Moving forward: After last week’s shocking insurrection at the Capitol, we are concerned that our political leaders may be tempted to tone down their calls for racial equity and to scale back ambitious anti-racist agendas in the cause of “national healing.” But to back down now would be to accommodate and capitulate to the ideology of white supremacy. This has happened before (as our board member Sheryll Cashin wrote this week in Politico) and it should not happen again. We live in a multiracial democracy and disaffected whites and their allies are going to have to get used to it. If we need to engage in a process of healing and reconciliation, we need to do it with our principles intact.
Updating Housing Choice Voucher payment standards: PRRAC submitted comments last week along with the Lawyers Committee, National Fair Housing Alliance and six state-based fair housing groups, on improving the rules governing how voucher rent caps are set, to enable families to access higher opportunity areas. See our comments here.
PRRAC and NCSD weigh in on the new Secretary of Education: In the latest issue of The 74, a foundation-supported education news site, we opined on Secretary Cardona’s experience with school integration as Commissioner of Education in Connecticut – see “Cardona’s Role in Connecticut’s Complex School Desegregation Efforts Becomes Focus: Will He Give Integration a National Platform as Ed Secretary?” The first item in NCSD’s “first 100 days” goals for the new administration was to “Nominate a Secretary of Education with a demonstrated commitment to school integration and racial justice.” We hope our wish will come true!
Other news and resources
New SOI protections for voucher families: Congratulations to the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and its coalition partners for passing a statewide source of income discrimination law in Colorado! And congratulations also to advocates in Toledo, Ohio for a similar victory there.
Launch of the American Roundtable project: The Architectural League’s ambitious documentary project profiles people in their built and unbuilt environments in nine American communities: “We offer these reports with the conviction that the best hope for our common future lies in understanding, respecting, embracing, and encouraging the many peoples and histories and aspirations of our variegated, complex, multicultural, multiracial society.”
