Transcript — The Future of Equal Opportunity

The following transcript comes from our webinar, “The Future of Equal Opportunity.” For more information, including video, audio, speaker bios, and additional resources, click here.

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Maureen Conway  01:40

Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Maureen Conway. I’m a Vice President at the Aspen Institute and Executive Director of the Economic Opportunities Program, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to our conversation today about the future of equal opportunity. This event is part of our Opportunity in America series in which we hear from experts, researchers, practitioners, workers, advocates, policymakers and business leaders about the changing economic landscape in the United States and how we can make sure that the economy works for everyone, regardless of place, of gender, of race or class or any other characteristic for those of us who have been for those of you who’ve been with us for the last couple of minutes, you’ve been viewing a few pieces of art curated for this event by my colleague Matt Helmer. Art responds to the society in which it’s created, but it can also reflect our past and paint a vision of what we aspire to be. It can confront us with our present realities and compel us to re-examine our assumptions about what is true. Most of the pieces that you’ve been seeing come from the Equal Employment Opportunity is the law portfolio, a series of prints created in 1973 by the Smithsonian American Art Museum that addresses the theme of equal employment opportunity. The portfolio was sponsored by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, to promote awareness of workplace discrimination laws. Another piece included is by Gwen Maxwell Williams, a quilt called we are not there yet, which is also housed at the Smithsonian and it’s from 2012 according to the Smithsonian Maxwell Williams designed this quilt to affirm the importance of the EEOC and to observe that workplace discrimination is with us to this day. So these pieces set the stage for our conversation today, what is our experience of equal opportunity and what might our future be? We hold these truths. We hold these truths that all men are created equal, that America is the land of opportunity, that if you work hard, you can improve your standard of living. But we also fall short of these truths. We are a nation divided about what Equal Opportunity looks like and where the challenges to this ideal lie. Maybe it’s just me, but I sometimes feel a sense of vertigo when confronted with others’ radically different understanding of where the inequities in our economy are and what needs to happen to ensure equal opportunity. Equal opportunity is an aspiration that was undermined even as it was written into our founding documents, and it remains both elusive and exalted as the bedrock of a free and just society. So today, we have a terrific set of speakers to discuss this timely, important, complicated and confounding issue and to share ideas for how we can move closer to providing equal opportunity for all. But before I introduce them, of course, we’ll just do a quick review of our technology. All attendees are muted. Please do use the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen to submit and upvote questions. Please share your perspective, ideas, examples, resources or experiences related to today’s topic. We know we have a really informed audience, so we’d love to hear from you. We encourage you to post about this conversation on your social media platform of choice. Our hashtag is talk opportunity. If you have any technical issues during this event, please message us in the chat or email us at eop.program@Aspeninstitute.org This event is being recorded and will be shared via email and posted to our website. Closed Captions are available for this discussion. Please click the CC button at the bottom of your screen to activate them, and now it is my great pleasure to introduce our first speaker today, Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, who joined the EEOC in August 2023 before joining the commission. Commissioner Kotagal was a partner at Cohen Milstein, where she was a member of the firm’s civil rights and Employment Practice Group and chaired the firm’s Hiring and Diversity Committee for nearly two decades. Commissioner Kotagal represented marginalized groups in employment and civil rights class action suits. Her cases often involved cutting edge issues related to Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, as well as Wage and Hour issues and the non discrimination provision. During the Affordable Care Act… during this time, Kotagal co-authored the inclusion rider, a voluntary agreement between actors, filmmakers and studios aimed at advancing equal opportunity in the film industry, both behind and in front of the camera. The Commissioner has dedicated her career to supporting workers and championing diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, and we are just so very grateful to have Commissioner Kotagal with us today. Commissioner Kotagal welcome, and I turn it over to you.

Kalpana Kotagal  07:08

Thank you so much Maureen for that warm introduction and thanks everyone for being here for this incredibly timely discussion. As Maureen said, my name is Kalpana Kotagal, I am a Commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC for short. We are the nation’s premiere civil rights agency. This year marks the 60th anniversary of our small agency which advances the unrealized promise of equal opportunity in the workplace, I think we can’t discuss today’s topic, the future of equal opportunity, without reflecting a little bit on the past. From my perspective, history is a really critical touchstone. It provides context for the present and for the work ahead. It reminds us that progress isn’t linear, far from it, and that our work, our action in the face of challenges, can and will make the difference. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which created the EEOC, and which prohibits workplace discrimination, is a perfect case in point. As many of you may know, the law didn’t come into being overnight. It took years of strategy and of litigation, of activism and organizing to get the bill passed. Following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown versus Board of Education in 1954 there was profound resistance to integration and an accompanying surge of violence in the face of that violence. However, a broader commitment to civil rights developed and deepened. Those leading the work remained steadfast, and in so doing, they helped to shift public opinion, the outcry to the kidnapping and murder of 14 year old Emmett Till 70 years ago, the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, sit-ins at whites only lunch counters across the south. All of these continued that steady drum beat for change in 1963 just hours after President Kennedy delivered a national address asking Congress to pass civil rights legislation describing civil rights as a moral issue as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution. Just hours later, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered standing in his own driveway carrying NAACP T shirts that read, Jim Crow must go. And just two months later, the 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom helps to galvanize further support for the Civil Rights Act, which, after 534 hours of debate, 500 amendments, was finally signed into law by President Johnson, surrounded by Dr King, by Dr Dorothy Height and so many others who had struggled their whole lives to see that day. The Civil Rights Act and the EEOC were born of the enduring struggle for civil rights, and we can trace that struggle back further to the movement for abolition, to the women’s rights movement, to the struggle of indigenous people to preserve their sovereignty, to the resilience of Japanese Americans during internment, the organizing of immigrant laborers and the fight to ensure that LGBTQ plus people are simply free to be who they are, these movements are interwoven threads to this day. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 reflects our nation’s highest ideals of equal employment opportunity, but those who fought for passage of the law, I don’t think they saw it as a solution to bigotry, nor did they expect it to end discrimination overnight. Rather, it was one step in the larger and unending fight for civil rights, for dignity. Of all people, civil rights leaders have opened the door to progress in every generation, but they have known that it would be on future generations, that it would be on us to keep those doors open and to open them wider. This was true when Congress passed the Age Discrimination and Employment Act in 1967 the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act just a few years ago today, the EEOC doors remain open, even as the agency lacks quorum due to the President’s unprecedented removal of my fellow democratic commissioners, workers and advocates can file charges of discrimination, which our dedicated non political career staff in our 53 offices around the country investigate to determine whether the anti discrimination laws were violated. EEOC staff negotiate with employers to change practices and secure relief for workers. The EEOC can also still pursue some litigation, especially where the harms are egregious, or where affected workers might not have access to counsel. Of course, chronic underfunding and under resourcing of the agency prevent us from doing more. 60 years later, we know that discrimination in employment is unfortunately still pervasive, and so the work of the EEOC and the work of all of us remains crucial in fiscal year 2024 alone, the EEOC recovered nearly $700 million for more than 21,000 workers. We received 88,000 charges of discrimination and more than 500,000 intake calls. Behind these numbers are real people, like the farm women, we obtained $2.5 million for who endured rampant sexual harassment in the fields, or the $8.7 million we recovered for a class of 83 black drivers who were given more dangerous and more challenging work by their employer and segregated from their white co workers. In another case, the EEOC obtained $365,000 for more than 200 job applicants, where the employer software automatically filtered out and rejected women over the age of 55 and men over the age of 60, and in yet another, the agency secured $100,000 to resolve a disability and pregnancy lawsuit where the employer fired an employee at days after she requested leave to recover from a stillbirth. And then there’s the $460,000 that the EEOC recovered for two mechanics in my home state of Ohio, who were harassed and subjected to physical violent violence simply for being gay. These stories represent just a sliver of the EEOC’s vital work, from advancing equal pay to ensuring that workers with disabilities, pregnancy related conditions or sincerely held religious beliefs, can access reasonable accommodations. They demonstrate the importance and the urgency of the continued fight for equal opportunity, as I know our esteemed panel will describe today, however that access to justice and equal opportunity is increasingly under threat. We are living in unprecedented times, a phrase that has become almost banal in recent months. As the daughter of immigrants who benefited from our nation’s promise of equal opportunity, I know that we can do better. This is again, where I find history to be so helpful, it provides us with two reminders. First, the times have been hard before, and they are certainly hard now, and they will undoubtedly be hard again and second, that this work is righteous, it is the work of building a more just society, of an economy that works for everyone, to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice. People of conscience must act. We must work to bend that arc, together with the work, with the action of the people here and of people across the country, I am confident that the EEOC will once again fully. Race. Its founding mission, preventing and remedying discrimination for all workers, especially the most vulnerable. I stand ready to work with all of you, and I look forward to the conversation ahead. Thank you so much.

Maureen Conway  16:47

Thank you so much. Commissioner Kotagal, those remarks were a perfect lead into our conversation today. Appreciate you being with us, and now let me introduce our terrific panel. In the interest of time, I will just match names to faces, but you can and should read more about them on our webpage if you don’t know them already. Today, we have with us, Stacey Abrams, political leader, business owner and author. And we have Dr Manuel, Pastor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. And it’s my pleasure to turn it over to my friend and colleague, Natalie Foster to moderate today’s conversation. Natalie’s President and co-founder of the Economic Security Project, a Senior Fellow here at the Aspen Institute with our Culture of Work initiative, and the author of the guarantee inside the fight for America’s next economy, which if you haven’t read you should. Natalie is a brilliant thinker, organizer, advocate and leader who brings heart, compassion and the courage of her convictions to all that she does. We’re so delighted we get to collaborate with her here and Natalie, Thanks, and I’ll turn it over to you.

Natalie Foster  18:01

Thank you so much, Maureen. Thank you, Commissioner for those remarks. As we’re saying, equal opportunity has always been at the heart of the American story, right? The belief that no matter who you are, your race, your gender, your zip code, that you should be able to work hard, contribute your talents and to thrive. And we know that this promise has never been fully realized. The commissioner laid out so many milestones over the course of this nation’s history, it feels to me like we are living through the backlash to a lot of that progress where institutions are being weaponized, opportunity, equity and fairness are being defunded, and this we are seeing the scapegoating of marginalized communities, and that’s why this conversation today feels so urgent, but also hopeful, because we have two with us, two leaders who bring different perspectives, but are deeply connected perspectives, and they’re two of my favorite meaning makers at this moment in history. So I’m really excited to dig in with you all, and I’m going to turn it over to you for opening remarks, and Stacey will go to you first. You know you’ve been a tireless advocate for equity, access and democratic participation. You have inspired millions of people to get involved in the process through your races, through the elected office positions you’ve held, but also through your new podcast and the work you’re doing today. So tell us where we are today and why it’s so important we continue to embrace and defend these ideals.

Stacey Abrams  19:46

First of all, Natalie, thank you so much for having me, and thank you to the Aspen Institute for this invitation. I’ve recently been spending a great deal of time talking about the 10 Steps to autocracy and authoritarianism. I talk about them because this is not a prognostication of what’s to come. It’s a description of where we are. In seven and a half months, this nation has descended into authoritarianism, and by understanding that, by recognizing that we have the opportunity to then decide where we want to go next. Unlike other nation states that were democracies that fell, Venezuela, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, if we remember, was a democracy, the entry into autocracy. And authoritarianism doesn’t happen all at once, but when it starts, it does not stop, unless the people stop it. And we know it when we see it, but we don’t always have the language to use. We know that we start to see after the election the executive expands his power, and it’s almost always a man. We see the weakening of competing powers. We see the legislative branch bend the knee or become complicit and sometimes instigate behaviors, and we see the judiciary at the highest levels refuse to take the responsibility it has. We then see the government gutted. We see them break how it works, because people will not fight for something that will not fight for it, and so you see the CDC dismantled. You see the closure of national parks because they’ve stripped them of staff. You see people, elderly folks, who are sitting on phones for hours trying to get access to their social security checks, only to be met. With a chat bot that doesn’t understand them. You break the government so it doesn’t work for anyone, so we forget why we have it. Step five, you see loyalists installed in positions of power so they can go after their enemies. They are not loyal to the people. They’re not loyal to the Constitution. They’re loyal to the autocrat and the authoritarian regime. Step six, you see the dismantling of media you watch in horror as we gut public broadcasting as formally formidable broadcasting companies pay extortion fees in order to stay alive. But then you also see the rise of a media ecosystem that tells lies as though it’s true and we don’t have the ability to discern the difference. Step seven is the step that I’m the most afraid of, and that brings us here today, and that is that you scapegoat people, that you have to blame someone for the brokenness. And that is why we have watched this administration so aggressively go after DEI, because if you can blame someone else, you don’t have to take responsibility. And what worries me the most is that it’s not just coming from the government, it’s coming from the very people who benefit from DEI, from the corporations and other organizations that know that DEI works. As the commissioner pointed out, DEI is the lifeblood of this country. It is a value system that has made us great, and we are quickly avoiding it and voiding out its promise. Step eight is that we then go after and we watch as they go after our civil society, as they break those who would protect us. They sue the law firms, they go after the universities and they arrest protesters. Step nine is the rise of private violence that is often attended by the rise of a private police, a secret police. That is what ICE agents who mask their faces are. That’s what National Guardsmen occupying our cities look like. And then step 10 is the end of democracy as we know it, because while we may have elections, we no longer truly have the right to vote. That’s why we’re watching midterm redistricting that is designed to architect who wins the next election. It’s why we see voters being purged and other voters being told, don’t bother showing up. It’s why mail in voting is under threat. But the reason I call out those 10 Steps to autocracy and authoritarianism is because we’ve got 10 Steps to power and freedom, and our opportunity in this moment is to recognize that while we are in the midst of an authoritarian regime, it is not taken firm hold. We are still fighting back, we are still speaking up, but we need more of us, so we have to recognize what’s at stake. We have to activate ourselves around it, and then we have to reclaim our right as patriots to a country that sees us and serves us, and that’s the work that we have before us.

Natalie Foster  24:16

Thank you. I hope you’ll lay out those 10 steps toward power and freedom over the course of this next hour. Stacey. Manny, I want to turn to you for some opening reflections. You know, we’ve seen people across race, class and geography who are feeling extreme precarity and are rightly feeling like our economics and our politics aren’t working for them. They’re seeing enormous amounts of wealth being generated, but none of it’s showing up in their communities, their schools, their affordable housing. So how did we get to this unique moment in history, and how do we begin to dig ourselves out of it?

Manuel Pastor  24:52

Thank you for the very small and easy question, and thanks to Aspen for having us here. I feel like what I should really just say is I yield my time to the gentle woman from Georgia, because I want to hear those 10 Steps too, but I’m an academic, which means I’m prepared to fill the six minutes that you’ve given me, and what I’d like to do is to say that the story beneath the story that Stacey is talking about is the rise in inequality in the United States. If you look at the single most dramatic economic phenomena that’s occurred over the last four decades, it’s been a rise in the share of income going to the top 1% in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, about 10% of national income was going to the top 1% disproportionate, but that’s what it was. Now it’s more than a quarter of national income going to the top 1% and holding on behind them is a group of the one to 5% five to 10% professionals, elites that are hoarding opportunity. And in that context of rising inequality in that context of folks hoarding what little opportunity they have, the whole notion of equal opportunity has begun to fall flat. We’ve gotten what Stacey Abrams frankly refers to as scape. Going trying to say that the decline in living standards for most of us has been a result of immigrants competing, when the truth is that immigrants are complementary work that is blamed on black folks being able to get a step ahead into some jobs, when, in fact, if you look at the progress of black to white median household income, it’s been stagnant for the last 40 years. There’s been very little progress, despite the efforts that have been there. So that has led to a reaction of fear and of feeding into white supremacy as a reaction. It also means that for a lot of people of color, equal opportunity feels like rearranging tears on the Titanic creating pathways for someone to become a professor, rather than for a construction worker to lead a decent life, rather than for a nurse or a caregiver to be able to get ahead. So what we need to do is to wed equal opportunity in terms of a pathway for people to make it to the middle class with a strategy to lift the working class. So those kinds of resentments are there that are racial or are perceived simply as some parts of people of color getting ahead. How do we do that? We need to shake a few bad habits. One of them is counter posing race versus class, thinking that those two things are disconnected, and that if we want to talk about race, we have to stop talking about the broad messages or broad patterns of income inequality. They are tied together, or that, and Stacey knows as well, participating in the Democratic Party, which has had some people believe that what we need to do is simply talk about class and ignore race, but that is going to demobilize the populations that we need to activate to be able to make change. So we need to have a story that weds race and class. The other thing we need to do is to understand equal opportunity is only real when we make it real. So we need to be thinking not just about suing so that people don’t face discrimination at work. That’s important. But how do we do job training? How do we have comprehensive immigration reform so that people aren’t in the shadows, fearful of what is going to happen to them, and they can begin to get the skills to make opportunity real? We need to shed our bad habits, and we need to talk about race and class in the same breath, and we need to talk about how to make opportunity real, not just for elites to get ahead, but for the masses of the American public to make their lives lives of dignity and opportunity.

Natalie Foster  29:51

Dignity and opportunity. Indeed, Stacey, you’ve described an infernal triangle of delegitimization, litigation and legislation that is designed to roll back equal opportunity. I think it was one of the numbers you laid out in the top 10, in the 10 steps toward authoritarianism. And you’ve argued that maintaining the language of DEI, of diversity, equity and inclusion is really important in this conversation and today. So talk to us about the attacks on the language and the challenges we’re going to need to address.

Stacey Abrams  30:24

Thank you. Dr Pastor actually gave a perfect example. They often hear the language of income inequality, which presumes the counter narrative of income equality, which is not what anyone’s actually intending. But instead of having a conversation about economic opportunity, we get caught up in the language, and that’s intentional, but we shouldn’t stop talking about income inequality. We don’t decide because billionaires say that they don’t care, that we’re no longer going to use that language. And yet, when that language often hides issues of identity or issues of access and humanity, we get caught up in this narrative of we have to change what we say. And that leads to the infernal triangle. Those who oppose our rights begin by de-legitimizing our language. We saw this happen in the 1970s around abortion. Most people forget that the Southern Baptist Convention did a resolution supporting abortion rights before they were against it. And we saw it happen very recently, with the use of the language of woke which was created by a community of color to describe how aware they have to be, how aware we have to be of the threats that we face. And so we have to recognize that the delegitimization of our language, the attacks on our language, are not because they would prefer we use different words. They don’t like the meaning. They don’t like the value system. Those who oppose DEI believe in uniformity, they believe in exclusion, and they believe in equality, uniformity, exclusion and unfairness. That’s what they want. But if they can convince us to argue about what we call ourselves, they never have to get to the values that they are decrying. So delegitimization is the beginning, but they’re smart, because it’s not enough to delegitimize you then have to litigate to dismantle what has been built. And as the Commissioner pointed out, this is a nation that has spent 250 years in reclamation, but also in construction. We have built the laws we need to support, the people we must protect, whether we’re talking about the immigration and nationalization act of 1965 or we’re talking about the Americans with Disabilities Act, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, but it’s also the FMLA. All of those are DEI laws. The Department of Education was born out of the DEI law. And so we have to recognize that the attacks on DEI aren’t simply the attack on the language. It’s also a predicate for attacking the laws themselves, because if you can dismantle the infrastructure and the protection, then you get to the third part. And that third prong in the infernal triangle is that you start to legislate away, right? You start to see language going into the law saying, We can never have it back. And it typically starts at the state level. The moment the students for fair admissions decision was issued by the Supreme Court, states started outlawing DEI. But the Supreme Court never said you couldn’t have DEI. It said very narrowly that colleges and universities could not use race as a primary factor in admissions to higher education. They did not say you couldn’t have an office for Native American students, who are first generation, but they have taken the opportunity to legislate against our rights. And so we have to cling to our language because it describes what we believe. If we do not believe it, then yes, stop saying it. But if you believe that diversity means all people, if you believe that equity means fair access to opportunity. If you stand for the predicate that inclusion is a native good because it means respect for others, then DEI should be the language we use. And most fundamentally, I don’t change my name just because someone calls me out of it. I don’t change my identity because a third grade bully decides to mock me. But it works because we spend so much of our time trying to justify ourselves to those who oppose us, we forget to harness our truth for ourselves. I don’t believe we change the language because you cannot fight the fight that the enemy wants you to fight. You have to fight the fight that you need to win, and we need to win the fight for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Natalie Foster  34:32

Dr. Pastor, is there more you want to say on language? I know you’re such a deep student of words and how they matter in the world,

Manuel Pastor  34:41

So very profound what Stacey said. And I want to lift up two other things. I think that we get into a language trap. I am trained as an economist. That’s when my PhD is in and you know, traditionally, the economic debate has been about individuals, free markets, small business, and it’s been pitted against the state collective a different approach, and that’s been our traditional ideological poles in the United States, and that language winds up getting weaponized, because Equal Opportunity gets presented as An individual issue, and so a strategy which is, I wanted to call you Governor Abrams, because that’s wish. What I wish had happened, what Stacey said, is to take into account people’s history in the context of admissions, in the context of job training, in the context of aid for a particular neighborhood or a particular people, and you’ve got people on the other side saying, we have to ignore all that. It’s got to be an individual thing we’re looking at. But you know what? That’s not what they really mean. Because while the traditional debate in the United States has been between individuals and collectives, markets in the state currently, it’s between tribes and mutuality, because it’s about protecting a particular group of people and their billionaire friends, and making sure that with the use of tariffs, with the use of different kinds of programs, that group. Protected and others are pushed away. So it’s not that they’re trying to lift up the importance of individuals. They’re trying to exclude people who’ve been trying to break in for years because they don’t understand the power of diversity, the power of mutuality, versus the power of just protecting your tribe. And that gets me to the second thing that I think we need to change in our debate, and it’s about thinking about equity as just fairness and inclusion. And I’ll tell you why I am blessed, and I wouldn’t say I was blessed, because, turns out, I’m very successful, but that’s partly because my dad was in a union, and that had helped our family move from being poor to being working class. And it’s partly because there was a civil rights law, and when restrictive redlining fell, we were able to buy a house in a place that had decent public schools. And it’s also because when there was a chance for me to go to college, there was affirmative action to take a chance on a kid like me that did not fit difficult profile. So I benefited from all those programs, and partly as a result, I have an endowed chair. It’s actually sitting right behind me. That chair, right back there is the Endowed Chair, but it also came with a lot of money. And I asked the guy, sort of a center right Republican, how did she get so rich? Really great guy. And he said, Well, I treated my customers, right? I treated my workers, right? I treated my suppliers, right, and the business worked out. And we know in our heart of hearts, that’s how sustainable businesses work over the long term. That’s the argument that Stacy was using about diversity being good for business. And there’s a lot of research done by the International Monetary Fund, done by the Federal Reserve, done by me, looking at how it is that equity is actually conducive to prosperity. Because we know when you have this level of racist over incarceration that’s stripping away talent that we need to grow. We know when you have an immigration system, people like to say it’s broken. It’s not broken. It’s working the way they think it should work, to exclude people, to marginalize people, to chew people up, that we are tossing away talent. We know that when we under invest in schools and low income areas, particularly black and brown kids, that we’re short changing our productivity for the future. We know when we don’t invest in a care economy, it means that our productive workers, who’ve got elders and children that they’re worried about can’t be at ease while they’re at work. We know that equity is conducive to prosperity, and so what I think is really critical in terms of debate as well, is yes, to fly our fairness and inclusion flag, but to continue to talk about how this is all part of unleashing talent to have a more productive and prosperous economy going forward.

Natalie Foster  40:04

That’s wonderful, and I really appreciate your point on mutuality too. Your book solidarity economics that you wrote with Chris Benner, I think lays out the case really well there. And I hope folks check that out.

Manuel Pastor  40:20

It is a very good book. I will recommend it.

Natalie Foster  40:24

But let’s look ahead now, and I want to talk a little bit about some of the institutions we’re going to need for the future. And it’s a pleasure to get to do with you. Stacey, who is a well documented sci fi nerd thinks a lot about the future. And you Manuel, who has always looked to the past to point to where we need to go, as you’ve done in one of my favorite books of yours, the state of resistance, about California. And you know, Stacey, you said this, we’ve, we’ve been a nation at 250 years in reclamation and construction, and let’s turn to the construction we’ll need in the future, right? If you think of it, Reverend Barber talks about the third reconstruction that’s needed in America, with the first reconstruction, you know, being after the Civil War, and the institutions we built that, like the Freedmen’s Bureau, right? That was designed to support the formerly enslaved black Americans, but also the poor white Americans who were left destitute after the Civil War, and that is the time we got the first public schools right in this country, or the second reconstruction in the civil rights era, where we got so many of the institutions. And the agencies and the laws that we’ve been discussing today, including the EEOC. So as we think about a third reconstruction, what are the institutions and agencies that will be fit for that moment that we will need in the future? Stacey, we’ll go to you first.

Stacey Abrams  41:50

I begin by thinking about what this moment of authoritarian rise is revealed to us, we have relied extraordinarily heavily on not just norms, but on values. We have believed that those who stand for public office are willing to do what they can and what they should for the benefit of others, and we can no longer trust that the system will hold because our values will hold. We have seen not simply a person who won the Office of President take on an expansive nature notion of power. We have seen members of his party suborn support and encourage the tearing away of values and the tearing away of rights from others, and so our first responsibility is to move the Office of Civil Rights from being a subset of a subset of the Department of Justice to being its own standalone agency. We need an agency that is dedicated to civil rights, civil liberties and diversity, equity and inclusion. So see civil rights, civil liberties and DEI because these pieces are yoked together. If you do not have DEI, then you don’t have civil rights. If you do not have civil liberties, your ability to call out the attacks on your civil rights aren’t real, but as long as it is sublimated to a Department of Justice that is under the control of someone who may or may not. Believe in justice, we are in danger. So that needs to be a standalone agency. Number two, we need a voting rights agency. Voting rights should not be something that is tucked underneath another subset. It is the cornerstone of how we make government work. And as someone who fights for democracy, I don’t fight for democracy because I like the construct. If there were better constructs, we’d go with them. I like democracy because democracy is how we guarantee our voices are heard, our needs are lifted up. We can’t guarantee they’ll be met, but we can guarantee they will be talked about, and that means that the right to vote should not be at the whim of those who get to decide whose voices they want to hear. The reason we are fighting over gerrymandering, the reason we are listening to the possibility of money being stripped away from states that refuse to eliminate mail in voting, because we have treated voting as an afterthought when it is actually the linchpin of how our nation can operate as a democracy. So that needs to be an agency. Number three, we need a department of economic power. Economic power is not the same as economic quality. We need to believe that people’s economic power determines every other decision they make. And Dr pastor has talked about it. You’ve written about it beautifully. When people feel economically secure, they feel comfortable granting the humanity of others. We watched in this last election as people who knew that they would be harming folks they cared about said that it was more important to them that the price of eggs come down than that a transgender child have access to information and to protection and safety. We should not be in a position where people feel they have to trade their humanity for economic convenience and economic security, and that means that we have to believe in economic power. We don’t have to and we cannot solve all of the isms that are rife in humanity, but we can mitigate their effectiveness if we are focused heavily on developing economic power, and if you’re talking about power, power is not simply about mitigating past harms, it’s about building future capacity. And that’s what Dr pastor has talked about so eloquently. We should be focused on that exclusively. We should have a department that is thinking about that is going through regulations, that is going through what states are deciding and making certain that economic power is at the forefront of what we’re delivering. Poor people don’t hate rich people. Poor people want to be rich people. I believe that we need a nation of thousandaires, people who believe that their economic security is so safe that it is okay to want others to have their rights and their liberties. But as long as we think that Maslow’s higher need isn’t real, then we are always going to be fighting to fix the very, very least that we can, instead of building what we need and what we deserve. And so if we guarantee rights, if we guarantee responsibility, if we guarantee economic access, the rest of it, the rest of I think our agencies are in good stead. We just need better people in them, and we need to make certain that they are no longer susceptible to the rise of authoritarianism. Because the problem I have is that much of what Donald Trump is doing, much of what the Republican Party has suborned, and this is not partisan. These are the people who hold the power. So it’s not about who got elected, it’s about who holds the power now. So these communities of power have decided that their self interest trumps everyone else. No pun intended. And so it is our responsibility to ensure that irrespective of who holds the job, that the work still gets done, and we need agencies that make that absolutely true.

Natalie Foster  46:52

Dr Pastor, what would you add to the department of economic power and voting rights?

Manuel Pastor  46:57

I very much like that. Your mention of Reverend Barber made me remember that over the course of my life, I’ve had to follow Jesse Jackson after he spoke, Reverend Barber after he spoke, and now Stacey Abrams after she spoke. So I’m either the luckiest or most unlucky speaker that I know about.

Stacey Abrams  47:19

Look, we’re just happy we get to go first.

Manuel Pastor  47:23

I you know, I want to say one thing first again, about language that I think very much echoes what Stacey talked about, is that, I think another thing that the left sometimes kind of gets wrong talking about income inequality is to say, well, there’s enough wealth to go around there. Probably yes, but I think what appeals to people more is there’s enough work to go around. There’s enough opportunities to contribute, to earn and to own, to become 1000 air as Stacy was talking about, to really have assets. And I think it doesn’t mean that everyone will work – that’s not the only thing that you can do in the world. And certainly, one of the things I was so glad that you mentioned is the Americans for Disability Act and the on-ramps that gives people to be able to contribute and participate and feel whole in the world with what they’re able to do. But I do think we need to focus on that. And I think in terms of the institutions Stacey has certainly named them. I would say we need to rebuild unions. That’s an important institution for leveraging power and working voice. We need to make the promise of de incarceration real with actual programs about re entry so that people can be successful. We need, and it’s controversial, comprehensive immigration reform so that a large share of those who’ve been in the country for such a long time and contributing can actually find a path. And that’s also going to require institutions for immigrant integration, so that people can actually be successful, learn English, be able to go to community college, etc. Certainly we need tax reform. And then another thing that doesn’t frequently get lifted up is that we need to support regional economic partnerships, because it is at the level of the region that people meet face to face, race to race, place to place, and sometimes discover the commonalities that they throw away when they move to a national stage and get into the Kabuki Theater of Congress and go red against blue, rather than people who are neighbors whose fates are indeed deeply interconnected and interdependent. Finally, one thing I think that we’re going to need to learn is that being successful at this work is about combining power building so you can get to the table with economic expertise, so you can participate with the experts. And we’ve too often divorced the community organizers. There’s a lot in this crowd who are doing the power building to make sure the voices are there from the economic development experts who have the language that needs to be there. We need to bring those two groups together, because the only way that equity will get to the table is when it’s kicking and screaming and making a big fuss, but once you get to the table, you need to be able to say, and by the way, I know exactly how we can get small businesses going. I know how much of a minimum wage we can absorb. I know the DEI programs that are actually effective. I know the re entry programs that work. I know how we can tap into naturalization classes on site so that lawful permanent immigrants can find their way to naturalization, which creates a boost in their wages and a boost in productivity. We need to marry the expertise with the power Valley.

Natalie Foster  51:31

Well, let’s stay on. On that note, Dr Pastor, and talk about what people can be doing today, because with us today are hundreds of people from around the country who come from very different perspectives and organizations. So we have workforce and economic development, folks, local government folks, people involved in legal advocacy, worker and human rights, the labor movement, grassroots organizers, many of them are with us today. And so what, how do you think about the roles these different entities play at the local level, and what should people be thinking about today in the fight for opportunity?

Manuel Pastor  52:09

Well, I talked a little bit about it, and what I just said, so I will just add one thing, probably about 15 years ago, along with the California Community Foundation, which is really LA Community Foundation, but it’s LA, so we just say it’s California, because we think we are the world. And our Research Center helped put together a council on immigrant integration. Now it’s called immigrant inclusion, and weirdly enough, probably the most important thing I asked people to do as homework from the first meeting was to take someone out to breakfast that they didn’t know that they didn’t usually work with and the head of the leading immigrant rights organization was asked out to breakfast by the person running the education programs at the Chamber of Commerce. Four years later, the LA chamber was supporting comprehensive immigration reform as one of its top three priorities in DC, and when the raids just happened in LA, the Chamber of Commerce condemned them because of the impact on the economy, and the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation launched a study on the impact, and we identified very much more with community based organizations, unions, et cetera, are working with LA EDC on this study about what the local impacts are of the deportations and how we can keep our families and our economy together. So I think, and I think Stacey can testify to this, that one of the most important things to do is to form lasting relationships that cross traditional boundaries, so we can begin to realize in our soul that, yes, a more diverse table is a richer table in terms of ideas, yes, a more equitable region in the long run, is a more prosperous region, and yes, thinking about how we form community and award dignity to everyone gets you to not be divided about that trans kid, because that trans kid deserves dignity, deserves to be wrapped in the love of a family and community and equity for that kid for those who are marginalized is going to benefit all of us.

Natalie Foster  54:45

Stacey, how about you? What advice do you have for people working on the ground right now in pursuit of equal opportunity?

Stacey Abrams  54:53

I would build off of Dr Pastor. We have to believe in alignment, not agreement. Agreement says that we come to our decisions for the same reasons. We bring the same experiences, or at least, we have the same philosophical grounding. And that’s not necessary. My job, before I ran for governor, I was the minority leader and the Georgia General Assembly. I used to joke that they call you leader to make you feel good, but they call you minority so you never forget your place. And the reason that mattered was that I could not accomplish a single bill. I couldn’t pass one, and I couldn’t stop one unless I got people from the other party to work with me, and one of my favorite examples was when there was a terrible bill that would have eroded stream buffers in Georgia, and the Chamber of Commerce of Georgia, which is not quite as enlightened as the LA, Chamber of Commerce, was very much in favor of it. The governor wanted the bill. It sailed through the Senate, and the Lieutenant Governor and the Speaker was happy to move it. But on the House side, I invited a colleague who was the head of the Tea Party to lunch, and we had a conversation, and to paraphrase it, like, you don’t believe in climate change. And she was like, Nah, that’s not my issue. I said, but you do believe in property values. Your property values will be eroded if these stream buffers are allowed to erode the value of your property, because those big companies that are going to take advantage of this aren’t going to be paying your tax bill, but the county where you live is going to still need the same amount of money. We were in alignment about this bill, and we worked together for three years to block that bill’s passage, and they finally have. Had to give up. I don’t think that agreement is vital. It’s nice to have. It feels good. It has a great psychic benefit, but alignment is what gets us where we need to be. And what Dr pastor was describing, when two communities come together that do not necessarily have an agreement about the source of the problem or the solution, they might find alignment in taking certain steps together. Alignment allows you to diverge when you need to, but you can get so much further ahead when you are aligned on why it needs to happen, not why it needs to happen. A lot of the work that I do looks at the intersection of economic power, civic power and individual power. And too often, as Dr sword defined it, described it, we see these as three separate gears. But if we want the machinery to work, if we want democracy to work, if we want to deliver for communities, if we want economic opportunity and civic participation to be real, if we want people to believe that they have the right to a better life, then we’ve got to bring those pieces together. And so to the extent people are only talking about economic power, or only working on civic participation, or think that this is about the individual, until we bring those three things together, we are working with a broken machine. And those who are working together, those who want us not to have those things learned a long time ago to work in unison. We’ve got to work together on these things, because when we put those three gears together, the speed of progress is extraordinary. And that’s what we saw happen in the first reconstruction. That’s what we saw happen in the second reconstruction, and in this third moment where we have to not just reconstruct, we have to reclaim our nation from authoritarian power. We should not be trying to fix what was broken. We should be using those gears to build what we should have had all along, and that is a nation that works for everyone, whether you were born here or you come here. And I want to take one moment of personal privilege. Dr, best or said that talking about immigration is controversial. We have to understand that immigration is not controversial. The propaganda around immigration is controversial, and we have to cut through that language going back to the 10 Steps to autocracy, the 10 Steps to freedom and power mean that we have to believe, we have to recognize what they’re doing. We have to activate ourselves to do better, and then we have to reclaim our right to win. Those are things we can do together, especially if we come together across organizations, across communities, across philosophies. I don’t say that you work with someone who is diametrically opposed to you and values, but we don’t have to have the same outcomes in mind to have the same direction to get there.

Manuel Pastor  59:22

I just want to echo I think that’s such an important point. And I often talk about how when people phrase the word collaboration, they think about doing stuff with people they’re in total agreement with. That’s really just hanging out with your friends. Collaboration is a principle conflict. It’s having some values agree on, trying to think about objectives, green on some principles, and having some principles about how you conflict, conflicting with integrity, with respect, with honesty, without manipulation, and then being able to then come back to that person again, because that’s been built up through principled conflict, not through easy agreement.

Natalie Foster  1:00:12

Yeah, that’s great. So I’m going to take some audience questions now that have come in prior to today, as well as today’s chat, and then we’ll close on a note of asking you each to give us something that is making you hopeful in this moment. But first, I want to read a question that came in today, and this person says, Great point from both speakers about systems not being broken, but working as they were designed. So with that in mind, what are your thoughts on working within and outside these systems at this moment? I think we’ve had echoes of that question through all of your comments, but I thought it was worth lifting up in this moment. And Dr Pastor, let’s go first to you.

Manuel Pastor  1:00:52

Well, that is a really great question. In a class I teach, I always say I don’t use the term disadvantaged, because that sounds like it might be an accident, like or, you know, we were doing this and we forgot about you. Sorry. It’s really structurally disempowered, and it’s often the way the system works. I think the challenge is figuring out how to both disrupt systems and then recreate systems that were. Work How to be both inside and outside. And I really want to turn over things to Stacy, because she’s been an expert at doing this, both disrupting by animating an entirely new electorate to try to change what’s going on, but actually learning to operate in those systems. And I think in the economic development world, this is actually also very important too. There’s a whole system of economic development. We need to learn that language, and we also need to push it to center equity, more, to open up the doors, more to include geographic areas, rural areas, urban areas that haven’t always been primary,

Stacey Abrams  1:02:15

I would absolutely agree that we have to have an inside outside strategy. So I wrote a book called lead from the outside, and the whole point was exactly that I do not reflect the typical leadership style when I became minority leader, and I only say this by way of example when I became Minority Leader. Became minority leader, I was the first woman to lead a party in the history of Georgia. I was the first black person to lead in the House of Representatives, and first black women to do a lot of stuff. And so the reason that mattered was that there was an estimation of my capacity that decided to de-emphasize what I could do, that I was inherently on the outside because I didn’t look like those who had power. But my rise to that role came about because I understand that we have to have an inside and an outside strategy. As Minority Leader, it was my job to go into rooms with the Speaker of the House, with the governor, and negotiate on behalf of not just my colleagues, but on behalf of the constituents we represented, that was an inside strategy. I had to work with the power as it existed to do what I called either stop stupid or at least slow it down. But I also had the responsibility of an outside strategy. As Minority Leader, is my job to be the voice of those who did not have power and were entitled to that power, and that meant that I would have to sometimes castigate and harangue those who were taking power from them, knowing two days later, I was going to have to ask them for something. We have to stop believing that this is about courtesy, this is about courage, and it’s about what we believe we should have. And so yes, that requires an inside and an outside strategy, but those two strategies have to be intentional. You also have to have allies, and we don’t have to do it all ourselves. Sometimes your inside strategy is supporting someone you don’t like that much, but because they are already in the room, you’re going to work with them to make sure they can stay there.

Manuel Pastor  1:04:04

I was in the Governor’s task force on jobs and business recovery during covid, and I very early on, said, Boy, this is going to be racially disparate, and immigrant communities in particular are going to be hard hit because they were left out of the CARES Act terms of aid, because of the fear of accessing health care, because of the kind of work that they had, and That issue got ignored over and over again, until a couple months in, in one of these meetings, I said pretty and politely, what the f is wrong with you people I’ve been talking about this. What could I have done better to make it so clear, within two weeks, they launched a testing program to make sure that the most, they call them, disadvantaged neighborhoods had testing that was equivalent to the rest of the neighborhoods in any particular county, and they made opening up of counties to business conditional on being able to meet the standards around testing and around getting vaccines out to communities. So you got to be inside, and sometimes you have to do what Stacey talked about in which I guess I modeled as well, which is scream a little bit loudly.

Natalie Foster  1:05:21

[Alex Dean] asks, How can states and localities have agency over the structures for equal opportunity? And I think it’s an important question for the audience today, what can states and localities broadly be doing? Stacey, we’ll go first to you.

Stacey Abrams  1:05:38

So I served as deputy city attorney for Atlanta in the beginning of my career, and what I would say is that we often look for macro solutions, where state and local governments are experts at micro solutions. So instead of working against particularly if you are a city that’s in a state that has preemption powers, which is most of the south and some of the West, part of the responsibility is to figure out what is the smallest unit of power you can leverage to accomplish the greatest end that you seek. So with your small businesses, what is it that’s stopping them? There are sometimes regulatory changes you can make at the city level that can unlock economic power. There are things that the state, if the state is actually in lockstep with you and wants good to happen, you can work at the state level. But we should never preclude the notion that small changes linked together can have massive effects. So whether it’s removing one of the steps in a permitting process, or it is making sure that you are having conversations as a local government with the banks to make sure those banking opportunities are made available, that you are locating your meetings in the communities where people don’t think you will show up. We don’t have to bring people to City Hall. City Hall can come to them, and often it’s simply showing up that demonstrates that economic opportunity is real. It’s also shifting our narrative from it being about small businesses themselves to the people who run those businesses. If you have a small business but you can’t afford daycare, then you have to be having a conversation as a local government, how do we solve for that problem. Is it that we stand up as a cooperative? Is it that we incentivize shared behavior and shared pools of funding? But the local governments have not just organ not not just legislative power, they have organizing power and convening power. When I ran for governor, part of my intention was to expand who believes they had a seat at the table. And that’s what state and local governments can do without permission. You can use the structures you have to expand access, but also to expand information. Every city, every county, every state, sends out some notice of some kind, whether you’re collecting taxes or notifying someone about a water bill, use that communication as an opportunity to share information, because what tends to preclude the most disempowered communities from participation is not that they don’t want it’s that they don’t know. And the power of government is the ability to give people information and then show them how that information can be used for their benefit. And we also need to talk about tax policy, because tax policy is something no one talks about. It is my favorite topic. And structurally, if we can use state and local governments to start to model better tax behavior, we can change a lot about the economic opportunities that are available to our communities.

Natalie Foster  1:08:30

Dr, Pastor, you’re a person who talks about tax policy, any any comments on the state and local question?

Manuel Pastor  1:08:37

So I’m from California, and I know everyone thinks that’s just an entirely different place. I just want to remind you that we gave the world Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, tax cutting fervor, anti immigrant hysteria, and the elimination of bilingual education, affirm and affirmative action, and then a race to over incarceration that outpaced the rest of the United States. So we’ve been on this arc of change. And I also want to point out, how about something in California called the California racial equity commission, I would ask folks who are interested to take a look at this very important reason: we’ve been operating under Prop 209 the elimination of affirmative action. We cannot use race in university admissions decisions and basically in local government. But we can pursue racial equity by looking at some of the other underlying factors that have to do with over incarceration, that have to do with under investment in schools, that have to do with tribal communities not getting resources. So you often think, because there’s a ruling at the Supreme Court about Harvard’s affirmative action program that pursuing racial equity is banned, we can’t use race and yet, we are actively looking at whether or not, we have disparate outcomes, and what are the mechanisms we can use to produce outcomes that are more equitable and beneficial for everyone that can happen at a local and state level,

Stacey Abrams  1:10:24

if I can add one piece here, DEI is not illegal. What students for fair admission said was simply that you cannot use race as the primary factor in college admissions. DEI is still legal. Every executive order issued by this administration is unlawful on its face, because it did not change the law itself. And so I encourage you to go to aprnetwork.org, which is a series of organizations I created that deal with DEI. And we’ve got two things I want you to look at. One is the litany of laws that are technically DEI, laws that they would have to dismantle to actually dismantle DEI. The second is that we have a chat bot called a diva, and a diva will answer your questions about your programming. We cannot give legal advice, but we can give legal guidance. And much of what people think has become unlawful because of the specter of anti DEI fervor, nothing changed. There are still so many things that we can do, and I know the commissioner knows this, and I know Dr. Pastor knows this. Please know that DEI is not illegal and it is to your benefit, and we can help you understand more about what you can do. And. Get you resources to help you figure out what else you need. That’s great. That’s my public service announcement.

Natalie Foster  1:11:35

Yes, and a chat bot included. I’m loving this. Let’s do final thoughts. Dr. Pastor, let’s go to you. What’s one thing that’s giving you hope at this moment? And any final thoughts.

Manuel Pastor  1:11:49

The city I live in, Los Angeles, has risen up in response to the authoritarian raids and basically the dress rehearsal that took place here for putting military in so many of our cities. And the reaction has been from our mayor, from other regional leaders, from our business community, from our labor unions, from our black community leaders, from our immigrant leaders, and interestingly, and from our Faith leaders who talk about dignity, community respect, but also at a very working class daily level of everyday life of people saying, this is not the way our neighbors, our cousins, our family members should be treated. And I think when you see that awakening. That’s the hope of a mass movement that is going to be necessary to be part of what Stacey so eloquently laid out as the steps to resist what’s going on.

Natalie Foster  1:13:07

Stacey? 

Stacey Abrams  1:13:09

I have six nieces and nephews between the ages of nine and 19. They are the first generation to lose civil rights during their lifetime, since Reconstruction, since Jim Crow, and yet, they are the most aggressively optimistic children. They believe that they are capable of more, because in our family, I’m the first generation. I’m in the first generation to be born with full citizenship in this country, and my nieces and nephews grew up believing that that would be their legacy. I’m optimistic because I know they will do the work to make it so, but I’m more excited because I know we will not stop fighting to make it happen for them.

Natalie Foster  1:13:50

Thank you for that. Commissioner Kotagal, Dr Manuel Pastor, Stacey Abrams, thank you so much for being here with us today, for the sobering, provocative and hopeful conversation. Maureen?

Maureen Conway  1:14:06

Yeah, thank you so much, and that was just amazing. We could have gone on longer. Stacey Abrams, I want you back for tax policy part two. This is an amazing discussion. Thank you so much, Stacey and Manuel for being here. Thank you, Commissioner Kotagal for setting the stage for us so brilliantly. Thank you, Natalie, for your expert moderation today. I also want to thank our team here at the Economic Opportunities Program. It takes a lot of folks to put these things together. Many thanks to Matt Helmer, Tony Mastria, Francis Almodovar, Nora Heffernan and our AV team at Architex for all their work in bringing you today’s event. And thank you, many thanks to the audience for joining us, for your great questions. Sorry we couldn’t get to all of them. There were so many. I really appreciate you joining us for this important and timely conversation. Please complete the survey that will open up shortly in your browser and stay tuned for further information about our upcoming events in October and through the end of the year. Thanks everybody, and hope to see you again soon. Bye.

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