Racial Unity, Economic Fairness Are Key to the Changes We Need

Two weeks ago, like many of you, I celebrated the election of the first person of color as President ofthe United States. Today, the possibilities seem endless.

People are questioning the wisdom of the free market. Americans are demanding a government that is transparent and accountable. They're responding to the message that real change starts and ends with all of us. We have the opportunity now to put forward our biggest ideas and move all of our institutions.

But there are huge challenges as well.

Barack Obama was elected on a promise of hope and change, but we are in an enormous economic, military and social crisis. This isn't a time of prosperity in which people are feeling like there's lots to share. When crisis hits, both human beings and countries tend to close ranks and shut down. So, we are likely to see proposals for change, but with somebody excluded because they're not seen as deserving of that change. Those people will be presented to us as too lazy, too uneducated, too foreign or too freeloading to qualify for the jobs of the grand new green economy, or the benefits of universal health care, or the opportunities of a fully funded education system.

Our job then is more urgent than it's ever been and that is to insist on the fulfillment of all the possibility we've felt in recent weeks.

Complacency will be our biggest enemy. It's inevitable after a big success. The antidote to complacency is a deep and urgent sense of purpose, keeping our gaze fixed on our ultimate goal, a fully inclusive society, economically, culturally and politically. That sense of purpose will help us know what's a false promise and what's real, which fights to take up and which to let go of, which compromises require a small protest and which require all the resistance we've got.

This political moment calls for our biggest ideas. It calls for demanding expanded civil rights, a federal guarantee to a good education, a health care system that includes undocumented immigrants, an economy that operates under entirely new rules, an immigration system that eases peoples' movement rather than restricts it.

The best way to push out our most transformative ideas is going to be by using our skills to first arouse the heart, and then arouse the brain. We have lots of new tools to work with. New technology makes it possible to tell our stories directly, without filters. Because the political, cultural and technological moment calls for both new ideas and new tactics, we have made some important strategic shifts at the Applied Research Center, the largest racial justice think-tank in America. We're going to popularize the need for racial justice and prepare people to fight for it, largely by finding new ways to tell the stories of ordinary people and the structures that shape their lives.

We have just experienced one of the most incredible moments in US history. Moments like this call for a historical perspective, and I'm getting mine today from the abolitionist and suffragette Sojourner Truth, from an 1867 speech after the Civil War. Slavery was ended, but women still had no right to vote. "I rejoice for you," she said, "I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked."

The outcome of this election signaled that it is possible to overcome both personal prejudice and structural obstacles to unite people behind hope and real solutions. We didn't crack that ice by ignoring racism and refusing to talk about it. We cracked it by out organizing and outpacing those who figured that racist assumptions would carry the day. We did it by convincing people that racism was not going to help build the country that they wanted to live in. But they don't yet understand that racial justice is the key to building that country. Now it's time for us to keep those people, and ourselves, stirring so that we can go the rest of the way. That's the work in front of us, and it starts right now.

Rinku Sen serves as president of the Applied Research Center (www.arc.org), America's largest think tank on race, and is publisher of Colorlines Magazine (www.colorlines.com). She is also the author of The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization.

SOURCE Applied Research Center

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