Eight minutes and forty-six seconds.
Eight shots fired into a woman sleeping in her own home.
401 years.
This country was founded on the backs of stolen Black lives and labor. White supremacy is deeply embedded in our institutions, our systems, our society.
We all witnessed the coronavirus pandemic expose the fragility of our institutions and the ways discrimination and bias are built into them by design. Then we watched that cop kneel on George Floyd’s neck as he struggled to breathe.
The nation is crying out “We Can’t Breathe” amid a stream of videos showing police officers pressing the air out of the lungs of people living in Black and brown bodies while a global pandemic, a virus that makes it hard to breathe, disproportionately harms Black and brown people due to the legacy of white supremacy.
As a white Executive Director, I know we must begin by acknowledging these realities and the pain and suffering of Black Americans, and recognize that protests happening daily in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and across the country are uprisings, long overdue.
The Women’s Law Project is devoted to expanding and protecting the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in Pennsylvania and beyond. Since our founding in 1974, we have purposefully and strategically focused on work designed to assist and empower the most vulnerable among us, those with the fewest resources. In a country built on systemic racism and sexism, that means our work, and our wins, disproportionately affect Black and brown people.
Our docket also reflects our longstanding core commitment to the struggle for racial justice. We have litigated against racist welfare residency requirements and lobbied against family caps, championed affirmative action and stronger anti-discrimination laws, advocated against the criminalization of Black motherhood, and brought anti-shackling and prison reform litigation.
We are currently challenging Pennsylvania’s ban on Medicaid coverage of abortion care, which disproportionately harms women of color. Several of our sexual assault and domestic violence cases have turned on qualified immunity, a judge-made doctrine that excuses the unconstitutional conduct of law enforcement officers and essentially immunizes bad policing from public accountability.
We recognize we can do more.
In solidarity with the nationwide movement to protect Black lives—men, women, and gender-nonconforming people–we commit to intensifying and clarifying our programmatic focus on racial justice, learning how to better align this work with the broader racial justice movement, and refining how we articulate that work to the community so that the goal of racial equity remains clear, prioritized, and always kept in focus.
The first step we are taking is addressing our own house. We made a brief statement amid the protests but held off on a fuller statement so that it could be inclusive of our hard-working staff, rather than just my sentiments. We commit ourselves to dismantling the legacy of white supremacy within our own organization, within the feminist communities in which we move, and within our individual hearts and minds.
We are in a rare precious moment where true progress is being made, thanks to the direct action of the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements. We are grateful to have the opportunity to move forward into a better world, together.
Carol E. Tracy, Executive Director
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing and defending the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in Pennsylvania and beyond.
June 2020: Our physical offices are still closed due to the pandemic but we are OPEN and working to serve your needs. Contact us here. Sign up for WLP’s Action Alerts. Stay up to date by following us on twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
