Mobility Equity: Whose Data Counts?
Tamika L. Butler, Esq. is a transportation planning consultant, civil rights lawyer, and nationally-recognized activist. In a talk at the MIT Mobility Initiative, Tamika explains how mobility justice is not just about transportation. It’s about power, identity, and social context.
Follow Tamika Butler on Instagram, Twitter, and www.tamikabutler.com.
Pictured: Tamika Butler. Image from www.tamikabutler.com
[Introduction to the series by Jinhua Zhao, Professor of Transportation at MIT, and Convenor of the Mobility Forum, organized by the MIT Mobility Initiative.]
Session begins at 01:05
Anne Hudson, Program Manager, Mobility Initiative: Thank you very much, Jinhua. It's my distinct pleasure to introduce Tamika Butler for today's talk. Tamika is an expert — really national treasure — on everything from built environment equity, anti-racism, inclusion, organizing and more. She's approached these issues in the past both from the legal side of things and from the policy side of things. She started her career in the legal side of things. She has a JD from Stanford, a BA in Psychology, and a BS in Sociology. And she she started her career as an employment lawyer at the Legal Aid Society Employment Law Center.
Since then, she's pivoted to policy and she's been a director of pretty much everything, including Director of Social Change Strategies at Liberty Hill Foundation, California Director for Young Invincibles, Executive Director for the LA County Bicycle Coalition, Executive Director of the LA Neighborhood Land Trust, and most recently, the Director of Planning for California and the Director of Equity and Inclusion at Toole Design.
And today, she's speaking to us as the Principal and Founder of tamika l. butler consulting, where she continues to shed light on a number of key issues related to inequality, inequity and social justice.
Tamika L. Butler, Esq.: Thank you so much. And thank you, everybody at MIT for bringing me in, for having me. We have a lot to get through. And the most exciting part of this is the Q&A. And for me to hear, you know the responses and the commentary between folks.
I wanted to talk a little bit about how you make equity actionable, and why data counts, which is really just a small part of what I'm going to talk about. I'm a person who likes to set clear expectations, let you know what I'm talking about. I'll tell you a little bit about me, a little bit about my company, how I got to being a planner and why it's important to confront power and privilege.
So, let's just jump right in with who I am. As Annie said, I'm Tamika. I've had a lot of different jobs. But I really came to transportation because I love to bike. And I was a person who just loved to bike in my free time. Whether or not I was a kid and that was the first time I really felt free and felt like I could get to where I wanted to go — or whether or not it's when I started biking once I moved to Los Angeles, and realized that this city that I didn't love, that felt very separated and stretched out was something that I actually really enjoyed once I could see everything from my bike point of view.
I'm originally from Omaha, Nebraska. And so I always tell people: Though I enjoy biking, I do not think of “bicyclist” as one of my core identities. I think of being a gender queer woman of color, particularly a black woman. I think being a black woman is the identity that I'm most grounded in. But right up there is definitely Midwesterner. That's a big part of who I am.
So, who am I with? I started my own company. Most recently, I was at a private consulting transportation company, Toole Design, which I really loved, learned a lot from and I think I just decided, you know, why not? Why not try this on my own? Everything that's been happening over the last few months meant that being a black person who talked about equity and talked about transportation equity — all of a sudden the things I was doing as a side hustle really picked up. And so in July, I decided to start my own business. And I've been really happy ever since.
I know we have quite a few students here — and so the thing I always like to talk about is, you know, am I a planner? I don't have formal planning education. I'm actually right now in the process of thinking about applying to urban planning programs to get a PhD. But other than that, I don't have a formal planning degree. My background is as a civil rights lawyer. I was a civil rights lawyer; I went to Stanford Law School. That's what brought me out to California. And what kept me here in California is frankly, no winter.
So here I am. How did I get from being a civil rights employment discrimination lawyer to be a planner? For me, it was really, my job as an employment discrimination lawyer when I graduated from law school was to open up workers’ rights clinics and the historically black communities in San Francisco. And I think as someone from the Midwest, my transition to the West Coast was tough.
I know that people think there are not Black people in Nebraska. But there are. They're not all related to me. And I think that it was hard for me. Because as a young queer kid, I was like, I got to get out to one of these coastal cities like, I'm Black, I'm gay, I'm not Midwestern: I got to go somewhere. And I thought, well, I'm gonna go to San Francisco. No one told me that Palo Alto and San Francisco were very different. But also, no one told me that the Black population in San Francisco was decreasing and getting pushed out. And so when I graduated, and I had that understanding, I wanted to start a worker's rights clinic, specifically for black folks facing employment discrimination.
And so one of those neighborhoods was Bayview-Hunters Point. And when I went out to like set up my clinic in Bayview-Hunters Point, first I had to overcome the barrier that, for many folks, even though I was talking to a community of Black folks, I didn't look like a lawyer. Twenty-something year old me wasn't who they imagined when they were going to talk to someone about their legal issues.
The second thing I had to overcome was that the city had just put a new [San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority] line through Bayview-Hunters Point. And many people in the community were upset about it, because they didn't feel like they had been talked to. They thought it was a line to get people - white folks - from the core of the city to the 49er’s stadium when it was in Bayview-Hunters Point. And so they were like, this isn't for us. Nobody talks to us about the stops, the timing, jobs, like no one talked to us. And so before I could help anybody on my legal employment issues, they wanted to know where I stood on this.
“Transportation is the prism through which we should see many other social justice issues. Because I can’t be economically mobile, if I’m not able to be mobile. I can’t have health care, education or access to those things if I literally can’t get there.”
And this was the first time I really had that realization that transportation is the prism through which we should see many other social justice issues. Because I can't be economically mobile, if I'm not able to be mobile. I can't have health care, education or access to those things if I literally can't get there. And then once I moved to LA, I also decided I was gonna do something crazy and ride my bike from San Francisco to LA training for that AIDS Lifecycle.
I fell in love with cycling. I fell in love with cycling so much, I decided to apply for a job at the LA County Bicycle Coalition. I was hesitant at first. I was worried that all of my friends who knew me as a civil rights lawyer were gonna be like, "Yo, bike lanes are the first sign of gentrification. What are you doing?" But instead, I had a lot of folks of color, who are in who are in the transportation space, or, frankly, the public health space that just talk so much to me about how people who are doing transportation planning, we're not thinking enough about the intersections of public health, of housing, of the way in which transportation sometimes is about moving people, but often doesn't talk about the right for people to stay in place. Right?
And for me, that's very important. As I sit here in LA on stolen Tongva land, it's important for us to acknowledge that the planning profession has been about who's on the other side of the tracks, what are the barriers and the rules and the infrastructure that we built to keep certain people out, or to bring certain people in and displace people. And so that's the framework I took to my job at the LA County Bicycle Coalition. And the white bike world didn't really know what to make of me, when I was first hired. They found this picture on my social media, and there were literally many blog posts saying, "Well, at least she knows how to ride a bike," because people didn't know who I was. But I will tell you that it was an amazing job working at the LA County Bicycle Coalition. I had the best time of my life, because how could you not be on your bike all the time, and not have the smile on your face? Also, I got to wear shirts like this that were extremely wrinkled, and no one cared because I was around a bunch of bike people all the time.
When I was at the LA County Bicycle Coalition, I helped lead a coalition that made Los Angeles a Vision Zero city. And even then, what made our coalition different is because it wasn't white-led, and we were not really on board with enforcement being a key component. And so most of the groups in our coalition - you know, we had the bike coalition, we had the walking organization. But we also had the Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization that focuses a ton on policing. And so we were saying things from the beginning that weren't necessarily sexy. I also got to be on at a ton of press conferences with who some people say might be our next Secretary of Transportation, Mayor Eric Garcetti. We launched [Metro] Bike Share, while I was at the bike coalition. We passed the first funding measure in Los Angeles County, countywide, that had specific allocations for active transportation, walking and biking. And then beyond that, I was in LA. And so I got to live the Hollywood lifestyle on a bike. I got to ride my bike to the Emmys with Seleta Reynolds, who I know is going to do one of these talks in a few weeks, but also the guy all the way on the left is a producer from Mad Men. He got us tickets to the Emmys, we rode up to the red carpet on bikes. It was truly a Hollywood fairy tale of a job.
And then there was a council member candidate - my council member candidate for the area who I lived in, who was somebody who owned a bike shop, and bike people loved him. Because in my neighborhood, there was one particular street where people kept dying. In fact, one woman died while I was feet away, eating outside at a restaurant. And when he decided to run for office, many folks said we have to vote for him, because he's going to get us a bike lane. And everyone wants him, except many of the women and folks of color I knew in the bike world, because he had kind of always been a jerk to us.
And so it was not a surprise to us when all of this information came out that he was caught on the dark webs using the N-word, saying trans people are indecisive, and that fat people deserve to be raped because of the decisions they've made. All of these different things, things that you would think would make people say, “We cannot support this person.” But what actually happened was that people said, "Well, he may have done those things, but he's gonna get me a bike lane."
And so I think too often in life, especially in our current political situation, people look around and they're like, "How can people stand by this person, when they're divisive, and when they're saying such horrible things? And if I was in a position of power where I could do something, I would say something." But people don't.
And I think that's particularly true in the planning space, in the transportation space. Sometimes people see things that are going poorly, but they don't say anything. And when I was pressured to publicly endorse this person, by funders, by folks who were important to our organization, ultimately, I decided that I had to leave. And I know sometimes when I talk about biking, people are like, "Oh, why can't you just shut up and bike? Just like they tell basketball players to shut up and dribble, right?" And, and many people think, well, bikes aren't racist. And my response to that is always, "You're absolutely right. Bikes don't discriminate. But people do. And people on bikes do."
“Bikes don’t discriminate. But people do. And people on bikes do.”
And when we talk about transportation, when we talk about planning, when we talk about anything in the built environment, we have to be willing to talk about race. And some people, that really makes them tighten up, because they're not interested in that option. They don't want to talk about race. They don't want to tackle these things. And sometimes you're in a space with people, and you're like, "We're all like-minded. We all want to help people, we care about biking, or we care about making this community walkable, or we care about climate change. And so how can we use infrastructure and mode shift to save the planet?" You hear about all of these things. But when you're the person who speaks up and says, "You know, we shouldn't really use the term walkable, because what about folks with disabilities?" When you speak up and say, "Yeah, but when you say “safe”, what do you mean? Because as a black person, I don't ever feel safe."
We dismiss those people. And it's often for those of us who are part of oppressed groups in these spaces, will be in this moment where we're vibing. And we feel like we found our people, and this is who we should be around. This is what it should be. And then as soon as we start to feel comfortable, and as soon as we feel like we're all on the same page, all of a sudden people who feel like they're on the same page with you, you start to kind of look at them sideways and say, "Wait, you don't want me to talk about these things?"
And why wouldn't you do that? Especially now, when our country is facing two pandemics, right? We are being ravaged by both COVID-19 and racism. And it is literally a time where there are like, two different worlds, right? Some people are only caring about their boozy brunch, and how soon they can get outside and eat outside on the sidewalk. And some people are literally trying to take up space, trying to own the streets and say "enough is enough." And those people are viewed as doing something wrong. And we want to pretend like, “Oh, it's just because they're being violent and burning things down.” But the reality is, those of us who have lived in Black bodies or been oppressed in any way, we know that none of this is new. We have been hearing for years about the way that policing has been used to hunt Black and Brown folks.
We know that in every aspect of the work, transportation, from the very beginning, has been about civil rights. Ever since Miss Rosa was like, "Nah, not today," this has been about civil rights. And it's not just transportation. It's our criminal justice system. It’s environmental racism. And the way some communities are killing the people who live there. It's our segregated education system. And most folks have picked up this New York Times bestseller about redlining. This is a great book. If you haven't read it, I suggest you read it.
“Forgotten for who? Because for many of us, we are still living with the ramifications of decisions that were not accidental, but that were planned to keep us as “The Other”. To keep us down. ”
But the other thing that I always like to point out to folks about this book is the subtitle is, "A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America" and I would ask, “forgotten for who?” Because for many of us, we are still living with the ramifications of decisions that were not accidental, but that were planned to keep us as “The Other”. To keep us down. And whether or not you're talking about what happened decades ago with redlining, or whether or not you're talking about the impacts of redlining today, where the virus is literally killing Black and brown people and indigenous people at a higher rate, it is hard to talk to a person of color who doesn't know somebody who they lost during this time. One of my best friends from college. Who doesn't know people who are essential workers and have never stopped working? My mom, my sister. And for us, when we talk about planning, or when we talk about transportation, and everybody saying, "Well, let's just do slow streets and open streets. And some folks of color are like, "But I don't know if that makes me feel safe."
It's because we know. We can see this video, which I've never watched, of George Floyd. But I have seen the shot. And I can see that green bike lane in the background. And as a black person, I can know that infrastructure won't save me if we are not willing to talk about racism. You can talk to me all you want about the need to be able to walk and run and ride. But if I continue to see people who are getting killed, just because people see the color of their skin as dangerous, then how can I do this work? I know a ton of white bike dudes, and I love them. And they're some of my best friends. And I will say nine out of ten of them know the law about biking more than any police officer. And I've seen police pull them over on their bikes. And they'll just go in on the police officer: "You don't know the law!" Get in their face, and nothing happens to them.
Meanwhile, a young Black man in LA was pulled over for a bike infraction and lost his life. And if you are a Black person, a person of color, a queer person, if you are a person with a disability, if you are in this work, and you are looking around and there are not a lot of people who look like you, you constantly wonder, "Is this a space for me? Am I going to be able to make an impact? Am I going to be able to create change?
And I think for Black folks in particular, we have dreams, we have aspirations. We want to get free. But we constantly have to wonder if the only way that people will know our names is if we become a hashtag. And so some people are like, "Yeah, there was another killing. Yeah, Breonna Taylor's murderers weren't charged. That's tough. So let's go back to the Zoom call. So did you turn in an assignment on time? So did you meet this deadline?" And the world just keeps going not realizing that even though we're at work or at school, and we're trying to do this stuff, there are other things weighing on us. And I always give the seizure warning on my next slide.
Because it's this; It's this feeling. This slide is how so many of us feel, particularly as Black folks, whether or not we're professional, whether or not we're a student, everything that's happening, and all the things we have to think about when we think about planning. It's tough. We're not okay, but it seems like people don't care. Instead, it seems like the colleagues we're surrounded by — and in this profession, the folks who are in power — particularly white men are just like, "Ugh, this is too much, make it stop." They just want to sit at their desk and zoom without hearing about any of us. It makes them want to pull their hair out, and more than anything, they want to tell us, "But I'm not racist. I didn't do anything. How can you just make this stop? Because it's a lot."
And I would just say, if in doing your work, whether it's school or professional work, community work, personal work, work in your interpersonal relationships, if you're not thinking about all of this stuff constantly, it's because you have privilege. And just because something doesn't feel like a problem to you, doesn't mean it's not a problem. When we talk about people who are transit-dependent, I always like to say, “You might not be transit dependent, but if that person serving you at a restaurant or checking you out at the grocery store, being your doctor or your nurse, if they're transit-dependent then you’re transit-dependent. And let me tell you, if these issues aren't your problem, personally, but you depend on people for whom it is a problem — and trust me, you depend on folks of color — then you have to force yourself to start thinking about this, and figure out how you are going to contribute to folks stopping the killing of us. I think you have to first ask yourself what you can do.
And when you think about that, you need to first understand the difference between diversity, equity and inclusion. People use those terms interchangeably, but they are not the same. Let's start with diversity. Diversity is like 90’s clip art. Get somebody who looks like a religious minority, put them in there, make them smile. Like, let's get women. Lots and lots of women! What? Is that a person in a wheelchair? Put them in the front! And a white guy? Put him in the back. Make it seem like it's hard to see. That's literally diversity. How do I get as many diverse faces as possible at the table? That is different than inclusion. Some people think inclusion is that everybody feels welcome. That's like Inclusion 101; You got to be past that. Inclusion is when the folks who are those pretty diverse faces at the table actually have power. And that is different. To have true inclusion, you have to go beyond diversity. So again, you can have a diverse space that is not inclusive. Because if you are not willing to shift some of the power, if those diverse people aren't in decision-making positions, culture-setting positions, if they cannot guide what's happening, say yes or no, then that's not inclusion. That is diversity for diversity's sake. And that's when tokenism happens. And if we want to get to equity, we have to have inclusion.
“If you are not willing to shift some of the power — if those diverse people aren’t in decision making positions — then that’s not inclusion. That is diversity for diversity’s sake.”
And when people think of equity, many people think of this picture (left image). And if you've seen this picture in a lot of presentations, you should always be the one to take mental note. This is not a picture we should use. There are problems with this picture. First of all, it doesn't show the reality of where some people are starting. And it also doesn't show what we should be aiming for: liberation. Why is there even a fence? And beyond that? The real problem with this picture for me — again, I've already said I'm about mobility justice. I'm about mobility liberation. Like, how can people be free and get to the places and people they love with dignity. But beyond that, you have to understand that privilege and power are at play.
Too often, in our work, we like to say we want to empower people. But empowering is still a colonial mindset. Because it's still saying certain people have the power and they will bestow it upon others. True work that understands knows that there's still someone who has decided that the goal of these folks is to watch a baseball game. But what if you don't like baseball? What if you want to play in the game? What if you want to coach the team? What if you want to own the team? What if you want to be the business person that has an exclusive contract with the stadium and you're providing all the food?
There's so many things folks might want. And we have to learn that true power is working with people, not just holding power over them, and giving folks the chance to self-determine what they want to do. And part of the change we have to make is individual. And so I tell people, if you want to realize this is not just a moment — it's actually a movement — then you have to understand that being racist isn't the same as being anti-racist. You have to conceptualize why you're so afraid to talk about these things to confront them. And how do we get away from a place where the norm is always considered to be what white people would do, what white people find safe, what able-bodied people find safe?
We have to de-center whiteness. And doing that means you're going to have to think about racism and white supremacy every single day, and think about what your commitment is to the ceasing of killing of Black people. I like to think about this; I'm a visual person. And again, I do transportation planning. So I like to think about this as a journey. And I'll end with with this journey piece. I will just say that the journey is when you think about how you show up in these spaces, sometimes we're just faking it 'til we make it. We're just an actor. I don't know why I should use they/them pronouns, but Tamika told me to, so I'm going to do it. That's fine. Sometimes that's the best you can do. But if you don't really internalize why you're doing what you're doing, if you don't really learn and understand and seek to have that understanding, then you will one day be found out.
“I’m about mobility liberation. Like, how can people be free and get to the places and people they love with dignity.”
Mel Gibson is a great example of this. I use him because he was just trending in the news the other day all over Twitter, because he has a new movie coming out. There were a lot of people saying if you think “cancel culture” is real, just remember that white men can't be canceled. Because he has a new movie coming out despite the fact that he has repeatedly made anti-Semitic remarks that he has been pulled over drunk by a police officer and said he hopes his partner gets raped by a gang of n-words. He's a horrible person. He may be a great actor, but he's a horrible person. And if you don't try to figure out when you're faking it until you make it, if you don't actually try to make it, if you don't actually try to understand, you'll be found out.
And when you do internalize and start to understand, that's when you become an ally. You realize it's not a noun; It is about taking action. But we're in some urgent times, and we actually need more than allies. We need accomplices. And the difference between allies and accomplices are that accomplices are willing to risk something. So an ally: When Sarah speaks up in a meeting and everybody ignores it, but then Bob says something everyone's like, "Bob, that's a good idea." An ally tells her after the meeting in an email, pulls her aside, "I just want you to know, I know you said that first. I don't know why people are ignoring you." But a true accomplice is not afraid to speak up in the meeting. "Actually, Sarah said it better. And she said it first." But people are afraid to do that. Because everybody knows that there are those people who you're like, "Oh, here she comes to me, again, talking about race. Oh, here comes Rachel again, talking about accessibility and disability." We don't want to be grouped with those people. So we don't speak up.
But the folks of color, the folks with disabilities, the oppressed folks: Every day we show up as our authentic self, we are risking something. We're risking advancement, we're risking jobs, we're risking opportunities. And so if you don't have to do that every day, you should force yourself to really do it, again by being brave, and questioning your power in your privilege. Asking questions, “Do the people most impacted by the decisions we're making, do they have a say? If they don't have a say, what privilege do you have? And why do I have a say?”
And when we are looking at power and privilege, we have to look at data. Data is important because it answers questions. It gives us a clearer picture and a context to the decisions that we make. But we can use data to decide where we need to go and and to help us determine and move forward our goals. But there are dangers. Because there's bias in data. You have to think about how biases impact the conclusions you make. You have to ground truth that data. Data doesn't tell the whole story. You have to know what's happening on the ground. You have to use qualitative and quantitative data. Data has to reflect the entire population you're studying. And then you have to say, “Who's getting into these elite institutions? Who's getting to create it? Who's getting to crunch it? Who's getting to analyze it? How do we figure out how to value things? Just because somebody doesn't have a degree — if they hang out on the corner on the stoop every single day, they are probably a better planner. They probably have more to say. They are an expert.
“Data doesn’t tell the whole story. [...] Who’s getting to create it? Who’s getting to crunch it? Who’s getting to analyze it? ”
That's why engagement is so important. It's building off of cultural strengths and values. It's not just outreach. Outreach is when we go out and say, "Here's what we're going to do." Engagement is going out there and knowing that you're going to ask members of the communities for ideas. You're going to really rely on local leadership. Again, you're going to co-power, not empower. You're going to look for participation and authenticity, but you're going to be open to the idea that what you hear might not be what you expected. And you're not going to go out as an expert and just tell people what they're thinking is wrong.
Because we have to remember - whether you're transportation, or housing, or a public health professional, when we go out into these communities to do our work, there's no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because the people who we're trying to serve, don't live single-issue lives. And if we're doing this work in the most authentic way, we have to ensure that we understand that we have to meet those folks where we are. And we have to be ready and willing to listen to all they bring to the table - whether or not that's a community member, whether or not that's your colleague, whether or not that’s your student or your classmate. Thank you.
About the MIT Mobility Initiative
The Mobility Initiative (MI) is designed to effect fundamental changes in the long-term trajectory of sustainable mobility development. It serves to coalesce all mobility and transportation activities at MIT, knitting together our efforts on research, education, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement at the Institute into a greater whole. Learn more at https://www.mobilityinitiative.mit.edu/