 underway. If there are people still in the hallway, you can come in and have a seat. We'll get started. Well, good afternoon. And welcome to the pre-10th anniversary symposium. The theme for our event is mobilizing economic research to address socio-economic and racial injustices. For those who are unfamiliar for the Mary Michelle, who was actually president of EPI when pre was established. So I also want to thank Larry for the role he played in bringing all of this to pass. And finally, I want to thank all of the individual donors, unions, and foundations for your generous support of EPI and say thank you specifically to the Kellogg Foundation and Nathan Cummings foundations for their direct support of PRE's work. When we decided that we wanted to host an event to mark the 10th anniversary of PRE, the hardest part was figuring out how to fit it all into just a few hours. You know, we could do this over days. We could make this a weeks event and still not get to everything. But the thing that was especially touching for me, and I was completely overwhelmed by the response from each of today's speakers that you will hear from later, they immediately agreed to participate without hesitation. It was the easiest invitations I have ever sent out in my life. Anybody who's ever planned an event knows that you send out invitations, you wait a week, you wait two weeks, you may get a couple, and then you have to start emailing and calling people again. I mean literally within the day people were like, yeah, I'm on board, sign me up. So thank you to all of you for agreeing to be here and for your support. In today's event. Each of today's speakers, I consider friends, colleagues, and absolutely brilliant in their respective fields. So these are the people that I direct people to when I don't have the answers. So I'm going to tell you that you're in for a treat today. In 2008, EPI launched the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy to provide a more focused and integrated approach to exploring and explaining how race, ethnicity, gender, and class intersect to affect economic outcomes in the United States. Over the last 10 years, pre's research has shown that large racial economic disparities in the United States have persisted over generations. And this includes racial gaps in unemployment, wages, income, poverty, housing, wealth, and the list goes on and on. At different times in history, we've also discovered that these gaps have either improved a bit or worsened a bit, but at no point in time have they been eliminated. So as we look forward to the next 10 years for pre, our focus will be on continuing the research, but also using what we've learned from the research to develop and propose solutions to these longstanding racial economic inequalities. And that's really the motivation behind today's event. It's my hope that today will be just the start of ongoing conversations and collaborations between EPI, our speakers, and many of the others of you who are in the room around these issues of socioeconomic and racial justice. At this point, I'm going to be quiet so that everyone can help themselves to some lunch. And I do want to say that while the budget didn't allow for me to book live entertainment during lunch, you know, that would have been really great, right? We are bringing you the second best, which is actually the best that we have to offer as a think tank. We have a slideshow of what I like to call pre's greatest hits. This is actually a series of a number of graphics highlighting some of the key findings on racial inequality from some of pre's most notable reports from over the last 10 years. If that doesn't do it for you, just hold tight. We will reconvene around five minutes before two and you will hear from our first panel. I want to pause and see our president, Thea Lee, has joined us. I don't know if you wanted to say anything before we get started. All right. So with that, you may go ahead and help yourselves to lunch, which is here on my right side of the room. And again, we will reconvene. Enjoy that entertainment. How was your lunchtime entertainment? So at this point, we are going to reconvene our program and I want to welcome our first panel of speakers. This first panel will be moderated by Dr. Julianne Malvaux, who is an EPI board member and president of economic education, among other, many other great and wonderful things. So I will have Dr. Malvaux join us and then if I could have all the panelists or the first panel. The occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Orange orangutan, because it's very rude to their species. So I'm trying to think of something else to say, but meanwhile we'll just stick with that. But in any case, I think it has become more clear in this administration, although it's always been clear that issues of race must be dealt with and must be dealt with when we deal with economic issues. Last night I had the interesting opportunity to attend a Kemp Foundation dinner. Some brothers ripped me into it. They told me they were taking me to dinner and then halfway they said, we're going to the Kemp Foundation. I'm like, I don't really regularly hang out with that many Republicans voluntarily. They don't have to be like incarceration or something. But what was interesting was that everyone talked about what's wonderful about our economy. But the speakers, of course, Tim Scott, Senator Tim Scott was there. He was the Kemp Foundation honoree last week. A gentleman who, a former founder of Facebook who has done some work with Innovation was there. And Gag Huff Ivanka was there. Also on a panel to talk about innovation and enterprise zones and the economy. And one of the things that struck me, and I just wanted to say a couple words about that before introducing the panel, is the extent to which the economic status of people of color and especially African Americans has been normalized. In other words, so it's normal to think that it's okay to have an unemployment rate for African Americans as twice that of whites. So that you have this, Tim Scott had these beautiful charts that talked about how long the economy had been expanding almost 10 years. And we have the lowest unemployment rate ever in anybody's lifetime. That's implicitly normalizing the fact that you have an unemployment rate differential that no one, frankly not even President Obama, felt important enough to tackle. And so part of the reason that I think this is so important in terms of establishing the facts is that we also have to look at the extent to which it's almost like okay, for it to be the level of discrimination that we see in labor markets. It's almost like okay to see differentials that have been extremely persistent. That when you see the status of young black people dropping to below that of their parents, it's happening with young whites too. But with young blacks, it's far more stark. For too many people, it's okay. And so what we think, I think at EPI in particular, but in general what progressive economists think many, not all, is that it's not okay. And that this kind of research really establishes the fact that it's not okay and that we want to look at what is okay and what we aspire to. Now all y'all are educated people, so I don't read bios because the basic assumption is that people can read. If I'm wrong, y'all should see me outside and we can talk about that too. But we have an extraordinarily, I don't believe in it. I don't want anybody to read mine and I don't want to read anybody else's. This is a distinguished group of human beings who have done in their careers amazing work. And so what I want to do is first of all, Valerie has kindly prepared some questions and I'm going to direct you to the speaker bios to let's look at their bios. But we want to start of course with Derek who has always done great work. Derek has been a colleague and a co-conspirator with Sandy Darity. They have in their work tackled the challenges that HBCUs face. They have tackled the challenges that closing the wealth gap face. According to their work we wouldn't be able to do it for 240 some years. Absent that word that white people cannot stand to utter or hear. Reparations. All together y'all. Reparations. I mean nothing bad will happen to you. We're not going to get you on the corner with Uzi. It's really talking about structural changes. So he and Sandy have looked at that issue and he's looked at a number of other issues. And so the first question is going to go to him and it talks about establishing the facts around racial economic labor market disparities. The implication is that there's some stuff that we don't know and choose not to know that's not out there. But some of the things, the basic facts that we need to know to sort of unpack this, to look at racial inequality in our labor markets and frankly Derek what we do about it. And you can come up here or you can sit there. Which do you prefer? I'll come up. I can project a little more. All right. He sounds like a winner. It is never an easy task to follow Julian. That's for sure. I will not be as witty or as charming. I will also start off with some thank yous to EPI for doing this work. There are people in the audience who profoundly influenced my work and continue to do so. I'll single out a few and I apologize if I missed some. Valerie Wilson of course, Janelle Jones, Bill Spriggs, I'm not sure if he's here. Bill Rogers, Larry Michelle, Alginon Austin, John Schmidt. They've all written seminal articles as it relates to a lot of the material that I'm going to present today. So, Trump presents a rosy picture and he starts with unemployment and Julian cited it. Well we know if we use a figure like wealth we are just as disparate with regards to racial inequality and wealth as we were at the end of the Civil War. What's also negated is the role of incarceration. Becky Pettit in her book, The Invisible Men, points out that if you look at people, black males between the ages of 25 to 30, prime working age, about 10% of them aren't even in the calculus and are excluded all together because of incarceration. And then we know that when we think about jobs, we had full employment for slaves. So just employment alone does not capture the nature of how work has changed. We know that 44% of homeless people have a job. We know that 40% of workers are in insecure contingent work. And we know that almost half the workforce, about 44%, has a job below $15 an hour. And we know that if we look at race those figures become even more pronounced. Nonetheless, to explain this inequality, the prominent discourse is one of a politics of personal responsibility and a post-racial ideology, a notion that the Civil Rights Act got rid of the jurid discrimination and that the remaining disparities are largely the result of actions or inactions or dysfunctional behavior, attitudes, lack of human capital, basically some ineptitude amongst blacks themselves. And then the third pillar is a multicultural liberalism which says that there's nothing particular about the strain and strife that black people experience and that they should bind their grievances for better healthcare labor markets with that of all Americans. That is the notion of a multicultural liberalism. And it's framed in a market ideology, a dogma of neoliberalism with, as Joe Soss, Richard, what's their name? Sanford Tram, Richard, what is his name? Ford Freud and Joe Soss have talked about in their book Disciplining the Poor, a poverty governance and a neoliberalism for everybody else. So the market is good for everyone else but we will sanction poor people with discipline so that they engage in better behavior. This puts the onus of social mobility on the individual. It's based in this thing that unfredded markets implicit in them are the rewarding of hard work, the virtues of the free market become inevitable and they lead to turning people's rags into riches. Markets become natural, transparent, efficient, self-regulating, inevitable. And they become the solution for all our problems, economic or otherwise. It's based in an ideology that the most astute, the most valued, the hardest worker they prosper and endure while on the flip side the market sanctions those that are not astute, that lack motivation and are simply lazy. In other words, the deserving poor. And this deserving poor is stigmatized by the political fodder of anti-blackness. That is the basis of this deserving poor and it applies whether they're black or not. Basically they receive their just rewards and they have to find something else to do over time or they fade away. But what's glaringly missing from that narrative is the role of capital and power and how capital and power can be used to influence the transactions themselves, to control markets and lead to the transactions themselves. Power and capital become self-reinforcing, they become iterative and without government intervention they lead to just solidified stratification and inequality. This bootstrap narrative and this politics of personal responsibility that individual agency, particularly self-investments in education, it might literally be bad for black people's health. All that hard work, we know that the mortality rate for working age Americans, black and white, blacks have a 50% elevated mortality rate in their white counterparts. That's for people in general, if we look at those with a college degree, that rate goes to 70%. We know that if you're a black man and you have a college degree, you're three times more likely to die from a stroke than a white man who dropped out of high school. We know that black women face greater infant mortality with a college degree than white women who dropped out of high school, as well as child mortality. So I'm going to stop in a second. I know I'm concerned with my colleagues so they have a amount of time. I'm wondering if framing inequality as an opportunity gap is a political ruse in itself. Does it lead us away from addressing the real structures around lack of resources and addressing inequality? That's talking about an opportunity gap, put the onus of inequality on the individuals, so as to lead us away from what William Barber, who I know is going to speak later, might talk about leading economic justice as a moral imperative where we provide economic rights, like a birthright to capital, like a federal job guarantee, so as to deal with some of these stigmatized inequalities that are associated with race, gender, etc. Okay. Structure or personal? Is it personal or is it something else? We'll get to that later. We're going to move on to Maria Mora, who is a professor at the University of Texas. Is that El Paso? I can't see. Rio Grandebelli. I apologize. Forgive me. In any case, like I said, I don't read bios so you see the reason I don't read bios is because I can't see. I can't read bios but she's got a distinguished career and the question that we really want to get her to dig in on is a question of the labor market status of Hispanics. People treat Hispanics like they're monolithic and we know that they're not. We're looking at and certainly the, okay, we're not going to talk about the orangutan anymore, but the immigration crisis reminds us of the multigenerational nature of the Latino population as well as the differing international nature of the Latino population. And so I'd like you, Maria, if you would, to dig deep for us and give us a sense of what we're missing when we get this number that says Hispanic population unemployment rate is X. It's shorthand that doesn't give us the full picture in terms of generation, in terms of how long people have been here, in terms of the difference between, let's say, Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans and all of that. So it's easy for us politically to use shorthand and we want you to give us longhand. Thank you. That is an excellent question. I'm very glad to be able to start to address it. But like Derek, I just wanted to take a couple of seconds to first of all thank EPI for hosting this wonderful event and also to thank Valerie for the invitation. So I was extremely excited when she reached out to me and she's right. I mean, when I got the invitation, I accepted immediately and I thought this was a fantastic event. You can see with the turnout today, it's also great and so I'm really happy to be able to share some of my findings with you. In terms of getting into the issue about the Hispanic population, Dr. Malvo is absolutely correct. We often hear numbers about the Hispanic population is doing this or the Latino population is doing that. But those numbers do mask considerable heterogeneity within the Hispanic population. This is a topic that I've been studying for the course of my career to talk about some of the differences within the Hispanic population. In fact, this past summer I was fortunate to publish a report, in fact, through Economic Policy Institute, with my co-author Alberto Davila, who is now the Dean of the Harrison College of Business at Southeast Missouri State University. And we do look at differences between Hispanics versus non-Hispanic whites, but we also talk a little bit more in terms of the differences within the Hispanic population. It's important to note that, again, we use the term Hispanic, but there are certainly a lot of differences with respect to immigration status. So we are comparing or essentially combining recently arrived immigrants new to the country with people whose families have been in the country, living in areas even before that part of the country was part of the United States. So it is a very broad umbrella that we tend to use. It's helpful to have some of that information, but I always love to disaggregate a little bit more. In addition, besides immigration, there are a lot of differences. When we look at what we sometimes refer to as Hispanic subgroups or our national origin identities, Mexican-Americans represent close to two-thirds of all Hispanics in the country. So a lot of the reports that we hear for Hispanics are generally driven by Mexican-Americans. But it's important to note that we have other significant Hispanic populations. For example, Puerto Ricans represent one out of every 10 Hispanics on the U.S. mainland, and in certain parts of the country, Puerto Ricans are the largest Hispanic group. Cubans represent close to 4% of Hispanics, followed very closely by Salvadorans. But if you are focused on Miami, then the Cubans are by far the largest Hispanic population. So a lot of these differences do get lost when we are just using that blanket term Hispanic or Latino. Now one of the things that in the EPI reports, there are lots and lots of beautiful tables and figures, and in fact some of them were flashing up during our wonderful slide show, our entertainment that we had during lunch. So I encourage you, if you want to get many more of the specific details to please look at that report. What struck us though is that when we did all these different comparisons, one picture that emerged is that there has been a long-standing gap in terms of labor market outcomes between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites. And what surprised us a little bit is that those gaps have been persistent over long periods of time. We really haven't seen that much of a narrowing. For example, compared to non-Hispanic white men, the unexplained earnings, so let's take out effects in terms of immigration or differences in education, etc., Hispanic men earned an average of 14.9% less than non-Hispanic white men in 2016, which was the most recent data that we have. And then when we compare Hispanic women with non-Hispanic white men, the earnings gap is 33%. What was surprising to us is that these gaps have been persistent over decades, and so we haven't seen that much narrowing. What might be driving some of that? We are really not sure. Discrimination is going to be one of those factors that would lead to these long-term unexplained earnings gaps. And so one of the things we would hope would be to take a closer look at some of the existing policies that we have and to enforce them in terms of anti-discrimination. Something else that we found very interesting is that when you only look at people within the same education level, so education does cause some of those earnings gaps to narrow, but if you compare college graduates with other college graduates, again we see this very long-term persistence earnings gap between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites. For example, for college graduates only Hispanic men earned about 20% less than their non-Hispanic white college graduate counterparts, and then for women it was 36%. That's larger than the overall unexplained earnings gaps. So like what my colleague Derek Hamilton just mentioned, when we're seeing these differences and these almost seem to be compounded by higher levels of schooling, this suggests that something else, something real has been going on, and it's something that hasn't been addressed for many years. I'll go ahead and stop there because I know we have additional panelists, and then I'll look forward to some of the discussion. Thank you. Maria, thank you very much. When you come back to the mic, I would ask you a follow-up question, but we are time limited. But I would like you to think just a bit about one of the things that I think we need to know who are not Hispanic or don't follow this research is what some of the differences are in terms of the stereotypes. Which of the populations is most likely to experience poverty, which are most likely to have challenges from a legislative perspective, which are most likely to be more responsive to legislative remedy. So if you just think about that for a sec as you prepare to come back to the mic. Now we have, our next speaker is Nina Banks, and she is a professor of economics and affiliated with Women and Gender Studies at Bucknell University. And her work first came to my attention when a research interest of ours kind of overlapped looking at Dr. Sadie Tanner-Moselle Alexander, who many of us claim is our intellectual mother, the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in economics. She received it from the University of Pennsylvania. And unfortunately the economics profession has not changed so significantly since Sadie got her degree in terms of many of the things that happened. One of the things about Sadie that always struck me in her journals, she once wrote she had the story of going, most first day of class maybe at Penn, looking for a classroom and it was raining. And she asked a white woman, where is this classroom? And the woman ignored her, didn't even speak back to her. And so she found the classroom eventually, she was late, walked into the classroom dripping wet and she said, and she saw the woman. She made eye contact. The very woman who would not speak to her was up in that classroom. Now I personally would have snatched her. Everybody didn't have my temperament. But what she wrote in her journal is, you know, this work is so hard and I have no one, no one but God. And I think that many of us who labor in the economics profession and look at those who are marginalized in the same way. And so Nina, there was a piece that the New York Times did. Raj Chetty talked about mobility with black boys and said that black boys had less mobility and white boys did despite class issues. And it was a good piece, but it focused on boys. Just as much of the work around African Americans focuses on boys and men. We talk about who gets shot by the popo. They act as if no women have ever been shot. But we know that at least 20% of those were shot are women. So I bet you probably have the same reaction that I did when you saw the Chetty piece about the ways that girls and intersectionality issues really were ignored. So I'd like you to address that in terms of the work. What we were talking about mobility with boys, but what about girls and women and mobility and future prospects? Thank you. Thank you for the question and also thank you Valerie Wilson for organizing this amazing event and congratulations to pre on your 10th anniversary. So when we take intersectionality into consideration, what that means is that we look at the ways in which multiple and overlapping forms of oppression affect the relative position of people within the economy. So the labor market arrangements that we see today are due to both employer practices and government policies that disadvantaged women of color, especially black women, relative to white women, but certainly relative to white men. So the interactive effects of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class position, citizenship status really affect economic outcomes. More so than just an attempt to try to look at race independently. I think it's also worth considering that black women have a unique work history when compared to other women in the United States. And one of the ways in which this work history differs is that anti-blackness has resulted in black women being viewed primarily as women who should be workers. And as a result of that, black women have been devalued as mothers. Now the irony of that devaluation of black women as mothers is that black women have been the most likely to be employed in the low wage women's work that involves caregiving and cleaning and cooking, even though that is work that is typically associated with mothering. So discrimination against black women meant that, and the discrimination typically took the form of exclusion from higher status and better paid jobs. But what it meant is that black women were relegated to working as domestic servants well into the 1970s. 1970s is very significant in terms of structural and demographic changes. And one of the changes that we see in the 1970s is that white women start to, married white women, start to move into the paid labor force in large numbers and on a consistent and regular basis. And so what happens is that that leads to the marketization of services that previously had been performed within the household, food services, caregiving services. And as a result, it led to an increased demand or need for people to perform those services. And so that work disproportionately has been performed by women of color for a very low wage. With respect to private household domestic service work, most of that work since the 1970s has been performed by immigrant women of color. But getting back to the issue of discrimination against black women, public policies have also reinforced this notion that black women are primarily workers and not mothers. And we certainly see this with the history of protective welfare legislation, which enabled poor women to stay at home, to be stay at home moms. Black women were excluded from the benefits of cash assistance, certainly in large numbers up through the 1960s. And that's because of this assumption that black women should be employed moms and not stay at home moms. But what I really, the point that I want to make is that the significance of this is that it's the state now that ensured that black women would be available as a source of low wage labor to provide care and cleaning services to white families. And as a result, black mothers have always been much more likely to be employed compared to other mothers. So today about 80% of black mothers who have children under the age of 18 are employed compared to just an average of 66% of other women. So black women were not protected as mothers, but black women have also not been protected sufficiently as workers. And I would say also that the state has also at times made it easier to exploit black women as workers. We see this certainly with the New Deal legislation that provided overtime and minimum wage and even collective bargaining rights to workers, but excluded the major sectors where black women were employed, domestic service and agriculture. And so the impact of that is that black women had to work much longer hours and at lower pay. Even today black women still lack many of the protections that other workers have. This occurs primarily with respect to paid sick leave as well as paid maternity leave. About 40% or over 40% of black women lack paid sick leave. So the labor market position of black women today stems from a history of state policies that institutionalized discriminatory employer practices against black women while also undermining their ability to provide consistent care for their own families. Thank you so much. So our final panelist is Jeanette Wicks-Slim. And again, she's at UMass Amherst both as a professor and associated with a research institution. And again, I'm going to direct you all to her biography rather than read it. One of the things that her research has looked at is the facts. The facts are really only as good as the questions that we ask. So we often find answers that are consistent with common knowledge, if you will. And common knowledge is not fact, common knowledge is just what somebody thought up. And so her work is looking at, especially some of the earnings inequalities between black and white women, looking at that from a more intersectional perspective. So if you could summarize your research, just build on some of what Nina has said about the different ways that women are viewed as workers or mothers or workers and mothers and what some of that means from an earning and policy perspective. Thank you. So I want to start off like a very else to thank Valerie really for inviting me. I feel like I'm on a panel of heavy hitters and I'm just happy to be here with them. So thank you. And a lot of what I'm going to say is going to overlap with what you've already heard. I mean, what Nina was just saying about different relationships that black women have had with working in the U.S. versus white women. I wanted to just highlight that I really try hard and when I'm talking about racism and white privilege to use the word having access to things as opposed to opportunity, because the opportunity I think emphasizes this idea of individual responsibility to achieve as much to which paradigm. And also what I'm going to talk about really overlaps with this concept or this what we are observing all the time is this very persistent gap in earnings, wealth, any sort of economic outcome that helps support families and households. There's this persistent gap that I think we see in a variety of ways and so I'll be talking about that. So the research I'm currently doing on racial earnings inequalities focus on trying to answer the following questions. To what degree do the consequences of racism and white privilege show up in labor outcomes among women and how has this changed over time? And in this work I focus on differences between black and white non-Hispanic women and I look over the time period of 1979 to 2016. So in this analysis I'm really trying to pay attention to how different black and white women's labor force experiences have been and how these differences should guide the way we measure racial earnings and equality. And I was trying to specifically think very hard about this difference in labor force participation amongst black and white women and the fact that black married women have historically been much more active in the labor force than white women. And so I will focus on this one point which is that one of the important reasons for this difference between the labor force activity of white married women compared to black women is they typically live in households that are supported by the earnings of white men. And so by the fact that white men typically have access to much higher earnings relative to most other demographic groups in the U.S. white women as well are able to access through that their earnings a certain form of white privilege that shows up. So I wanted to really focus on this key channel through which white non-Hispanic women typically access racial privilege which is either households and really importantly the race-based privilege for white married women and how that can have two different contradictory effects on their earnings. So on the one hand among white married women their race-based privilege can reduce their earnings. I think all of this is obvious but I was just trying to think about how this changes how we measure racial and equality in earnings. So their white privilege can reduce the labor market earnings if they follow the sexist convention of primarily doing unpaid work at home which they're more easily able to do when they have a household with access to white men's earnings. On the other hand among white married women who are active in the labor market their race-based privilege can increase their labor market earnings and this is because when white women do seek work they typically have access to better hourly pay and higher more consistent levels of employment relative to black women. So in other words white privilege can increase or decrease the earnings of white women relative to black women and so we need to be really careful to try to examine these countervailing influences of white privilege separately since when they're examined together these effects can offset each other and produce a confused picture of the influence of white privilege in the labor market experiences of women. So to try to isolate these countervailing effects of white privilege among women I looked at earnings and equality by household types pretty straightforward exercise. I estimated racial earnings and equality among single women with no children, single mothers, married women with no children and married mothers separately. This way the effect of white privilege that lowers earnings among white women relative to black women should mostly be contained among married mothers. The household type where there has been the greatest frequency of white women working primarily within the home unpaid and where their access to income aside from their own earnings is relatively substantial. So when you do this it produces actually a very different picture of racial earnings and equality among women at least from what I have seen in the research and how this has changed over time. So just to take an example if you look at the empirical observation of that black and white women basically achieved parity in their earnings in the late 1970s. On the face this observation suggests that discrimination, racism, white privilege plays a small role in the labor market experiences of women at that time. However if you look by household type what you see is that the parity in earnings actually reflects a combination of two contradictory outcomes. First in 1979 white married mothers typically earned less than black married mothers about 15% less. And second how all other white women single women with children single women without children and married women with no children typically earned about 20% more than their black counterparts. So in other words when you look at racial earnings and equality within household type it becomes clear that white privilege didn't get squeezed out of the US labor markets by 1979 instead white privilege operated to lower earnings among white married mothers relative to black women and raised earnings amongst white women in all other household types relative to black women. When these contradictory effects are combined when we look at across household types which is what we typically do these effects offset each other and produce a small racial earnings gap implying wrongly that white privilege only weekly influenced women's access to late market earnings. So similarly you get a profoundly different picture when you look at the trends in racial earnings and equality within household type compared to what you see when you look across household types. When you look at earnings and equality across household types starting in 1979 you see a small earnings gap that grows over time until the white earnings premium reaches about 20% in 2016. But when you look within household type you see that there has been a persistent white earnings premium of about 20% amongst single mothers amongst single women without children and among married women without children and this gap has basically been unchanged since 1979 through 2016. The growing gap in earnings between black and white women that we see across households appears to be largely driven by the increased labor market activity by married white mothers which has raised their average earnings so that now the white earnings premium amongst married mothers mirrors the same 20% white earnings premium that appears amongst other household types. So for me the main takeaway from looking at these trends is that the degree to which the consequences of racism and white privilege shows up in women's access to earnings is large and largely unchanged since 1979. Thank you so much. Now I have not been a good moderator because I let y'all talk as long as you wanted to when I had instructions that said you were only allowed to talk five minutes but what that means is that now we're going to have this thing called a lightning round because in order to get some audience participation and in order to facilitate the timely movement of our day we have about y'all got like two minutes each for this next question and then we're going to have about ten minutes of questions from the audience which I think is only appropriate. So lightning round I'm going to start with Marie. I ask you a follow-up question but the other question I wanted you to address this is a tall order in two minutes but I know you can do a system. Is to also look at you've done some work on Puerto Rico the crisis Mauritius looking at the origins of the Puerto Rican crisis prior to Hurricane Maria. So if you could just take a second to talk a bit about the response to the island of Puerto Rico I'm afraid my other question about some differences within the Latino community all in two minutes. All in two minutes. Thank you. I guess I'll stay seated since our other panelists did as well. Those are a very excellent questions so in terms of the previous question that you had asked me to ponder why the other panelists were going if you are a lot of studies have shown that a phenotype plays a role in terms of the more what's the word I'm looking for. A stratification in terms of the long term structural problems are the ones that we're looking at. So basically people who have more native features darker features tend to be more likely to live in poverty they tend to have lower earnings etc. Some studies have also found that when you are talking about progress made by different immigrant generations there's a lot of progress made between the first and second generation but not as much observed between the second and third and third plus generations. Some of the argument is that with respect to a lot of Hispanic populations that some people might begin to opt out of identifying themselves as being Hispanic and there's some work by Brian Duncan and Stephen Trehu who finds they talk about the missing Mexican American. The people who have lighter features might be products of intermarriage and intermarriage couples tend to be hired more highly educated that they may be less likely to identify as being Hispanic. So then what we're picking up with the numbers would be Hispanics but not really all Hispanics. So that would be in a nutshell in terms of that question in terms of some of the poverty rates that we see being much more structural. A lot of those do depend on where people are living in the more traditional settlement areas for Hispanic populations. We tend to have relatively high poverty rates compared to some of the newer destinations. And speaking of destinations that gets into the issue about Puerto Rico. So I actually do have a book that just came out about Puerto Rico crisis. We got our galley proofs for the book literally two days after Hurricane Maria struck and so we begged our publisher to please let us have an addendum because we thought our book could be very useful in terms of guiding some of the recovery efforts and also to consider what to do with all the migrants that are coming from the island of Puerto Rico. We actually started working on this project several years ago. It's going to be a book chapter long story but the more we dug into the data the more we realized there were such important questions to be asked and that the island itself was undergoing a major transformation in terms of demographic shift. You have a shrinking population that's also rapidly aging. There was a lot of massive out migration. We're hearing about it now because of the hurricane. But between 2006 and 2016 Puerto Rico lost more migrants than they had in any other period including the Great Migration. It's the second largest if you consider relative to the size of the population since the Great Migration. But that means that a lot of mainland communities are picking up a lot of the migrants from the island. We talk about in our book how 2006 represents the year of what we call the perfect storm. That is a case that is a year where a lot of things just all came together in such a way that the island's economy essentially collapsed and a lot of people are referring to the island of this period as being Puerto Rico's depression. We talk about la crisis Puerto Rico because we kept saying it's a crisis but it's more than a crisis. Again we're now more than 10 years into this economic decline. Puerto Rico's only had one year of positive economic growth since 2006 and that was the year 2012. So Hurricane Maria struck at really when Puerto Rico was extremely vulnerable. With respect to the out migration we focus in our book we talk a lot about differences. What's happening on the island as well as Puerto Ricans on the mainland. But depending on where Puerto Ricans are settling we actually identify a lot of different outcomes. So those who are moving to the more traditional settlement areas of New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Connecticut we tend to see very high poverty rates. So among recent migrants poverty rates are as high as 60% in those areas. Again we're talking about American citizens here. Puerto Rico has a population right now of 3.3 million people. These aren't American citizens. 3.3 million is a larger population than what 21 states as well as Washington DC have. So if we saw the type of treatment in terms of recovery of an entire area like let's say Nevada or Arkansas or Vermont or Wyoming etc. I think we'd hear much more, there may be much more outcry. Texas is actually a big receiving area of the new migrants and they tend to do pretty well. They have higher levels of education and relatively low levels of poverty. But even there when we do the unexplained earnings there are significant earnings gaps that exist among Puerto Ricans in Texas. I say Florida for last because Florida as many of you have heard has become essentially one of the main destination areas of Puerto Ricans. We refer to it as being an old new destination. It emerged in the 1970s and 80s as being a destination state. We find that between 2006 and 2016 Florida picked up one third of migrants from the island. The estimates of post Maria the percentages are even higher about 45% according to our colleagues at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. They do better than those in Florida moving to Florida tend to do better than those moving to the traditional areas such as New York. But there are still a lot of issues with respect to poverty and low earnings. And one last thing that's a surprise to a lot of people right now the most recent population estimates is there are now more Puerto Ricans living in Florida than in New York. Wow that is surprising. Okay you did almost as well as I wanted you to. Those were not two minutes. But I'm going to ask your colleagues to remember the words lightning round. So Derek your work in the words of the erudite economist Lauren Hill. It's not what you copy what you keep. And that really speaks to the income gap wealth gap employment unemployment rate gap. But I want you to look at the labor market inequality and wealth inequality and think about what kind of strategies are different in closing gaps in either of those places. Lightning round. I was hoping Puerto Rico would deliver us Florida but maybe the jury's still out. But anyway. Income is a flow wealth is a stop income allows for subsistence wealth allows for choice freedom. We talk about markets given as choice and freedom. It is literally wealth that gives you choice freedom and optimality wealth gives you the privilege to invest in higher education wealth gives you the privilege if you're confronted with an expensive legal system. I can go on and on and on but I got a two minute right lightning round so I won't be able to. But I can say wealth is the beginning and the end of economic security. And how do you get wealth. Well it is wealth that begets more wealth. It is wealth that begets more wealth. We know that black individuals with a head of household graduated from college. They have less wealth than white families with a head dropped out of high school. Again it is wealth that begets more wealth. So this leads to the the second. Well let me also say this really quick. We overstate the functionality of education. To the detriment of understanding the functionality of wealth. And to answer the question about what we can do about it. Well the way Americans have generated wealth in the past as a result of public policy that has been passed down from generation to generation. Because the racial wealth gap is an iterative intergenerational gap that began when blacks were literally capital for whites. And was expanded when we had public policy in the post world war that excluded blacks and red lining etc. That we can go into. Well it was those policies in the post war into the into the depression. That put whites with with some seed capital that allowed them to get an education without debt. So they can get a managerial and professional occupation or some down payment for a home or some seed capital for a business. Americans grow their wealth in a passive way. It's having access to one of those assets where as opposed to renting you have a home that has the automatic deduction of savings that comes from paying a mortgage or the passive appreciation of your house from period to period. That's the way we've generated wealth or having a business that can grow over time. And we know that if you have a business without capital you're doomed for not being successful if you have all the brilliant ideas in the world. If you lack capital you cannot implement those ideas and turn them into financial gain. So this is why I've been advocating for a birthright to capital for everyone. We're talking about the government seeding every young adult and Sandy's been involved in advocating this as well as well as others. Seeding every young adult with a birth account that when they become an adult they can use for some asset enhancing endeavor like a debt free education like a down payment on a home like some seed capital for business so that they too can have an opportunity for social mobility. Thank you Derek. Nina I want you to just take everything he said and put a gender spin on it. One of the things that you know there was a popular quote fact years ago that an African American woman had a median wealth of five dollars. And there were some spins on it wasn't the whole truth it was peace of the truth. But when we started looking at wealth and all those things the gender lens gives us different kinds of results are they different policy results as well. Thank you. Let me start also by mentioning I think some common myths right that inform our policies about black women and I'm going to I'm going to do this within two minutes. One of the biggest myths I think that we operate with black women is that black women are in the economic situation that we are in because black women don't want to work and also that black women don't sufficiently invest in our education. If you if you so the median year round the median income for year round full time black women is about thirty three thousand dollars which is about twelve percent less than the average for other women in the United States. That is primarily due to black women being employed disproportionately in low wage service jobs and also at minimum wage and sub minimum wage jobs. But respect to with respect to that myth black women I would argue have been burdened by work to a greater degree than other women and that's something that we always need to think about when we think about policies. The other part of it with respect to education is that investing in education has not closed the income gap for black women. And so Wilson and Rogers found that college educated black women have experienced the largest racial earnings gap since nineteen seventy nine. So a couple of things to also keep in mind with respect to work is that black women have always had the highest labor force participation rate right since the nineteenth century. I'm talking about voluntary work here right so nineteen century and that black women are also distinctive with respect to bread winning compared to other women. Over seventy percent of black mothers are breadwinners who contribute more than fifty percent of the household income and seventy five percent of these bread winning moms are lone parents. So when we think about women who are lone parents then we have to think about not only the fact that they are burdened with paid work responsibilities but also with unpaid really important work caring for people within their household children and increasingly elderly people. So policies would be the provision universally provided government subsidized child care elder care certainly those would I think go a long way towards making women's lives better flexible work paid leave paid parental leave. I would also say increasing the minimum wage so that it is a living wage extending various labor protections to those two categories that have still not been sufficiently covered farm workers and home care workers who are again disproportionately people of color but lack over time and minimum wage protections in some cases and then finally the other the other really important piece has to be comprehensive immigration reform that provides a path to citizenship. Thank you so much. Jeanette you've got the last question again the challenge of playing like this is a lightning round. So you you connect in your work you're connecting data and differences between black and white women with policy but if you have bad data you're going to end up with bad public policy. So tell me tell us what kind of data would you need. What's missing from the current data to get us to better public policy around these gaps. Lightning right. I'm going to be really quick. I'm not going to refer to the comments I had written up. My main response and given you know what the researchers just talking about one of the things that I was surprised was I hadn't seen an analysis like this elsewhere which I felt either meant I was doing something totally off the wall or that it just meant that I was trying to think about the question I was looking at differently than than it's been thought about in the past. And so it made me think about this question about what kind of data do we need. You know how do we work against bad data that can inform bad policy. Is it kind of this exercise really highlighted to me how important it is to have diverse perspectives coming to the research table so that the lived experiences of different people's lives. They inform what we think is important to look at that we know to me this idea of looking at racial inequality in earnings by household type just made intuitively a lot of sense. But again I felt like I hadn't seen a lot of work like that in the past. And I think it tells a different story about what what racial inequality looks like. So just that I just want to make that one quick comment is that you know in order to avoid incomplete measures bad data and to really advance policy that's going to work. We need to have diverse perspectives coming to the research table to ask the questions that we really need to be asking and look for the information we really need to find. Great. Thank you so much. So we have get the whole panel a hand please real quick. So we have about 10 minutes before the next panel begins so we have the opportunity for questions we have a young lady here with a mic in her hand if you put your hand up she'll come to you and you can ask a question to one or all the panelists but we have 10 minutes. So keep that in mind. Hi I'm curious with the new economy and old economy today and I look at new economy and I think about tech and health care innovation and some of these industries that did not exist 20 years ago. And what you consider perhaps old economy like in the services field and you know hotel businesses and restaurant businesses and small businesses today. Would you say some of those labor and income disparities has that been exacerbated by some of these new disruptions that are occurring in the labor force. Is that directed to anyone in particular. You know to all of you. Don't all y'all answer one time Derek why don't you start. I mean John Schmidt and Janelle Jones have the have the answer to that question in their paper a college degree is not enough. They look at young black people with a college degree and find that even when you graduate from it with a STEM major that you're unemployed at the time that they looked at the study. They had unemployment rates of about 10 percent if you graduate with a STEM major and about 30 percent if you included under employment. So you know the notion of technology being the explanation. Technology is not new. And I think that there's at least some ample evidence that even when blacks get the skills for those those sector jobs that they still are worse off. And I want to respond really quick to one thing about the five dollar statistic that came out because I think this is somewhat of a myth too. There's no question that intersectionality is prevalent and the roles that both race and gender play in determining stratification. But sometimes that statistic is presented and what's ignored is that black men aren't doing so well in that wealth anyway. So you're talking about single black women at about five dollars in net worth. I think the comparable figure for black men might have been a thousand dollars at the time. But as I mentioned before which excluded is those men that are incarcerated. They're not even into calculus. And if we're talking about single individuals they're more likely to be incarcerated than married individuals and they're more likely to be young and not married. So that's one point. And the other point is that and we know higher mortality amongst men that where they might have been selected out the ones that ultimately we shouldn't be overthinking. Intersectionality to the point where we think that some group is doing much better often than the other group. And this relates to the Chetty study in and of itself and a lot of the work that Jeanette presented anyway of you. It's hard to separate men and women and divorce them from their family context anyway. So the Chetty study found that black men who were in upper echelons of society in terms of their family and geography. Well they were more downwardly mobile than their white counterparts. They did not find that result for women. Well the problem of why they didn't find that result from the women is really in Jeanette's results that black the motivations to works and the need to work. It can't be divorced from a larger context of the needs that are in your family and black women have lots of needs in their family. So I think we need to consider that. Also the Chetty study didn't consider wealth. Good point. You know in the in the response that I will put my moderator had a cyber just a second just to also interject a concept I call the third burden of black women. So when you you cannot compare black women and white women just clean because the third bird of African American women are dealing with race and gender and the extent to which black men are discriminated against in the economy. That's that's the third burden. So if you don't look at that part of what happens with African American women and you simply compare labor first participation unemployment rates all of those things you're making almost a false comparison. And that's just with the econ numbers. And then you want to also look at the time numbers. I mean the way that we've chosen to locate prisons provides an additional burden to African American women who are traveling hours on a Saturday often with their children. To see their significant others or their other children incarcerated and we know that recidivism is connected to family participation. So those women who choose not to visit in prison are basically also perhaps unwillingly but also suggesting that they're not giving that person the family to come back to. So we have to look at that third bird. It's not a clean comparison ever at all. We have another question from the audience. Hello. OK my question was briefly touched upon by Jeanette and I was wondering about the policymakers themselves. So in economics we do a terrible job of actually training more underrepresented minorities to join this field. And this could be a contributing factor to why we have less best policymakers sitting at the table. So my question is what can we do to better improve the pipeline. I mean within the Beltway folks like the Economic Policy Institute do the fastest job of training our students. Maybe some other pockets throughout the U.S. But outside of that there's no marketing. There's no advertising. If you're a black person trying to get into the discipline you probably will never meet a black economist or someone from a Latino community. You probably never meet a Latino economist. What can we do to make it better. Sorry this is directed to to anyone on the panel specifically Derek Murray. I feel like you guys are anybody everybody. You said that before. You confused me. OK. Jeanette why don't you start since he initially directed the question to you. Sure. But I just I wanted to address the first question as well. Because one thinks whenever I think about like the new economy kind of new jobs there are what I one of the things I used to do. I haven't done this in a while but I've looked at the BLS projections of what kind of jobs are going to be produced. And what always struck me is that there are many many of the jobs are being projected to exist in like 20 years. What are their projection line is pretty much look the same. And a lot of them bulk of them have our jobs that only require a high school degree. So the large bulk of jobs are going to exist in the future look a lot like what they look like now. And the other thing about you know the research I was presenting is that you know the earnings in quality that I looked at amongst women. It was basically unchanged for 40 years. And we're talking not in 179 through 2016. A lot has changed over that time. But the persistence of that earnings equality about the same size. It's just been there. So I think that that the new economy stuff is not going to affect that. It's you know things would change in the economy but not that that earnings. In terms of you know what do we do about getting more diverse set of economists. I think the thing I always immediately think of although I don't know if this is the most effective policy tool is affirmative action because it's one of those policies that just says right out we need to work against our racial biases and our gender biases and just name it and make everybody think about it when they're hiring when they're recruiting whatever advertising they're doing so putting that issue right out in front. So that has always appealed to me about affirmative action policies. Anybody else. Yes I'd be happy to talk. Before I just I forgot to mention that my co-authors with my book is Alberto Davila at Southeast Missouri State University and also Avidan Rodriguez who is now the president of the University of Albany SUNY. So he's the first Latino president of any of the four year SUNY schools. So I'd be remiss to not mention them. With respect to the question about increasing the diversity in the economics profession that's something I'm extremely passionate about and have spent really the last couple of decades trying to address. I'm one of the founding members of the American Society of Hispanic Economists and a former president and we worked very hard to get the official recognition of the American Economic Association just to even say we existed. And so we do exist and we do have a session at the ASSA meetings. The National Economic Association has a much longer history and they have they host several sessions. So one of the things that we think is important is to try to bring our junior colleagues and students to be exposed to underrepresented minority economists because there's not enough of us. I am director of the American Economic Association's mentoring program which is a program funded by the National Science Foundation for PhD students from underrepresented minority groups across the country. And I'm pleased to say we have a record number of job market candidates this year. There are 15 and so that's you might say that doesn't sound like a big number. It's a huge number because when we're talking about graduating only a small handful each year. I mean when you lose just one or two in a PhD program that is a big loss. It does need to start sooner than that. The American Economic Association does have a summer program for aspiring for undergraduate students who are thinking about going to graduate school. That's at Michigan State University. Right now the director is Lisa Cook. And we host we with the mentoring program I host an annual conference at the site of the summer program. So the undergraduates also get to be involved and some of you in this room have participated. So we bring together the undergraduates with the PhD students with their mentors professional economists. You get the whole range of the econ profession. I had a colleague who went to the last one a black economist and he told me he did not know that there were so many black economists in the country. And I said well actually well almost all of them are here. Although Derek missed that one. Derek always comes but Derek was not able to participate in that one. But a lot of it is exposing students to the role models. And I am hoping with social media we'll be able to increase our presence. But it is it's one step at a time. Efforts are being made but there's certainly a lot more work to be done. Really quick on the pipeline issue. Orthodox economics is hostile to individuals from subaltern group. It's inability to explain persistent inequality beyond the myopic approach of individual optimization which leads us to conclusions of a deficit frame as to why one group is achieving and the other group isn't. That becomes an orthodoxy that is not attractive to other to people from a group that has persistently been on the back end. Which is why we need to forge ahead with new theories and new ideology so as to be more attractive to people as well as to affect the discourse in society so that we can have better solutions for our problems. Nina you want to add something real quick because we're going to close up if you don't. Okay well this they've this has been a rousing conversation. These are like real facts not fake facts not personal facts. So they've they've begun to help us talk through some of the inequality issues and I want to thank all of them for their contributions Derek especially for the structural issues. Maria for helping us think about Latinos and all their diversity. Nina for bringing in the intersectional peace and especially the often ignored factors that affect African American women. And of course Jeanette for helping us think about how the questions are asked and what the answers are. Thank you all very much for your attention. I think we're going to have like a 30 second break right now before the next panel comes up. Actually probably a minute. This afternoon laid out a lot of information and challenges. Most of it very troubling and unsettling. And if we look at the persistence of racial wage and wealth gaps over five decades that should shake us up and it should open up a conversation about new policy solutions and it should open up our minds to maybe examine things we haven't looked at before and that's exactly what today's panel is going to do. That's how we hope to use this panel to raise some innovative ideas and bounce them off of each other and off of you. And I just wanted to say how proud EPI is to host this symposium today but also how committed we are to making sure that examining race and gender is integrated into all the work that we do at EPI whether it's macroeconomics or health and education and retirement security. All those sort of everyday economics issues are not separated from race and gender. They are part of that. And that's I think one of the things that we admire most about Valerie and the work that she's done with PRE is the way that the EPI, the entire work of EPI is trying so hard to make sure that we are looking deeper and underneath the issues and not trying to put these issues off by themselves in a separate place. So let me introduce the whole panel to you right now. We are so fortunate to have Connie Raza, the Vice President for Policy and Research at Demos. Jessica Fulton, the Director of Economic Policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Naomi Walker, my new colleague at the Economic Policy Institute and the Director of our Earn Economic Analysis and Research Network State Policy Network. And we are, I'm especially happy to have Naomi with us this afternoon and for life at EPI. And finally my former colleague Bill Spriggs, the Chief Economist at the AFL-CIO and Professor of Economics at Howard University. You could not be in better hands for this important conversation. And we're going to start at the way that we did last one which is with a couple of directed questions to all of them and then hopefully leaving enough time for you. So Connie, starting with you. We know that it is relatively easy to get interested parties in a room like this one to talk about a policy agenda for racial economic justice. We don't always agree on everything that should be in that agenda but we do agree that we should have an agenda like that. But what is more challenging sometimes is to take that discussion beyond this room to those who are not interested or don't think it's important. So Connie, tell us, is it important? How important is it to broaden the audience that is engaged on issues of race and how can we do that in a productive way? Thank you and I am just so excited to be here and celebrating pre, I am such a fan of pre and of EPI in general and of so many people who are in this room. So I'm really thrilled to be here. I think it is important and that's a surprise to everybody. You know, one of the things that I think has been a challenge for folks who are progressive, even liberal, has been to talk about race and to talk about race to audiences who aren't already clearly interested in talking about race. But if we don't talk about it, it's not like it's not getting talked about, right? I mean if we don't talk about it, it's either getting talked about explicitly or implicitly and everybody understands those codes. And so Demos partnered with Anat Shankar Osario and Ian Haney Lopez this past year to do a race class narrative project to really think about how we can talk about race outside of sort of like our, you know, communities of like-minded people. And there were four main things that really need to happen in any conversation about this. First is to discuss race overtly, that to really talk about an inclusive we to imagine for folks so that they can see that we all, white, black, brown, aspire to great things, that we all face challenges in providing for our families and so forth. But actually paint, like it seems like a little thing to say white, black, brown or however you want to put it, but actually it helps folks get beyond the we that they think of who live next to them or whatever their family. The second is to actually name racial scapegoating as a weapon that's wielded to harm us all and to name the villains in particular. So the rich and powerful lobbyists in Washington or, you know, politicians who are beholden to powerful oil interests are using racial scapegoating or using strategic racism to divide us against our own interests. Then to emphasize unity and collective action, we've done this before. We've come together before and we passed the Civil Rights Act. You know, we've passed, you know, the very first labor laws were passed because folks came together across difference. And finally to really point to a government that works for all of us. So I know that we all in this room are, you know, working to make sure that we have a government that has the resources to be able to defend us all and to work to provide for us all. And so to really name that. The thing that we really need to think about is how we do this to move people who aren't with us but are persuadable while holding our base. And so it's a tricky thing because to say we all, white, black, brown, can feel alienating to folks who have very specific histories of the ways in which the systems of government have actually worked against us. We have to be able to acknowledge that. And so one of the things that I've been really thinking about a lot has been how do we talk to folks about the decisions that we've made collectively. The policies and practices that we have invested in over time that really drive us apart. And so that we're not naturalizing these things. And I think that, and this is actually for this audience in particular, like there's a lot of ways where we can talk about unemployment rates and we can talk about sort of like generational wealth or things like that. And it takes away actually that unemployment rates result from decisions that we've made, policy decisions that we've made over time. And so we have to make sure to build that in and to build in the story about what it means that there are, that black folks are disproportionately unemployed, right? Because if you leave it hanging just there, folks are filling in what the story is that means that we're disproportionately underemployed or unemployed, right? It's because we're lazy, we don't have to get up and go, like whatever the reasons. And so you really have to say because of systemic racism, because of discrimination and a history that has depleted the resources of our communities, of schools that folks are able to go to and have segregated people. Black folks are underemployed because of employer practices, black folks are underemployed. So really naming that. And then something that I'll just sort of throw out there is really thinking about how political disqualification and economic disadvantage really drive the social deprivation that leads to sort of a real true othering of folks. So racism, for instance, sexism, for instance, really result from the need for the wealthy to maintain power. And that they exclude, I mean, it's the famous quote that we hear kind of every election cycle of some Republican saying to a room, it's not good for us if the numbers are high, the turnout numbers, right? Like it's important to disqualify folks from participating in our democracy as it is in our economy in order to be able to preserve power. And so really being clear about that analysis as we're thinking about how we're communicating with other people. Thank you so much, Connie. That was a wonderful frame for the conversation that we want to have next. Next I'd like to turn to Jessica. Connie talked about the importance of engaging the public very directly on issues of race and racial justice, but another necessary challenge is how we build the political support to introduce and ultimately pass legislation. So what are some of the strategic ways, Jessica, now that you're at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in which we can build the political momentum that we need to move a policy agenda for racial economic justice? Thanks for the question and thanks to the folks at EPI for including the Joint Center in this conversation today. I'm going to focus on three things that the Joint Center focuses on that I think are kind of critical for us moving forward. They're not going to solve the problem, obviously, but they're going to, I think, get us a good bit of the way there. I think first we need to continue fighting to make sure that we have candidates running and in office who are even open to considering that there needs to be some sort of racial justice agenda. I think it's very difficult to even have the conversation with people who will cut you off before you even get in the room. Like you cannot get a meeting with some folks because they're not interested in these issues. I think simultaneously we need to think about the people that are staffing our elected officials. Because right now it's very well-meaning young folks, public servants who are really interested in doing good in the world who may have blinders on when it comes to issues of racial justice. I think that the Joint Center did a report just before I joined a couple months ago that shows that of the 1,174 top staffers in the House of Representatives, 161 are people of color. That is 13.7 percent, right? The population of the United States is 38 percent people of color, and that is a problem. It's unacceptable. And actually it's not unacceptable because it would be nice if there were more people of color in the halls of Congress. It's important because we would get better policy out of it, right? What you end up with is members of Congress who are not hearing from people who are demographically representative of the people that they actually represent, their actual constituents. And so that's something that we're very interested in at the Joint Center in holding people accountable to hiring folks who look like the folks in their districts. And I think later this week, I'm not allowed to talk about this, later this week we're going to be releasing a report that shows what member offices look like for a few of the districts and states where there are large numbers of people of color. And it actually is disturbing, especially when you see who the members are that have these offices that are, you know, all of their top staffers are white. And finally, probably the thing that I think is really relevant to most of the people in this room is that the researchers that are at think tanks in academia, you have to be thinking about the questions that you're asking, right? And you have to be thinking about the answers that you're putting out into the world because you kind of have to prove to people that there is racial injustice, right? People don't automatically, people aren't having these lived experiences that are making decisions. And so it's really important, I think, for people in academia and people in think tanks to be advocating for racial justice agenda. Because right now what we have are people in power who are very intentionally targeting communities of color and creating negative impacts. And they're not being explicit about, well, sometimes they're not being explicit about the fact that that's what they're doing. But when we have the power to, we're not countering that. We're not saying that we need to break down these barriers that are being put up when people are in power that don't want folks of color to thrive. Thank you so much, Jessica, for that also very important observation. Naomi, so we've been talking about national policies to address issues of race and racial justice. But what opportunities do you think there are at the state level to make some progress? Thanks, Thea. So I want to talk a little bit about the opportunities as well as some of the challenges that we are going to be facing at the state level. And we have more opportunities to drive forward a progressive state agenda than we've had for the past eight years. I don't know if folks remember the horrifying election in 2010 that was really sort of a bloodbath for workers and workers unions. Where we saw a whole wave of very viciously anti-worker policies that were passed that had a definite disproportionate impact on workers of color. And so for 2019, there are a lot of opportunities to reverse some of those bad policies that were passed as well as drive forward a new set of policies that we just haven't had the political heft to move in the past several years. And so I also just want to do a little caveat. I don't want to pretend that it's going to be easy even though we now have Democrats that hold the governor's house and state legislatures in 14 states. So Democratic trifectas in 14 states and then another nine states where there are Democratic governors that are going to be dealing with and grappling with Republican legislatures. But even with those Democratic governors, we've been working on a project with our allies at the National Employment Law Project to figure out what are some of the executive orders and administrative actions that we can move even where the legislature won't be friendly. But that is all going to be a big, heavy political lift. And as researchers and think tanks, we can't do it alone. And so I don't want to pretend that this is, you know, any of us operating alone, that we really, I think the moment, the political moment that we're in demands more than ever that we partner with grassroots organizations, power-building, base-building organizations, groups led by people of color, the labor movement, folks who are really serious about building and wielding power to drive some of these, to drive some of these. To drive some of these policies. I also just want to flag, even though 2019 looks so much better than we've seen in recent years, we've got to get through the lame duck sessions first. And there are so many threats coming at us in the lame duck session right to work in Ohio for public sector workers, which would definitely disproportionately impact workers of color. You know, roll backs of some of the ballot initiatives that got passed in the election that we just had. You know, Michigan is going after, the legislature may be going after the voting rights reforms and the minimum wage and all these other issues that have been moved. And so we've got this sort of danger period that we could face that if it goes poorly, will impact issues that we all care about. But there are still lots of opportunities and we want to be really smart and strategic about how we drive forward a progressive policy agenda that helps workers, white, black and brown, move forward. And so, you know, we've been talking to and working with partners on things like raising the minimum wage, expanding state overtime laws, really working with the new governors. And attorneys general to get serious about enforcement of wage and labor standards, anti-discrimination laws, the whole sort of host of issues. But I also think that this is a moment given the opportunities that we have that we can be a little bolder and think a little bit bigger about what a progressive race forward state economic agenda would look like. You know, one of the things that we see happening in a lot of places, both from advocates and from funders is this sort of conflation of racial justice and criminal justice. And they're not the same. Racial justice, there needs to be criminal justice in order for there to be real racial justice to happen, but there's a whole host of other issues which the panel ahead of us just, you know, addressed a whole host of other policies that we really want to dig into and figure out how to talk about them, how to ensure that they have the positive racial impacts that we want. And so we're interested, so this is less, you know, answers on that question and more just flagging. This is one of the sets of issues that we really want to dig in on over the coming legislative session. And then one other thing I just want to mention, I don't know how I am on time, I'm going to go quick, is that at EPI we've been fortunate to just get two grants from the Kresge Foundation and the Sirdna Foundation to do some work on Earn in the South. And that's really about how do we build the capacity of some of the Earn groups in the southern states to work together with community partners, people of color led organizations, organizations led by people with lived experiences on these issues to jointly come up with economic agenda that can move in the south. The south is not, none of the southern states at this point are ready to drive forward the kind of legislation that a California or an Oregon or a Massachusetts could do. And so the question is like what are the sets of things that we can propose and support through economic research, policy research and start to drive to change the economic access for workers in the south. So we're really excited about that work and would love to talk to you about it at the reception. Or in the Q&A. Or the Q&A, yes. And just listening to Naomi talk gets me excited again about all the great work that lies ahead of us in this realm. I think there are a lot of opportunities at the state level and we're looking forward to taking advantage of them. Bill. So in the first panel we talked, we touched on the importance of using an intersectional approach to racial inequality that includes ethnicity and gender, education, nativity, family structure, among other things. Yet when it comes to the role that class plays in racial inequality, we have a tendency to debate the importance of one over the other rather than viewing the two through an intersectional lens. Do you think this limits our understanding of racial inequality or our ability to effectively mobilize support for a racial justice agenda? Yes, I do. So that's the quick answer. Let me thank EPI for putting this together. And especially a shout out to Valerie Wilson who has taken big charge of this agenda and you, Thea, I'm celebrating so much of you being the president now. And I want to give a quick shout out because there are one, two, four current co-facuity members of mine at Howard and the audience. I won former faculty member from Howard and the audience and so I appreciate their support. The problem is that to effect your way policies designed to hurt blacks, it's impossible not to hurt all working people. And a problem among a lot of people who are progressive is they think that if I do class, then I can ignore the racial component. So when you look at why our state's right to work, the one thing that immediately jumps out and the one thing that always predicts it is what share of workers are black. This is the number one predictor. It's quite clear that to defeat unions is to go after black workers and policy makers who go after unions understand they are doing it with that racial motive. They understand that the wage gap for black and Latino workers is exacerbated if they don't have access to the same white privilege as white workers. And so it's vital for black and Latino workers to have access to an extra set of power. And so that's one key example where we think we're going after one thing, but let's be clear the people who go after working people always are going on a racial lens. And they see the world in that way and that's how they're able to market the policy. So it's no mistake that black workers in particular live in the states with the worst worker policies, lowest benefits for being unemployed, lowest benefits for workers compensation, least number of labor market inspectors. All of those things go with what share of the workers are black. Now, not coincidentally, they also go with not having unions. So you can't disentangle the two things. They are so highly correlated, low union density and all these bad things to workers, high share of black workers and all these bad things to workers. So I think it's key that people understand that's the way that policy makers want to drive it. The difficulty we have is that many policy makers have refused to engage on a true class basis and so they like to have the conversation split up because they don't want to engage as we heard before with its Wall Street, right? So on mass incarceration, when they're talking about locking people up, they're not talking about locking up HSBC bank officers who were the biggest drug clearing, money clearing operation in the United States, they didn't go to jail. So when they talk about, you know, let's lock them up, they don't mean them. When they get upset about immigration, no one was upset about the Brazzaro program in World War II so Americans could have food and we know we cheated the Brazzaro workers out of their wage. Now we want to complain about Mexicans crossing the border. Like what? Really? Do we complain? And this is not a dig at the First Lady, but let's be clear, we don't complain about all immigrants. And if they can play basketball, we don't complain about them. If they can be movie stars, we don't complain about them. So let's be clear about which immigrants we complain about. If there are problems, there are problems. So we can't let politicians off the hook until they get serious and use a true class lens, then we can't move forward to benefit everyone and they have to be far more honest in their rhetoric about you can't simply solve the race problem. Without taking on the class problem and you can't solve the class problem without taking on race. They are too intertwined to do separately and we get policies that fall short. So you look at the issue of access to college. Well, we want to argue about that in terms of tuition, but then we ignore that black and brown students don't have access. They get admitted to schools that have the least amount of resources. And so we skip over looking at equity. So there are a lot of ways in which we get bad policy because we don't look at it fully. Well, that was an excellent set of initial answers. And for the second round, we're going to ask one question for all of you and we're going to call it a lightning round just like Julianne did. Two minutes so we can have time for your questions. And we want to talk about the future of work, which is a little bit of a buzz phrase in Washington, DC. Everybody wants to talk about the future of work, even though we all know that there's no question that technology is changing the workplace and it's changing labor relations. But it's also true that robots are not going to wipe your kids snotty nose. They're not going to convince your grandma to eat her lunch. And they're also not going to write a research paper for EPI. So having established all that, I wanted to ask each of you, as we think about how do we shape a more equitable future for workers of color along all the dimensions that we've been discussing today? How do you define the future of work and what policies do we need to put in place to get to a better future for workers? Thank you. Let's start with Connie. We'll just go down the road. Connie, you're going to go in first. Oh, thank you. When I think about what is a better future for all workers, I think of workers holistically. And so I think that the history that has us where we are is a real one and actually needs repairing. And so when I'm thinking about what would get us to a better future of work, I really think about how we structure inclusion into our economy and into our democracy. And how we make different policy decisions that mean that people who work are secure in being able to provide for their families. That they're able to count on their housing costs not going up significantly. That they can be in the same communities that they want to be in and aren't pushed out because of such things that they can provide for their kids and then that they can aspire, right? That we can thrive. And so the policies that would do that are the policy or the reverse of the policies that we have, right? Just do the opposite. I mean, we actually have made really effective decisions for keeping people out of stability, to keep people unstable and at the whim of their employers. And so in order to reverse that, I think we actually have to think pretty holistically and think about how do we actually get the power back from the corporations and the politicians who are beholden to them to be able to really set our living and working and loving environments. So perfect. So all of that, yes. And so I used to be very skeptical of the future of work as a term in general. I think one of the things that is kind of shaping my thinking around that though is that the Joint Center did a report last year that showed that 27% of African Americans are concentrated in 30 of the jobs that are at risk of automation, right? So that's taxi drivers, bus drivers, that's security guards, that's cashiers, fast food workers. And there are real implications for those workers, I think, in the new economy. I think we can also argue that those weren't great jobs in the beginning, so maybe it doesn't matter if they're going to disappear, but those workers have to go somewhere. And so I think we need to think about how to address that so that we're not increasing disparities in the future. And I'm not exactly sure what that looks like, but I do think we need to be very intentional about considering that. And I also think one of the things that Nina Banks talked about early in the first panel was about care work, right? And I think that we really need to be very intentional about how we value care work. Those are the jobs, like my grandmother's home health aide, Brittany. Brittany is at my aunt's house all day so that my parents can work, so that my aunt can work, right, so that people can go on about their lives. And I think that we do not do a good enough job of valuing that work, perhaps because it is historically black women's work. But we really need to consider how we do that in moving forward, especially if we're not going to figure out all of paid leave and all of the things that other people need to be able to go to work and do their jobs. Yes, all of it. And I want to point out that one of the things I think is really important is the ability for workers to have a voice on the job and how do we restore that through federal legislation? How do we use state laws and the state policy levers that we have to tweak that so it's more an understood, rather like a rule rather than an exception, is that the way to say it? Yeah, that workers will have a voice on the job. And then the other thing that is less a worker economic issue but definitely related, I think this last election and what's happening in Florida and Georgia have just really shown a spotlight on how broken and flawed our voting system is. And I'm struggling to figure out what is our role as state policy groups and EPI, what's our voice in that? But I think until we fix that system so that workers actually have a voice in determining their own access to some of the economic benefits that we want them to have, I think we're just not going to get there. So anyway, I think that's a discussion to have as a community of economists, I am not one, but what is the thing that we bring to that fight as well? So I would add that we can't give in to the dystopia that's being sold to us because it isn't the future of work, it is really people's nightmares that they want to continue to push on workers and make them more pessimistic about the future. So you don't hear the serious discussions about a future in which we update why is the work week 40 hours when it was created in the 19th or pushed for by unions in the 19th century when productivity was lower or leave or these other things that would make work better. We don't hear if workers are going to be more productive, where are all these new wages going to come from? That is, no one says, oh, workers can be much better off. Look at how much more productive we're going to make them and therefore wages are going to go through the roof because productivity is going to double and triple, so wages should double and triple, but that's not what they say. And finally, the biggest fear I have is the way in which it gets pitched to the black community. So black people have always been vital to computers and IT. If you saw hidden figures, you see how important blacks were to writing the first initial codes that really mattered. It is not an exaggeration that a black woman was in charge of a group of other black women and white women who wrote the code that got men to the moon. They wrote that code. And you have some people come later and act like, oh, we didn't finish computer programming, really? So today, more blacks are computer programmers, IT workers than are K through 12 educators. This is the black middle class. They are computer and IT programmers. That's why Prince George's County looks like Prince George's County. And the way that it gets pitched is constantly to push us out of an industry in which we had the foothold. And this exclusion is part of this vision of the future of work. I call it the Star Trek, so only Lieutenant Uru makes it through to the future. The rest of us somehow know that got extinct. And that's what we must guard against as well. We must guard against that exclusion. Blacks are still more likely to major in computer science than whites, but because of the way we've let Silicon Valley drive things, that advantage of blacks has been shrinking. Historically, black colleges used to produce 30% of black computer programmers. That's down because, again, we've let people de-invest in the schools where black and brown kids go and have access to. So there are a number of things that I think we have to flip in the story to turn it from a conversation led by people who want to sell a dystopia to those of us who look to the future and look at what could be, what would be better. Thank you so much to all four of you and thank you for your discipline. That leaves us 20 minutes for Q&A, which I think is perfect. And there are folks out here with microphones. Please just identify yourself so we know where you're coming from. And then also let us know if you want to direct your question at any particular one of the panelists or all of them. Hi. Yes. This is for everyone. We're on the heels of a Democrat and socialist movement in the States, but we're also missing middle class workers. There's a class of people who would say that we should mobilize our base and people of minority to really turn out vote or turn out. But there's also people that think that perhaps we should still be trying to convince and perhaps panic to other people to understand the plight of poor working class people or people of color at large. White women in this past election really were a deficit, right? Not in a good way. And they are really missing the plight of people of color at large. And the race class narrative project that you mentioned, Connie, at Demos was fantastic. It also mentioned this concept of the dependent clause problem, where we say an issue and then we call out specifically that it's especially bad for black people or for brown people, so on and so forth, and how that can convince some people that it's the minorities person's fault while it is particularly harder for them to get access or so on and so forth. So in that vein, what is the role for racial equity and the work of racial equity in this now new America that we're in? I'll take the first stab. I mean, unfortunately some policy solutions don't get recognized and the black community is always being a solution. And so part of that is education that we have to do. So many black people, when they think about unions, think about only building construction unions and they ignore black workers in transit. They ignore black workers in the public sector. They ignore black workers who are in hospitals. And so often when they hear, oh, we need to fight right to work, they're ignoring that specifically the unions that created the black middle class. The auto workers, the steel workers, they don't exist in a right to work setting. Sometimes it's because white workers have a stereotype. So when you hear people say, well, you have to have a job to get SNAP or to get Medicaid, a higher share of black women are employed than white women. The labor force participation rate of black women is so high that despite their higher unemployment rate, a higher share of them work. It is white women who actually are targeted by these policies. They are the ones who actually would suffer from such policies. But again, they hear it through the wrong lens. So some of this has to be that at the grassroots level, we have to learn how to educate people on what are real policy solutions. You don't have to talk about, you don't have to say disproportionately black people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we do have to recognize what the solution is. And we have to do that politics. We tend to want to only do policy, but you got to do the politics. You got to go to the door and explain the politics of it. And I mean, I just came from a meeting where I got to meet with the head of the trade union congress in the UK who did their door-to-door organizing to wipe UKIP out. And that was their key, was they had at the door face-to-face these conversations. So I think we sometimes miss that key element. A couple of things that I would just add on to that is our, a couple of things that I would add on to that are that I think that the distinction between the policy and the politics is really important for us to get comfortable with. We should have policy that is addressing the historic and systematic kind of exclusion that we have currently in our economy and our democracy. But we don't necessarily always have to lead with that. I do think that we have to also come to terms with that when working-class white folks decide to align themselves with wealthy white folks instead of other working-class people. It's not exactly that they're going against their own self-interest. We actually have to figure out how to talk to white folks about what it is that they stand to lose and what it is that they stand to gain by giving up the illusion of white privilege and the reality of white privilege. It is a fact in our world right now that white privilege actually confers real benefits. And so they do stand to lose and we have to figure out how to talk to folks through that about what they stand to gain by standing with other folks. Hi, Ted Johnson from the Brennan Center. I'm a former military guy so one of the problems that we had as an officer in the military wasn't that there weren't enough people. Black qualified folks but that the culture wasn't particularly welcoming sometimes and highly skilled, highly educated black workers essentially were opting out. I'm curious in the future of work on this evolution of our economy if you've looked into black highly skilled workers opting out of high profile positions because the cultures and those industries aren't welcoming to black folks. And to the extent that the problem we have with the evolution of our workforce is because of the cultures of the industries and not because there's a dearth of candidates. That's a really interesting question and I think it could go for women as well. When you look at occupational segregation by race or by gender some portion of that is going to be rational responses of people feeling unwelcome or unsafe in certain occupations. And then it sort of piles on top of the point that Jessica made about care work for example that you have low paying work where there's a heavy concentration of people of color and women. And yet when you look at care work there's no obvious reason why that's a low paid occupation. First of all it's difficult. It's highly skilled and third of all it's important. You know we're entrusting people with our loved ones and especially in their most vulnerable and frail state so you know you can imagine a different universe in which that was very highly remunerated work. But please to the panel of lots of important issues on the table but in particular about why people why culture might steer people in and out of certain occupations. I want to be real quick. The IT sector in the DC area the DMV is as large as Silicon Valley. It is as sophisticated. The cloud is here. It's not in Silicon Valley. 99% of the cloud is in Loudoun County Virginia. The computers that are the cloud almost all cybersecurity is here. This workforce is over 20% black. It's the same size as Silicon Valley. But the culture we saw with the revolt of the Google workers is that Google and Silicon Valley have like a frat boy mentality. So yes it is unwelcoming but we let them browbeat the rest of us into believing that nobody else can do the work except them and that we should excuse their bad boy behavior. And their revolt there of course was against their unbelievably misogynistic views. So yes and we shouldn't tolerate it. One thing that the joint center is working on this report workforce development and we've been talking to some folks in the field and one of the things that one of the women who does trainings was saying was that they can get workers into jobs but the workers won't stay. And she's saying so there's this cultural piece right. And the people at the top are like no we want we want to diverse work for us like we want these people to come in but nobody's talking to like frontline managers about what's going to happen when somebody who is different from you comes into your workplace. And like there it's not diversity training like that's not what it is. There's something else there that I think we really need to work to get it because like if we don't fix that then like nobody wants to be in a hostile work environment. Right. So like we have to figure that out in order to make all of this work. And yeah I don't know the answer. So I would offer that some of the hostile work environment is part of the systemic exclusion. And so I would say you know one of the things that's amazing. I always think about this when I see stars I get free stuff all the time. Right. Because they're wealthy and people want them to have things and they know the people who can give them the things. Well that's exactly how opportunities work. Right. And so it's actually an asset to be a part of those networks and to be able to leverage those networks and understand the codes that you need in those. And so that it feels super interpersonal. Right. It feels like my boss is doing this to me or my colleague is not wanting to share with me the information but it's I think also a part of the sort of the economic exclusion that we've seen. The political disqualification. It's a part of that as well. And so part of what I think is so hard. I mean this is kind of the diversity training challenge is it's really hard to change people's hearts and minds. But you can surely change their behavior. And so having affirmative and clear sort of policies that lay out what is appropriate behavior so that there's at least a tool. Even if you're in a hostile work environment there's some place to go where you can point to. I mean I just think that we have to think about it also systematically. I would just say in addition to sort of the employers having these you know systems and structures it's like what are the levers that government can use. And so if government is giving contracts or vendor things whatever. Anyway you know what I'm saying. What are the requirements that you can embed in those bidding contracts that would really require even if it's just disclosure of the number of people senior level people of color senior level women. Like some of the things that like subtly get at these questions. And so while they don't necessarily mandate behavior the very act that people are forced to report on it could change behavior. One of the things foundations are starting to do is ask 501C3s to lay out who's on your board. What do they look like. What's the race, ethnicity, gender, age like this sort of thing. And this is starting to shift and of staff. And that's starting to shape behavior of groups in our space as they know that they have to respond in order to get money they have to respond and look good on those measures. And so you know there's a similar way to do that through government policy. And the one other thing that I would add is unions. So I mean I don't know how many folks in here have been parts of unions. I've been a part of a union, a bunch of folks here have worked for unions. I mean like actually one of the great examples of multiracial organizing to actually shift the culture and the power dynamic has been unions and it's been within the workplace and it's been broader than the workplace. So I think that it's like part of the air we breathe but I just want to name it. Thank you Connie. And actually I was thinking as all of you were talking that a lot of EPIs policy agenda what we call our first day fairness is all about exactly this which is how do you redress power imbalance and systemic kinds of discrimination. So for example trying to get rid of these forced arbitration clauses that some employees are forced actually almost 60% of non-union employees in the United States are forced to sign as a condition of employment. That is something that along with the class action waiver which the Supreme Court just endorsed is something that when you are facing a discriminatory situation at your workplace you are prevented from joining with your coworkers in a class action. You have to get your own lawyer and go by yourself into the very biased situation where the employer controls the arbitration process and those kinds of things can really undermine people's ability to stand up for themselves and to exercise their rights. And of course a union is can be and should be in the best of all worlds a really important tool for workers and for sort of some of that equality at the workplace. Are there other questions? Are there questions? Well I think we'll give ourselves a couple of minutes to take a break but can you please join me in thanking this extraordinary panel of speakers. And Valerie's going to come tell us what to expect next. So we do have just a few minutes if you need to take a break. Maybe there's a few refreshments around the room. So there is hot water now. I'm not sure where the restrooms are. So if you need to take a break you're free to do so now. We will get started with our keynote speaker at four o'clock. We have about five minutes. Somebody bring it. If you followed him in the past year with the Poor People's Campaign you've seen somebody give voice to all the research that we've been talking about here. But see I've known him from before that I went down to Bennett College just to start a little trouble. His daughter was on the committee that selected me as president. And he immediately made his friendship known. And whenever I kind of went halfway off the reservation he would tell the boy that I really wasn't that bad. Except for you didn't rescue me from the time I called Mitt Romney Edie. You told me I should have said that. But in any case what he brings to every table is the social and economic justice perspective. He talks about race but for him it's not really about race. His co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign is Reverend Liz Theoharis, a white woman who is doing the work as well. He was arrested, no he was not arrested. A group of folks were arrested outside of the Supreme Court. With Liz Theoharis, Reverend Bill Lamar, some of you know him from Metropolitan AME Church, and Reverend Barber came to the Rainbow Coalition and shared with us how these folks were shackled with their collars on shackled for praying. He has led us all over the country state by state by state to talk about social and economic justice. He is first of all a freedom fighter. He's an NAACP man. Started with NAACP when he was just a teenager with the youth division but continued it was one of the most powerful NAACP presidents, the chair of the North Carolina NAACP and served on the national board. In that capacity really tried to move the association awake, might we say, move it woke. He was very successful with that. He truly believes in all of the intersectionality things that we've heard people talk about this afternoon and it comes up and it comes up and it comes up in his work. His organization Repairs of the Breach talks about the promise that America broke consistently with black folks and working folks and women and poor folks and all of that. You know, I could say so much more about him, but I'm not. I will say that he is fierce, that he is focused, but the most important thing that I can tell you about Reverend William Barber, other than the fact that he's funny, is that he is truly a man of faith. There ain't nothing in this for him but God. He does this because he is spirit-led, spirit-focused, and really one of the most powerful advocates we have. Someone asked me yesterday, how would you describe Reverend Barber as a speaker? I said, well, here you have a cross between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. That's who he is, not only in terms of his speaking style, but also in terms of his spirit. And then most of all, he my friend. He's my friend. I love him dearly, admire him completely and cannot wait to hear him. Not only now, but also later this evening, he's going to talk to us a little briefly and then he's going to talk to us more extensively at our later reception. So if you haven't paid, somebody in here will take your money. Somebody here take their money? Thea will take your money. Okay, Reverend Barber. And I tell everybody, I used to say, if anybody bothers you, just let me know. And because we ought to all give Julianne Malvo a round of applause for the work that she has done and the voice that she's had over the years and to the director and the great story that your father was a part of helping to design the buildings for Resurrection City. A lot of people don't know that, but that's, he was there and helped design Resurrection City. John is here from IPS, and where's John? He's here from IPS, and Phyllis is, I had to move on, do some work. A young lady that helped me stay in trouble. North Carolina Sierra. Hey, raise your hand. Yeah, that's North Carolina. And I'll tell you, I may tell you a story about her in a minute, but this whole business of why researchers are so critical. The nephew of Miss Boyenton, who was beat on the Edmunds Petters Bridge is now working with me. He's right here, brother Elliott, young brother, young millennial. And Shaly Gupta is the director of policy for the Poor People's Campaign and is working with all of us across the country. She's here today as well, and we're glad to have her. And then Abstentia is the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, who's the co-chair of Poor People's Campaign, but also the director of the Kairos Center at Union. I was asked this question, and somebody said, well, we wanted you to talk about why research is so important to movements, why research is so important to movement. And I thought about it, I've been thinking about how to frame it, and then I said, well, you know, they invited a preacher, and we have so many preachers, too many today, that are going around praying P-R-A-Y-N-G for a president in a Congress that's praying P-R-E-Y-N-G on all of the people that the scriptures and God and all say we shouldn't be praying on. So I want to kind of tell you something that you might not expect in an economic conference. I'm always struck when people say to me, but you're talking about morality and we're talking about money, and I say, and you really think they're different. You don't recognize that a budget is a moral document, that policies are about moral decisions, that morality is not just about inspiration, but about information, and that as Joseph Sticklets, the Nobel Peace Prize economist once said, we have to deal not just with what does it cost to fix inequality, but what is the cost of inequality, the cost of inequality. I'm a preacher and from my theological tradition, researchers help to protect the moral integrity of a movement, because the worst thing a movement can do is be loud and wrong, and we've seen too much of that, where the movement has bumper sticker sayings, but no stats, no depth, and that's one of the quickest ways for a movement to lose its integrity. In the Bible, for instance, the prophets of the Bible were really social activists. The only time the prophets in ancient Israel rose to the fore was when the kings or the politicians and their court chaplains weren't doing their job. That's the only time. There was no other need for a prophetic. And if you read the prophets, you find out that they had to have some researchers somewhere, and they were versed in research because they were able to say to the nation something like this. For instance, in Isaiah's day, they had glitz, they had glamour, they had temples and all of those things, but Isaiah says, I'm looking at your society, and we've done an analysis, and based on that analysis, Isaiah 10 listening to this name says, woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights and make women and children their prey. Isaiah couldn't say that without some research, and after looking at the research, he came to the conclusion that the legislation was not just a difference of opinion, but it was evil, and not only was it a difference of opinion, but it was robbing. Somebody had shown him some research that whatever was going on, whatever the government was doing, it was taking from the hurt the least. It was robbing them. Well, actually it was raping them. I hate to use that word, but that's what it was, because in Hebrew when it says make women and children pray, because rape is about power, and as somebody who dealt with attempted abuse, sexual abuse against men, I don't data understand it in terms of a woman, but I understand it is about power, and Isaiah was bold enough to stand up to the king and say what you all are doing is raping and robbing the poor, the women and the children. He couldn't have said that with that kind of moral authority without research. Later on over in Isaiah 58, Isaiah, is that me? Was that me? I don't know, but I'll make sure it's not me. In Isaiah 58, Isaiah says, okay, you all have all this worship going on, you have all this praying, but what you're doing is not pleasing because you've got all this ceremony, but you have not loose the bands of wickedness. Now in this conference you might say, why is he going through Bible study? Because loose the bands of wickedness in that text actually means you have not paid people what they deserve. That's what was called wickedness in Hebrew. Wickedness was not some, you had too many Martinez, that's not wickedness. Wickedness in that text is specific to the issue of not paying people what they deserve and trying to cover it over with a lot of religiosity. Researchers help us pull back the cover and force society to see the hurt and the harm of the decisions that people are making. He goes on to say, and then he goes on in that same text and says, and the nation will never be able to repair itself until it stops being wicked and not paying people what they deserve. So sometimes you need researchers that can say, help a movement say to the nation, as long as your policies are this way, you might have a little ebb and flow, but you're never really going to be able to fix the society because the scientists' policies have actually insulated destruction. That's why you have to have researchers to protect the integrity of the movement. Now I follow this brown-skinned Palestinian Jew named Jesus. And Jesus, don't y'all mess around and follow what the so-called white evangelicals say? That's not even a term, actually. A lot of these terms, too, another reason you need researchers is to help people stop using terms that you shouldn't be using anyway, like left versus right. Y'all really are not on the left as EPI, right? You shouldn't even talk like that because that language is set up to be divisive. Just like I'm not a liberal Christian versus a conservative Christian. It's kind of like those are not even terms that are used biblically. You're conservative and you're liberal. And so are you in the way you look at some things. But these terms that we have brought into our thinking that are designed, so we call people the right and then after we call them the right, we spend 45 minutes trying to convince people they're wrong. And we use language that comes from the 17th century during the French Revolution when the left were those who didn't want the monarchy and the right wanted the monarchy. And we're actually transposing language that doesn't even fit. In fact, it's too puny, it's too weak, it's too hollow to deal with the realities of now. So you need researchers that can use facts, figures, empirical data to help change how we even talk about the anecdotal realities. So I go back to Jesus who I follow. Jesus was very keen on social policy. His first sermon went like this. Wo unto those, no, no, excuse me. The spirit of the Lord is upon me for he hath anointed me to preach good news to the poor. Right? The poor. Now, the researchers would have told Jesus in that day that Rome favored the 1% and disregarded the 99%. That Rome had classes of people. One group, people were called the humiliators, the humiliated ones. And the others were called the honoristries, which is the honored ones. And the honored ones controlled the politics and they wanted all the tax cuts. They wanted the law to favor them. And they expressed their grandeur in the way in which they had their entourage come through the city. And they boasted on their entourage, their dress, and their education. And it was into that world that Jesus comes and says, no, this is Rome. This is not the way it should be. This may be Caesar's way, but Caesar is a egotistical, narcissistic builder. See, that's who Caesar is, who loves to put his name on buildings. And if he could, would put his face on every coin. That's who Caesar is. Caesar is the one who desires military parades to flaunt his, to brag. That's who Caesar is. I don't know why y'all laughing. I'm talking about something 2,000 years ago. That's who, that's who Caesar is. Caesar believed he had the authority to grab any woman anytime he wanted to. And Caesar only wanted people around him who told him what he wanted to hear. And Caesar only cared about money. Everything was about money. And into this Jesus comes and says, the spirit of the Lord, which is above Caesar, is focused on the poor. Now there are three words for poor in Greek. But the one used to describe this moral movement of Jesus is patokos, P-T-C-H-O-S, which literally means, Julian, those who have been made poor by exploitive policies. So Jesus had to have some research around in order to say in his first sermon, I'm calling out the policies and declaring that they are wrong. And at the end of his life, he says a nation, not individual, a charity, he says the nations will be judged by how you treat the poor, patokos again. So you can't even understand scripture in the contemporary moment without having researchers that unpack to us what's really going on underneath the glitter, the glamour, and the grandeur. Movements need researchers to protect the integrity of the movement. Because when you have a movement, one of the first things they're going to do is question. That's why I look at my sister back there when we started in the Moral Monday movement and in North Carolina, the first thing I did is went to her and said, we need a budget. We need everything we are raising up. We need two things. We need to figure out how to get every issue we're raising up in the courts, but in everything that has a cost. We need to know the cost if we do it, the cost if we don't do it, and we need to answer up front the question they're going to raise, which is they're always going to say, that would be nice and that would be a nice moral thing to do, but it'll raise taxes. A researcher to go ahead and deal with that question up front so that when we debated them, we started with that. Now I know my opponent here is going to say that this will raise taxes, but according to the Center for Tax and Policy and Budget, not only were these programs not raised taxes on everyone, they may raise taxes on the wealthiest who are already paying 20% less than they should be, so we're really not raising it, we're just bringing it to. But in addition to that, if you implement this, it will create a surplus in the budget. And by the way, if you don't implement this over the next 10 years, it's going to cost the state such and such and such thing. So I just thought I'd put that out there first. A researcher helps us de-claw, if you will, or de-tooth, if you will. Those who only have one or two critiques, they're going to throw at our work. It's not like we don't already know what they're going to say, but the worst thing is to know what they're going to critique you about and not be prepared. That's critical with the researchers, and we need researchers also who are willing to sit side by side with the movement to go on and defend the movement. When people say they shouldn't be in the street, well actually, here are the numbers. Here's the data. There is an empirical connection to their emotional outbursts. It is not just pure emotion. These are not unlearned people. It is not that they're just mad and don't know what they're talking about. In fact, they're not even mad because they're not crazy. They're mad, you kind of off the run. They are angry and they have legitimate discontent. Every now and then, you need to legitimize my cussing. I'm a cussing preacher. I didn't say I was a vulgar preacher, but I'm a cussing preacher. Like Dr. King, when Dr. King said, we must challenge the things that damn men's souls. That needs to be quantified. What's damning their souls? That's legitimate discontent. If Dr. King says, I refuse to believe that the great vaults of this nation are bankrupt, somebody's got to already have the footnote for that. Actually, before it's said, so that you can use the metaphor, but then defend it. Research and revolutions go hand in hand. Revolutionaries have to be radicalized by the research, because otherwise they will think just like the larger society tells them to think. And if you think just like the larger society that tells you to think, you can't challenge Rome if you are Rome. There must be, all we hear, for instance, all the time is, if you do something like that, it's going to raise taxes. After a while, you can begin to think that and believe that, and you need a retooling or retutoring. Because we get so brainwashed by what's thrown out. Secondly, researchers provide connections for unity. Now, right now in the Poor People's Campaign, we are saying that Dr. King said there were three areas. I'm talking more about tonight, systemic racism. He said racism, militarism, and poverty. He said there were triune evils, triune evils. We're saying today there are five diseases, five fatal, can be fatal diseases that are impacting this democracy. And it's not about left versus right, it's about right versus wrong. Systemic racism. And by that, we are not talking about when Roseanne Barr said something stupid. And we're not even talking about when some kids raised the Nazi sign, even though as bad as that is and as ugly as that is, we're talking about measured systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that gives a false moral cover for the four other diseases or the four other immoral realities. And what our movement is saying is that we have to have researchers that can connect all five of them or understand. You cannot talk about economic advancement, living wages and lifting the poor. If you don't deal with the systemic racism, for instance, of voter suppression. And you can't talk about either two of those without talking about ecological devastation because the whole planet is destroyed. We really don't have to worry about racism. But in the sense that the first people that are going to be destroyed are black and brown and poor Asians and poor natives and poor brown people and white people and so forth. We have to have researchers that do this, help movements, help the larger public understand, this is going to sound so crazy, this is going to sound really crazy, but I got researched to back it up, that voter suppression in this moment is more of a white issue than a black. She says zero minutes, okay. There's more of a white issue than a black, right? You said remember I know it's not, yes it is. Because the research shows that every state that has participated in racialized voter suppression are also the poorest states. So the people who get elected through racialized voter suppression, when they get elected they pass policies that hurt mostly white people because in the states that are the poorest, the largest number of people in terms of raw numbers are white, not in terms of percentage. So you have to have researchers to make that connection so that we don't have black folk over here fighting against voter suppression and then white folk over here and some neoliberalism sometimes and thinking they're working on separate things. When in fact they're all connected. Is that helpful? That's why we need you. Because we're losing too often because we're siloed. And I used to write national geographics and every time a predator wanted to kill something, the first goal is to separate the prey from the others. That's why the elephants, when the lions come around them, they all circle. They understand that yes, each one of them might be individual and have their own family, but in a fight, they need to understand the intersectionality and researchers. And we need that help even with the poor people who came now with this group and with working with IPS and we need the Economic Policy Institute. We've got 41 units, groups across the country now, 41 states, you all have the same thing. We had 5,000 people in six weeks to do civil disobedience, 50-some thousand people to participate, 38 million hits on Twitter, 3 million people watching the video and they are believing that this movement has something to say, rooted both in empirical data and anecdotal reality and that's just the launch. That was just the launch. 38 million Twitter hits was just the launch and people are ready for a grown-up researched movement that can handle dealing with race and poverty and ecological devastation and the war economy all in the same space and can use that kind of power and research to register people for the movement who vote, not just people who vote but for the movement who vote and build out a long-term strategy using much of what you all have done all your life. And then lastly, research helps us to penetrate penetrate the distortions and also to focus our work. Now, I just want to... I'm not anti-the-north. I'm not anti-the-north, Julian. But I'm trying to say to everybody I can in this country and I've dedicated my life, I just decided if you would opt from here on, I'm going south because you can tinker around all you want to until we change the south and until we build the coalitions of white and black and brown and Latino and Asian and poor folk in the south and raise up this movement that also votes. Until we do that, you're not really going to be able to shift the political calculus in this country. And we're right here. I've been talking about it for 11 years in the midst of the birthing pains of a third reconstruction. It's right here. It's right here. But we cannot wait till the election season to do it. It has to be done year-round. It has to be done multi-year. I don't know if you've done this research lately. I promise it's last sentence because she's looking at me like. I just want you to hold this. I may mention them again. If I do, when I'm telling you in the churches, y'all say amen the second time. I may mention them again. But I want you to give you these numbers. Write this down. You're researching. 170, 26, 31%, 100 million and 140. What are the numbers? If you calculate the electoral college from Virginia to Texas, you come up with a little bit over or right at 171 electoral votes, which means anybody that's running and you give away 170, you give them 13 states. They only need 99 electoral card votes from the other 37 states. The 13 former Confederate states, which only have about 23% of this country's population, controls 171 electoral votes. And it doesn't have to be that way. The data is showing us that it's right to be changed. And we can build these coalitions if we can build the right kind of budgets and right kind of movements like we're doing in the Poor People's Campaign. The next number, 26. That's the number of United States Senate seats you can control by just controlling the 13, which means you only need 25 from the other 37 states. You don't have to win two of every state to control the United States Senate. 31 is the percent of the U.S. House of Representatives. All you got to do is control from Virginia to Texas and you control 31% of the United States House of Representatives, which means you only need 20% from the other 37 states. 100 million, that's the number of people that didn't vote in the last election before this mid-year. 100 million people. And 140 is the number of poor and low-wealth people in this country, not 37. 140 million, according to the Souls of Poor Folks piece that we've done. The 140 million poor people and the majority of them are in the South are the key to the transformation of our politics. But the only way to do it is to get your research and IP research connected to a movement that dares to go in eastern Kentucky as well as the Delta of Mississippi. And I leave here today, I'm here in the Mississippi. All of these close elections are a sign that we're right the tipping point. If there's ever been a time that policy groups are to see themselves as movement policy groups. And if there's ever been a time that we ought to go south and shift the political calculus in this nation for the next 20 years, 30 years, 40 years and beyond. It is, in fact, because we can't believe the talking heads who haven't done the research that don't know if you register 30% of the unregistered black voters in the South and you connect them with progressive whites and Latinos, flip about five southern states right now, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi and perhaps in Texas and maybe even South Carolina. That's what the research said. That's not what the talking heads say because the corporate media doesn't want them to talk about that. Connected to the right researchers can do this, must do this, has to do this. And it is our movement. It is our movement. And I believe that with everything inside of me, give us the numbers. Give us the budgets. Give us the footnotes. And we will change this nation. So I told you when we started this afternoon that we were going to have a unique blend. Y'all remember what it was? We're going to have some celebration, some commiseration. And we're going to end with jubilation. So then we deliver on that. So I want to take this time to quickly thank you all for coming out and spending so much of your time with us this afternoon in celebration of the 10th anniversary of PRE. Thank you to all of our speakers today. They all did a wonderful, excellent job. I told you that these are the experts. These are the people that know what they're talking about. And so I hope you took copious notes. I also want to thank our staff who helped to support this event. Our communications staff, many of whom are in the back. Our research assistants. Development department. Everybody at EPI had a hand in making this a success. So I want to thank you all. And with that, we're going to adjourn, but I want to encourage and invite you to join us at 6.30 for our benefit event that will be taking place just down the hall from here. And if that doesn't convince you, Reverend Barber is going to be there as well. You can get some more of what he had for us this afternoon. So again, I thank you for joining us, and we need to exit this room quickly because they have to turn it over for another event. Thank you all for coming.