Economics Archives - Tools For Racial Justice

Adoption Is A Feminist Issue, But Not For The Reasons You Think

by Liz Latty | April 2017
Mainstream feminism — feminism by and for middle and upper-middle-class white women — has historically gotten behind adoption. Feminists have supported the rights of single people and same-gendered families to adopt, the rights of adoptive families in contested adoptions, and policies intended to get children into adoptive homes faster. What’s missing from mainstream feminism is any explicit support for families of origin: the parents who have to lose their children, the families that must be dismantled in order for adoptive families to be built. The adoption industry is a business. It generates billions of dollars each year and requires other people’s children in order to stay profitable. Here’s the toughest truth yet: Those children are almost always the children of poor and working class people.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [White Privilege] [Economics] [Accountability] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [White Supremacy]

It’s Not the White Working Class That is Hurting the Most

by Ana Swanson | January 2017
President-elect Donald Trump was lifted into office by white adults over 25 without a four-year degree, who favored him by a margin of 39 percentage points. Their economic frustration and suffering are real, and white working-class America is a large group – 42 percent of the country. Yet month after month, economic data show that African Americans and Hispanics in the United States are, on average, in a worse position. Jobs data released last week put the white unemployment rate in December at 4.3 percent, compared with 7.8 percent for African Americans and 5.9 percent for Hispanics. “Even just looking at one month, we can say that the economy disproportionately has worse outcomes for workers of color,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Economics] [Systemic Racism] [Employment]

Boston. Racism. Image. Reality.

by Akilah Johnson | December 2017
Google the phrase “Most racist city,” and Boston pops up more than any other place, time and time again.
It may be easy to write that off as a meaningless digital snapshot of what people say about us, and what we say about ourselves — proof of little beyond the dated (or, hopefully, outdated) memories of Boston’s public and fierce school desegregation battles of the 1970s. You’d be wrong. More than half of people of color interviewed “rated Boston as unwelcoming.” The Spotlight team takes on our hardest question.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Economics] [White Blindness] [White Culture] [Myths] [History]

Charlottesville’s First Black Female Mayor: ‘We’re Not a Post-Racial Nation’

by Lois Beckett | August 2018
An interview with Nikuyah Walker, an independent who ran under the campaign slogan “Unmasking the illusion”. She argued that Charlottesville’s Democratic politicians had failed to do enough to tackle systemic racism and economic inequality, and that it was time for a deeper change. Walker speaks to the Guardian about her policy agenda, what it was like growing up black in Charlottesville, and why she believes Democratic politicians “don’t know how to reform systems”.
TAGS: [History] [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Politics] [Economics] [Collective Action]