Welcome 2021
4th January 2021 · 0 Comments
Our Resolution: To Seek an Equitable Future for Black Americans
In 2020, Americans experienced a living hell. Those of us left have survived the coronavirus pandemic so far, but most of us, God rest those killed by the coronavirus, survived the worst U.S. president in modern times. We fought against Donald J. Trump Sr.’s insanity, cruelty, racism, homophobia, misogyny and attempted political coup.
We took to the streets, in the midst of an out-of-control viral spread, risking our lives to send a message, worldwide, that Black Lives Matter and we marched against racist police who killed unarmed Black Americans.
Black Americans live in a perpetual state of survival. We’ve had to survive institutional racism embedded in the private and public sectors. The after-effect of America’s legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and apartheid have prompted an endless struggle for equality, justice and recognition of our humanity.
We survived through it all.
As we enter 2021 with a collective sigh of relief and the hope that some form of normalcy will return, we are cognizant that the struggle continues and that we must take preemptive precautions to guard our lives but also to demand an equitable future from the incoming Biden administration. We expect the Executive Branch to live up to America’s preamble:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Black youth in the 1960s followed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent protest strategies. They were patient and determined to overcome adversity, oppression and voter suppression, as they marched for equality in the summer of 1963.
In summer 2020, we saw youth march in the Black Lives Matter Movement. Unlike previous generations, the millennials and Gen. Z are boldly demanding equality, and they won’t wait for the arc of justice to bend. They are progressives who are using social media, cell phones, live streaming, blogging, podcasting, You Tube broadcasting, Zoom organizing, voting and speaking truth to power. They are intensely politically active.
Their courage, persistence and resistance give us hope that someday in the near future, Black Americans will receive equality and justice through Biden administration policies that reform American institutions, whether private, public, for-profit or non-profit.
In other words, entities found to be non-compliant will be ineligible for federal contracts, loans and grants. Nothing gets a people’s mind right like hitting them in their pockets.
Also, it is painfully clear that healthcare providers, including some doctors and other professionals, some police departments and police unions, financial lenders and banks, educational institutions, and federal agencies must be reformed if Black Americans are to receive fair and equitable treatment.
This means that the Biden administration’s Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division must reinstate Consent Decrees and seriously investigate discrimination complaints. The DOJ should also review federal laws that may be inherently discriminatory.
The Fed’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission needs to be strengthened. Instead of just investigating and telling complainants they have grounds to sue, the EEOC could employ a cadre of lawyers to represent low-income citizens seeking redress.
The Small Business Administration (SBA) needs to redefine small businesses. A business that grosses $1 million annually is considered a small business. This measurement leaves out many mom and pop businesses. An independent commission should be empaneled to monitor and track the number of SBA loans awarded by race.
President-elect Biden must also repair the damage while chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Biden helped to write and voted for The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that former President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994.
Criminal justice advocates say the law led to mass incarceration and disproportionately hurt Black and Brown Americans.
The law imposed tougher prison sentences at the federal level and encouraged states to do the same. It provided funds for states to build more prisons, aimed to fund 100,000 more cops and backed grants that encouraged police officers to carry out more drug-related arrests. The law also encouraged states to back drug courts to divert drug offenders from prison and into treatment and also helped fund some addiction treatment, according to a VOX report.
Reporters often brought up Biden’s participation in the crime law while on the campaign trail. In an attempt to undo the damage caused by the law, Biden released The Biden Plan for Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice. According to the plan:
“Today, too many people are incarcerated in the United States – and too many of them are black and brown…To build safe and healthy communities, we need to rethink who we’re sending to jail, how we treat those in jail, and how we help them get the health care, education, jobs, and housing they need to successfully rejoin society, after they serve their time.”
Biden also calls for the immediate passage of Congressman Bobby Scott’s SAFE Justice Act, an evidence-based, comprehensive bill to reform our criminal justice system “from front-end sentencing reform to back-end release policies.” For details, visit https://joebiden.com/justice/.
We will be watching and monitoring the Biden administration’s progress in carrying out “Lift Every Voice: The Biden Plan for Black America.”
To see the plan, visit https://joebiden.com/blackamerica/.
The crime bill aside, Biden does have a track record for supporting civil rights initiatives. His past actions give us hope for an equitable future.
As a U.S. senator, Biden co-sponsored the Civil Rights Act of 1990 to protect against employment discrimination and led multiple reauthorizations of the Voting Rights Act, protecting African Americans’ rights to vote. Biden also led efforts to reauthorize and extend the Fair Housing Act, and as Delaware’s senator, he was a vocal advocate and supporter of Delaware State University, the state’s Historically Black university.
We are cautiously optimistic that equality and justice will become realities in the Black community.
We appreciate Biden for installing the most diverse presidential Cabinet in U.S. history and we hope these officials mandate diversity in their departments and encourage companies and entities that interface with them to do the same. We also hope that the various federal commissions (FCC. FEC. etc.) will also reflect the country’s diversity.
We should absolutely expect a better future with equality and justice for Black Americans, but we should also heed the sage advice of President Ronald Reagan (of all people). Reagan’s motto was “Trust but verify.”
We are definitely trusting the Biden administration to pay it forward for Black Americans, who put him over the top and into the Oval Office, but we will seek validation that Biden is not a paper tiger and that he enacts the reforms he put on paper.
Hope springs eternal.
This article originally published in the January 4, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
