Pearl Friis’s Reviews > The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System > Status Update

immense expenditures by the federal government…demonstrate the feasibility of funding both an Economic Bill of Rights for the 21st Century & African American reparations. …If the crisis spurs the nation, finally, to embrace bold transformative policies that shape a new future-the Great Republic-then the lessons learned from COVID-19 would’ve proved to be both tragic & hopeful in the fight for equality & equity.

The New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Gl Bill … Southerners lobbied to exclude domestic & farm laborers from receiving benefits (65% of Black workers were domestic or farm laborers at the time) & to designate the management of the newly created benefits programs to state & local administrators. This excluded many Southern Blacks who lived under the state-sanctioned second-class citizenship wrought by Jim Crow laws.

Hyper-incarceration is a signature feature of the American criminal justice system. We lock up 1.4 million Americans in state and federal prisons and 738,000 people in local jails, a demographic which is disproportionately Black. •HEDWIG "HEDy" LEE

… more than two hundred Black people have been killed at the hands of police since the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Our courage to flick our stones at tech giants comes from an awareness of what happens if we don't. In the absence of our wearied cries, there's nothing. Worse than being ignored are the consequences of silence. We are here for ourselves and the communities we love, & this provides enough strength to keep going— to hit our targets with precision, and watch as the giants fall.