Groundwater
2 min read · June 2, 2023
New Power Labs
Tl;dr — Racial disparities in access to capital, healthcare, education, and other socioeconomic issues are interrelated. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
Imagine that one morning you wake up to find a dead fish in the lake in front of your house. You might assume something was wrong with the fish.
What if the next morning, you see that half the fish in the lake are dead? You might wonder if there’s something wrong with the lakewater. What if the next morning you learn that in five nearby lakes, half of the fish are dead, too?
At first glance, it seems confusing; from a bird’s eye view, the lakes aren’t connected to each other. Then you realize that under the earth’s surface, the same groundwater flows into each lake. You learn that the groundwater is contaminated, affecting all the lakes in the area.
This groundwater metaphor was developed by the Racial Equity Institute to explain how structural racism manifests into disparities in education, access to capital, healthcare — and every socioeconomic issue. It is based on three observations: racial inequity shares common markers across different systems; socioeconomic differences don’t explain this racial inequity; and inequities are systemic, regardless of people’s culture or behaviours.
In the same way, we can’t look at racial disparities in access to capital independently from healthcare access or education, for example. While there are gaps in data, we know that across these issues in Canada, the shared groundwater is contaminated because of structural racism. For example, we continue to see an education access gap, with only 53 percent of the Indigenous population holding some level of post-secondary education. When it comes to access to capital, 56 percent of Indigenous businesses report facing restrictions in getting funding.
And, to come back to our metaphor, while contaminated groundwater hurts the most vulnerable first, eventually even the healthy fish will be affected.
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