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"One does not fight to influence change and then leave the change to someone else to bring about." Stokely CarMichael
OUR FOCUS AREAS
Medicare for All
Racial disparities in health care are the direct legacy of slavery, post emancipation, Jim Crow segregation and ongoing structural racism. One of the main reasons so many African Americans struggle with access to healthcare, is their ability to pay for healthcare. Whether it’s the massive gap in income or decades of structural racism, we continue to see a higher uninsured and underinsured rate that continue to plague our communities today. Medicare for All will begin to equalize that and with a more level playing field, we can begin to right the structural racism that has impacted our communities.
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Medicare For All will provide comprehensive health care benefits including dental, vision, long-term services. This supports comprehensive reproductive services, and mental health service to all regardless of employment status or income. Medicare For All will eliminate insurance premiums, deductibles and copays and provide all patients with the freedom to choose the doctors, hospitals and other health care providers they wish to see. Healthcare is a human right. This must be more than a popular political talking point, it must become public policy.
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Check out this video here.
Climate Change
Climate Change is one of the most urgent problems of our time, but often is not a focus of our action, because it is abstract. It seems far away, and long in the future. However, the fact is that we are seeing the effects. Now, more than ever, we see the destruction of climate change does not fall equally on all communities. Poor black, white, indigenous, and communities of color are the most harmed by the short-term profit seeking sickness that drives our international resource extraction business models.
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Disaster zones in the US, populated largely by poor and low-income folks, are disproportionately targeted for environmental pollution -- causing detrimental health effects that not only affect the wellbeing of affected folks, but it also drains them of their economic resources that they are forced to use to survive. GTM believes that Climate Change should be a top concern for policy makers who must see the urgent need for a Green New Deal that drives job programs which will transform our energy economy with a focus on equity, sustainability and justice.
Criminal Justice Reform
Due to structural racism in the criminal justice system and other social and economic disparities, Black and Latinx people comprise 31 percent of the population, 58 percent of those individuals are incarcerated; and one in three Black and one in seven Latinx boys -- compared to one in 17 white boys -- are likely to spend time in prison in their lifetimes. Young Black men are 50 percent more likely than whites to be held in pre-trial detention.
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Black, Latinx and Indigenous women comprise an increasing share of arrests, police use of force and of prison and jail incarceration. Black teen girls are four times more likely than white girls to be imprisoned. Black women, especially those with mental health illness, suffer higher rates of law enforcement sexual assault and other physical abuse. For decades, our criminal justice system has been designed, not to keep us safe or to protect and serve our community, but to maintain systems of privilege and oppression that have managed the hollowing out of our middle class.
Reparations
After the abolition of slavery, the U.S. government reneged on compensation to the formerly enslaved whose labor built national wealth, while restoring full property control to the Confederate plantation owners. The Homestead Act gave away 246 million acres of predominantly Indigenous land to mostly white families. During the Great Depression major economic recovery programs largely excluded Black people due to racist Congressional opposition. The post-World II GI bill provided home mortgages, but shut out nearly all the 1.2 million Black veterans. Similar segregation and racist real estate practices for decades restricted the sale of homes and blocked millions of Black families from home ownership.
The refusal to provide restitution to the formerly enslaved, and subsequent decades of racist barriers in access to land and home ownership, the racist attacks on successful Black business enterprises resulted in the generational wealth chasm. This has impaired millions of Black families with less access to better housing, better-funded schools, less access to higher education, employment opportunities, savings to cover medical crises, job loss and other emergencies.
GTM supports reparations for Black Americans, starting with H.R. 40 to study the issue and similar state and local legislation with the goal of targeted investment in Black Communities. This is done to address healthcare, housing, education, employment discrimination, as well as cash payments as restitution for centuries of structural racism from slavery through segregation to today that have resulted in the wage gap and other racial disparities.