December 10, 2018 is the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1948, in the aftermath of the fall of the Nazi regime, the United States joined many countries in the world and signed the Declaration. Several of the rights listed in the document were already within the U.S. Constitution, but some were not. We have done particularly poorly in living up to the Declaration’s call for a right to an adequate standard of living, including food, housing, and medical care.
The Green New Deal is a vision for comprehensive national policy that addresses climate change at the scale and scope we need, creates living-wage jobs, and addresses racial and economic inequity by investing in communities.
We at Demos are acutely aware of, and actively fighting against, the racist policies, beliefs, political tactics and narratives that have created and deepened the racial divide in our country. On this third annual National Day of Racial Healing*, we are reflecting on the ways in which we can unite to heal the wounds of racial division and the centuries of trauma they have caused for people of color.
As a child, I vividly remember my Puerto Rican mom always watching the Oprah Winfrey Show, and I distinctly remember Oprah Winfrey and her show being my first real exposure to black culture, besides my black father and his family.
Today, Black History Month is an invitation to face with confidence the tragedies and trials that break our hearts, to be fearless in hope and unyielding in our fight for justice — for all of us.
I talk to my children about how they—who have ethnic roots in Ireland, China, Samoa, Germany, Switzerland, and the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, but as far as we know, no African ancestry—are beneficiaries of the struggles of black history.
Yesterday, Demos and 4 other civil rights legal organizations filed an emergency motion to stop Texas from discriminating against voters of color and purging naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote from the voter rolls.
We talk about the Black people who overcame oppression but not about the people—overwhelming white and powerful—who created the oppression others had to overcome. This must change.
The New York State Senate and Assembly heard arguments for public financing of elections, the best policy tool we have to push back against the presence of big money in politics and to push forward on the march toward racial equity.
American immigrants—of which I am one—cannot pretend that America’s history as a slave society bears no relation and has no consequence for the America that they live in today. We cannot carve the history of racial oppression out of the history of America.
Each year, Black History Month reminds us to do something we rarely do as a society: remember (or learn for the first time) and reflect on the truly breathtaking contributions of Black people over the centuries. Many outlets do a beautiful job of cataloging some of these contributions, including several of my colleagues here on this blog.
I grew up in a military family, and we lived in predominantly white cities. I spent most of my formative years in Lancaster, California. Lancaster was a true juxtaposition: it was a city in southern California, which was a region widely hailed for its progressive values. At the same time, Lancaster was more of a big town than a city, with a majority white population that held deep conservative beliefs.
Watching television can be a window into experiences beyond your own, but it shouldn't be a passive act—keep in mind who is controlling the race narrative.
The bottom half of American households now controls less than 5 percent of our total net worth. Our republican founders could not have imagined a distribution of wealth so concentrated, nor a democracy so threatened by the rule of property.
But the direction of all my work, at bottom, is toward a new family economy, something I believe we can achieve only by fundamentally reformulating American politics around ideas of community wealth and family economic protection. This is a politics that leverages families and communities against market compulsion using the resources and regulatory power of a conservative or "subsidiary" welfare state-one that supports and protects traditional social structures but does not usurp their functions or alter their God-given purposes.
Today, children of wealthy parents are the ones who disproportionately attend college. Meanwhile, student financial assistance at the federal, state and university level has shifted away from a needs-based approach, leaving low-income and moderate-income students sitting at home.