If you are looking for ways to develop or deepen your involvement in racial justice, below you’ll find a collection of resources to help get you started, whether it be by donating, marching, signing a petition or writing your local and federal elected officials.
Please note: ZOOM link will be shared with all participants on the day before and day-of the event.
Black workers are facing a crisis on multiple fronts. They are more likely to be frontline workers and more likely to die from COVID-19. Unemployment rates for Black workers continue to rise even as rates for white workers fall. And they are on the front lines in the system of structural racism that leads to police brutality, poverty, and worse health care outcomes.
At the same time, the Movement for Black Lives has created the foundation of a resistance, and an opening to imagine real change.
How can we build a broad movement of unions, worker centers, community organizations and social justice activists to dismantle white supremacy? Considering the legacy of structural racism and police brutality, as well as the virus and economic crisis, our speakers will discuss ideas on how to build working class power for a better world.
Speakers include:
Michelle Crentsil
Political Director, New York State Nurses Association
Courtney Sebring
Creative Communications Director, BYP 100
April Sims
Secretary-Treasurer, Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO
Clarence Taylor
Professor Emeritus, Modern African American, Religion, Civil Rights, Baruch College
Maurice BP-Weeks
Co-Executive Director, Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE)
Moderated by:
Diana Robinson
Union Semester Coordinator, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies
The protests over the past week and a half have laid bare many of the excesses of the police and called into increasing question what their role in our cities is and should be. In a recent Streetsblog post, SLU professor Kafui Attoh explained why the protests have in particular laid bare the structural racism in New York’s mass-transit policing.
Attoh reminds us that, before the pandemic, before the recent wave of mass protests, Gov. Cuomo and the MTA had decided to add hundreds of new transit police to the city’s subway system in order to combat fare evasion. The news was announced much to the dismay of activists, who noted that this would simply exacerbate existing inequalities and racial profiling — and would cost the city a fortune.
Now, here we are six months later, and, Attoh observes, one would think the conversation would have changed:
Today, the issues facing the MTA and New York City Transit appear more existential. After Cuomo’s March 20 “New York on PAUSE” declaration, daily transit ridership fell by 90 percent. By mid-April ridership on the subway had reached a historic low of 365,000 daily trips — down from 5.56 million trips a year before. Losses in fare revenue have been extensive.
The MTA’s financial situation remains shaky despite the fact that the agency has received federal and state aid and new powers to borrow from its capital budget — and especially given the possibility of another outbreak. Beyond the hit to transit budgets, the human costs also have mounted. As of this week, more than 60 transit workers in the city — most of them bus drivers — have succumbed to COVID-19. Transit in the city is facing a new reality — one that has made a mockery of the old bugaboo of “fare evasion.”
And yet, the MTA intends to move forward with its pre-COVID plan:
In mid-April, Gothamist reported that, despite $8 billion in COVID related losses, the MTA still plans to plow ahead with its decision to hire 350 new MTA police officers. Having already hired 150 since January, the MTA will expand the force’s ranks by 150 in July and by another 200 in December.
As Attoh explains, this dynamic makes abundantly apparent what is motivating policymakers — and what we need instead:
The push for more MTA police — despite transit’s financial woes and the retreat of the issue of fare evasion — clarifies what was already clear to activists six months ago: The purpose of the policing fetish is simply the need to control the mobility of the economically and racially marginalized — a population that will face the brunt of the coming austerity.
We must address these structural questions — and now, with hope, we will.
The New Labor Forum has a monthly newsletter on current topics in labor, curated by the some of the most insightful scholars and activists in the labor world today. Check out some highlights from the latest edition below.
In his introduction to Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, the poet Martin Espada writes: “I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads, faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen. I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.” Espada’s words hold special poignancy now, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
George Floyd died on a Minneapolis street, his neck pinioned beneath the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin. Like so many other police killings of people of color, the murder of George Floyd demands that we scrutinize the role of law enforcement unions in relation to racist and warrior-style policing. In the case of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, the union is standing by Officer Chauvin and his colleagues, who looked on for over eight minutes as Floyd pleaded “I can’t breathe.” Although Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey last year banned the warrior-style training that teaches the sort of chokehold that Officer Chauvin used to restrain Floyd, the Minneapolis Federation continues to champion the use of such potentially lethal maneuvers. The union leadership, in the person of union president Bob Kroll, has a long history of antagonism against advocates of reform and has called Black Lives Matter a “terrorist organization.” These facts force tough questions about the nature of police unionism. Four years ago, faculty and staff at the CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, publisher of New Labor Forum, already understood the gravity of this matter and devoted a two-day conference to bringing Black Lives Matter activists into conversation with leaders and members of police unions. In this newsletter, we offer an interview with conference speaker Carmen Berkeley, then Director of the AFL-CIO’s Civil, Human and Women’s Rights Department. We also include reporting from Mother Jones by Inae Ho on the Minneapolis union’s endorsement of conditions that ultimately led to George Floyd’s death.
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This article was originally posted by Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
By Michael Javen Fortner
With audacity and grace, the “Mothers of the Movement” have reminded us of the humanity of their slain children and the inhumanity of the racist practices that took those innocent lives. Standing united at the Democratic National Convention, in the city of brotherly love and sisterly affection, these brave women spoke for the dead. They shared their heart-wrenching stories and exposed the ugly, real-life consequences of so-called “law and order.” Geneva Reed-Veal, the mother of Sandra Bland, who was found hanging in a jail cell after being arrested during a traffic stop, told us that when “a young black life is cut short, it’s not just a personal loss. It is a national loss. It is a loss that diminishes all of us.”
In some corners of the right, these earnest pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Fox News, talk radio, and their consumers never miss the chance to defend police brutality. Voicing the vitriol of a conservative fringe, Rudy Giuliani recently lectured black parents, telling them to “teach your children to be respectful to the police.” Of course, respect did not save Philando Castile’s life or the lives of many others. At the same time, the push for criminal justice reform has been embraced by many conservative intellectuals and officials. Many have begun to acknowledge that black lives have not mattered as much as their colorblind faith suggested they would. They realize that, as the leader of the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, Newt Gingrich, admitted, whites “don’t understand being black in America.”
Almost a half century ago, crime was on the rise. Continue reading The Last Hurrah of the “Silent Majority”?
This post was originally published in the Spring 2015 issue of New Labor Forum.
By Sarah Jaffe
Cameron McLay became chief of police in Pittsburgh in September 2014, tasked by new mayor Bill Peduto with cleaning up the department, after its former chief wound up in federal prison for corruption. This put him in charge at a time when the Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country, calling for an end to police brutality, racial profiling, and the deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of police officers. When the chief met some of those activists, with the group What’s Up?! Pittsburgh, at community festivities, he posed, in uniform, for an Instagram photo with one of their signs. It read: “I resolve to challenge racism @ work. #EndWhiteSilence.” The photo looked to many like a rare example of a police officer supporting the message of the protesters — the mayor told reporters that he immediately reposted the picture to his own Facebook page.
