With a shimmy and an insult, KC Council member crossed a line she still doesn’t see

Last week, the Kansas City Council passed resolutions honoring civil rights icons John Lewis and C.T. Vivian and voted unanimously to require city employees to take the implicit bias training that can help us recognize and root out racial and other biases we may not even realize we’ve absorbed.

Then, Councilwoman Teresa Loar unintentionally illustrated why council members, too, could benefit from that training, just like all the rest of us.

First, Loar implied that City Councilwoman Melissa Robinson could not possibly have written her own remarks on the subject of whether or not to privatize the city’s animal control operation. “That was a very nice speech someone wrote you, Miss Robinson,” Loar said during the public discussion. “My guess it’s labor somewhere.”

Robinson, who is Black, responded to her white colleague this way: “Let me address you addressing my intellect. I have an MBA; I don’t need anybody to write a word for me.”

She’d heard what Loar had said as questioning her intelligence in a way that’s all too familiar to African Americans, no matter how many advanced degrees they may hold.

In an interview, Loar said she didn’t mean it that way. “She gets very emotional about things, and she did kind of take my head off. I couldn’t figure out what it was all about.”

She said she never intended to question Robinon’s intelligence. “I was just kind of thinking, ‘This is bothering her more than it’s bothering me.’ She’s young, she’s new. All I asked her was who wrote that. I would have said that to anybody.” But maybe that’s the problem.

Then, Loar appeared to mock Robinson physically, with a neck roll and shimmy that Robinson and others who saw it read as overtly racial. Loar said she doesn’t remember doing anything like that. “Oh for God’s sake,” she said. “Everything with Melissa is racial.”

Robinson was “very stung” by the exchange, she said in an interview. What she wanted to ask Loar in the moment, she said, was, “Have you ever physically mocked another white person? This is bigoted behavior. It’s very, very sad, and toxic for the council.” Three white council members approached Robinson after the meeting to commiserate, she said.

A fourth, Councilman Kevin O’Neill, called her the next morning.

“Yup,” he said, when asked about it. Whatever Loar’s intent, he said, “that was crossing a line, and she should publicly apologize” to Robinson.

Especially when he saw Loar mimicking Robinson physically, O’Neill said, he was tempted to vote against Loar’s ordinance to privatize the operation, which passed easily. He didn’t do that, but “the way it was delivered, it was across the line, and something I can’t forgive.”

In a council meeting last month, Loar also responded emotionally to Kansas City Public Schools Superintendent Mark Bedell’s statement about the council’s profligacy in handing out tax abatements that then limit the revenues available to spend on education. That’s disproportionately hurting minority students, Bedell said, in a way that defines and deepens institutional racism.

“In the wake of the last month” since George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers, Bedell wrote, “I am sitting with how racism continues to fester in the culture, conversations and policies relating to business and economic development practices in our City. Frankly, I am exhausted with the development community pitting the City against the public entities that are doing the work of trying to give our students and their families access to the world they deserve. This is systemic racism.”

In response to the BlueScope project that’s looking for a 13-year extension of its already 20-year abatement from the council, Bedell said, “a Northland City Council member said the Council had to think of the City first, not the schools, libraries and mental health services. Are our families not Kansas City constituents?”

That’s a more than fair question, but Loar heard this as him calling her personally a racist.

“I’ve been called a racist and a bigot this week,” she said at the June 25 council meeting. “Once by Dr. Bedell, by the way. … I don’t know Dr. Bedell, and I think it was a very cheap shot of him.”

Then she went on to read a list of some of the African Americans with whom she’s served over the years. “I ask you to ask any of them if there’s anything I’ve ever done that even hints of racism.”

“I know it’s trendy right now, and it’s fun and it’s easy to call us a racist, but by God, I’m not going to take it. I’m 66 years old. I’ve never been a racist, and I will not be called that anymore.”

You could argue that unfortunate racial views are “trendy,” too, though hopefully that’s changing.

And declaring that no one can call you a racist is guaranteed to have the opposite effect.

Racial bias is kind of like cancer, in that it’s not one disease but 100, all of which are malignant but each of which manifests a little differently. Some are quite curable — that’s the point of implicit bias training — even when they’ve gone undetected for far too long.

Loar said she’d be glad to apologize, if Robinson could only explain why she should. “If anything, it should be the other way around. If I’ve hurt her, I definitely apologize” even if “I don’t know what for. Maybe that should go both ways. And trust me, I’ll never say or do anything to her again. I certainly don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’m an old lady, a grandma, not out there to fire up the troops.”

The point isn’t that we have to be so careful about what we say that we don’t communicate at all. And if no one points out how hurtful some of these exchanges are, that helps nobody, either.

But you can be a grandma, with the best of intentions, not out there to fire up anybody, and still do that without ever knowing it. In fact, that’s exactly what unconscious bias training is meant to address — and why it can work, too. Because it’s only those who hurt others on purpose who can’t learn.