We
at Roosevelt are mourning the continued assault on Black lives, from
COVID-19, police brutality, and beyond. We stand in solidarity with
you.
#JusticeForGeorgeFloyd
The murder of George Floyd, and the
historic nationwide protests that followed, has given renewed momentum
to the fight against anti-Black police brutality. Against the backdrop
of a global pandemic that has exacerbated health,
wealth, and housing inequities for Black people, the message is clear: We
must dismantle the rules that devalue Black life. “To fight injustice
is to confront it; to confront it, we must reckon with the choices,
both implicit and explicit, of our past and present,” Roosevelt
Managing Director of Communications Kendra Bozarth writes in a Roosevelt
statement.
“Inequality today—most notably being the loss, and too
often the theft, of Black lives—is rooted in centuries of racial
exclusion and disenfranchisement. And any effort to address the racial inequality embedded into
our society must also account for the racial exclusion built into our
economics, politics, and policymaking.” As Rutgers University
professor Brittney Cooper said, "Immediate freedom is what we want.
Gradualism does not serve us."
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Another angle: “We
are at a pivotal point in our society where an optimistic outcome
would be one where we bend towards justice—or we may bend towards
something not akin to justice, like fascism,” Roosevelt Fellow Darrick
Hamilton tells the Financial Times. Read
on.
The Imperative of
Reparations
“Ultimately, respect for Black
Americans as people and as citizens—and acknowledgment, redress, and
closure for the history and financial hardship they have
endured—requires monetary compensation,” Roosevelt Senior Fellow Sandy
Darity and folklorist A. Kirsten Mullen write in a new Roosevelt
report. Comprehensive reparations paid by the US government, they
argue, would give the descendants of enslaved people an inheritance
that was properly theirs all along. And there are American precedents
for reparations, including 9/11 and Sandy Hook victim funds.
Read
more, and listen
to Darity discuss protests, police brutality, and COVID-19
on
WUNC’s Tested.
Rewrite the Racial
Rules
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