Last night, when speaking to @BaltimoreGreens, someone asked me about @BaltCitySchools sending children and teachers back to physical buildings.

I said: "people in power often impose THEIR thoughts on racial equity w/out listening. Equity concerns are important but so is TRUST."

Some are now using equity as a way of telling Black people: "Your children are behind."

Hell, they were already (left) "behind"! Are y'all going to catch them up AND keep them COVID free in the buildings?

With a history of medical apartheid, many people don't TRUST the system.

Imagine YOUR child is a student in @BaltCitySchools and you live in a redlined Black neighborhood.

The city has redlined your neighborhood. The schools are deeply underfunded.

Do you trust that the school system will protect YOUR child from a deadly pathogen given this history?

This isn't a knock on the current @BaltCitySchools leadership per se. Many of them are stepping into a system that has a long history of educational apartheid and many want to dismantle it.

But that history is there and it impacts everything about the decisions we make today.

Look, the foundational basis of any relationship is trust. If you don't have trust, you don't have anything. You can't build solidarity, you can't move together, you can't work in partnership.

Trust is essential. You've got to build it if you don't have it.