May 25 is the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Every day this week, the Equal Justice Society is sharing a remembrance of Mr. Floyd, examining the impact he had on this country, and renewing our commitment to honor his legacy.
Previous posts:
- Monday, May 19: Five Years After the Murder of George Floyd
- Tuesday, May 20: 72% say no changes that improved the lives of Black people five years after murder of George Floyd
- Wednesday, May 21: Five years after the murder of George Floyd, DOJ abandons police accountability, Congresswoman calls for Derek Chauvin pardon
In today’s remembrance we share remarks delivered yesterday by EJS President Lisa Holder to the May 2025 graduates of the University of California Department of Geography:
“If you committed to anti-racism, racial justice, and antifascism in the 2020 summer of reckoning, then recommit and stand firm to uplift policies that repair the harm and legacy of racial injustice: from diversity, Equity, Inclusion to critical race studies, to implicit bias research and development, to multicultural education, to abolition, to reparations. These are race-conscious policies that repair the nation and undergird a more perfect union.”
Remarks by EJS President Lisa Holder at May 2025 Commencement Ceremony of the University of California Department of Geography (May 21, 2025)
I do a lot of thought leadership, and I must admit that these days it is hard to know what to say to people to stabilize them and restore their sense of belonging. There is so much engineered chaos and ugliness thrown at us minute to minute. The apex predators are ripping the rug from under us hoping that we fall into the “sunken place.”
Remember that the ground lies beneath the rug, holding us firm. Stay grounded and sure-footed. If you stumble for a moment, that’s ok, you’re human. Just find your footing, rise, and stand ten toes down for equality, the rule of law, equity, and inclusive democracy.
Equality, the rule of law, equity, and inclusive democracy. This is our ideological north star. And I hope to offer some tools to help us stay tethered to this north star and sustain us under the threat of authoritarianism.
A quarter century ago, civil rights icons Eva Paterson and Professor Charles Ogletree founded the Equal Justice Society to push back on the notion that race no longer matters and colorblindness is the standard bearer for constitutional interpretation and lawmaking in the courts.
Twenty-five years later, we are movement lawyers grounded in constitutional scholarship and social science. We are activists with litigation expertise, and we understand that laws are made in the legislature and the courtroom and that grassroots movements can be the primary catalyst for law and policy that expands civil rights, racial justice, and inclusive democracy. Nonprofits like EJS are the apparatus, other than voting, that allows the people to exercise power and shape democracy. You can ally with nonprofits, whether it’s through financial support or thought partnerships in service of people-powered democracy.
For me, this work – civil rights democracy expansion – is not a job, it is not even just a profession, it is a vocation that I have been committed to for more than 30 years. It is indeed a ministry.
Social and Racial Justice advocacy is a balance of Heartwork and Headwork. It is quantitative and qualitative. It is both data-driven and narrative-driven. It is empirical and anecdotal. This is why it’s so important to have social scientists as partners and anchors in the liberation and inclusive democracy movement.
So what can social scientists do to make liberation, decolonization, racial justice and inclusive democracy a sustainable reality?
Do your job. Generate the research methodologies, best practices, epistemologies, and disciplined academic frameworks that will serve as the scholarly underpinning for the movement.
Advocate for the protection and expansion of disaggregated data which is under attack.
Educate the public on why data is crucial for making evidence-based policy.
Provide the metrics and datasets that measure outcomes, that connect the dots between historical discrimination and ongoing discriminatory practices and outcomes.
This empirical data and data analysis is critical from a movement lawyer’s perspective because that’s how we show judges and other lawmakers that race-conscious policy is aligned with and not contrary to equal protection and equality as outlined by the constitution and rule of law.
This sounds lofty, but as a practitioner, I assure you that your innovative research helps us protect and expand civil rights wins and lays the foundation for multiracial inclusive democracy.
Now that we have established that geographers are frontline soldiers in the real-time battle to preserve democracy, I hope you will lean into a certain set of touchstones to prime you for battle and sustain you on the front!
Lean into reason, science, empiricism, and narratives with historical integrity. Evidence-based, historically contextualized policies are anchors for equality and the rule of law. Reject apex predators’ ahistorical, irrational, post-democracy, anti-science, anti-truth disinformation narratives. People without a past have no foundation for a sustainable future.
Lean into abundance, not scarcity frames. If the pie is redistributed away from its current regressive configuration – where one percent of the people and the military-industrial complex receive the vast percentage of the nation’s wealth – and toward equal shares for all, then given the wealth of the nation there is more than enough for everyone to take a seat and a satisfying piece of pie, instead of the 99 percent fighting over crumbs. Begin with the whole pie, not the crumbs, to create an abundance frame as the jumping-off point for your scientific analysis in service of inclusive multiracial democracy.
Lean into Hope and lean into “woke.” The segregationist insurrectionist army is on the march. They have doubled down on white supremacy, packaging it as an even more aggressive myth of meritocracy and color-blindness called “anti-woke”. The emotional current for this political ideology is cynicism, nihilism, and fragility that obliterates hope. These psychodynamic and ideological frames are being deployed to dismantle civil rights and inclusive democracy by re-branding all civil rights laws and non-binary agendas as “wokeness” and/or reverse racism.
Understand that equity, equal opportunity, fairness, and equality are not just notions or fads in identity politics, it is the rule of law. Until the courts and the legislators and all three branches of government come to a consensus otherwise, instead of a unilateral power grab by any one of those branches, the equity, equality, and equal opportunity trifecta remains the rule. Our first duty as good citizens and conscientious professionals is to honor the social compact and comply with equity and inclusion because it is good policy and it is the law.
Let me be clear: diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility practices are good for outcomes, they are moral — and they are key to compliance with the civil rights laws that democracy coalitions have labored to pass over the last 75 years.
Executive orders do not amend these laws, which obligate institutions to:
Identify and remove barriers to equal opportunity;
Address harassment and discrimination;
Ensure that policies and practices do not have an unjustified negative impact on protected groups; and
Create environments where people of all backgrounds can fully participate and contribute.
Lean into pro-democracy and antifascism movements as an ideological north star. Scholars who study the rise and fall of authoritarianism observe that the window of time to disrupt and kill an emerging authoritarian regime is short – two years at most. You must lead the counterinsurgency against despotism with an organizing concept that captivates the national consciousness and offers a viable positive alternative worldview.
To help disrupt the authoritarian onslaught, tether your research and analysis to affirmative pro-democracy visions. Find mission partners in the nonprofit sector to apply and leverage your research in service of pro-democracy power-building movements.
If you are already actively engaged in civil society pro-democracy efforts, lean into your proactive programmatic agendas and affirmative mission statements.
The best defense is a strong offense, so lean into proactive missions instead of doubling down on reactive, piecemeal damage control agendas, especially when using litigation and social science research as a tool for racial and social justice.
We cannot abandon our long-term programmatic agendas for social justice because we are scrambling to combat the chaotic barrage of unlawful executive orders.
Notably, we are approaching the five-year memorial of the brutal murder of Mr. George Floyd. If you committed to anti-racism, racial justice, and antifascism in the 2020 summer of reckoning, then recommit and stand firm to uplift policies that repair the harm and legacy of racial injustice: from diversity, Equity, Inclusion to critical race studies, to implicit bias research and development, to multicultural education, to abolition, to reparations. These are race-conscious policies that repair the nation and undergird a more perfect union.
Lean into intersectionality and decolonization constructs. Race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, class, indigeneity are categories that have been weaponized by colonizers for centuries as wedges to divide us. We must strive to unlearn the mainstream mentality that these identities are siloed and hierarchical and remap and decolonize our thinking, adapting a new vision that braids the categories together to reflect our lived experience as beings with complex, overlapping identities. This abundance approach to identity builds more bridges for understanding between people who share common identifiers, and it surfaces sustainable alliances that transcend wedge politics.
The practical corollary is to lean into cross-racial allyship and solidarity. I’ll provide some affirmations that help us lean into multiracial allyship:
“The fate of each minority depends upon the extent of justice given to all other groups.” (Core founder Ina Sugihara)
“The price of liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks -the total liberation in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.” (James Baldwin)
“When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion.” (African proverb)
Along these same lines:
Lean into inclusivity, lifting universal truths and shared values that welcome all people into the democracy expansion conversation.
Lean into succession and legacy; multi-generational movements are sustainable movements. This moment is just a snapshot in time, so please don’t get hysterical. Think of this movement for inclusivity, racial justice, and democracy expansion as a 100-year movement. Accept that you will not make it to the end, but that your contribution through mentorship and succession planning enlists the next generation of changemakers and is the catalyst for future transformation.
Sadly, the anti-woke segregationist insurgents are ahead of the curve on this legacy thinking. They have been organizing a multi-gen, exclusion movement to roll back inclusive democracy and undo our civil right wins for 75 years since Brown v. Board of Education, and for 50 years since Roe v. Wade.
We must quickly pivot to this legacy strategy for sustainable democracy, and you all are perfectly positioned to lead it given your proximity to students and young minds.
We are living in the most disingenuous times, so Lean into Radical Truth-Telling as your North Star for public communications and media engagement. This power grab to eliminate democracy targets comms, narrative, and media messaging. On social media, vet and combat white supremacist, misogynistic, homophobic disinformation and misinformation packaged as catchy soundbites about “anti-woke.” Lift-up fact based, science-based, historically accurate messages grounded in truth.
As tempting as it might be to hide your head in the sand and disengage, opting out is not an option right now. Stay awake, exercise critical thinking, and consume news, media, and information mindfully and intentionally, but not indiscriminately because the constant barrage of bad news will deplete you and make you less effective.
Never be afraid to speak truth to power. As Dr. King said, society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our souls when we look the other way.
Finally, lean into Nirvana, Chi, Flow, Mother Earth, whatever you want to call it. I am no yogi, but I have figured out a few things in my 50 trips around the sun. When the earthly landscape becomes so chaotic and dystopic that minute-to-minute it causes you distress – you mustn’t give way to fear and fragility. Instead, seek balance through yoga, dance, spin, tai chi – whatever it takes to build that mind-body connection that taps into your soul’s vitality and makes you endure.
To move into alignment with that essential energy, sometimes you must simply let go and meditate on daily affirmations, mine are:
There is nothing to fear but fear itself
The struggle is its own reward
We can only go so far as our imagination takes us
We are one
Congratulations colleagues on your achievement, I wish you great success in your careers. We are One and I will see YOU on the frontlines.
Onward! Adelante!