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It’s been quite the start to 2021. Just this month alone: on January 5th, we celebrated the election of Georgia’s first Black and Jewish senators, Senator Raphael Warnock and Senator John Ossoff. This was immediately followed by the insurrectionist/white nationalist/ white supremacist attack at the United States Capitol on January 6th –– an event that was an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 Election and a clear attack on our efforts to create a multiracial democracy. Then, on January 20th, we saw the swearing-in and the inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
During his first few hours in office, President Biden took immediate action to further racial equity through 17 executive actions and proposed legislation that reversed the policies of the outgoing administration.
The actions included:
- Racial Equity: Executive actions revoking Trump Administration Executive Order 13950, directing federal agencies to ensure racial equity within their policies, prevent workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, and rescind the Trump Administration's 1776 Commission.
- COVID-19: A plan to address the ongoing pandemic that at this point has claimed 420,000 American lives, disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and other communities of color; and proposing a legislative package to provide immediate relief to millions of unemployed people and those paying student loans.
- Immigration: Executive actions that urge Congress to provide the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States a path to citizenship, undo the Muslim Ban, end the exclusion of the counting of undocumented people in the Census, halt the construction of the border wall, and reverse the restrictions on refugees and asylum seekers.
- Housing Justice: Executive actions to extend a foreclosure moratorium for federally backed mortgages and an eviction moratorium for renters.
- Environmental Justice: Executive actions to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement within 30 days, cancel the Keystone XL pipeline (which had launched the indigenous people-led Standing Rock demonstrations), and reverse more than 100 Trump Administration actions on the environment.
We hold the rescinding of Executive Order 13950 as a big win. At Facing Race: A National Virtual Conference last November, Race Forward launched the #BannedWords campaign, which elevated phrases such as “systemic racism,” “unconscious bias”, and “intersectionality” that the order banned from federal government trainings, workshops, and discussions.
As our work moves forward in this new cycle, we’re committed to making bold and broad strides towards achieving racial equity. We continue to call for racial equity to be at the forefront of government operations, policies, and practices. As part of the Racial Equity Anchor Collaborative, Race Forward joins with our Anchor partners to call on President Biden to establish a White House Office on Racial Equity and Inclusion to coordinate the full range of federal agency efforts to advance racial equity, centered on the administration’s promise to confront systemic racism and to heal the “soul of our nation.”
Race Forward President Glenn Harris said: “We stand at the crossroads of our country’s reckoning of race. We stand at this crossroads because of the vision and work of Black organizers and activists, alongside other organizers and activists of color, who have pushed this country closer to its professed ideals of justice, equality, and freedom for all. The Biden-Harris administration must walk alongside these organizers and activists by taking proactive steps to address systemic racism.”
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