Commemorating the promise of equality on Juneteenth. View this in your browser and share with your friends. <[link removed]>
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We at Roosevelt are mourning the continued assault on Black lives, from COVID-19, police brutality, and beyond. We stand in solidarity with you.
Juneteenth and the Fight for Justice
This year’s Juneteenth <[link removed]> comes at a critical moment in our nation’s history; a global pandemic continues to disproportionately take Black lives <[link removed]> and shutter Black-owned businesses <[link removed]>, and protestors worldwide are condemning violent policing systems that have targeted Black communities since slavery. Just as emancipation was a delayed reality for the enslaved people of Texas, true equality is unrealized for Black Americans today, as Roosevelt Senior Fellow Sandy Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen explain in a Teen Vogue op-ed <[link removed]>. “Today’s racial injustice and inequality, including the astonishing racial wealth gap, originated with the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres <[link removed]>. The payment of this debt is feasible and at least 155 years overdue,” they write. “The goal is equality—if we act together. On this Juneteenth, in honor of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and all those memorialized by the movement for Black lives, let us collectively say enough is enough.”
- A plan for reparations: On NPR’s Morning Edition <[link removed]>, Darity describes the reparations proposals in his and Mullen’s new book,From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century <[link removed]>. “We feel strongly that direct payments must be a major component. We have talked about support for education, support for entrepreneurial activity, some resources that go to historically black colleges and universities. But the preponderance of the funds must go to individual recipients. And they must go in such a way that we, in fact, eliminate the racial wealth gap. That's the big objective of the reparations project.”
- The racial wealth gap: “Just one way to achieve justice, as I’ve outlined in arecent law review essay <[link removed]>, is to focus on outcomes rather than means, with a focus on closing the racial wealth gap. For example, reparations could mean that the federal government could enlist several programs and agencies at once, intended to eliminate the racial wealth gap,” Roosevelt Fellow Mehrsa Baradaran writes for the American Prospect. “The racial wealth gap has deleterious effects on black communities in practically every domain: environmental impact, education, credit availability, housing, and policing. Thus, a response must be multifaceted.”Read on. <[link removed]>
Centering Blackness
“Anti-Blackness is the foundational architecture of the rules that maintain racial oppression and economic exclusion today, so we need a new approach to reassess and reimagine the rules, policies, and narratives that uphold it,” Anne Price (Insight Center for Community Economic Development President), Jhumpa Bhattacharya (Insight Center Vice President of Programs and Strategy) and Dorian Warren (Community Change President and Economic Security Project Cochair) write for Medium. “Centering Blackness and the experience of Black people is a framework that allows for possibilities of redemption, reconciliation, and transcendence. It allows us to envision and build a world where anti-Blackness does not exist and work toward tangible solutions to benefit all Americans.” Read on. <[link removed]>
Black LGBTQ+ Lives Matter
Last weekend, an estimated 15,000 people participated in the Brooklyn Liberation march <[link removed]> for Black transgender lives—which are disproportionately harmed by police violence and health care discrimination <[link removed]> and stolen by murders the American Medical Association describes as an “epidemic.” <[link removed]> Until Monday’s historic Supreme Court ruling <[link removed]>, they—and all LGBTQ+ people—could also be fired solely for their identity in more than half of US states. The prohibition of workplace discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals is a massive (and long overdue) leap forward for civil rights and worker power. Supported by the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s also a reminder that equality requires intersectionality <[link removed]>.
10 Ideas for Student-Powered Change
This week, the Roosevelt Network released its 12th annual 10 Ideas student policy journal, which features the research and policy proposals of students across the country. As Roosevelt Network National Director Katie Kirchner writes in the journal’s opening letter, “the policies in this journal were written during the fall of 2019—before the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—but reflect an urgency that has only heightened in the time since their writing.” Among this year’s ideas: increasing legal representation for asylum seekers in Texas and people facing eviction in South Bend, Indiana. Read more. <[link removed]>
What We’re Reading
The Supreme Court’s Landmark LGBTQ Rights Decision, Explained in 5 Simple Sentences <[link removed]> - Vox
An American Spring of Reckoning <[link removed]> - The New Yorker
COVID-19 Changed How We Vote. It Could Also Change Who Votes. <[link removed]> - New York Times
The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black [feat. Roosevelt’s Anne Price] <[link removed]> - The Atlantic
Activists Are Pushing to Make Juneteenth a National Holiday. Here’s the History Behind Their Fight <[link removed]> - TIME
The Systemic Racism Black Americans Face, Explained in 9 Charts <[link removed]> - Vox
It Didn’t Have to Be Like This <[link removed]> - The Atlantic
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