The following is an excerpt from the Racial Equity Institute’s paper, The Groundwater Approach:
The Fish, the Lake, and the Groundwater
If you have a lake in front of your house and one fish is floating belly-up dead, it makes sense to analyze the fish. What is wrong with it? Imagine the fish is one student failing in the education system. We’d ask: Did it study hard enough? Is it getting the support it needs at home? But if you come out to that same lake and half the fish are floating belly-up dead, what should you do? This time you’ve got to analyze the lake. Imagine the lake is the education system and half the students are failing. This time we’d ask: Might the system itself be causing such consistent, unacceptable outcomes for students? If so, how?
Now… picture five lakes around your house, and in each and every lake half the fish are floating belly-up dead! What is it time to do? We say it’s time to analyze the groundwater. How did the water in all these lakes end up with the same contamination? On the surface the lakes don’t appear to be connected, but it’s possible—even likely—that they are. In fact, over 95% of the freshwater on the planet is not above ground where we can see it; it is below the surface in the groundwater.
This time we can imagine half the kids in a given region are failing in the education system, half the kids suffer from ill health, half are performing poorly in the criminal justice system, half are struggling in and out of the child welfare system, and it’s often the same kids in each system! By using a “groundwater” approach, one might begin to ask these questions: Why are educators creating the same racial inequity as doctors, police officers, and child welfare workers? How might our systems be connected? Most importantly, how do we use our position(s) in one system to impact a structural racial arrangement that might be deeper than any single system?
To “fix fish” or clean up one lake at a time simply won’t work—all we’d do is put “fixed” fish back into toxic water or filter a lake that is quickly recontaminated by the toxic groundwater. [1] Our groundwater metaphor is designed to help practitioners at all levels internalize the reality that we live in a racially structured society, and that that is what causes racial inequity.
The metaphor is based on three observations: racial inequity looks the same across systems, socioeconomic difference does not explain the racial inequity; and inequities are caused by systems, regardless of people’s culture or behavior. Embracing these truths forces leaders to confront the reality that all our systems, institutions, and outcomes emanate from the racial hierarchy on which the United States was built. In other words, we have a “groundwater” problem, and we need “groundwater” solutions.
This is an excerpt - to read the other pages in the paper which address some common arguments, questions and stats, download it here now.