The last few months of uncertainty and protests have highlighted the inequality that casts a shadow over our city and country. From COVID-19 infection rates to police brutality, Philadelphia’s Black community is being attacked by two pandemics: one an acute health crisis, and the other a much more insidious disease of racial oppression.

Earlier this year, I penned an article for Billy Penn about the workforce impact of COVID-19. In that article, I posed a question of “What does it mean for a community to bear the brunt of the workforce fallout from the pandemic?”

Building on that work, I here pose a different set of questions: How do we see racial oppression manifest itself in workforce and hiring practices? How can employers help mitigate this impact? Undoing the systemic oppression of the last several centuries will involve placing racial equity front and center in workforce practices, and I suggest a few ways that employers in the Philadelphia region can do this.

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