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 comes at a critical moment in our nation’s
history; a global pandemic continues to disproportionately
take
Black lives and
shutter
Black-owned businesses, 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. “Today’s racial injustice and inequality,
including the astonishing racial wealth gap, originated with the
unfulfilled
promise of 40 acres. 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, Darity describes
the reparations proposals in his and Mullen’s new book, From
Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st
Century. “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
a recent
law review essay, 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.
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.
Black
LGBTQ+ Lives
Matter
Last weekend, an estimated 15,000
people participated in the Brooklyn
Liberation march
for Black transgender lives—which are disproportionately harmed by
police violence and health
care discrimination and stolen by murders the American Medical Association
describes as an “epidemic.” Until Monday’s historic
Supreme Court ruling, 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.
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.
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