The next battle for Black Lives Matter: Economic justice
Black Lives Matter activists are expanding their call for justice to a new target: the economy.
In a detailed proposal released Monday, a consortium of more than 50 civil rights groups laid out an ambitious plan to improve the financial lives of black Americans with a heavy emphasis on reparations, investing in black communities and economic justice.
"The issues dealing with race and racism and racial inequality in the United States are intimately connected to the issues of wealth inequality," said Patrick Mason, an economist who contributed to the report and the chair of the board of directors at the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative.
Mason worked on a section in the proposal that calls for a restructuring of the tax code, which he says is responsible for much of today's wealth inequality.
Many tax programs, including the estate tax and capital gains tax, favor wealthier Americans, he said.
The report calls for increases on both of those taxes. It also seeks to put an end to income caps on payroll taxes that fund Social Security and unemployment and to raise corporate taxes, among other measures.
That additional tax revenue could be used to fund federal and state job programs. Creating new jobs is necessary to help close the staggering racial wealth gap in America, Morgan said. (White families have a median wealth that is 13 times that of black and Latino families, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.)
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Isaiah Davis
"Homeownership is linked to jobs, crime is linked to jobs, the ability for individuals to marry and for those marriages not to fall apart is also linked to these jobs," he said.
Momentum around economic justice has been growing since the high-profile killings of unarmed black men at the hands of police, many who were low income or had committed minor infractions like selling loose cigarettes in the case of Eric Garner of New York or selling used CDs like Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. After the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the Justice Department found that local police officers had excessively stopped and ticketed black residents often charging them multiple times in a single stop.
While media coverage around Black Lives Matter has often focused on the protests or killings of black men and women, those issues are inextricably linked to the economy, said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, the director of the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative at the Corporation for Enterprise Development.
Recently, a campaign championed by Solange Knowles and the hip-hop artist Killer Mike encouraging blacks to invest their money in black-owned banks gained traction on social media. In an emotional interview with Hot 107.9 in Atlanta Mike said, "What we're going to do is to divert money away from the system. This works."
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Gabriel Lewis
Part of the proposal released Monday called for federal money that is typically earmarked for policing and prisons to be reinvested in education, employment and other services in predominantly black communities. The report also calls for an end to money bail, the fees and fines associated with incarceration and an end to assessing an applicant's criminal history when getting housing, loans or jobs.
The activists also called for reparations to be paid to black Americans for the wealth lost as a result of slavery, racism and other forms of institutional discrimination.
Asante-Muhammad said the Black Lives Matter report was "a mix of historic proposals of what we can loosely call the Black freedom movement," like the 1963 March on Washington and the Black Panthers setting up breakfast programs.
Richard Wallace an organizer for the Worker's Center for Racial Justice in Chicago, one of the groups behind the report, said that while economics was important it cannot be disconnected from the rest of the plan which includes increasing political power and ending capital punishment and mass incarceration of blacks. "What good is economic justice if they are still killing us? "Wallace said.
FIN
Isaac Jenkins
Slavery was good for black people, it civilized them. We don't owe you anything, get over it!
Hunter Nelson
Maybe if they want money so bad they should've finished high school and gotten decent jobs.
Carson Stewart
Blacks can get in line, I’m still waiting for my reparations check from Mongolia and that's back-dated to 1241 A.D.
Cameron Mitchell
no free money for you stupid nigger
Connor White
>reparations
We have that, it's called welfare.
Isaiah Cook
This pic describes BLM perfectly
Noah Russell
FUCK OFF NIGGERS
Cameron Ramirez
another racebait!
Jeremiah Scott
Where's the white police officer?
Josiah Collins
Is it easy to immigrate to the US and live on welfare?
Gavin Carter
SHAME ON YOU ISRAEL H E K E L S
Matthew Howard
I just wanna be a NEET writer but I waste a lot of time here on work.
Justin Bell
As long as you don't have kids and are fine with practically stealing money, it will work out great!
Ian Kelly
only in europe is easy
Evan Hernandez
All Niggers Must Hang
Nicholas Watson
we should still pay these fuckers, for screwing the entire Islamic world, and giving us the ability to colonize first the new world/colonize the whole world
Nicholas Collins
1/1
Juan Wood
2
Evan Fisher
So they've delivered their demands.
Has anyone asked them, "Or what?" yet?
Jason Perez
give generously Sup Forums the kangz need ka$h.
Nicholas Johnson
Heh, so we can bankrupt these people, right?
Asher Reyes
Fake a black profile and bleed them out...sounds like a plan.
Christopher Reed
In all seriousness, if we're talking racial reparations, blacks owe us for all the crime they commit.
Noah White
nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger
Bentley Edwards
every negative comment gets a donation? from who? lmao
its funny how blacks cant understand that whites are not as stupid as they are.
Jaxon Johnson
after hillary gets kicked around by trump during the debates, she will radically alter her campaign. She will Obama-it. She will entirely focus on the black community from september until the election, trying to stir them up to vote.
She will offer a reparations-program or something equivalent in scope and in judgement in very early november.
she will pander so hard that it'll shock america but it'll be difficult for the undecided to vote against her as the liberal shaming of MSM will be in full effect due to Clinton "routinely calling attention to racial inequality."
Never mind that none of this has been demonstrated.
Screen-cap this.
Adrian Walker
All the disinfo. All the denial. All the delusion. Holy shit.
