Congratulations, Mr. President.

You’ve been waiting a long time to hear those words. I vaguely remember a campaign in my youth, in 1988, when a few questionable people pointed out a few questionable things in your speeches and it seemed to disqualify you, back when even a question of integrity problems were disqualifying for a Presidential campaign. Marginal, really. I think they were afraid of you. We got George H.W. Bush that time, and he was a decent man, I think. He did some questionable things, too, before he was President. It’s complicated.

It wasn’t a problem tonight. You lyric-checked Barack Obama, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ecclesiastes, Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton, St. Paul, your grandparents. Spread the faith. That was an emotional moment for me. You can do that when you’re the President-elect. You can refer to others’ words. And you can play with my emotions. It’s okay, really.

There are other things you can do as President. I think we should talk about them.

You have a unique opportunity to show America that government works, and is largely not the problem they’ve been told it is. The People have spent four years learning what it’s like when government isn’t there to protect them from the unseen and unforeseen, the insidious and the accidental. Government agencies keep our food and medicine safe, our air and water clean, and keep pandemics away before we even have to worry. It works for us, and it’s not enough to rebuild those capabilities – we have to make sure that the People understand that employing people to worry about those things for us is so much easier and more effective than everybody trying to be experts about everything and fending for themselves – we’re stronger together.

While we’re talking about government that works for us, I’m going to lyric-check another President. You.

“The African American community stood up again for me. You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”

You’d better believe that We the People are going to hold you to that. I’m sure you watched the coverage. You know that, without Black votes in Philadelphia and Atlanta and Detroit, Brown votes in Phoenix and Las Vegas, without the massive voting population of Middle Easterners who worked hard to become citizens in Detroit and Minneapolis, without the Black Lives who marched to make sure the names George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery were spoken aloud, and then marched to the polling stations, you would be licking your wounds and watching a second Trump Administration stomp on the rights of other human beings at a record pace, without the threat of a re-election campaign to temper their worst impulses.

IT IS NOT ENOUGH this time to simply stop the assault on the rights of African American, Latinx American, and Muslim American people. We’re not doing that anymore, not pretending that the status quo is progress and that it’s enough to stop the erosion. You keep saying the phrase “systemic racism” out loud, and that’s a step that would have been political poison a decade ago, but awareness is not enough. If I may presume…

It’s time to stop the economic profiling that allows corporations and businesses to make billions of dollars without investing one cent into communities of color or of economic disadvantage. Retailers who refuse to build grocery stores in the inner cities, creating food deserts and denying jobs to those who need them most. Distribution aggregators who blight our suburbs and countrysides with huge, soulless concrete warehouses nowhere near public transit for their workers, while enormous facilities of the past lie unoccupied and crumbling, right in the neighborhoods where jobs are needed the most. What are you going to do about it? Will you be courageous enough to stop rewarding companies for merely existing, and use tax policy to reward business for reinvesting, rebuilding and revitalizing communities by renovating what’s already here, in places where those jobs are needed the most? You don’t even need to stop giving corporations the tax breaks that get you the campaign funds – just tie them to something meaningful.

I’d like to give an example of systemic racism about which you may not have thought: school districts and the connection of geographic boundaries and property taxes to school funding. This is a leftover from the desegregation days, something my own hometown illustrates very well. When Federal courts finally started ordering school desegregation around the country, Louisville, KY, officials originally responded by creating a city school district and a Jefferson County school district. Which is to say, the inner-city, black school district, and the outlying, white school district. The idea was to use the existing redlining policies to keep schools, and funding, segregated. The poorer black neighborhoods would get the schools they could afford, and the better-off white neighborhoods had a separate school district that wouldn’t be easily forced to integrate with the city district, and also wouldn’t have to see their taxes go to help funding schools in poor neighborhoods.

That was eventually ruled unconstitutional, and the school systems combined and desegregated via busing and eventually assignment and magnet school programs. But that didn’t stop the problem. Tens of thousands of upper-middle-class white families fled Jefferson County to bedroom communities in surrounding counties, and took their tax revenue to a place where their children would not be forced to attend schools with black children, and where their tax dollars would go to the lily-white school systems in those counties that are inaccessible to lower-income folk because of transportation challenges and a general attitude of unwelcomeness. The phenomenon of white flight led to a shrinking of the property tax base in the district and the de facto defunding of the school districts that need it the most, and this phenomenon was repeated all over America.

The grand idea here is that tying school funding to the artificial boundaries of a political map is inequitable to the students in those districts. It’s time to end that. Every citizen of America benefits from the equitable education of our citizens in hundreds of ways, from the perpetuation and improvement of a workforce that will attract jobs, foster innovation, and build a meritocratic system that rewards those who achieve independent of privilege, to simply the quality of life improvement of living in a community of properly-educated citizens with economic and intellectual hope. School funding should be equitable across all borders and without boundary. It’s time to stop tying educational opportunity to the ZIP Code of your origin.

Having their back means saying their names. Mr. President, nobody should ever have to say another name to make sure they’re remembered, to make them a rallying cry against government-sponsored violence toward communities of color. Enough is enough. No Black person should ever have to be another hashtag.

We know that people of color receive disproportionately longer sentences for crimes. We know people of color are more often detained by police, and see harsher treatment during those interactions. We know that people of color, particularly Black men, are more often killed during these interactions, at an appallingly disproportionate rate. These are things we know.

What we don’t know enough about is how and why. There is no standard for tracking the killing of citizens of any race by police. There is no standard for investigation of these extrajudicial killings. There is no study of the training of police officers, no standards for how these officers are to be trained, not even a rule that says that law enforcement organizations have to report the killing of a citizen to any agency. We simply don’t know, and ‘racism’ isn’t a specific enough answer.

It is time to require all law enforcement agencies to report all police-involved citizen shootings to an agency charged with tracking and studying the details of these tragedies. ALL agencies.

It is time to launch a nationwide study of police training, a real inquiry, to find out why police are killing citizens in large numbers, and to learn how to train police in the areas of conflict resolution and de-escalation. It is not anti-police or anti-rule-of-law to make the job of police less dangerous for them and us.

It is time to modernize police practices, to discover which functions police are serving that should not be the job of police – things like social work, minor disputes – and to recognize that it is inequitable to assign four bicycle cops to a city event in a white neighborhood, but two dozen cops with shotguns to an R&B concert. We need police in our streets. We need tough police with guns in some streets because there are bad people who hurt other people in those streets. We do not need tough police with guns in elementary schools and at community picnics. It is not anti-police to take things off their plate that shouldn’t be their job – it makes their job easier.

And it is time to take the responsibility of investigating and enforcing the law as relates to law enforcement personnel away from those same law enforcement agencies. To recognize that a law-enforcement organization cannot investigate itself fairly or enforce the law equitably against its own members. To call all police-involved shootings what they are – civil-rights issues to be investigated by Federal agents trained for the purpose. It is not anti-police, and definitely not anti-rule-of-law, to expect law enforcement agencies and personnel to abide by the law and to respect the rights of citizens and human beings of all races, religions and backgrounds.

The truth, Mr. President, is that this is the minimum. You said you owe these folks. This is the barest of repayment for what is owed our most vulnerable citizens, the ones who propelled you into the position to restore morality and justice to the actions of the United States government. But I’d bet that if you follow through on these things, a lot of other problems will suddenly become more manageable, and some will disappear entirely.

White allies don’t ask for cookies for doing the right things. We just do them, and recognize that thank-yous are for things above and beyond, and that treating people of color as equals is not above and beyond. It’s what’s required, and what is owed any human being. Here’s your chance to erase the stain of the Crime Bill, to atone for America’s Original Sin by extending a real hand of partnership to people our forefathers exploited, and to form a more perfect union between Causasian Americans and these exceptional Americans, once and for all.

You owe them.