The always thoughtful Jonathan Zur, president and CEO of the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, was part of a long piece in Sunday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch about Richmond, race and reconciliation. (University President Ed Ayers was also among the thought leaders discussing Richmond’s slave-trading history.)
The 2003 Jepson School of Leadership Studies alumnus Zur articulated an action-oriented approach to dealing with Richmond’s past. He told the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “We’ve had a lot of dialogues for the dialogue. … Let’s look at our education system. Let’s look at our housing. Let’s look at our city-county structure. Let’s think about who benefits from things being the way they are, who’s invested in things being created the way they are and staying there. And so the work then is critically looking at these structures and institutions that have been governing our way of life for so long, and perhaps making changes where changes need to be made.”
“People have very different lived experiences in metro Richmond,” said Zur, who grew up in New Jersey. “And so the conversation is why and how. And the action is, ‘What do we do to change that so there is an equitable lived experience?” The article
