PPC Mass Gathering on June 20 Confronts Racial and Economic Inequities
Published on May, 11 2020
By Dorothy Van Soest
Women, Money & Democracy Issue Committee
June 2020
As new COVID-19 cases and deaths keep climbing each day in the U.S., reaching staggering numbers that represent unfathomable suffering, the pandemic is revealing that our systems and structures desperately need to be reimagined.
When we ignore the most vulnerable among us, but at the same time count on them to keep our cities and towns running without a safety net, we create a morally unconscionable situation that leads to dangerous public health consequences for us all.
Both racial and economic inequities are being worsened by the epidemic, revealing to us that poverty and race are inseparable. We cannot resolve one without resolving the other.
When the pandemic is finally over, all of our lives depend on things not going back to the way they were before. As Kenia Alcocer, co-chair of the California PPC and Organizer with Unión de Vecinos puts it on the PPC website, “We don’t want to go back to ‘normal,’ because normal wasn’t good.”
The exploitative economic and social systems that COVID-19 has laid bare for all to see must be confronted and dismantled. The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is doing just that. From Alaska to Arkansas, from the Bronx to the border and all across our country, people have been coming together since the spring of 2018 to continue the work begun in 1968 by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
On June 20th, the PPC will hold the largest digital and social media gathering of poor and low-wealth people, moral and religious leaders, advocates, and people of conscience in this nation’s history. Voices representing the 140 million poor and low-wealth people across our country will be talking about how the global pandemic is exposing the already existing crisis of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and militarism, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.
WILPF US is an organizing partner of the Poor People’s Campaign and we are all in! To register for the mass gathering on Saturday, June 20, use this WILPF-specific link.
For more information about the PPC and this important event, go to: www.poorpeoplescampaign.org
