Racial Justice

The best way to advance policies to raise living standards for working people is for diverse groups to recognize that they share more in common than not. Since class identity has often been racialized, one of the greatest challenges to rebuilding the economic power of the working class lies in establishing multiracial solidarity on a national scale. It is important to remember that the same special interest groups that fund the opposition to policies such as the minimum wage and paid sick leave, and that support efforts to undermine collective bargaining power, are often the same ones aligned with support of voter suppression tactics that limit voting among people of color, low-income individuals, students, seniors, and people with disabilities. The best way to advance the needed economic policies is for diverse groups to recognize that they share more in common than not and work together to achieve their overlapping and intersecting agendas. Getting to that point requires honesty and a collective reckoning about race, white privilege, and institutional racism, with respect to the costs and benefits to each of us.

Advancing policies that address persistent racial disparities while also tackling class inequality will require abandoning the zero-sum mindset that says one group’s set of issues is totally distinct from and in direct competition with another’s. Overcoming this trap begins with defining a broader view of how all the issues are related. It will take a considerable amount of ongoing effort to shift the dominant narrative from one that divides the masses to one that creates a new world of possibilities that benefits all of us.

People of color will become a majority of the American working class in 2032.

Publications

The State of Working Connecticut: Advancing Economic Justice in the Labor Market

Connecticut Voices for Children released their annual State of Working Connecticut report entitled, “Advancing Economic Justice in the Labor Market.”  This year’s report examines the economic standing of Connecticut’s workers and calls for a sweeping, antiracist program to advance economic justice; additionally, it offers six recommendations to combat rising wage inequality and to address the substantial racial wage gaps in the U.S. and Connecticut.

Worker Power Key to a Better Balance in Georgia

Key Takeaways:

  • This Labor Day, we are reminded that there are still anti-labor policies on the books in Georgia that diminish worker power and economic opportunity for all.
  • Unions play a significant role in shaping a better future for Georgia’s workers, their families and the economy overall.

Why it matters

At the expense of low-wage workers, those who wield more than their fair share of corporate and political power have facilitated and benefited from a historic rise in racial and economic inequality. Policymakers and business interests have collaborated long enough through state and local policies to make Georgia simultaneously the No. 1 place to do business and home of the No. 1 place for income inequality.

The weakening of labor protections in Georgia allowed for policies like Georgia’s Senate Bill (SB) 359 to ram through this legislative session. This bill shields businesses from liability by creating a near-impossible standard to prove gross negligence if a worker contracts COVID-19 on the job. In other words, state lawmakers bolstered protections for employers, but not for the people they employ who were forced to return to work prematurely during a deadly pandemic in a state with one of the highest infection rates, particularly among Black and Latinx Georgians.

Connecticut Voices for Children’s Issue Briefing Book 2020-2022

Connecticut Voices for Children released their Issue Briefing Book 2020-2022.  Versions of this document have been developed throughout the 25 years of the organization’s history. As the state experiences the convergence of a health crisis, an economic recession due to that crisis, and a contentious and long-overdue conversation on race, the “Book” has been refreshed given Voices’ new, strategic aim toward economic justice and these unprecedented times. The Issue Briefing Book 2020-2022 is designed to be a starting point for shared knowledge around the research and recommendations that are fundamental to family economic security and the undergirding fiscal and economics, with the hope of advancing shared action.

Abridged Brief | Full Brief

Black Lives Matter & Anti-Racist Resources

  • June 1, 2020

Statement from EARN and EPI

All of us at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) are angered and deeply saddened by the police murder of George Floyd, and so many other senseless deaths in the Black community—incidents rooted in a long history of anti-Blackness in our nation.

This is a horrible moment for our nation—and a moment that challenges each of us to commit to lasting change.

The racism that led to these tragic and unnecessary deaths has also created tragic economic disparities between Black and white people in the United States, a reality that the pandemic has magnified and laid bare.

EPI’s staff knows this all too well. For more than 30 years, EPI researchers have used the tools of economic analysis and empirical research to expose the truth about the glaring and growing inequality in the United States impacting working families—disparities that are disproportionately experienced by Black people.

Exposing and understanding the root causes of the systemic racism, inequities, and injustice in the U.S. economy is a necessary precondition for developing, advocating for, and ultimately implementing policy solutions adequate to the scale and scope of the problem.

We have all been shaken by recent events, which are bound by a common thread of bigotry woven throughout U.S. history. We all know that derailing racism is the only way to ensure that all Black people are able to live the supposed American dream, not the American nightmare we are witnessing now.

—The Economic Policy Institute staff 

Originally posted here.

EARN members’ statements:  

A selection of EPI resources and webinars on systemic anti-black racism through an economic policy lens: 

To explore more EPI resources on race and the economy, you can take a look at the videos and podcast episodes available on our website and YouTube channel. In particular, you can watch the recordings of the Program on Race Ethnicity and the Economy (PREE) workshop series: Turning Good Intentions into Constructive Engagement on Race. 

  1. Basic Principles for Constructive Engagement on Race 
  2. Race and Ethnicity in Empirical Analysis 
  3. Building Effective Partnerships with Racial Justice-Focused Advocates and Activists 
  4. Contemporary Social Issues and the Native American Experience in the United States 
  5. Contemporary Social Issues and the Asian American Experience in the United States 
  6. Contemporary Social Issues & the African American Experience 

Contextualizing the murder of George Floyd and other black Americans murdered by police, the Black Lives Matter movement, and systemic racism in the United States:  

Tools for being anti-racist: 

  • Excellent guides from the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture on talking about race and being anti-racist. The museum has a host of online resources that are worth exploring. 
  • So You Want to Talk About Race? by Ijeoma Oluo: A guide for having constructive conversations about race that are aimed at making long-lasting change 
  • White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo and Michael Eric Dyson and  
  • How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi 
  • Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi: A history of racist ideas in America. A retelling of American history that focuses on the ways that racist and assimilationist ideas and philosophies have shaped our country. The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic)