01/24/2025
This statement from Equal Justice Society about the inauguration hits hard. Take a few moments to read:
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"The Equal Justice Society will draw from global and historical inspiration in our fight for democracy"
On Monday, we honor and remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who showed America how to become America through his words and deeds and the courage of his convictions.
He gifted America and Americans a moral compass, a North Star, to illuminate a path toward a bona fide inclusive democracy rather than an aspirational democracy that existed solely on paper and in theory.
Twenty-five years ago, EJS’s own North Stars - Eva Paterson, the late Professor Charles Ogletree, and other remarkable civil rights leaders - formed the Equal Justice Society to combat a baseless false equivalency narrative that America is colorblind and post-racial, no longer dependent on equity policies to level the playing field for equality. When EJS opened its doors, Judge Constance Baker Motley said “Now, I can rest.”
EJS countered the false narrative with social science establishing that explicit and implicit bias perpetuated white supremacy and institutional racism in every one of our sociopolitical and economic structures. American racial pathology stratified opportunity and access and recreated segregationist outcomes. Black and indigenous people were at the bottom across social indicators facing the most adverse circumstances and outsized burdens.
Twenty-five years ago, and still today, it remains resoundingly clear that we need race and gender consciousness to level a playing field rutted and distorted by 200 years of genocide, labor and land extraction, 100 years of Jim Crow segregation and terror, and 50 years of post-civil rights apartheid expressed through the prison industrial complex, the war on drugs, deregulation and social safety net shrinking.
Anti-Black racism in the United States is institutional and systemic. Its eradication requires systemic fixes at the level of the Great Society programs undertaken to end the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Sadly, on Monday we will also see a person inaugurated who embodies the vicious opposition of progress. We must recalibrate how to reach the shifting finishing line that continues to move away from us. We are steadfast in this struggle, and though the course is elusive the goal of equal opportunity is still attainable.
Our strategy is based on cross-racial approaches to reparations as a unifying force for building a sustainable multicultural democracy, continuing to champion and protect policies on the harm repair continuum from Diversity Equity and Inclusion to reparations, and focusing on Black women's health and Black student equity in the struggle.
Although we’re seeing a contraction of options and opportunities in the United States, we will continue to draw inspiration and guidance from global movements and precedents. This is a time for us to think globally and act locally, using the state and local apparatus as a catalyst for progressivism and leaning on our progressive partners in the struggles around the world. Diasporic people in the U.S. can leverage their lived experience of colonization and marginalization in America to inform the international discourse on decolonization, transitional justice, and global democracy.
The United Nations standards for reparations – Restitution, Compensation, Rehabilitation, Satisfaction, and Guarantees of Non-Repetition – were a critical inspiration for the work of the California Reparations Task Force that I served on. Our two-year effort delivered a historic blueprint for repairing the harm of 200 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow and the cascading harms that continue to flow from this legacy of oppression. The California taskforce report is now being used across the country to inform a viable legal construct for equity, equal opportunity, and reparations policy.
No force, no matter how wretched, can stop us from bending the arc toward justice and accountability and from delivering our ancestors and their legacy of hope and liberation from the margins of the American experience to the center of it.
We will redouble our efforts to repair the nation through reparations, advance Black women’s health equity, deploy implicit bias elimination research and implementation, end the school-to-prison industrial complex, fix school discipline, cultivate diverse multiracial pipelines connected to fair housing, education, and employment opportunities, and articulate the evidence-based, historically accurate, critically informed culture narratives that advance multiracial inclusive democracy and shatter the myth of white superiority.
On EJS’s 25th anniversary, I ask you to stand with us in this daunting but achievable endeavor.
Lisa Holder
President
Equal Justice Society
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