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This
week’s COVID-19 and Race Commentary explores why the nationwide uprising
for racial justice could bring big, lasting change, how racism harms
health, and why building Black-owned businesses is key to an equitable
recovery.
Issue No 10. June 17,
2020
Beginning America’s Next Story
By Angela Glover
Blackwell
Having been an advocate
for racial justice for nearly 50 years, I am not surprised that people
are asking me whether this moment is different. Is it going to lead to
big, lasting change?
My answer: This feels
like a seismic shift, and the beginning of America’s next story.
I grew up during the
Civil Rights movement and graduated from college into the Black Power
movement. Over the years, I’ve litigated to fight employment
discrimination, protect consumer rights, and reform police. Alongside
brilliant, dedicated Black residents and leaders, I worked to reduce
Black infant mortality and bring grocery stores and investments to
neglected Black neighborhoods. In solidarity with thousands of visionary
activists, I’ve fought to obtain, protect, and defend our rights while
unapologetically demanding racial equity — just and fair inclusion into a
society where all can participate, prosper, and reach their full
potential.
I can recognize a big
moment for change when I see one. This looks like the real thing.
This uprising signals
something different from the marches and goals of the Civil Rights
movement. That movement saw America as a place of opportunity, and
believed that things would get better for Black people if the system
would just eliminate discriminatory laws that locked us out of
participating in everything from voting to jobs to public accommodations.
The Black Power movement
believed that protesting segregation was not enough to remedy generations
of structural racism. The proponents had a biting critique of capitalism
and a deep love of Black culture and people. Black Power prioritized
building Black economic and political might over integration into White
society.
In the end, neither
movement fundamentally improved outcomes for the majority of Black
Americans. The Civil Rights movement underestimated the power of racism
to survive and even thrive after discriminatory laws were removed. The
Black Power movement underestimated the degree of police violence it
would confront and the impact of FBI infiltration on its credibility. It
also underestimated the willingness of White America to abandon cities
and set up race-based enclaves in surrounding areas, while simultaneously
sucking the resources, infrastructure, and political clout out of urban
centers where Black people were beginning to amass power.
But today, the
circumstances, the demands, and especially the capacities are different.
There’s a growing consensus that something is fundamentally wrong in
America, tied to racism and exclusion. A recent poll found that 76 percent of Americans consider racism and
discrimination a “big problem,” up 26 points from 2015. This
is a remarkable change in just a few years.
This shift in perception
is due to the savvy and uncompromising Movement for Black Lives and its courageous leaders. It also reflects the
growing number of Black elected, civic, labor, government,
and business leaders, as well as Black researchers, artists, and foundation executives who are
increasingly using their Black power and platforms to call out structural
racism, build solidarity with others who are feeling the full brunt of
systemic exclusion, and call for bold change.
We may also be witnessing
a turning point for the White community.
Not only are thousands of young White people joining protests in every
region of the country, White business leaders, elected officials,
scholars, and pundits are all rushing to show their support for those in the
streets. They are calling out racism and admitting to their complicity in
advancing it and ignoring it. They are also putting money and resources on the table
to finally defeat racism.
And now this new movement
is demanding transformation.
Americans have been
watching the brutalization of Black bodies since before the founding of
the country but somehow managed to deny the reality of what they had
seen. The videotaped beating of Rodney King made police violence against
Black people undeniable, but the videotaped murder of George Floyd has rendered it unacceptable. The righteous
indignation of multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational protesters is
forcing the nation to wrestle with the ghosts of the past and the role
that policing has played in institutionalizing brutality
against Black people. As a result, we are now talking about
defunding the police and reimagining community safety, instead of
settling for minor reforms.
But it’s not only about
law enforcement. George Floyd was killed in the midst of the COVID-19
pandemic, in which Black Americans are 3.5 times more likely to die of the virus than
Whites, and Latinx Americans are twice as likely to die. This
is a result of longstanding structural racism in health-care access,
housing, education, and the economy. As of April, less than half of the adult Black population was
employed. And people of color with jobs were more likely to be frontline industry workers
with the greatest exposure to the coronavirus.
As the world enters a deep economic recession, young people
(and not just young people of color) are facing both inequality and
extreme uncertainty. They wonder if they will ever have a good job, be
able to buy a house, or save money for retirement. Young people of color had
the highest unemployment rates before COVID-19, according to the US
Department of Labor, and have even fewer job options now. As with prior
social movements, youth are a driving force in this uprising and they
aren’t interested in compromise. They want economic transformation and
reject the current toxic inequality that favors the wealthy
while limiting equitable opportunities, ravaging the planet, and throwing
the most vulnerable people to the bottom of the economic pile.
It’s exhilarating to see
this diverse movement centering Black people and standing up for
transformative change. Let’s revel in this moment but remember that we
won’t achieve lasting impact unless we continue to do the work. We must
reach into our radical imaginations and bring forth a
compelling vision for the nation we need and deserve. We must keep
raising awareness, organizing, demanding change, using our power,
building our movement, expanding our ranks, and moving forward.
Do the work and it will be
different this time.
Angela Glover
Blackwell is Founder in Residence at PolicyLink and host of the
podcast Radical Imagination.
Highlights from the
News, Analysis, and Commentary
As states begin
to reopen, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Task Force on Business and Jobs
Recovery issued an open letter calling out the insidious
effects of structural racism across society, and urging business and civic
leaders throughout the nation to rebuild the economy to be more inclusive
and resilient. Recovering
from COVID-19 “presents an opportunity to re-imagine our society and
economy by striking out against injustice. We declare with one voice that
this pattern of racial inequality must stop now and that the results of
our attempt to redress the past and correct the present will manifest in
this generation.”
A critical
recovery strategy that would build significant wealth in Black
communities is the creation of more Black-owned businesses with
broad public support so they can grow, Ron Busby, CEO of the U.S. Black Chambers, Inc., tells Forbes. In addition to serving as engines
of wealth and job creation, small businesses owned by people of color are
the emotional heart of neighborhoods suffering most because of COVID-19
and the economic aftershocks, as this New
York Times story about a beloved bar in Oakland,
California, poignantly illustrates.
Please share with your
networks, send your ideas and feedback,
and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram using
hashtag #COVIDandRace.
We hope you find the
COVID-19 and Race Series an important tool for keeping up with news about
the virus and its impact on communities we serve. As a nonprofit
organization, PolicyLink is honored to provide resources to support the
needs of our nation's 100 million economically insecure individuals.
Generous partners like you make our work possible.
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