A New Paradigm for Justice and Democracy
Ignoring race is not a viable political or policy strategy.
Building a society that ensures economic and political power for all people is.
To get there, we need a new paradigm for racial justice, as Roosevelt Deputy Director of Race and Democracy Kyle Strickland and Roosevelt President and CEO Felicia Wong explain in a new report.
Neoliberalism and racial liberalism—the prevailing paradigms of the last 50 years—promoted race-neutrality and promised that markets would compete away racism. They failed, empirically and emotionally.
“Together,” Strickland and Wong write, “these old paradigms excluded and divided. They limited our politics and institutions. And they hindered the policies and narratives that could advance racial equity and justice.”
Drawing on themes from a century of research, scholarship, and activism, Strickland and Wong outline an emerging paradigm that recognizes this truth: Race and economic policy are inextricably linked. And the values of today’s racial justice movement—freedom and liberation, repair and redress of historical harms, and material equity—are central to this shift in thinking.
“Today’s movement openly recognizes the mutually reinforcing systems of racial capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy as significant barriers to racial justice,” they write. “We will not see transformative policy change, structural reform, or a stable and lasting multiracial democracy without a new paradigm.”
And “the only kind of democracy we can have going forward is multiracial.”
Read more in A New Paradigm for Justice and Democracy: Moving beyond the Twin Failures of Neoliberalism and Racial Liberalism.
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