Colorlines

That capacity helps make multiracial governance possible. By that, we mean people of different races, faiths, abilities, backgrounds, and places sharing public power and making decisions together about schools, budgets, housing, health, and the future of their communities. Authoritarian politics depends on persuading people that their neighbor’s participation is a threat and that another community’s dignity represents their own loss. The wedges reach our own institutions, too.

Across the country, people are watching ICE operations surge through workplaces, neighborhoods and courthouses again. Masked agents are appearing in public with greater force. Detention has expanded. Fatal encounters have again become more frequent. The Trump administration calls this immigration enforcement. That description is both technically accurate and politically and morally inadequate.

The Case for Co-Governance: Our Foundational Argument Co-governance is a collection of participatory models and practices in which government and communities work together through formal and informal structures to make collective policy decisions, co-create programs to meet community needs, and make sure those policies and programs are implemented effectively. With co-governance, community members are not solely asked for feedback or input after decisions are made.

How can the next 250 years of democracy be built better for all of us? This summer, explore "The Case for Co-Governance" with us — a collection of voices and strategies showing us the power of working together to build and govern a future that can truly deliver the promise of out multiracial nation. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence finds democracy at a crossroads in the United States.

For Leah Obias, Director of Policy and Strategy at Race Forward, the core messaging of May Day is to look at labor through its intersections. Wealth inequality coupled with the racial wealth gap, compounded with the combination of rising temperatures, rising sea levels, wildfires and flooding all bundle into an existential crisis, they explain.

The root causes of housing injustice in the United States are as deep as the immemorial history of a city such as New Orleans. That history includes colonizers displacing Indigenous communities and land ownership pathways reserved for white people. As far as homeownership, a driver of wealth for many in this country, explains Morris, is an opportunity that hasn’t been equitably distributed.

There is no American History without women. Movements do not appear overnight; they are built in classrooms, churches, union halls, and the neighborhoods just trying to survive.

The Carolinas in the 1950s were a time touched heavily by the harsh realities of Jim Crow. During this time, activists, faith leaders, and teachers were hatching plans to ensure every U.S. citizen could act upon their constitutionally-appointed right to vote. On Johns Island, a marshland coastal community just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, this looked like members of the mutual aid organization, the Progressive Club.

Skip to main content May 25, 2023 4 mins

Black man, where is home for you Is it in your women Your mother or sisters, or lovers They took them and broke them before you when you got off slave ship to say You don’t have the power to save them They’ve told the black man don’t be home We’ll take food out of the mouths of your children and partners and mothers and sister And decades later pops still ain’t back from the milk run at the store Black man, where is home for you Is it in your brother Are you his keeper Are you Nino atop the...