Music stars, including Alicia Keys, Mary J Blige and TI, called for the establishment of a United States government commission on racial justice within 100 days of the start of the Biden government.
In 2016, Keys conducted a video titled 23 Ways to Be Killed for Being Black in America, in which celebrities like Beyoncé and Bono recited the circumstances surrounding the deaths of black Americans, including Sandra Bland and Philando Castile.
A new video entitled 17 Ways Black People Are Killed in America follows the same format, with musicians like Khalid, Summer Walker and rappers Quavo and Offset de Migos, describing the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others.
The video calls for the establishment of a commission first proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2020 by Northern California representative Barbara Lee, entitled the United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation. Lee’s proposal was for the commission to “recognize, memorize and be a catalyst for progress, including the permanent elimination of persistent racial inequalities”.
Keys and others call for the commission to be established within 100 days of Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, to bring “restorative and restorative action to achieve racial justice”.
Chaves campaigned with new Vice President Kamala Harris at an Arizona rally in October, telling the crowd: “We are the heads of these candidates, which is 100% true. We hired them! We can feel the joy for all the rights that we fought for so many years. “
His video follows a similar exhortation by Stevie Wonder, who marked Martin Luther King Day on Monday (a holiday that Wonder helped start in 1983) with an appeal for “a truth commission that forces this country to look at its lies ”, in relation to racial equality. “I am calling on President Biden and Vice President Harris to start a formal government investigation to establish the truth about inequality in this country … without the truth we cannot be responsible. Without responsibility we cannot have forgiveness. Without forgiveness, we cannot heal. “
Stevie Wonder
(@Stevie Wonder)
Addressing King, he said: “You would not believe the lack of progress; it makes me physically sick. I’m sick because politicians are trying to find an easy solution to a 400-year-old problem. “
Wonder recently addressed racial inequality in a new song, Can’t Put It in the Hands of Fate, with lyrics that include: “You say you’re tired of us protesting / I say I didn’t have enough to make a change .. You say you believe ‘all lives matter’ / I say I don’t fucking believe. “
In announcing the song in October, he asked for “an atonement, not just for a few years, but for at least three to five years – we cannot ignore and act as if things in this nation had not happened … We cannot erase them out of the history books. 1619, it happened. The slave trade took place, reconstruction took place, 150 million blacks died, it happened. The only way to fix this is through our love and respect. “