Specifically, COVID has ushered us into a new age of fiscal antiblackness – black economic mobility and progressive wealth tax are key to reverse the trend.
Zewde and Hamilton 20(NAOMI ZEWDE is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy at the City University of New York and a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, DARRICK HAMILTON is the incoming Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and University Professor at The New School., 8-26-2020, "Truth and Redistribution," https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/black-lives/2020/08/26/racial-wealth-gap-black-power)//BRownRice
The protests in every city rallying against police killings and racialized violence directed at Black bodies are inseparable from the economic conditions that Black communities are facing. The fact that a Black man can be killed by a law enforcement officer over an approximately 10-minute period with a knee on his neck in broad daylight while repeatedly screaming for mercy, and that he can’t breathe, speaks to a larger political economy that devalues people’s lives based on their race or ethnicity.
Black Americans, because of racialized stigma and their economic and political position, are not only more vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence, but to a global pandemic as well. Their diminished political position is evidenced by their exposure to unjust police violence, and their economic vulnerability is made most vivid by the persistent and unjust racial wealth gap that leaves Black families with few resources to address a shock like the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the overall public response to the pandemic and to broader economic insecurity has been highly racialized. Black lives are devalued in our economy and our fiscal policies reflect that.
In a nutshell, our racial dilemma is grounded in a political, economic, and identity-based devaluing of Black lives that has persisted ever since the first enslaved African arrived in Jamestown in 1619. The ensuing history of the United States is built on both racial and economic injustice, two related but distinct problems.
These racial and economic injustices, while entrenched, can be addressed. Below are three complementary policies that can make meaningful progress toward undoing centuries of systemic inequities, while prospectively ensuring capital access going forward: (1) Reparations through which the nation acknowledges and redresses its exploitation and extraction of Black resources and personhood; (2) Baby Bonds (publicly funded trust accounts) to establish a birthright to capital; and (3) a wealth tax to break up the concentration of wealth among the capitalist elite and diffuse the political power that goes along with such concentration.