Twelve years after starting college, white men have paid off 44% of their student loan balances on average, while black men saw their balances grow by 11%, according to an analysis from Demos.
Twelve years after starting college, the white female borrower has paid off 72% of her loan balance. Over the same time period, the typical Black female borrower's balance has grown by 13%.
COVID-19 has exposed longstanding racial and economic inequalities in American life, which is evident in the fact that communities of color are being hit the hardest by both the medical and the economic impacts of the virus.
“These are folks who are serving [and] preparing food for all of the rest of us. It's a recipe for contagion when...the people preparing your food cannot afford to stay home when they have a contagious disease.”
"We call on policymakers, the media and the public to take affirmative steps to halt and condemn xenophobia and to ensure that the health and safety of all Americans is protected."
"This will have serious consequences for staff morale at the justice department, for the credibility of justice department attorneys in court, and for the public’s sense that the justice system is fair."
In 2020, a different group of grassroots outsiders increasingly is setting the terms of debate on the left. They are being led by black and brown people, young people, women, immigrants and working people—often outside the control of the traditional gatekeepers of American politics.
The crisis of American democracy is a deeper, more chronic one arising from systemic racial and gender exclusion, entrenched economic inequality, and technological and ecological transformations that undermine dreams of collective action and inclusive shared self-governance.
K. Sabeel Rahman and Hollie Russon Gilman's new book, Civic Power, calls for a broader approach to democratic reform, offering a critical framework and concrete suggestions to support those reforms that meaningfully redistribute power to citizens.
In 2016, a report from the progressive think tank Demosfound that most campaign dollars in local elections were coming from contributors who are white, male and high-income.
By enacting SB 7066, the Florida legislature has created two classes of returning citizens: those who can afford to reclaim their voting rights, and those who cannot.
Today’s Supreme Court decision that federal courts have no ability to check extreme partisan gerrymandering is a stunning blow to our democracy. This decision represents an abdication of judicial responsibility to protect against constitutional violations.
Women of color are generally underrepresented as campaign donors even though they vote at high rates, according to research by progressive think tank Demos.
The counter to this neoliberal vision involves, then, a more thorough moral critique—and a more transformative policy agenda—that tackles the underlying forces of corporate power, market inequities, structural racism, and anti-democratic political institutions. That progressives are finally talking in these expansive terms represents a potentially transformative inflection point in American politics.