In his 1993 classic “Race Matters,” scholar Dr. Cornel West characterizes what our fiscal priorities say about us as a community: “The neglect of our public infrastructure” is a reflection of “not only our myopic education policies ... but also the low priority we place on our common life.”

When will we stop pretending that something other than systemic racism has caused the state of Richmond Public Schools and the city’s deteriorating infrastructure?

Let’s get one thing straight: Mayor Levar M. Stoney’s 2020 budget proposal to invest in public education and to improve basic services is an effort to remedy racism. It’s effectively universal affirmative action with a price tag. Simply put, the mayor asks us city dwellers to invest in ourselves.

For decades after WWII, Richmond’s white leaders fought hard to prevent the city’s population from becoming majority black. As more black people moved into Richmond from nearby counties, more white residents moved out of the city. Federal highway “urban renewal” programs destroyed black neighborhoods while it simplified the commute for white suburban residents to drive into the city for work and quickly leave.

Beginning in the1980s, many black people left the inner city to live in the suburbs. Most have never returned. Frankly, some black people chose individuals in their families over the collective good of the black community. While black people surely did not begin this out-migration trend, we did help its proliferation.

In the past 10 years, Richmond’s population has rebounded significantly as cities became cool again. But the newcomers are increasingly white and/or multiracial people.

The result? Today, Richmond has lost its majority single-race black status and is now 48 percent African-American — a majority minority city, but not a majority black city.

Meanwhile, 75 percent of RPS students live near or below the poverty line because, in this country, public education is reserved for the poor and those with limited options simply based on where they reside. In America, your ZIP code determines your early educational opportunities.

To no fault of their own, the education of our children is subject to the income of their parents. This should not be, but it is. So how do we deal with it in a city with the highest poverty rate of any urban locale in the Commonwealth? How do we confront this when it costs about 40 percent more to educate a student living in poverty?

As the story of black migration to the suburbs attests, if you can afford a better life, you likely jump at the chance, leaving your community behind. Those of us that remain are left holding the bag all the while struggling to crawl out of the gutter of underfunded schools.

Earlier this month, Mayor Stoney presented his 2020 budget to City Council, which includes a 9 cent property tax hike proposal. After the mayor’s presentation, Councilwoman Reva M. Trammell suggested Mayor Stoney was breaking a campaign promise to not raise taxes. Her strong opposition to taxes is representative of a larger culture that engulfs more than just local Richmond politics.

Ever since President George H.W. Bush said at the Republican National Convention in 1988 “Read my lips: No new taxes,” America’s orientation to tax policy has shifted to the right. The conservative theory argues the economy is not improved by tax increases, but by tax cuts. The sad reality is once you remove politics from the equation, there is scant non-partisan evidence to prove the theory.

Certainly, Mayor Stoney’s tax proposal is bold and ambitious and may not be a politically wise strategy. Risk-taking mayors do not always get rewarded at the polls for implementing dynamic change, although history looks on them with favor.

To be clear, it is bold to propose a budget that addresses systemic inequality and decades of disinvestment — and mismanagement by some predecessors.

But risk-taking works and serves to get at the root of problems with an eye toward eliminating them once and for all. In 2016, Richmond elected Mayor Stoney, who ran on an agenda of being a mayor who would champion Richmond Public Schools and its students, focus on basic services and work toward healing our huge racial and economic divides — to build one city.

Investing in public education in a majority-black school district helps everyone because an educated public contributes to a productive social order, less crime and better health.

Substandard schools drive families away, shrink the tax base and hurt all city services. Strong schools attract new families and make greater levels of economic and racial diversity in the classroom possible, to the benefit of all kids.

Mayor Stoney pushed to establish an Education Compact between the mayor, City Council and the Richmond School Board so that the schools provide an annual accountability report to the mayor and council and the public can better understand what their dollars got them. This is exactly what Mayor Stoney ran on and what he was elected to do. What’s needed now is for City Council to get on board.

I get it — a modestly increased tax bill is aggrevating. But a school system that continues to fail our kids is intolerable and unjust.

But there’s another side of responsibly governing a city: Attention to infrastructure and the basic services that make for a functional urban environment. This means roads, fixing potholes and street and sidewalk repair. The mayor’s budget invests in addressing that fundamental need as well.

There is a price tag attached: The no-brainer cigarette tax and raising the property tax rate from $1.20 per $100 of assessed value to $1.29 per $100 of assessed value. This is, of course, significantly higher than the county tax rates, but still far less than the $1.53 per $100 of assessed value that Richmond property owners paid 30 years ago.

Here’s the reality of governing a city like Richmond: There are simply too few resources. The city’s tax base is cramped by non-taxable property and by the decades-long and arguably, racist, moratorium on annexation.

Richmond is in fact a caricature of a national urban phenomenon: Concentrate all the most challenging problems in cities, deprive it of resources and then blame the local government and its elected officials (who are likely to be people of color) for failing to provide services that are on par with suburban county governments. That is what political scientists have long labeled the “hollow prize.”

This is the decades-long dynamic Mayor Stoney is seeking to reverse, and it rightly starts with schoolchildren.

While Mayor Stoney has lobbied for more state dollars, Richmond can’t rely on better state funding with a GOP-led legislature with little to no interest in funding the public education of families unlikely to vote for them — especially in the Trump era of severe disinvestment in cities, an era where federal dollars to urban cities is at its lowest.

It has taken two years, a lot of trust-building work and careful analysis to get to the point where our mayor, schools superintendent and School Board leadership are fully aligned — a point that literally has never been reached before in our 15 years under the current form of government.

It’s unconscionable that our local leaders would pass up the opportunity to build on the momentum to finally fix — and not just Band-Aid — our schools.

If we don’t invest in our own community, who will? This is the moment when the rubber hits the road — the moment where we can decide whether to be a city looking in the rearview mirror, or a city that takes meaningful action on its deepest problems, using the tools at hand, to secure a better future.

The writer is chair of the Department of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University.