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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.”
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.
