About a year ago, I wrote about how Dallas arts and cultural organizations struggle to secure funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Looking back over two years of grants, Dallas received around 45 cents in federal arts funding per resident. Compared to a city like Seattle, which received around $3.20 per resident during that same time frame, that’s not good.

The city’s Office of Arts & Culture hoped to mentor more arts groups through the federal endowment’s application process. A year later, however, and things haven’t improved. The latest round of NEA grant funding has been announced, and out of 1,114 recipients, only 54 are in Texas and just four are in Dallas. As Deep Vellum founder Will Evans points out on Twitter, that’s four grants for the arts in the ninth largest city in the country. Yikes.

Why should we care? Well, as I wrote last year, NEA funding not only helps pay for important cultural activity, it is something of a barometer of the health of a local arts community. Cities that receive the lion’s share of NEA funding also tend to have strong sources of local and state funding. Healthy local patronage enables arts organizations to build capacity for long-range planning and foster a depth of development experience that can help craft successful NEA grant applications. The lack of successful NEA grant applications in Dallas is one indication that our local arts ecology is ill.

Samuel Sinyangwe is an activist and Stanford-trained data scientist and policy analyst who co-founded Campaign Zero, which researches solutions to end police violence. Although based in New York, yesterday on Twitter Sinyangwe took a passing look at the budget of the Dallas Police Department in order to illustrate what “defunding” the police could look like in practice.

Given the controversy and confusion around the word “defund” that has erupted in Dallas since protesters began calling for it in the streets — and 10 of 14 council members used it in a memo to the city manager on Tuesday — I believe it is worth walking through Sinyangwe’s analysis to offer some clarity on what this policy approach actually means.

In late 2019, Sara Mokuria, associate director for leadership initiatives with The Institute for Urban Policy Research at the UTD and a co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality, helped organize a new network of activists under the name Our City Our Budget. The group advocated for including funding for a handful of deceptively simple programs in the 2019-2020 Dallas municipal budget.

At the time, the Dallas City Council, spooked by a record spike in crime, was promoting what they called “a public safety budget.” But Mokuria believed that directing money to the very programs the city planned to cut to afford more police officers—parks, rec centers, homeless services—would have a better impact on public safety. “We think we should be having an anti-poverty budget, not a public safety budget,” Mokuria said at the time. “And truly, an anti-poverty budget is a public safety budget. When you invest in the people, you don’t have to police them.”

In recent weeks, Mokuria has become one of a handful of prominent voices that have emerged from the protest movement to advance the call to “defund” or “dismantle” the police department. And while these words have quickly become weaponized to promote polarization around the issue of police reform, they aren’t new ideas in Dallas. Activists like Mokuria have been advocating for them for years. They represent a desire to change the public’s perception about the role of policing in America, to recognize that pouring money into an increasingly militarized police force doesn’t reduce crime; it does, however, terrorize many communities of color.

Defunding the police, Mokuria says, is simply a process of reallocating the city’s resources toward programs and departments that are better suited at addressing the instability, inequality, and degradation that contribute to crime. It means no longer trying to address all of the city’s problems by dumping more money into the police department, and instead funding mental health, drug addiction treatment, and better schools. “Defunding is investing in cleanup of environmental racism,” Mokuria says. “It is addressing the housing crisis.”

Perhaps the person who best articulated the need to defund the police was, somewhat ironically, former Dallas Police Chief David Brown. In the wake of the 2016 police shootings, Brown acknowledged that the tension between the police and the community is a result of a system that pretends that the police are the solution to too many societal problems.

Dallas—and the country—is experiencing the most widespread movement of direct action we have seen in more than 60 years. People are taking to the streets to demand that this city wakes up, listens, and sees the systemic and endemic racism that has defined the lives of people of color in America for what it is. If real progress is going to be made, however, that direct action must advance an agenda of change.

Based on the many conversations going on right now, there is a hunger for change. When Love Field swiftly moves to take down a statue of a racist cop, when the hosts of sports talk station The Ticket spend a week soul searching, you know we have entered a new kind of moment. Reforms that weren’t imaginable a month ago now seem possible.

Change is already happening. Los Angeles may redeploy public funds from its police budget to fund community development. The Minneapolis City Council voted to disband its police department. Even during the disastrous Dallas City Council meeting Friday, the city manager presented a list of possible reforms, and promising ideas were put forth by council members, like reimagining the police academy and banning elected officials from taking campaign donations from police unions.

This next step, however, concerns me. A knee-jerk response to the crisis will likely miss the monumental scale of the problem. Racism runs through every aspect and every institution of American society. It is baked into the structures of power that hold our city, state, and country together. Racism is so much a part of American life that we are blind to most of the insidious ways it defines our culture. Confronting that is going to take courage, not only from our neighbors who have taken to the streets but from all of us.

Over the past week, I have seen a lot of well-meaning efforts to confront the problem. There have been the numerous corporate statements backing Black Lives Matter; public symbols of support, like the blackout of Reunion Tower; and the sharing of articles and ideas on social media about how to support businesses owned by people of color, contribute to organizations that work in disadvantaged communities, and raise money to help repair the damage to properties that took the punch of the anger that manifested in Dallas’ streets. These are not meaningless gestures. They represent people in positions of power and privilege saying, “We hear you.”

But ultimately these are only gestures. They are the kinds of gestures that have been made before, and they are gestures that have proven hollow when it comes to making meaningful change. Real change is going to need to strike more deeply, and it is going to require more than giving our attention, time, and money. But to understand what real change looks like, we must first confront assumptions about how our society works.

Ya’Ke Smith is the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication’s first Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, though for years he was a mainstay in Dallas’ film community. I first encountered Smith’s work when he screened his feature film Wolf at the Dallas International Film Festival in 2012. Wolf is a powerful and complex film about child abuse in a church and its effect on a family and a close-knit community. It has never really left me. Smith previously taught at the University of Texas at Arlington, and since Wolf, his short film “Dawn” made a splash on HBO and remained in rotation for a couple of years.

Yesterday, Smith alerted me his latest piece, called “Dear Bruh: A Eulogy. A Baptism. A Call to Action.” The short film, which you can watch below, is a elegy born of our current moment, a moving reflection on love and loss, racism and history, suffering and endurance. I won’t say more. The piece speaks for itself. Listen.

A year ago, former state Rep. Eric Johnson defeated former Council member Scott Griggs to become the 62nd mayor of Dallas. It has been a tough year to learn how to lead a city. Since Johnson took office, he has had to face a sharp rise in violent crime, a devastating category-3 tornado, a pandemic, and now mass protests over police brutality.

During that time, we have learned a lot about the mayor’s leadership style—and yet not a lot about the mayor. Johnson comes across as a reserved, private figure, protective in his language and careful with his actions. Around the horseshoe, he leans on parliamentary procedure and public statements to advance policy objectives. He prefers to communicate with the public via press conferences, television interviews, and social media.

In recent weeks, we have seen how this leadership style can create confusion and contention at City Hall. Matt reported on the mayor’s ongoing spat with the city manager over the balance of power at City Hall, a tussle that has played out via a series of lengthy communiques but few actual conversations between Dallas’ two most powerful leaders. In the June issue of D Magazine, I write about how this leadership style has also cast a shadow over the mayor’s relationship with his colleagues on the Council, alienating nearly half of them and sowing distrust among Dallas’ governing body.

As the last week has shown, Dallas is at a pivotal moment in its history, a time when inspirational leadership, strong moral guidance, and real reformative action are needed more than ever. Is Eric Johnson up for the task? His behavior during his first year in office raises doubts.

Here’s the piece. It’s online today.