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.
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.
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 CARES Act passed fails to meet a simple moral test - that we protect the most vulnerable among us because it largely excludes immigrant and mixed-status families, including their U.S. citizen children, from stimulus payments.
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.
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.
“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.”
"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."
Boosting the returns on homeownership for black families would reduce the wealth gap with white families by more than $17,000, or 16%, according to a 2015 report from the public-policy organization Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.
Demos’s report details how historical and structural racism contributes to higher interest rates and insurance costs for Black and Latinx people, compared to white Americans.
In 2019, progressive organizations, funders, academics, artists, and more came together to strategize about what must be done to face and address the crises undermining our democracy.
The Disparate Impact standard is critical to continued and enhanced opportunity to access fair credit, housing, and homeownership. Demos strongly opposes efforts to undermine this longstanding enforcement tool.
So the next time Democrats complain about lower voter turnout, not just in 53206, but in any beleaguered neighborhood, they might think first about the policies, both old and new, that have served and continue to serve as stumbling blocks for black political participation.
