“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.”
This pandemic is revealing the deeper inequities for Black and brown people that have always been present in our economy and democracy but that are often papered over in ordinary times.
"Like in previous moments of crisis, whether it's the Great Depression or the 2008 financial crisis, we will need new governmental bodies to address the public needs at this scale."
COVID-19 is a threat to everyone, but the economic damage resulting from medically necessary quarantines and shelter-in-place orders is neither random nor equally distributed.
There have been devastating reports of disproportionate rates of death in Black communities as a result of COVID-19. Racial capitalism and structural racism are to blame.
The Postal Service faces a $13 billion revenue loss this fiscal year alone; If the Postal Service is allowed to fail, it will be a tremendous blow to all Americans.
We're all seeing systematic efforts to shift the economic and health risks of the pandemic from governments and employers and onto the backs of disproportionately Black and brown workers.
The ongoing devaluing of Black life that’s now on full display forces us to confront America’s racist origins and to uproot our systems of racial violence, economic subordination, and hoarding of political power.
Rather than cutting funds for public needs while allowing police budgets to swell, cities, states, and the federal government must shift funding to the real priorities of communities.
Private credit reporting companies should be replaced by a publicly run credit registry that operates in the public interest and that automatically corrects for events like natural disasters and global health crises.
The COVID-19 crisis has cast into stark relief what has always been true: the wealth and prosperity of the U.S. economy rests on the labor, and the lives, of black and brown communities.
At the Democratic National Convention, former First Lady Michelle Obama made a point that is relevant to both parties: If policymakers do not take bold and transformative action, trends can and will get worse.
Written testimony of Demos President K. Sabeel Rahman before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law
From March through May, New Florida Majority Education Fund surveyed over 21,000 Floridians to ask how the pandemic was affecting their lives and well-being. This report presents our findings from those surveys.