Season 2 of "Your Kitchen Cabinet: Radical Leaders Uncovering the Past to Build the Democracy We All Deserve," is a six part series on Zoom that will examine the origins and ideas that birthed democracy in the United States and how those ideals still reverberate today. As candidates and campaigns seek to transform our democracy in this special moment, it is important to understand how we really came to be, to illuminate where we are going, and most importantly, to reveal what type of democracy we deserve.

Wednesday, July 22: The Revolutionary War. How Did We Begin?

Crispus Attucks, a free Black man, is known as the first American colonist killed in the American Revolution. In fact over a quarter of the Revolutionary Army was made up of enslaved people and many enslaved Black people were "given" their freedom if they were able to serve all four years in George Washington’s army. This is a reminder that from the very beginning of what would become the United States, Black and brown people have been commodified in service of this country. George Floyd’s brother asked in his testimony in front of the U.S. Congress in 2020, “what is the value of a Black man’s life, twenty dollars?” What are other ways that Black and brown people are traded in state sanctioned operations to get access to resources that they otherwise would not have access to?

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