And, Guaranteed income rooted in racial and gender justice – must be designed in context of generational inequities

[Jhumpa, “Exploring Guaranteed Income Through A Racial And Gender Justice Lens,” Roosevelt Institute, June 2019 https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_UBI-Racial-Gender-Justice-brief-201906.pdf, accessed June 26, 2023, GDS-LL]

As a means to address economic and racial injustice, a guaranteed income has a notable history of being uplifted by racial justice advocates and movements.

We must acknowledge that the legacy of a guaranteed income is inextricably linked to racial justice. Looking at historical precedents, much attention is focused on the Black Panther Party’s 1966 10-point platform, which called for offering every person employment or a guaranteed income. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., also called for a guaranteed income, outlining his own proposal in his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Much less attention has been paid to the role that the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) played in advancing a guaranteed income, which reached over 100,000 members at the organization’s peak. The NWRO focused primarily on racial, gender, and economic justice. Many NWRO members were Black women who moved north from the sharecropping south and faced widespread employment discrimination. They clearly understood that their status as public assistance recipients was tied to being seen as laborers, rather than hard-working mothers, who were nonetheless deemed unworthy and undeserving of any assistance. They challenged the stigma of welfare and insisted that a decent standard of living was a right —one that should not be tied to waged work—while also emphasizing the work and value of caregiving.

Movements such as these understood the potential that a guaranteed income had, and we owe it to ourselves—and to those who came before us—to understand how a guaranteed income needs to be designed in the 21st century in order to finish what began generations ago.