We Must Seize this Opportunity To Demand and Secure Racial Justice
The Equal Justice Center stands in solidarity with the Black-led protests against discrimination, police injustices, and structural racism. We share the profound outrage and mourning over the countless members of our communities who have been killed and wounded by these intolerable injustices, both recently and for too many years to count. We join particularly and emphatically in reaffirming that Black lives matter.
The current wave of protest is a long overdue wake-up call for our society. It is also clear that protest alone is not enough. We urge our communities to seize this moment to turn the deeply-felt protest into thoroughgoing and meaningful reforms that can transform us into the better and more just society that we yearn to be. The Equal Justice Center is committed to doing its part to fight for those reforms, in close coalition with, and drawing guidance from, Black-led advocacy groups, organizations of color, and other community allies.
The Equal Justice Center strives to empower low-income families, workers, and communities to achieve fair treatment in the workplace, in the justice system, and in our shared society. EJC supports the ringing community call for fundamental reform of our criminal justice system and of our entire structural approach to policing. Our society has an historic opportunity to reinvent our deeply flawed criminal justice systems and criminal law enforcement systems in order to better serve community needs, to remove the endemic racial and economic inequities, and to establish genuine community confidence. Our organization will do all that we can to help seize this opportunity.
The history of human civilization and the history of racial and labor justice, demonstrate that structural reform and redemption are possible. Indeed they are our sacred obligation - now and every day in the coming weeks, months, and years. Together, we must and will replace the hateful idea of “domination” with the higher ideals of inclusion, fairness, dignity, and shared prosperity. We owe this to those who have gone before, those who have died seeking justice, and those who have died at the hands of injustice. If we unite together and persist unrelentingly, we will not merely move forward in the struggle, we will prevail.
