Centering Racial Equity in PIT Work

There aren’t many good things that came out of the Coronavirus pandemic. People are sick. People are dying. People are out of work. People are filing for unemployment insurance (UI), and many have been turned down or still waiting for their benefits to start. It’s this final injustice, however, that may end up creating a silver lining for Americans since –because of the soaring number of people who filed for benefits — systemic racism and inconsistencies were uncovered and may finally be eradicated.

New America Public Interest Technology senior advisor Vivian Graubard will explore this topic on Thursday, November 12 during the PIT UN 2020 virtual convening. The session, Centering Racial Equality in PIT Work, brings together moderator Graubard with journalist and former New Practice Lab fellow Monée Fields-White, Matt Morrison, Executive Director at Working America, and Umbreen Qureshi, a designer with non-profit design studio Civilla.

Graubard got the idea for her session over the summer when she and Fields-White uncovered the inequities during a research sprint, which resulted in a new unemployment data dashboard being launched, she says.

“During that sprint we set out to understand the experiences of Black and Latino workers with UI. What we discovered is that on top of all of the barriers that exist when examined, there are compounding inequities that make the UI program really inaccessible for people of color,” Graubard explains. “Even if you were to fix the things like the call centers that are overly busy and broken websites you would not fundamentally fix what is broken about unemployment insurance and how it serves or does not serve people of color.”

Working America’s Morrison says that racism and racial bias “permeate every aspect of American society and that has been the case for more than 400 years. The unemployment insurance system is permeated with both overt and implicit racial assumptions and, quite frankly, that should be no surprise.”

He points to a variety of examples of racial bias including lack of clarity around processing of applications and determinations. “A simple process of operating applications and recording systems would go a long way to shedding light on where there are disparities in applications be processed. Right now, the burden is on applicants in most states to actively pursue claims on an ongoing basis.”

Thursday’s conversation will address all of these points as well as what public interest technologists can do to remove some of the problems within the system. They’ll also talk about what comes next for this work, and how each of the organizations can help make a difference. “We’re really hoping that the racial equity framework will grow. There's a lot of work to do here. We want to actually formalize this framework and make it something that policymakers and advocates and public interest technologists can use in their own work.”

The keynote panel is on Thursday, November 12 at 7 p.m. Sign up to attend here.