You won't have to search too hard to find a safe space here. Look right on the homepage

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If you scroll down on the Daily Kos homepage, you may have noticed a list of anti-racist resources and a message of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Well, both of those resources are the handiwork of the Daily Kos Equity Council, which aims to do exactly what the name suggests: build a better company and community by highlighting issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

I’m a co-chair of the council along with content strategist Cara Zelaya, and we’re excited to announce that Daily Kos will be devoting front page space each month to celebrate a cultural holiday or monthly observance specifically highlighting those pushed to the margins of society.

Since 2021, that space has been used to showcase Black History Month content in February, and that’s a tradition we’d like to continue. We’re also looking to cover historical celebrations from Juneteenth and Pride Month to Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Month, and National Native American Heritage Month. We’re starting with Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May.

Part of the reason we are prioritizing this work is because we want the issues facing these communities to be recognized and respected.

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None of us should have to accept a society that only tolerates us and in some cases, threatens and harms us because we are different. Staff Writer Aysha Qamar has written at length about Asian communities targeted with attacks rooted in xenophobia and ignorance. Marissa Higgins has tracked legislative effort after legislative effort aimed at endangering trans youth and the families who protect them. We write about both blatant cases of violent racism against Black communities and more subtle microaggressions that have become unfortunate workplace and schoolyard norms for people of color in this country.

Disability rights and inclusion activist Imani Barbarin said during an Equity Council panel on ableism that even language more readily identifiable as ableist is often rooted in white supremacy. She gave as examples words like “crazy” and “tone deaf.”

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”When something happens that shakes the system […] people try to tie it to disabilities to create the idea that that person is then disposable or should be gotten rid of,” Barbarin said. “We do this with mass shooters. We do this with Republicans, extremists, and it’s the idea behind it that really bothers me the most, which is that simply by tying somebody to a disability means that we can then disregard them. We can discard of them.”

We don’t discard people here. We celebrate each other. We laugh with each other, and we respect and support each other. We want that work to continue every day and to expand to the larger site community until it’s no longer work, until respecting each other and valuing each other is innate.

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