Giving Compass' Take:

• As coronavirus continues to reveal deeply embedded, fundamental injustices across the globe, Lisbeth B. Schorr, at Medium, calls for a complete reconstruction of social institutions.

• What are you doing to embrace the need for change during coronavirus? Why is acknowledging privilege an essential first step in this process?

• Learn more about the deep interconnections between the pandemic and structural racism.

Recent weeks and months have raised the possibility that tectonic shifts are looming, or even under way. The coronavirus revealed deep race-based disparities that have long been widely ignored. Then came the vicious police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, which ripped the veneer off not only policing practices, but many of our core social institutions. Years of police brutality targeting Americans of color suddenly became visible. Long ago, James Baldwin pointed to the importance of this visibility when he wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

The possibility that big ideas could suddenly take hold might have seemed fanciful even months ago. But a global recession, skyrocketing unemployment, a pandemic that could be with us for years, and an unprecedented degree of racial awareness represent the kind of shock to the system that could indeed be the start of massive rebuilding.

The prospect of the laws, regulations, and practices of police departments throughout the country being changed profoundly in the near future seems plausible. The responses to the economic shocks wrought by the coronavirus pandemic are still in turmoil and their effects unclear. In this essay I will address what we have learned from the past that should inform our efforts in two other domains: What it will take to build a reliable anti-poverty safety net, and to re-imagine our social institutions so they will assure decent life prospects for all, including for those whose life prospects are now grim.

By expanding our capacity to generate, disseminate, and apply a full range of evidence, we will be able to build the social structures that would result in all of us living in a nation of universal decency.

Read the full article about remodeling social institutions by Lisbeth B. Schorr at Medium.