Mahoning Valley - YWCA Mahoning Valley is shining a light to dismantle racial justice issues in the United States.

On November 16, YWCA hosted an online workshop called “Understanding Race in America." The featured speaker is Margaret Mitchell, President and CEO of YWCA Greater Cleveland.

“In order to understand race in America, you must understand slavery,” Mitchell said.

She started the workshop explaining although many people believe “slavery doesn’t exist and it was long ago,” she said in order to make links between the past and the present in regard to racism, people must understand the history of slavery.

She said slavery along with the Jim Crow laws, which legalized slavery,  in total lasted about 350 years.

“86% of our population in America has been linked to slavery or Jim Crow,” she said.

She said to target racism, people need to work together to advance equity. In order to do this, she said people need to be able to begin to pull apart actions, policies, norms and the way we think to make change.

She said although it’s been proven we are all genetically the same, society clings to race as a social construct.

"It is a battle, it's a burden, it's an attack because of the color of one's skin," she said, "America will never be what she's meant to be until we attack this."

She said people need to see the inequities in order to change and dismantle them, and said it comes down to the state and governmental level.

"Internally, you have to recognize where you are not being explicit because when you're not explicit in a world, in a country, where we are all socialized around racism, the default becomes whiteness..."