The Inseparable Ties Between Racial and Economic Justice

Beloved Community Communications Team

As part of Unity’s Ends Statements — and our commitment to “understand the interconnected roots of oppression” — three newsletter articles from Rev. KP Hong (Oct 2024, Sept 2025, Dec 2025) examine how racial justice and economic justice are bound together within the structures of racial capitalism. To broaden this conversation, we invited several Unity Church members to offer brief “letters to the editor” in response. We asked them what insights or questions feel most pressing, and how those reflections shape their stance in the broader struggle for racial and economic justice. We are grateful for their thoughtful, lightly edited contributions, inviting us all to keep wrestling with the inseparable ties between racial and economic justice.

By and large diversity, equity and inclusion conversations and trainings have left out economic diversity. 

For Unity to fully lean into antiracism, we must do the difficult work of tackling economic justice. There is economic diversity within the congregation, but we must acknowledge that, overall, the congregation is one of economic privilege. 
​
Reparations are increasingly, and rightly so, a part of the discussion around racial and economic justice. While reparations are vital to racial and economic justice, it is a starting point, not an end point. If the current economic structures are left in place, mass inequality will continue.

This requires a much more arduous approach to economic justice. One that requires us to wholly examine our privilege, the comfort we have grown accustomed to, and challenges us in every sense of the word to ask what we are willing to give up for an antiracist society. 
— Jennifer Bubke

With the new ends statement we encounter a first for Unity Church — a mandate to discuss economic justice. 

Discussing economic justice should terrify you. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” That means your economic model has to shift — your asset strategy has to be just. If you don’t hear about economic justice and shutter a little for the health and wellbeing of your 401k then you’re not taking this mandate seriously. 

We (Unitarians) love a hard conversation. Digging into dangerous words is our jam. . . But shifting your retirement savings from the extractive stock market into regenerative and local investments is not a “difficult and transformative conversation.” It’s the practical application of our values in the world. It has consequences — to you — to your money. 

Economic justice is terrifying — if you're committed. 
— Jesse Williams

As a welfare worker 56 years ago, I was assigned to a no-go zone for the Boston Police who would not enter the area because of the danger. These “projects” have since been torn down and progress made but the root causes of economic inequality remain. How do we build an economically just society, one that cares for all? I still believe that real change must come from the ballot box. A guaranteed minimum income, access to child care, quality education, universal health care, and getting money out of politics are just a few issues to be addressed.

I am drawn to a concept in Judaism called Tikkun Olam which refers to the pursuit of social justice and the cultivating of godly qualities throughout the world and based on the belief that each person bears responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but for the welfare of society at large. 
— Jim Mulvey

I agree with that racism, capitalism and, relatedly, colonialism have operated together for centuries — with the social construction and legal imposition of “race” having devastating economic, political, and environmental consequences for othered individuals and communities. 

Overlooking the centrality of capitalism to the creation and maintenance of racism means that many of us have mistakenly sought to address discrimination at an individual level (“liberal antiracism”) rather than at the systemic level (“radical antiracism”). This mistake is not surprising because it appears less daunting to address an issue from an interpersonal instead of a structural standpoint. In addition, some of us have benefitted significantly from the capitalist system. My question is whether all of us are now willing to walk the walk — dismantling the systemic sources of racism — rather than solely talking the talk of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I remain convinced that anything less than systemic analysis and action, informed by individual and communal experience, will not build the beloved community we need and deserve. 
— Justin Cummins

Your brief essay has provoked more thought than any other social commentary I’ve read this year… and raised more questions. 

I would suggest that most governing systems have fallen somewhere into the middle of these opposites. By putting a ceiling on liberty, a limit to how rich or powerful you are allowed by law to become, governments have tried to use some resources to install a floor to keep the least wealthy members of the population from sinking too far into inequality, hence injustice: poverty and all that goes with it. So for most systems, whether more or less autocratic or democratic, the tension and the conflict arise from questions of how high we can allow the ceiling to rise? How low can we allow the floor to sink? 

Added to all of the issues surrounding capitalism and racism, we face seeming determination to render our planet inhospitable and perhaps uninhabitable. Perhaps, having risen to dominate a complex and beautiful biosphere, we are destined to become footnotes to history, if anyone out there is recording the history of the planet Earth.
— Dutton Foster