springs needs to find that middle ground in discussions about race, but it’s hard to get there.
“That’s sort of the challenge we have right now. It’s hard to find people who are sort of in that middle,” he said.
He works with the Saratoga Springs Community Outreach Committee, a group formed by Commissioner of Public Safety Robin Dalton last summer. The group is dedicated to educating people about bias and racism, with the aim to eradicate it in Saratoga Springs.
“It is a good town," he said, but "there are bad apples.” The job is to get people to recognize bias, to learn about it and to erase it. About 13 people are very active in the group, that Wiggins says will become a clearinghouse or repository of what’s happening racially in Saratoga Springs.
“The only way we can really resolve that is to bring people together and really hammer this out,” Wiggins said, adding, it is not happening enough.
Courtesy Springs' Community Outreach Committee (2021)
Christopher Chambers
To that end, the committee hosts its first in a series of “Candid Discussions on Bias and Racism.”
The online meeting is today, Friday Feb. 12, with Georgetown Professor Christopher Chambers. The topic: racism in education.
Their website says the discussion will focus on institutional racism in education, spanning primary through postsecondary levels. Professor Chambers will examine key topics of discussion, such as:
- Historically “active” oppression and suppression versus tools such as property redlining and other “passive” restrictions and how they play out today.
- School administrative issues regarding both faculty and student affairs.
- Affirmative action, whether in primary and secondary education for “magnet” or specialty schools or post-secondary admissions.
- Media and technology as both a troublemaker and a solution-finder.
[The discussion starts at 5:30 p.m. Friday Feb. 12 on Zoom. For more information and to register, click here.]