“West of [interstate highway] 83 there is no viable business district, no economic engine or opportunities for young people,” says James Hamlin, the owner of a local bakery.

Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue was once a thriving cultural center for the city’s Black population during the era of segregation. Famous artists like Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington all arrived in the city to play at Baltimore’s Royal Theater.

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But the venue was demolished in the 1970s, and today most of the businesses that thrived during the era of segregation have closed. Most people who know the area think of the drug trade portrayed in the popular HBO show The Wire, or of the 2015 protests that erupted after police killed a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray. Further east on North Avenue, the paint is chipped off the storefronts and the nearby townhouses are boarded up. It’s impossible not to notice the history of economic neglect in these majority-Black neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, residents claim that the city only responds to service requests, calls to change streetlights, or pick up trash in areas of Baltimore where the majority of the population is white. Black neighborhoods, many of which are cut off from other parts of the city by highways and a lack of public transportation, are largely left to fend for themselves.

But an ambitious plan put forward by the President of Baltimore’s City Council, 35-year-old Brandon Scott, aims to change that by tasking government agencies with finding solutions to the deep structural racism that has plagued the city for decades.

In November last year, the city voted overwhelmingly in favor of establishing a permanent Equity Assistance Fund that would be used exclusively to support efforts that aim to reduce race, gender, and economic inequality. The charter amendment that establishes the fund is one of the first in the country that explicitly mentions structural and institutional racism. A separate bill also obligates each government agency to analyze how it can address structural inequalities and come up with an equity action plan.

Scott, who has been working in local government since he was just 27, said his personal experience growing up in Baltimore motivated him to address the city’s longstanding history of inequality.

“I lived in Lower Park Heights, so you have vacant homes, violence, of course, blight, lead paint in houses, and all of that stuff going on. And then right above me you had some of the most affluent areas in the city,” Scott said, describing a scenario that is typical for Baltimore City.

“The area right to the east of us, right across [highway] 83, is Roland Park, which is one of the most affluent neighborhoods. So when you grow up in the city and you are surrounded by what you see, and then you see the opposite not far away from you, it changes the way you look at the world,” Scott continued.

The differences between Baltimore’s neighborhoods even affect how long residents live. In Baltimore’s Greenmount East neighborhood, the average life expectancy is around 66 years. In Roland Park, in contrast, the average life expectancy is 84 years. The disparities mimic the difference in life expectancy between some of the world’s most and least developed countries.

This starkly unequal landscape was created largely through deliberate policies that aimed to separate the city’s white residents from the Black population. At the turn of the century, in 1910, Baltimore passed an extreme ordinance that prohibited Black and white populations from living in the same neighborhoods. Segregation allowed banks and the federal government to exclude majority-Black neighborhoods from their loan programs, making it nearly impossible for Black residents to become homeowners.

The 1910 ordinance didn’t last very long. The Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional in 1917. But many of the city’s residential neighborhoods remain segregated over a century later.

Researchers have described Baltimore as having an L-shaped corridor down the center of the city where the white population lives, and a majority-Black, butterfly-shaped area that surrounds either side of the city’s main artery. Today, predominantly white neighborhoods in Baltimore receive between two and four times as much capital investment as majority-Black neighborhoods, according to recent estimates.

With all of this in mind, advocates argue that only robust public policy like the kind proposed by Scott can address the problems caused by nearly a century of racist policies.

But one year after the city’s residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bills, the details are still nebulous. Agencies are currently working on their assessments and action plans, and the first agency budgets to be shaped through a lens of equity will be presented in the late spring and early summer.

Mara James, a legislative lead at Baltimore’s Bureau of the Budget and Management Research, noted that there is some concern about how to finance the Equity Assistance Fund.

“The legislation established the Fund but did not designate a funding source. At this point in time, no funding sources have been identified for the Fund,” James said. “We value the efforts of Council President Scott to put equity at the forefront of the City’s work, but our office is concerned about the impact that any dedicated fund may have on the City’s ability to respond to fiscal emergencies or large future costs and ensure we continue to provide core services to residents.”

One number often floated publicly is $15 million, or roughly 3 percent of the police department’s annual budget. But current Mayor Jack Young has also expressed some concern about where the extra money would come from and whether it would be possible to skim money from the police budget.

“The administration is not focused on that legislation. We’re focused on developing an equity framework,” James Bentley, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said about the Equity Assistance Fund.

Bentley argues that the city doesn’t have the ability to finance the Fund because of a state-mandated policy that will require millions of dollars be invested into public schools over the next decade. But the mayor’s office wants to use data and statistics to find new ways to ensure that the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods get as much attention as the wealthier ones, he says.

“When you look at the data it clearly showed a discrepancy, that some areas get more attention to the detriment of others. Mayor Young wants us to use data to show where there are disparities,” Bentley said.

Young has also suggested that tax incentives could be used to attract business to parts of the city that lack economic investment. But some experts argue that purely economic policies may not be enough to achieve sustainable racial and economic justice.

“I wish there was one policy that would solve the history of a lack of investment or neighborhoods being where they are. Tax incentives alone can’t be the answer to structural racism,” said Leon Andrews, a director of the National League of Cities. “It can complement other things that you want to do, but if you just have tax incentives without thinking about the inequities and what that means for the neighborhood, you can repeat displacement and gentrification as we’ve seen in other neighborhoods. Tax benefits for what purpose? Who benefits?”

For many of the youth living around Pennsylvania Avenue, the government’s plans — mayor’s or council’s — mean little if they aren’t implemented.

“We have assets but we don’t have infrastructure,” says Hamlin, the local bakery owner. “The ideas are good but something has to happen.”

The predominantly Black River Parishes along the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge are overrun with over 150 plants and refineries. This area was once dubbed Cancer Alley by residents and media because of the clusters of cancer patients in the area. Now residents are calling it Death Alley because of the significant amount of deaths by cancer and other illnesses among the residents who live near the industrial pollution.

“You put poison in the land, water and in the air, the result is sickness and death. The planned killing of any group is genocide,” Pat Bryant, the son of sharecroppers and a resident of New Orleans, said frankly. Bryant started Justice and Beyond in 2012 as a response to social and environmental injustice along the Louisiana parishes.

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After Emancipation, in 1863, many formerly enslaved Americans remained in the South, occupied fertile plots of land, and built themselves small shanties along the curvatures of the serpent-like Mississippi River, not far from the plantations that once enslaved them. These communities represented freedom and prosperity long fought for.

Descendants of enslaved Americans who, against all odds, made lives for themselves along the Mississippi have found themselves next door to refineries, chemical plants, and waste dumps in one of the most heavily polluted areas of the country. Cities like Morrisonville, Diamond, Mossville, Sunrise, and Revilletown, all founded by formerly enslaved Americans, have all been erased by environmental racism. Each town was devastated by the toxins emitted into the air, water, and soil surrounding their communities by multinational petrochemical companies like Shell and Georgia Gulf Corp. that inevitably seeped onto their land, into their homes, and poisoned their bodies. Those who didn’t fall ill and die were eventually bought out or moved.

The town of Morrisonville, founded in the late 1870s after the Civil War, was wiped off the map by the 1980s. “Morrisonville is one of the sad stories that had so much promise at the end of slavery and fell to such tough circumstances during Reconstruction. The people were able to make a living. They built houses. They educated their families when there was no public education for African Americans. And some of them were able to send their kids to college to build a better life,” Bryant told me.

Today, Dow Louisiana, the largest petrochemical company in the state, resides there, and the only thing left of the historic community of Morrisonville is the town cemetery and its more than 100 years of familial ties. The exploitation and genocide of Black Americans may look different in the 21st century, but there is no denying that racism, environmental and otherwise, plays a powerful role in the fates of these predominately Black Louisiana parishes, and much of America.

Every family along the River Parishes has lost droves of loved ones to cancer and other pollution-related ailments. Many have joined or created activist groups opposing large petrochemical companies, but their cries are being dismissed and pushed aside while people are getting sick and dying at alarming rates.

Resident Mary Hampton started Concerned Citizens of St. John as a result of the lack of action from public officials and the deadly effects of chloroprene coming from the Denka plant to the residents of St. John. In 2016, the EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment revealed that residents living near the Denka Performance Elastomer plant were 800 times more likely to get cancer. Denka is the sole source of chloroprene in the United States. Since rule-making is such a long and strenuous process, the EPA does not prioritize compounds that are not present in more than one community.

“My father had prostate cancer, my two sisters-in-law died with breast cancer, my son-in-law died from bone cancer, my other brother died of bone cancer. So many members of my immediate family that I have lost,” Hampton said of Denka’s legacy in St. John. Her voice broke as she detailed many of those close to her who passed before their time and the children they left behind. “We just want a safe place to live, that’s all.”

According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, in the Environmental Protection Agency’s “22-year history of processing environmental discrimination complaints, the office has never once made a formal finding of a Title VI (prohibits discrimination on the base of race, color, or national origin) violation.” Latinx Americans are exposed to 63 percent more pollution than they create and Black Americans are exposed to 56 percent, in comparison with white Americans, who are exposed to 17 percent less, according to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. People of color contribute less to the overall effects of pollution but carry the bulk of the burden.

Stephanie Cooper, a 50-year-old teacher of 29 years, is Vice President of RISE St. James, an activist group fighting to block Formosa Plastics. Cooper’s family has lived in St. James Parish for four generations. Her father, Oliver Cooper Sr., purchased their land when she was just eight years old. During this same time, he challenged the status quo by running for St. James Councilman — a seat that he kept well into his 70s.

Now, Formosa plans to build a massive ethane cracker complex a mile from the local public school which would emit ethylene oxide, a toxic chemical that causes cancers like non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, and breast cancer.

“We used to enjoy just sitting outside or with the screen door [open] but you can’t do that anymore. The door has to be closed,” Cooper explained. The pollution in the area is so bad that the beautiful garden her family once had is no longer possible and the critters have all but left. “We used to catch butterflies with butterfly nets and catch dragonflies on the fences, but you don’t see too much of that anymore. Now you’d be lucky if you see a pigeon.”

“If Formosa come in, that’s it,” Milton Cayette told me. Cayette’s great-great-grandfather bought 17 acres of land in the late 1800s, which Cayette tends to and lives on to this day. “They said that if anything would happen people would need to be at least a one-mile radius from the center of the plant. They built it 300 feet from my house and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The Taiwanese Formosa Plastics Group was awarded The Black Planet Award in 2009, an award meant for companies creating the most ecological damage on a global level, by Ethecon Foundation. Ethecon cited “a continuing sequence of social and ecological foul play throughout the world.” In fact, one quarter of Taiwan’s greenhouse gas emissions could be tied back to FPG.

Yet, state and local officials offered FPG an estimated $1.5 billion in incentives to bring the chemical complex to St. James Parish, without disclosing any information to residents.

This massacre, followed by subsequent relocation to Fort Humboldt, resulted in the death of nearly one half of the pre-contact Wiyot population — estimated at close to 2,000 people. Today, the tribe has returned to near its ancestral territory, after long legal fights to gain federal recognition, with close to 600 Wiyot people living locally.

Eureka’s return is believed to be the first time a local government has returned land to a tribe in the U.S. Eureka City Council member Kim Bergel described the return as “the right thing to do.”

Eureka’s actions are significant politically, spiritually, and also economically. While Duluwat Island is relatively small, returning the land takes the tiniest step towards rectifying the injustices that the United States has committed towards Wiyot peoples. It signifies a desire to help Wiyot peoples rebuild their community and nation after centuries of dispossession and genocide.

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From 1776 to 1887, the United States transferred nearly 1.5 billion acres of land into American control. Initially, this was done through treaty and executive order or through forcible removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands, often putting them on reservations. While this made up the majority of land seizures, the seizure of land also included the 1887 Dawes Act, otherwise known as Allotment, which sought to individualize Indian land ownership, converting Indigenous peoples into models of homesteading farmers. The Act would cause Indigenous-controlled land to go from 138 million acres in 1887 to just 48 million acres by 1934.

The seizure of lands and territories and the creation of reservations is a significant reason why Indigenous communities have such concentrated poverty in the United States. Imagine being forced to move from the only home you have ever known to a place you have never been, with fewer resources to succeed there, and then being told that the lifestyle that has helped you prosper is “uncivilized,” and that to survive, you need to embrace a completely new worldview. Not exactly a model for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For many, the taking of land coincided with an effort to eradicate Indigenous peoples in general. Peter Burnett, the first governor of California, remarked as such when he told the nascent legislature in 1851 “that a war of extermination will continue to be waged between races, until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

To exterminate a whole group means not just the physical killing of a community. It means the destruction of a worldview, a home. This extermination created Allotment. It created boarding schools that sought to “kill the Indian, and save the man.” It created Indian termination policy, which sought to terminate tribes, relocating and assimilating Indigenous peoples. All of these American policies created the conditions for the intense poverty that Indigenous peoples face today.

These processes of extermination have not resulted in the erasure of Indigenous peoples in the United States – far from it. They have altered the ways in which Indigenous peoples interact with the world, though. Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa/Yurok/Karuk), assistant professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University, notes two things in this regard: First, that the world that contemporary Indigenous peoples inhabit is a post-apocalyptic one. Second, that this post-apocalypse alters Indigenous peoples’ abilities to thrive socially, communally, politically, and economically. When your base mode of living for generations is mere survival, how can you imagine building anything beyond that?

The combination of both land seizure and eradication efforts has resulted in significant economic disparities for Indigenous peoples in the United States. The 2008 Census estimated that 30 percent of all American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) peoples were in poverty. This reached 40 percent for those living on a reservation. Comparatively, the total U.S. population recorded a poverty rate of 16 percent. According to a 2017 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the AI/AN unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. Comparatively, the total U.S. rate hovered around 4.4 percent.

This is what makes the return of Duluwat Island to Wiyot peoples so important. It acknowledges past wrongs, understands how the original seizure of land harmed generations irreparably, and tries to rectify that in a culturally, spiritually, politically, and economically significant way. In giving back the land, instead of Wiyot Tribe buying the land back as has happened previously, Eureka took a step towards conciliation.

While the United States has often tried to find alternative methods of compensation for Indigenous land, the federal government would do well to follow the example of Eureka and the Wiyot Tribe. Just give the land back.

But today, fourth-generation farmer June Provost and his wife Angie are among the very last of Louisiana’s black sugarcane farmers — and they’re fighting desperately to retain their land and livelihood. (Months of interviews and research became a feature story I published last October in the Guardian.)

After June was driven out of business in 2015, and then Angie in 2017, the Provosts alleged discrimination and wrongdoing by local agricultural lenders, a local sugar mill, and county U.S. Department of Agriculture officials, and they’ve brought multiple lawsuits to prove they were treated differently than white farmers. June and Angie say the tactics used to force them from their land — including vandalism, intimidation, and contract and lending discrimination — have been widely deployed by various institutions to topple the entire black farming community.

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The agriculture industry is awash in such discrimination, with slavery as the original and most horrifying sin. In 1982, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights predicted that by 2000, there would be no remaining black farmers in the United States (today, fewer than 2 percent of U.S. farmers are black), and a 1997 USDA internal audit showed that loan applications for black farmers took three times longer than white farmers to be processed. The Pigford lawsuits of the 1990s and 2000s found that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had consistently discriminated against black farmers during the loan process, and resulted in pay-outs (most of them $50,000) for thousands of victims.

As a country, we are long overdue to atone for the unpaid labor, trauma, and harm inflicted upon enslaved Africans — as well as for decades of Jim Crow policies, which widely placed black Americans and their descendants at a stark economic disadvantage. Today, the call for reparations is gaining momentum. Many key Democrats have expressed support for legislation sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), which would establish a commission to study the feasibility of reparations.

The first attempt at reparations came on the heels of the Civil War, when General Sherman ordered a sweeping redistribution of land across the U.S. South. Up to 400,000 acres of formerly Confederate-owned land was to be divided into 40-acre parcels and given to newly-freed slaves. But just months later, President Andrew Johnson overturned the order, and black families were evicted from their new acreage. “Forty acres and a mule” became one of many broken promises by the U.S. government to black America.

During slavery, the Louisiana sugar barons were among the most brutal perpetrators, using the bodies of enslaved black people to build and work their plantations. Such plantations produced the products that would prop up the early U.S. economy. Angie Provost’s ancestors were stolen from their home in Cameroon and forced onto slave ships bound for Louisiana sugar plantations.

Even after slavery was outlawed, many black workers were imprisoned as indentured servants under a legal system of debt peonage. Laborers worked off debt in the fields for free, but were kept perpetually in debt, forever bound to work without pay. Just as wealth, opportunity, and the institution of racism was passed to the children of white plantation owners, imprisonment by debt was often transferred to the next generation of black laborers.

In her book, Farming While Black, farmer and food sovereignty activist Leah Penniman wrote, “If African American people were paid $20 per week for our agricultural labor rather than enslaved, we would have $6.4 trillion in today’s dollars in the bank right now. This figure does not include reparations for denied credit and homeownership opportunities, exclusion from the social safety net and education, or property theft and destruction.”

But reparations aren’t only about the past. A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that “between 1983 and 2016, the median black family saw their wealth drop by more than half after adjusting for inflation, compared to a 33 percent increase for the median white household.” Today, reads the report, “the median black family today owns $3,600 — just 2 percent of the $147,000 of wealth the median white family owns.”

A similar disparity exists in land ownership. In the United States, white landowners own 98 percent of rural acreage (worth over $1 trillion), while black landowners own less than one percent (worth approximately $14 billion).

Last year, during an interview with Hank Sanders, one of the lead attorneys for the Pigford case, I asked him if he felt that the $50,000 pay-outs that black farmers received constituted justice. “I feel like we did the best we could do, but I don’t think that was justice,” he said. “When you take a farm away from people, you not only take away a way of earning a living, you also take away a lifestyle. Money can’t replace that.”

But, he said, it was a start. It was also proof of the widespread racism within the department, and the significant harm done to black farmers at the hands of the government.

“Pigford was meant to right the wrongs of discrimination, but most of the claimants awarded are out of business,” said Angie. This now includes June, who received a pay-out as a Pigford claimant, along with his father and brothers, leading Angie to believe that reparations should also include policy changes, “including extending legal limits for retaliation.”

“Those of us discriminated against — whether it’s racism or sexism — rarely speak up or fight back based on the fear of being eliminated or devalued further,” said Angie. “Taking away that fear is part of reparations.”

Here’s the tl;dr:

A first bill, introduced at the end of January by Sen. Bob Casey, and Reps. Bobby Scott and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, would phase out section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which has made it legal for employers to pay disabled workers as little as pennies per hour. It would also provide resources to help these workers transition into competitive, integrated employment in their communities.

Second, Congressional Democrats’ $15 federal minimum wage bill, the Raise the Wage Act — introduced in mid-January by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Bobby Scott with the backing of the full Democratic leadership — would also eliminate the subminimum wage for workers with disabilities and phase out the separate subminimum wage for tipped workers, which is currently $2.13 per hour.

In the first week of February, Sen. Kamala Harris and Rep. Raúl Grijalva introduced the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, which would extend time-and-a-half overtime pay to agricultural workers, as well as minimum-wage protections to most agricultural workers who still lack them.

Finally, Sen. Harris and Rep. Pramila Jayapal recently announced the first-ever federal domestic workers’ bill of rights, which would give the nation’s more than 2 million home care workers long-denied rights to overtime pay, safety and health protections, recourse against harassment and discrimination, collective bargaining, and more.

This legislation is designed to chip away at several pernicious “-isms” written into the United States’ labor law — racism, sexism, and ableism.

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Many labor carve-outs are the direct legacy of slavery: At the urging of Southern lawmakers determined to maintain a white economic and social hierarchy, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) — which established some of our most basic worker protections like the rights to form a union, earn a minimum wage, and receive overtime pay — cut out domestic and agricultural workers, who were overwhelmingly black and brown. At the same time, the discriminatory practice of tipping — which had originally enabled American employers to avoid paying wages to newly-freed black workers — and treating disabled workers as inferior permanently codified some forms of labor as lower-than-minimum-wage work.

As a result, workers in these groups tend to have a lot less power than other workers. For starters, the pay isn’t enough to keep workers out of poverty even if they have a full time job: In recent years, the median annual wage has been roughly $23,000 for tipped workers*, home care workers, and agricultural workers, and an estimated 420,000 disabled workers employed in “sheltered workshops” created under 14(c) were paid an average of $2.15 per hour. These groups of workers are also disproportionately likely to endure physical and verbal abuse, sexual harassment, wage theft, discrimination, and dangerous working conditions.

Yet these unprotected jobs make up a large and growing swath of our economy: Caregiving is the fastest-growing major occupation in the United States, and is forecast to be one of the largest sectors by the end of the next decade, with more than 4.1 million workers employed as home health aides and personal care aides by 2026. The largest employer of tipped workers, the restaurant industry, accounts for 9.5 million workers, which is nearly seven percent of the U.S. workforce. Since these jobs are heavily dominated by women and workers of color, their devaluation perpetuates America’s already-deep inequalities on the basis of race, gender, and disability. The Trump administration has further endangered the many immigrant workers in these professions — who made up 24 percent of domestic workers and 76 percent of farm workers in recent years — by pushing anti-immigrant policies and using xenophobic language that make it even less likely that immigrant workers will seek recourse for illegal or inhumane treatment.

Opponents will likely break out the usual fearmongering that closing loopholes will harm rather than help workers by making it harder to find jobs, like we’ve recently seen in D.C., New Jersey, and Maine. The problem with their argument is simple: States have already enacted these policies and seen positive results. In the eight states where tipped workers are paid the full minimum wage, tipped workers earn more and restaurant growth has outpaced other states. States such as New Hampshire and Maryland are already phasing out the subminimum wage for disabled workers, while eight states and Seattle already have domestic workers’ bills of rights in place. And in several states, including agricultural powerhouses California and Minnesota, farm workers have won overtime protections.

Lawmakers’ proposed fixes are by no means perfect. Perhaps the most egregious untouched loophole affects America’s more than 800,000 incarcerated workers, who earn as little as a few cents per hour — or nothing at all — and for whom labor is compulsory in some states. Also excluded are the roughly 1 in 8 workers in so-called “alternative work arrangements,” including independent contractors (ICs) as well as workers whose employers misclassify them as ICs to avoid taxes and legal requirements, such as Uber and Lyft drivers. Still, even if they’re imperfect and eight decades overdue, the proposed fixes are an important steps forward.

It’s no accident that the champions of these efforts in Congress are largely women and people of color, who come from the communities that have borne the brunt of these exclusionary policies. And it’s encouraging that some lawmakers believe that in addition to big, bold ideas, being a true progressive leader involves unglamorous, piecemeal grunt work, such as plugging the longstanding leaks in the nation’s labor laws. As long as the loopholes continue to exist, the shameful “isms” that create our two-tiered society will continue to stare us down through the holes of our frayed worker protection system.

* The most recent analysis of tipped workers’ wages nationwide, by Sylvia Allegretto and David Cooper, uses 2011-2013 BLS data in 2013 dollars. We assume that median wages have grown at roughly the pace of inflation, adjusting to today’s dollars using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers.

None of those claims are exactly true, but the one that happened during his State of the Union address this year is what keeps me up at night. While making the case for his economic platform, Trump specifically touted low black unemployment, saying, “[It’s] something I’m very proud of, African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded.” Republicans cheered; Democrats grimaced. I rolled my eyes.

The average black unemployment rate since November 2017 is 6.5 percent — indeed the lowest it has been since the United States started recording unemployment for black workers back in 1972. But that does not mean all black Americans are in full economic health, as the president’s proclamation would suggest. More to the point, it is debatable whether Trump should get any credit for such low unemployment metrics or whether they are just a continuation of the Obama administration’s efforts.

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First of all, black unemployment is still nearly double white employment nationwide. (In 14 states and the District of Columbia, black unemployment rates are more than double white rates, and in South Carolina black unemployment is triple white rates.) If white unemployment levels were anywhere near this high, it would be considered a national crisis.

There were only 11 times in the past 50 years when the white unemployment rate has been higher than today’s black unemployment rate — and five of those were during the worst recession since the Great Depression. As a reminder, the government responded to that recession with a $831 billion stimulus to boost the economy and lower unemployment. Yet, Trump is praising the same unemployment rate for blacks today without a similar economic response.

What’s worse, the jobs that black workers and white workers get do not pay the same: Black workers earn less money and build less wealth than white workers.

The typical full-time black worker still earns about $12,000 less annually than a white worker. Gender pay gaps also compound this inequity. On average in 2017, black women earn 66 cents for every dollar earned by a white man. That has a serious impact on peoples’ lives: Roughly 20 percent of black and Hispanic people live in poverty compared to less than 9 percent of white people. This is, in part, because black workers are more likely to be trapped in low-wage work, and the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for nearly a decade. A yearly income at this rate is just over $15,000.

Structural racism contributes to pull black men, in particular, into low-wage work, especially for those with a criminal record. Black men are incarcerated at six times the rate of white men. With an estimated 87 percent of employers conducting criminal background checks, formerly incarcerated individuals are more likely to remain unemployed one year after their release and formerly incarcerated men are paid 40 percent less annually than non-incarcerated men.

In addition to wages, wealth disparities along racial lines are even more disturbing. Wealth, which is often held in the form of a person’s homes, savings, and investments, is a cushion that helps families pay for education or keep themselves afloat during periods of unemployment. In 2016, the median wealth of white Americans was $142,180 compared to $13,460 for black Americans.

This directly impacts black Americans’ social mobility. Racial gaps are identifiable with respect to college completion, homeownership, and criminalization. Black Americans hold college degrees at only 62 percent the rate of whites. Among black households, one-third fewer are homeowners compared to white households. Even when black Americans do become homeowners, if the neighborhood they reside is more than 50 percent black, their homes are valued at nearly half the price of similar homes in communities with no black residents. And, with a prison population of 487,300, black Americans account for one-third of America’s federal and state prison inmates, which is more than twice their share of the U.S. population.

Trump’s rosy economic picture is dangerously misleading for black workers in America. The unemployment rate may be lower for black Americans than in the past, but it is still high compared with white rates — and a web of discrimination, criminalization, and low wages is still holding people back. Glossing over those truths to focus on the statistic that suits the president’s talking points doesn’t make the reality of things any better. Black people should not be used as a convenient political prop — especially without meaningful investment in our communities to better our full economic outcomes.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the nature of employment statistics for formerly incarcerated individuals.

Karen had cycled in and out of prisons for crimes committed in the Greater Philadelphia area, ranging from identity theft and fraud to prostitution and strong-armed robbery. In her early 20s, a Delaware judge handed down a drug trafficking conviction that came with her first of several prison sentences. That’s when she was invited to enroll in a collective-oriented recovery program—a method that was relatively new to that prison in the early 1990s, and Karen’s first exposure to drug treatment. The program was designed to be a “total treatment environment,” where participants were separated from the distractions of normal prison life with other inmates, and instead lived and worked in a space focused on recovery, mutual support, and accountability for self-change.

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Karen didn’t make it through even 5 weeks of the 12-month program before getting kicked out for insubordination to a counselor. When I asked her to reflect on her thoughts about leaving the counseling program to return to work assignments and the general prison population, her response startled me. “I loved [leaving]” she said. “It was just time for me to leave … I ended up losing weight in there. I had lost 19 pounds and ain’t nobody know who I was.”

What Karen encountered—and happily left—was a type of treatment program on which a lot of U.S. prisons rely: the therapeutic community (TC). Based on her story, and the stories of those like her, its success seems to depend on the race of the participants.

*

More than 1 million adults with serious mental illnesses are currently under criminal justice supervision, and the criminal legal system has emerged as one of the largest dedicated providers of substance abuse treatment for American citizens. Treatment for inmates with substance use disorder ranges from cognitive behavioral therapies, which teach patients to identify how thoughts and beliefs affect behavior, to medication, such as methadone, and even to mindfulness, which teaches students how to acknowledge and accept their present-moment struggles and design healthy ways to cope with those feelings and triggers.

Currently, more than 25 percent of state inmates and 1 in 5 federal inmates receive group-based drug treatment, typically offered in the form of a therapeutic community. The guiding approach of the TC is to provide drug-addicted inmates with a substance-free environment and group-based counseling. What sets this prison-based model apart is its focus. Unlike other programs that treat addiction, with TC, it’s understood that the person is sick, and that addiction is only a symptom of that sickness.

For example, during half-day “group shares,” participants are supposed to publicly examine their personal choices. If someone’s behavior doesn’t support the stated values of the TC, they are confronted by the community to help them “get back on track.” This recalibration takes shape first in the form of a verbal “pull-up,” where one community member makes the transgression of another known to the rest of the community. This exposure usually takes place during “encounter groups,” or “EGs,” as Karen referred to them— mandatory group-based meetings marked by harsh public shaming.

My research team interviewed 300 men and women who participated in these encounter groups while incarcerated in Delaware, and several described the experience as being situated in the middle of a pinball machine, where when in the “hot seat” (literally in the center of the group of other TC residents circled around you), you are emotionally hurled from one peer’s criticism to the next. Karen described why she was glad to not have to deal with it anymore:

EG is when everybody is sittin’ around in a circle, and you sit right in the middle of that circle, and when they call your name you would turn around to ‘em and they just blow you right out. Anything that they wanted to say—cuss at you—all you do is sit up in there and you don’t do nothing.

The rationale for this element of “treatment” is to require participants to publicly admit that their choices and negative behaviors got them to where they are now. This is a critical part of TC programming, and newer residents are socialized into these norms by older residents and TC staff, many of whom are in recovery themselves.

Respondents I spoke with shared that the initiation practice breeds bitterness and despair.

Leaving the TC, however, is no simple feat. Participants aren’t assessed as making progress unless they accept that they are “sick” and that they are personally responsible for their current imprisonment and the circumstances that brought them there. But in an age of massive cuts to public benefits and derogatory myths about “welfare queens,” female drug treatment clients are already often characterized as pathologically inferior and dependent. Those without jobs, or children they care for, must tread this territory with a very light step. And for formerly incarcerated non-Whites who must also carry the disproportionate burden of discrimination in post-prison housing and labor markets, the “addict” label is even more dangerous.

*

My interviews with current and former White TC participants suggest that, even though they also find pull-ups horrific, they are more comfortable adopting the label of “addict.” They shared that adopting a sick role allows them to enjoy a collection of rights and pardons, including protection from having to assume full responsibility for their life circumstances, and access to more inclusive, less blame-laden care. We’ve seen the same thing with the emerging conversation about the opioid crisis and how much collective empathy has been extended to White opioid users, despite being denied to Black heroin users for decades. Justine, a 51-year old White women from the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware, shared that she knew that her addict status would have hurt her recovery and post-prison reintegration prospects much more if she were not White:

When I got out of state [prison], it was like people forgave me in ways I never expected.  They thought that because they saw me doing the work, going to meetings, walking the steps—they thought that I deserved a second chance … I learned that nobody wants a pretty White girl to go to waste like that. Strangers will fight for me even if I won’t.  That’s a truth that still gets me out of trouble today.

Experiences like Justine’s underscore the benefits of White privilege and class privilege. Studies show that White job candidates, regardless of their backgrounds, are given the benefit of the doubt in the labor market in ways that are denied to Black applicants. On the other hand, Black jobseekers are more hesitant to disclose anything that confirms the drug-using or criminal stereotype that they believe employers are already harboring.

Melanie, a Black woman who had served over 10 years for a cocaine possession conviction, shared that the illness language was synonymous with “junkie” and would never help her once released from prison. Instead, she believed that those labels would only lock her out from viable job opportunities and housing options, which are already limited for poor racial minority women with criminal records. Melanie was one of many who either “faked it,” relying on a script that she believed TC counselors wanted to hear, or dropped out of the TC altogether and forfeited the opportunity to claim a formal rehabilitation status.

Other Black respondents left the program because of their desire to get out from under the state’s gaze as soon as possible. The appeal to White TC graduates of prolonging treatment for the sake of earning a certificate of rehabilitation that could be displayed to prospective employers and landlords didn’t have the same luster for Black graduates. For White graduates, the certificate served as a badge. For Black graduates, the certificate lingered as a foul stain, proof of their diseased persona that could resurface at any time.

We already live in a society where Black people simply don’t get to be pardoned, sick, redeemed, or fully human. Incarcerated people who are Black and assessed as drug-addicted are self-selecting out of the corrections-based recovery process because it simply costs them too much and nets them too little.

Damon, a Black man who had worked in construction since his teens but couldn’t find work upon returning home from prison, had this to say about flaunting the TC graduation credentials: “I can tell you this much … I don’t know what the silver bullet is, but I know that that ain’t it.”

* All first names are pseudonyms and used to protect research subjects’ privacy.

**“Black” and “White” are capitalized throughout to illustrate that they represent political categories, just as you would see when identifying an “Irish,” “American,” or “Chicano” individual.

Now, in a groundbreaking new study by a team of researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and the Census Bureau, he’s changing the conversation yet again. This latest study finds that even when children grow up next to each other with parents who earn similar incomes, black boys fare worse than white boys in 99 percent of the country. And, perhaps even more staggering, those gaps only worsen in neighborhoods with low poverty rates and good schools.

I spoke with Chetty to unpack this new study and what it means for our understanding of racial inequality in America.

Rebecca Vallas: So the racial income and wealth gap has long been documented, but your study sheds new light on what’s driving income inequality across racial groups. What did you find with your colleagues?

Raj Chetty: What’s new about the study is that it takes a perspective across generations. So most prior work on racial inequality in the United States has looked at people with a snapshot at a point in time—comparing adults who were, let’s say, 40 years old who were black versus white versus Hispanic and looking at how their incomes and other outcomes differ. But what we do here is use data that span across generations where we can link kids to their parents. And in this case we’re able to use anonymized data covering about 20 million kids and their parents and look at how these disparities evolve across generations.

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The key finding that emerges from this analysis is that there are very large differences by race, especially when it comes to kids’ chance of climbing and staying at the top of the income ladder. Most strikingly, even among kids who grow up in high-income families, if you’re black, you have a much lower chance of remaining in the next generation at the top of the income distribution or even in the middle of the income distribution than if you’re white. Black kids have almost an equal chance of ending up at the bottom as they do of staying at the top if they start out in a high-income family.

The reason that’s so important is that it tells us these disparities are not just arising from something that’s happening today. Trying to climb the income ladder for black Americans is almost like you’re on a treadmill. You climb up in one generation only then to fall behind again and have to climb up once more, and it’s that feature, that cycle that has to be broken to combat these disparities in the long run.

RV: Your study also found that racial inequality can’t be explained by differences in cognitive ability, which maybe sounds common sense to a lot of folks listening, but is actually pretty important as an empirical finding considering a lot of the narratives that still persist out there about what explains poverty in America.

RC: That’s right. We really don’t think differences in ability explain the gaps that we’re documenting, and there are two simple reasons for that. The first is the pattern that I just described of downward mobility across generations. It’s really only there for black boys. Black women do just about as well as white women once you control for their parental income. And that suggests first of all, if you look at most prior theories of differences in cognitive ability, The Bell Curve book for example, it does not present evidence that you’d expect these differences to vary by gender. Furthermore, if you look at test score data, which is the basis for most prior theories about differences in ability, the fact that black kids when they’re in school tend to score lower on standardized tests than white kids, that actually is true for both black boys and for black girls to the same extent. In contrast when you look at earnings there are dramatic gender differences.

And so that suggests that these tests are actually not really capturing in a very accurate way differences in ability as they matter for long-term outcomes, which casts doubt on that whole body of evidence. So, based on that type of reasoning, we really think this is not about differences in ability. One final piece of evidence that echoes that is if you look at kids who move to different areas, areas where we see better outcomes for black kids, you see that they do much better themselves, which again demonstrates that environment seems to be important. This is not about immutable factors like differences in ability.

RV: You mentioned gender differences. One of the most interesting pieces of the study—to me in particular—was that when it comes to women, it seems to be a very different story.

RC: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think we were quite surprised by that. So there is earlier evidence showing that gaps in wages, for example, are smaller for women between black and white relative to black and white men. What we were struck by is if you just control for parental income so you look at two children, say growing up in a family making $50,000 a year, if you look at their daughters they have essentially the same outcomes in terms of earning, wage rates, employment rates, their chance of going to college. Lots of different outcomes you can look at.

If you look at boys, it’s a completely different picture. If you compare black boys to white boys you see enormous gaps in earnings and employment rates, perhaps most starkly in the context of incarceration. One in five black men born to a low-income family is incarcerated on a given day, which is just an astonishingly high rate. You don’t see anything like that for both black and white women.

Now, one thing I want to emphasize here is that in some of the public discussion following the paper, people have been a little bit surprised. “Are you saying there is no issue here for women? That doesn’t really sound right.” I want to emphasize that that is not what we’re saying. First of all, if you just look in the raw data, there is still a significant difference in the earnings of black women and white women, and the reason for that is black women still grow up in much lower-income families than white women. So it’s only once you control for parental income that their outcomes look much more similar. The second important point to note is that black women, white women, and black men all have relatively similar levels of earnings, that it’s really white men who have considerably higher levels of earnings. The reason we focus on black men is when we look at certain outcomes like the probability that they have a job or their odds of being incarcerated or their chances of completing high school, they do look like an outlier relative to all the other groups. Black men are significantly less likely to be employed than black women, they are significantly more likely to be incarcerated, they’re significantly less likely to complete high school. And so it does seem like there are a special set of challenges confronting black men. That’s not to say that there’s no issue for black women or that gender equity is not an issue, that’s just not the focus of this study.

RV: The gaps that you found in your research only worsen in neighborhoods with low poverty rates and good schools. Why is that?

RC: Both black kids and white kids do much better in places that have better schools, that have low poverty rates, that you might think of intuitively as “good neighborhoods.” So we’re not challenging that intuition at all. However, what you see in the data is that white kids gain more from being in these lower-poverty areas and from attending better schools than black kids do. And as a result the gaps between white kids and black kids are larger in those areas. So the takeaway from that is not that schools are not important or that having lower-poverty, lower-crime areas are not important; all of those things would help black kids and white kids as we’ve shown in our prior work.

What this study is showing is it is not adequate by itself to close black-white disparities. You need to do more than that. You need to perhaps integrate black kids into these better schools so that they can take advantages of the resources they offer to the same extent that white kids do.

To put it differently, thinking about socioeconomic class and neighborhood is not a substitute for thinking about race. We need to think about how to narrow racial disparities separately.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on March 23. It was edited for length and clarity.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, children of color are significantly more likely to be referred to special education than white children. They are also more likely to be educated in segregated settings—away from nondisabled peers—and to be suspended from school. For example, in the 2013-14 school year, 6 percent of all public school children received at least one out-of-school suspension. This figure doubles to 12 percent for children with disabilities, and doubles again to approximately one quarter of black, Hispanic, multi-racial, and American Indian/Alaska Native boys with disabilities.

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That much time in segregated classrooms—or being out of class entirely—drags down students’ academic performance. Only 3 percent of black 4th graders in special education were proficient in reading; Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native students are 5 and 6 percent proficient, respectively. Since the overwhelming majority of children in special education can complete grade-level work with appropriate interventions and supports, these numbers point to something beyond student ability: an unequal education. Students in segregated classrooms are less likely to engage with effective educators and less likely to participate in enrichment activities. Decades of research clearly show that children with disabilities perform better academically when they are held to high expectations and have access to the general curriculum.

That’s all in addition to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 60 years ago that “separate but equal” is inherently unequal.

When Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 2004 to revamp special education, it tried to address this inequality through specific provisions about significant disproportionality. But more than a decade later, black students are still 40 percent more likely to be identified as needing special education and are twice as likely to be labeled as having an intellectual disability or emotional disturbance. Hispanic students are 40 percent more likely to be labeled as having a learning disability, and American Indian/Alaska Native students are 60 percent more likely to labeled as having an intellectual disability. At the school district level, the data can be even worse: Almost 800 school districts identified black students with emotional disturbance 300 percent more often than white students.

That’s in part because the IDEA doesn’t define “significant disproportionality.” The Department of Education originally gave states full discretion on how to identify school districts, so states created definitions that were almost impossible to meet—and let themselves off the hook when it came to addressing any problems. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), out of a total of more 15,000 school districts in the United States, only 356 school districts (approximately 2 percent) were flagged as having overrepresented students of color in special education.

In 2016, the Department of Education issued regulations requiring states to use a standard approach to identify significant disproportionality. It also established more effective ways to address the issue. This is the specific part of the law that the Trump administration wants to delay: the one with the potential to make it effective. More than one hundred civil rights and disability organizations have already expressed opposition to this roll-back.

According to the Trump administration, the rule might not address the problem. But since states are just beginning the appropriate analyses and are not required to comply with the rule until July 2018, they simply don’t have enough data to say that the rule doesn’t work. The administration also argues that states are in the best position to evaluate the problem, despite the decade of evidence proving otherwise.

Unfortunately, this appears to be part of a pattern of rolling back hard-won protections for children and adults with disabilities from the current administration. We know that Secretary Betsy DeVos is considering rescinding critical guidance protecting children of color and children with disabilities from unfair and illegal discipline practices. The Department of Justice recently rescinded a number of pieces of significant guidance regarding the civil rights of individuals with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, during her confirmation hearing and subsequently, Secretary DeVos has displayed a lack of clarity and purpose regarding enforcing the rights of children with disabilities and recently rescinded 72 pieces of guidance related to special education without sufficient explanation.

Under federal law, the public has 75 days to provide comment on this proposed rule. Children of color have already waited through Jim Crow and segregation, Supreme Court cases and legislation, for an equal public education. How much longer must they wait?

For more about this, listen to Michael Yudin on the February 2 episode of Off-Kilter. 

But even with those words of encouragement, there were still times when I felt I was lacking, and that I stuck out like a sore thumb—beyond the difference in my race and skin color. I had my fair share of racist encounters: classmates asking if we were going to get shot by gang bangers on a school trip to see Watts Towers, and being bullied by boys who were universally kind to the white girls in my class. I also had my first experiences with classism, even at the age of 9.

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Classism—especially in a country where most people believe they are middle class—is subtle and implicit. It was there when my Spanish teacher didn’t realize some students might not be able to afford a camcorder to complete an assignment, until my mother called and asked for an alternative way for me to complete the project. It was there when the same teacher became inexplicably obsessed with my statement, during a class discussion, that I owned an armoire. She was concerned enough about my furniture to talk to my mother about it at a parent-teacher conference: “Loryn claims she has an armoire, but I really think she was trying to fit in with the wealthier kids,” she said.

Those moments were embarrassing, and that embarrassment kept me in my place (which is to say, quiet). Then the class gap started to steer entire curriculums. Like a lot of students, I struggled with math. But while other students had access to expensive tutors, I had to rely on the lessons in school or my parents helping me whenever they could. I often got answers wrong when I was called on, which led to the other kids teasing me. It got to a point where I didn’t even bother raising my hand to speak—I didn’t want to feel that embarrassment again.

In the classroom, we acted according to our status: The rich kids asked for attention, while I tried to be obedient. Research shows that’s typical: An Indiana University study concluded that social class leads to differences in how parents tell their kids to navigate school. More affluent parents tell their kids to ask questions and actively seek attention, while working class parents tell their kids that asking for extra help is disrespectful. And so, the divide between the haves and have-nots is multiplied.

This divide makes the current administration’s emphasis on “school choice” a hard sell. President Trump’s budget called for a $250 million increase in voucher programs, which would pay for more students to attend private schools. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has not provided many additional details, but she is an outspoken advocate for school choice programs, arguing that it focuses on the needs of the individual child. But more often than not, sending students to schools with more resources simply means they’re attending schools that are whiter and wealthier. And that comes with a culture shock.

A study by the Department of Education showed that test scores fell when students moved from public to private schools. Though there are a number of potential causes for the drop in performance, researchers suspect that the different behavioral expectations—just like the ones that plagued me—play the biggest role. And it doesn’t help that teachers have lower expectations for students of color and students from disadvantaged backgrounds—those expectations actually play a bigger role in student outcomes than a student’s own motivation or effort.

If you are convinced that private school vouchers are the answer to the country’s education woes, you will also need to be ready to prepare students who do not come from wealthy families for the classism and class differences they will face. This means training teachers and other faculty to be sensitive to how these differences affect the way kids learn—and yes, how to unlearn the assumptions they may make about poor students.

Nativism—the often racialized view that local interests should be protected over those of immigrants—is as old as the country itself. The anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic “Know-Nothing Party” was a major political force in the middle of the 19th century, electing eight governors and more than 100 members of Congress. The Immigration Act of 1924 severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europeans, targeting Italians and Jews. Just this week, former White House adviser Steve Bannon revived anti-Catholic tropes in voicing his opposition to DACA.

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I spoke with Tyler Anbinder, a historian at The George Washington University and expert on the history of nativism in the United States, about how Trump’s decision fits into nativist politics throughout the country’s history.

Jeremy Slevin: You’ve written a lot about this concept of nativism. Can you start by explaining what it means and where Donald Trump fits into it?

Tyler Anbinder: Nativism is the fear of or dislike of immigrants and the belief that immigrants make the United States a worse place to live. Donald Trump fits in the pattern of American nativism that we’ve had for several centuries in that there’s always been a certain portion of the population that has a gut reaction that immigrants are a bad thing, that they take jobs from other Americans, that they change American culture for the worse, that immigrants can never become true Americans. Those tend to be the strains of nativist thought.

JS: Is there precedent for this level of vitriol and this level of nativism at the presidential level?

TA: Probably not at the presidential level. Typically, it’s been Congress that’s been much more anti-immigrant than presidents. In the past, when you had Congress pass anti-immigrant legislation, presidents have repeatedly vetoed it, and that happened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with presidents such as Taft and Wilson vetoing immigrant-restriction legislation.

So this is a rare case in which the president tends to be the leader of the anti-immigrant movement and Congress is maybe a little less willing to go along.

JS: Obviously the big news this week is DACA, rolling back President Obama’s executive order protecting DREAMers. I think what makes this shocking to a lot of people is that these are people brought here as kids, traditionally a sympathetic political group. Has there been a singling out of immigrant children, either for good or for ill, in the past? Or is this a new territory?

TA: This is pretty much a new territory, because for most of American history, children have not been immigrants. Immigrants would overwhelmingly be people in their 20s especially, late teens, maybe early 30s … immigrants rarely brought children to America. They typically came to America unmarried, trying to strike out in the world on their own. There were exceptions—during the Irish potato famine for instance, or when Eastern European Jews were escaping the Pogroms in Russia. But typically, children haven’t been a very big part of the American immigration story.

JS: The not-so-subtle subtext of all this is racism, whether against Muslims like we saw in the travel ban and now Latinos with the end of DACA. It seems like race and immigration have always been linked—how has that evolved over time?

TA: Certainly American nativism has always had a racial dimension, even though exactly what people mean by the term “race” has changed. In the 19th century, the big targets of the nativists were the Irish. The American nativists believed that the Irish were of a different race—that most white Americans were Anglo-Saxon in origin, and the Irish were different and therefore couldn’t become true Americans, and weren’t even intellectually capable of reaching the status of other Americans.

In the late 19th century, the same charges were leveled against Eastern European Jews and Italian immigrants, which were the two biggest immigrant groups in that period. People said the same things. They would go so far as to say that these groups weren’t really “white,” and therefore being “less than white,” they weren’t capable of the intellectual attainments that other whites were and they should be barred from the United States.

JS: Have nativists always wrapped themselves in the identity of whiteness?

TA: Yes, with some exceptions. In the 1920’s, when there were restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigration, African Americans were big supporters of that. They supported it primarily because they said, “immigrants are taking our jobs, and if we have fewer immigrants, better jobs would go to African Americans.”

So it’s not just that nativism is solely something that whites participate in. It can be something that others partake in, too. But in terms of the majority of American nativism, there’s always been a sense that the new group isn’t part of what the current Americans define as being American. For a long time that meant being a certain type of Protestant. Then it meant all Protestants. Then it meant all Christians. Then it meant Judeo-Christians. And that’s where we are today, perhaps.

JS: Steve Bannon said today that American Catholics have an economic interest in unlimited illegal immigration, so you’re kind of seeing that Anglo-Saxon anti-Catholic sentiment creep up again.

TA: That’s so interesting, I didn’t hear about that. Yes, that would precisely fit in with that historic trend.

JS: At the same time, there’s a tension within the modern Republican party between business leaders and Republican elites who often support immigration because it’s seen as a boon to the economy. Has that tension always existed?

TA: Yes, although the important thing to understand is that the business community won out for most of American history. Even when immigration restrictions were in place, often there would be loopholes. A great example of that is in the 1920’s, when restrictions were put in place on Southern and Eastern European Jews, there was an exception for Latinos. And that’s so those employers say, “well, we may not be able to get those Eastern or Southern European workers, but we can get Mexicans instead to do the work that those other people used to do.”

It’s only really starting in the 1960’s, when the restrictions were relaxed on groups like Asians and Africans and Eastern Europeans, that the restrictions were put in place on Latinos.

JS: So it kind of shifted—when Eastern Europeans were the largest immigrant group, they were targeted, and now that Latinos are a larger immigrant group, they’ve become the target.

Obviously, you’re more accustomed to looking backward, but what do you think is next, after DACA? Do you think we’re on a more restrictionist path like the 1920’s, or do you think this has got to shift?

TA: Well, it’ll be really interesting. Until very recently, I’d have said that the restriction could not win out legislatively. Politicians have found that talking tough on immigration is good, but Congressional Republicans are split between a cultural wing and a business wing, and the business wing has been very adamantly against restricting immigration for the reasons that we talked about. Because of that, there’s been this 30-year stalemate where nothing has changed.

But typically, Republican presidents have leaned toward the business wing. Clearly, it’s hard to predict where Trump is going to go, but one option he has is removing the [undocumented] immigrants that are already here. That’s something that the president can do on his own; he doesn’t need Congress, since it’s just an enforcement matter. That seems like the most likely possibility.

The next possibility would be the bill that was proposed by Tom Cotton a few weeks ago calling for a reduction in the number of legal immigrants. I find it hard to imagine that bill passing Congress, but certainly a lot of the Trump base would support that proposal, I’d imagine. I still think the most likely thing is gridlock on that, but with stepped-up deportation.

But I have to say this is a whole new ballgame, so it’s hard to predict.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and will air as part of a complete episode on September 15. It was edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview below.

Right now, we are looking for a story that lets us assign blame for terror and racism. The uprising in Charlottesville has knocked the wind out of us, and it is only natural to hope that the blame can be placed on something impersonal, to believe that no human being might simply be addicted to hate.

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That’s likely how it came to be that former congressman and mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to say this:

Most of the issues that we’re dealing with now are related to poverty. But we still want to put everything in a racial context. The problem with the—and the reason I feel uncomfortable condemning the Klan types is—they are almost the poorest of the poor.

They are the forgotten Americans. And, um, they have been used and abused and neglected. Instead of giving them affordable health care, they give them black lung jobs, and they’re happy.

And that just doesn’t make sense in today’s world. And they see progress in the black community and on television and everywhere and they don’t share it.

It is a good impulse to look for structural reasons for social ills. But it goes too far when it removes agency from human beings. Poverty, even the crushing sort that has you rolling pennies to buy milk, does not cause bigotry. One does not conceive a love of genocide because the economy tanks. We choose what we say, and whom we hurt.

If poverty were a causal effect for racism, then you would not expect to see quite so many virulent racists in the upper classes. David Duke and Richard Spencer were both children of some privilege. Stephen Miller didn’t grow up in straitened circumstances. These are the men who stoke the fears and resentments of the lower classes, who manipulate and misinform.

Lyndon Johnson famously said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” He wasn’t wrong, and that strategy has been used to great effect over the centuries. It’s why we have de facto segregation, it’s why we pushed through welfare reform using the boogeyman of the “welfare queen,” and it’s why the same crime gets you a different sentence depending on what color you are. Find a bit of structural racism, and behind it you’ll find a white politician pandering to the worst parts of human nature to gain or hold power.

But there is a difference between misinformation and hate. I know many good people who support bad policies; they are well-intentioned but misinformed. I don’t know many good people who take pleasure in terrorizing others, who would join hate groups and call it a fight for utopia. We live under crushing poverty and manage to not kill our horrible bosses or the uncaring bill collectors; we can surely manage to not join the Klan.

There is no excuse for willful evil, even if someone’s life is filled with pain and desperation. Someone who is very poor has few choices, but the things you can choose are all about what sort of person you want to be. It’s the one thing you can control, the one thing you can’t lose and nobody can take from you. Those choices are intentional, adult decisions. To explain them away is to say that the poor are incapable of moral reasoning. In our quest to be reasonable and kind to the less fortunate, we risk making them not human at all.

One day we will have a conversation about race in the upper classes, about the people who make the laws and set the narratives and peddle these lies. Today is not that day, and sometimes it seems like that day might never come. For now, it is enough to say: The poor cannot afford illusions about themselves or their lives. At least give them respect that any autonomous human deserves, and call evil “evil” without equivocation.

Poverty does not cause bigotry, no matter how comforting it might be to tell ourselves it does.

This week, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) called for the removal of all Confederate monuments in North Carolina. Mayor Jim Gray (D) of Lexington, Kentucky, announced the removal of two Confederate statues from a historic courthouse in the city. And officials in Florida and Maryland made similar announcements.

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But the conversation around the monuments’ removal is missing crucial context around how they got there in the first place. Most Confederate monuments were constructed at the dawn of the Jim Crow era, decades after the Civil War, with a second uptick in the 1960s in response to the civil rights movement. Like the popularity of the Confederate battle flag, their construction neatly aligns with backlash against racial progress.

To learn more about the evolution of Civil War iconography, I spoke to Professor Kirk Savage. Savage has spent a career studying the history of monuments. He’s written about the construction of the National Mall, the 9/11 memorial, and he is perhaps best known for Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, a book on the history of Civil War monuments.

Jeremy Slevin: I think a lot of people don’t know that most of these monuments were constructed after the Civil War, around the turn of the 20th century. Can you give us a sense of the timeline and why that happened?

Kirk Savage: The big boom in Confederate monument building was roughly between 1890 and 1920, and then there was a secondary boom in Confederate commemoration that was in reaction to the civil rights movement in the ’50s and ’60s. In both these cases, there were political reasons why those monuments were erected when they were. The first boom took place during the consolidation of Jim Crow and racial segregation in the South, the final defeat of the ideals of reconstruction and racial equality in the South. The second boom took place when that Jim Crow era came under threat from the civil rights movement.

Now, I should say that in the North, there was a less marked but similar lag in monument construction, simply because the veterans of that war were dying off. But what really distinguished the white Southern commemoration of the lost cause was the systematic campaign to build monuments, rewrite textbooks, and put Confederate flags and symbols in public schools. This was happening in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a systematic propaganda campaign to advance the racial cause of the Confederacy.

JS: And the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville was constructed at the tail end of that first wave, in the 1920s?

KS: Right, in the 1920s, if I remember correctly. That’s interesting in a way, that it took them so long. Richmond erected its huge monument to Robert E. Lee in 1890, and New Orleans a few years before that. The Richmond monument really kicked off the campaign to make the Confederacy respectable again.

JS: I was struck in your book that these weren’t necessarily initiated by the government. In a lot of cases, they were these volunteer, activist organizations that pushed for these monuments. Can you talk a little bit about that?

KS: Yes, yes, in fact it wasn’t until much later that state governments got involved. In the earlier days in the late 19th century it was these activist organizations that were in the South, largely driven by women’s groups. The United Daughters of the Confederacy was the outgrowth of that organization, which then conducted this systematic campaign that I just mentioned.

That’s the way public monuments worked in general in the 19th century. It was elite civic organizations that erected them, and only certain groups had real access to public space in that period of time. So of course African Americans, Native Americans, people of color had no access to that arena and no entry into those conversations.

JS: Was there public backlash? Of course this is the Jim Crow South we’re talking about, but was there public outcry to these monuments?

KS: There was some, which is interesting. To return to the example of Richmond and the monument to Lee in 1890, there was a black newspaper called The Richmond Planet that published a fiery series of articles in opposition to it, talking about the black community’s relationship to that monument, which of course is entirely different from the white community’s. There were these pockets of resistance. They were largely overlooked by the mainstream white media and politicians, but they were there. What it shows us is that that kind of resistance, that kind of attitude was always there. It just wasn’t reported for the most part.

JS: As you mentioned earlier, there was a second wave during the civil rights movement, which many of us associate with progress and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. But there wasn’t a systematic campaign to take down these monuments. In fact, we saw an uptick. Why do you think that was?

KS: Well, look who was in charge of the state and local governments in the South. They were still exclusively in white hands, and they were very worried about their loss of power and the potential that they might have to share power with African Americans. It was very much a backlash against that civil rights movement. You see places like Alabama for the first time in the 1960s displaying the Confederate flag on its capitol building. It was very much a defiant pushback against the forces that were trying to destroy segregation.

JS: It sounds like that mirrors the iconography of the Confederate flag as well. It became a symbol during the lost cause and was taken up by the segregationists in the 1960s. Have they followed a similar trajectory?

KS: Monuments and flags you mean?

JS: Yes.

KS: Yeah, it’s interesting to me that after the Dylann Roof massacre in the Charleston church, the first symbols to be attacked were the flags. Of course, he was shown in those photographs holding the Confederate flags. So it’s interesting now that with the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville at the Robert E. Lee memorial, the attention has turned to monuments. But yes, in a sense, these always went in a parallel process. But the unraveling seems to go flag first, monument second.

JS: In the book you write, “Public monuments were meant to yield resolution and consensus … but the process of commemoration often leads to conflict, not closure, because in defining the past we define our present.” What do you see as the next step? Is there a closure? Do these monuments have to come down?

KS: That’s a really tricky question because I have, for a long time, been maintaining—hoping—that we can have a “truth commission” kind of dialogue around these monuments, so the monuments could inspire us and open the way to really confront the legacy of slavery and white supremacy in this nation. The question of what to do with any particular Confederate monument would raise those larger questions that we urgently need to explore and wrestle with as a society.

Unfortunately though, I think what’s happened now with Dylann Roof and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville is that the time for dialogue is closing around these monuments. Local governments are put in a position where they have to take them down, because otherwise they’re going to be appropriated by neo-Nazis, or they’re going to be torn down by counter-protestors. It’s a little hard for me to know what the way forward is now because we need to have this dialogue. We can’t just take these monuments down and think that we have solved our problem, because we won’t have. But on the other hand, the monuments are honoring something that we absolutely need to repudiate. The easiest way to repudiate them is to take them down. And I understand why that was done in New Orleans, and I think the mayor there did an eloquent job of explaining why they had to come down. But now everything is lightning speed, and it’s hard to know where we’re going to be even a week from now.

JS: We shall see. I appreciate you joining me professor. Thanks so much, Kirk.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and will air as part of a complete episode on August 18. It was lightly edited for clarity.

The Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act of 2016, sponsored by Democratic Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, represents a dramatic and desperately needed shift in how the nation’s capital will approach violent crime. In 2015, D.C. led the country in two categories: murders and police presence. With 119 homicides, it had a higher murder rate than every state in the country; and with six officers for every 1,000 citizens, it was the most heavily policed district in America.

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In his office on Pennsylvania Ave, Councilmember McDuffie sports a pink polo beneath a gray tweed jacket. He speaks in perfect prose, with none of the ums and ahs and broken sentences that plague most of us. He believes in the NEAR Act because it addresses the “root causes” of violence.

“You cannot arrest your way out of this problem,” he says.

McDuffie was raised in D.C. in the 1980’s and 90’s, when it was known as the murder capital of the United States. He grew up around the open drug markets; he had friends who were killed in their neighborhoods.

“I’ve seen a person shot, bleeding out in my arms. I’ve seen these things firsthand,” he says. “That is the context I brought to this work.”

McDuffie has also seen the perils of overpolicing. He’s watched police officers “converge on communities of color, stopping people in neighborhoods like mine without probable cause.”

The NEAR Act draws from model programs in Chicago and Richmond by establishing an Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) in D.C. The ONSE will hire people from within the community—“people who have credibility in these neighborhoods,” McDuffie says. They will identify community members who are at risk of committing violence or becoming a victim of violence, and then offer them trauma-informed therapy, life planning, and mentorship. The bill also provides funds to train police officers on “cultural competency” and how to recognize bias, and it calls for increased data collection on police stops and the use of force.

While he was drafting the bill, McDuffie consulted with local activists who had long called for criminal justice and police reform in the district—including Eugene Puryear, an author and organizer who helped found the Stop Police Terror Project.

Puryear’s energy is contagious; he peppers his caffeinated speech with phrases like “punctuated equilibrium” and “tectonic shifts.” He lauded McDuffie for doing a “deep dive on the issue,” but he also wants to credit the organizers who he thinks helped create the political space for the NEAR Act. He believes that the national Movement for Black Lives—and its local manifestations, such as the Stop Police Terror Project—convinced the council members to care about overpolicing and mass incarceration because their constituents were fired up about these issues.

During the early phases of the Stop Police Terror Project, the group interrupted a speech by Mayor Muriel Bowser, who was pushing a crime bill that would have boosted police presence in the city. The group faced harsh criticism for the action—Puryear says that “everyone said we were band of radicals interrupting stuff with no positive program and no support in the community.”

But when the city council held a public hearing two months later to compare Bowser’s bill to the NEAR Act, nearly everyone who testified did so in favor of the latter. With overwhelming support from the community, the council passed the NEAR Act unanimously in March 2016. But neither the council nor the mayor fully funded the act in the 2017 budget, essentially putting it in limbo.

Over the next several months, the Movement for Black Lives kept growing. Thousands of protestors demonstrated in 88 cities across the country in the weeks after Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police officers. When Puryear and the Stop Police Terror Project started knocking on doors to gather signatures to fully fund the NEAR Act, they saw how badly residents wanted action.

“Once you would say you had any connection to Black Lives Matter, doors were swinging wide open,” Puryear said. He knocked on at least 500 doors, and he says that “every person who came to the door signed our petition, bar none.”

The council and the mayor agreed to fully fund the NEAR Act in the 2018 budget, which will go into effect on October 1. And the NEAR Act isn’t alone: Puryear says it’s part of a “cascading series” of local initiatives that came around in this “Black Lives Matter moment.” This includes a body-worn camera program for D.C. police officers and a juvenile justice bill, also sponsored by Councilmember McDuffie, that bans solitary confinement and court shackling for underage defendants.

Puryear believes that social change in the United States comes in spurts—long periods of very little change followed by rapid periods of huge changes. He hopes that we’re in one of those periods now, but he recognizes that progress isn’t inevitable. “What we do really matters,” he says. “The opportunities that are presented can just as easily be lost.” He thinks the next major battle surrounding the NEAR Act is its implementation: “There’s a lot of different ways this can be rolled out within the letter of the law.”

McDuffie agrees, and he says he’s working to make sure the bill gets implemented with the spirit and intent of how it was drafted.

The two models that the NEAR Act is based on have shown promise: Richmond has seen a 76 percent drop in homicides, and the Cure Violence model has curbed violence in pilot programs around the world. It remains to be seen whether the nation’s capital will have similar success—whether the old way of approaching violent crime, with militarized policing and mass incarceration, is finally on its way out.

In the fall of 2015, the New York City Department of Education announced plans to redraw District 3’s attendance zones with the goal of making schools like P.S. 199 more economically integrated. The proposed changes would move several elementary school students from Public School 191—a neighboring, high-poverty, majority-minority school—into P.S. 199.

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Parents at the wealthy school were outraged, and the city’s first attempt to integrate the two schools failed amid the backlash. After contentious debates and heated protests, the city dropped the plan, stating it would need more time to devise a new approach that “reached consensus.”

The city resurrected its proposal the next year, and although the rezoning plan is still fraught with conflict, it somehow muscled its way through the dissension to reach a final vote last fall. District 3’s Community Education Council—a locally elected parent group that votes on zoning policies—had long been in favor of new zoning lines and approved the city’s plan on a 9-to-1 vote.

But parents who are opposed to the plan have continued to fight. Some are placing political pressure, threatening to campaign against any official who supports the new zones. Others have warned of enrolling their children in private school. Some have even hinted at taking legal action. Overall, the battles roiling P.S. 199 and P.S. 191’s elementary school campuses have proved that when it comes to school integration, change is no easy task.

One would think Americans are ready for school integration, though. In a new study released by me and my colleague, Ulrich Boser, we found that most Americans—more than 60 percent—report that school segregation is an important issue for them, and nearly 70 percent of Americans agree that more should be done to integrate low- and high-poverty schools.

These findings were a bit startling at first glance. After all, if most Americans are in favor of school integration, why aren’t diverse, integrated classrooms spreading across the country?

Historically, school integration has met intense resistance. But at least in principle, the general public seems to endorse it, and our poll may have tapped into the country’s sympathy for people living in poverty.

In fact, one 2012 poll found that 52 percent of Americans believe “helping the poor and needy is a top priority.” Another poll found that reducing poverty is “very” or “extremely” important to most Americans.

National support for school integration may also be due to the country’s increased attention on income inequality. More than three-quarters of adult Americans, for instance, believe “the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.” Nearly 90 percent of Americans also believe they are “falling backward” in their finances. And a majority believe “the next generation has it even worse.”

Seeking to disrupt trends of economic inequality, Americans could be keen on helping children with low incomes have a fair shot at entering the middle class, and they see education as the best way to get there. But if there’s anything the desegregation battles in New York City prove, it’s that integration can leave both a sweet and bitter taste in Americans’ mouth. Americans might support integration in theory, but many have different reactions when it reaches their own backyards.

Research shows that reporting favorable views of integration can demonstrate a “superficial tolerance” of integration. But sending one’s own child to an integrating school is a much greater challenge: It requires a person to acknowledge—and maybe uproot—deep-seated stereotypes about families with low incomes and education.

Poverty is also racialized in the United States, and words like “low-income” in America can trigger other words like “black” and “brown.” Children of color, as young as five, are more likely to be perceived as violent and disruptive, which can stoke fears about integrating schools on both economic and racial lines.

But it may not be student diversity, per se, that is distressing to parents as is the thought of losing certain privileges. For affluent parents, they may feel territorial over the high-flying success of their school. And property values, neighborhood identity, and a sense of safety feel as though they are at stake.

“A school belongs to the neighborhood it resides,” said one parent at PS 199.

“It’s not that I don’t want my children to go to school in a mixed school … But at the same time we want the best for our children. We want the best for our property value,” said another.

And it’s not just wealthy parents who are afraid. Through our focus group sessions with diverse parents in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., metro areas, we found that low-income parents were wary of integration, and they drew on their own life experiences as supporting evidence.

For instance, low-income white parents spoke of being looked down upon by the “rich kids.” As one parent put it: “They don’t want us there, so why should we go there?” They pictured affluent families throwing lavish birthday parties, showering the higher-income kids with fancy cars and expensive gifts, making their own children feel insecure.

Despite whatever frustrations may be brewing among high- and low-income parents, District 3’s rezoning plan will take full effect this fall. In the Upper West Side of Manhattan, children who used to live in two separate worlds will now read, write, learn, and play together.

Fortunately, it’s not the only plan to mark a real shift in school diversity for New York City. The New York City Department of Education recently unveiled its citywide plan for integration, pledging to increase diversity across their entire public schooling system.

These changes are promising. Despite rapidly changing demographics in this country, school diversity has barely kept pace, and research shows that all students perform better academically and socially when they learn in diverse classrooms.

Many Americans do believe the time is ripe for change, but it remains to be seen whether all Americans will embrace this change when it arrives in their own communities.

This goal—and the plan for how to get there—are bullshit.

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Let’s talk about the goal first: a stable two-parent family. Brooks is feeding the narrative that there is an ideal kind of family—one that does best, one that is how people should be. It’s a family with two married parents. It’s a family in which people have children and mostly women raise them. It’s a family in which no one dies or is infertile or is incarcerated. It’s a family in which no one decides to stay single or childless or get divorced.

It is, in short, not reality. And making policy around this idealized vision of family has very real, often terrible consequences.

First, there is the emotional toll. When there is one ideal, people are crucified for falling short. They are blamed and marginalized. Their families are vilified and demonized. We have seen this with black single moms during welfare reform, gay parents during the same sex marriage movement, and now families with disabilities as policymakers seek to cut benefits. This helps no one.

Second, policies that focus on this idealized family, which account for less than one-fifth of American households, leave out the needs of tons of other families. We saw this last fall, when the Trump campaign floated a paid leave plan that only applied to birth mothers. The plan not only left out adoptive parents and male parents, it also ignored the needs of people caring for aging or disabled loved ones, sick children, their partners, or themselves.

Third, it can waste a ton of money. Jennifer Randles’s work reveals that though the nation has spent close to a billion dollars on programs that promote marriage over the last two decades, “couples who took government-funded relationship skills classes were neither more likely to marry or stay together nor to improve their financial situations.”

Fourth, policies aimed at keeping people married can trap people in dangerous relationships—even kill them. Perhaps the starkest example is the dramatic changes in women’s well-being after the passage of no-fault divorce. Research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers shows that in states that passed no-fault divorce laws, suicide rates among wives decreased by 8 to 16 percent and domestic violence rates fell by 30 percent.

Even if we set Brooks’s dubious two-parents-a-dog-and-a-white-picket-fence goal aside, the policies he mentions would fall short of what any kind of family needs. His proposals to “help” families focus on changing individual choices without mentioning the systems that override them. Brooks fails to mention how America’s incarceration system is dividing families, particularly black families. He doesn’t address the fact that our nation’s immigration policies are literally ripping families apart. He does not discuss the importance of health care, good jobs, or reproductive care—all of which have been linked to strong and stable families. A few programs and a social script are not going to cut it.

Instead of this harmful, narrow vision of family, we should be looking for ways to value and support a whole range of healthy, stable families. Some are single parents. Some are couples without children. Some are brothers taking care of sisters, grandparents caring for children, extended chosen families. All of these families deserve support and appreciation.

When you have a broader vision of family, you can make the kind of policy choices that actually support everyone. And you can also make clear to all kinds of families that they are not less than or inadequate—and they deserve to have their needs met.

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These folks hope the new president will bring us back to this romanticized vision: the U.S. as Mayberry, the small town from the The Andy Griffith Show that has become synonymous with an idealized, folksy life.

The problem is, that America never actually existed.

At least not for my family, living in segregated Chicago in the 1940s—around the time when The Andy Griffith Show was set.  My grandparents lived in public housing. Other housing options weren’t available to them because back then, black people couldn’t just move into any home or neighborhood they wanted.

Their parents—my great-grandparents—had come north to the promised land of Chicago to escape racial violence in the South, only to find that black folks couldn’t escape America’s racist purgatory. My grandmother was born a month after the 1919 race riots in Chicago, which started when a black swimmer crossed the “invisible” color line at the 31^st Street beach. My great-grandmother, eight months pregnant at the time, had to run home to escape the angry white mob—tripping and falling on her stomach heavy with my grandma inside.

Such were the experiences of oppression, violence, segregation, and opportunities denied that were passed down to my grandparents.

My grandmother and grandfather were janitors. In fact, three of my four grandparents were janitors. When they first started working, jobs didn’t have benefits like pensions and health care. But there was a key development in their lives that would impact my family for generations to come–they joined a union. My janitor grandparents were members of the Janitors’ Union, SEIU Local 1, at a time when racial exclusion from the labor movement was too often the norm.

Those good-paying union jobs helped my grandparents save money and buy a home on the South Side. When they bought their house in 1954, they were the third black family on a block made up of working-class Irish and Italian families. By 1960, the entire block was black.

White flight was in full swing, because white families thought the presence of black families would cause property values to plummet. The result, almost 60 years later, is segregation that still isolates my community from good jobs, good schools, and the hope for something better.

Still, those good union jobs helped my grandparents send the first person in our family to college–my mother. In 1950s America, a smart black woman had only two options: nursing school or teacher’s college. My mom chose to become a teacher, and taught in public school for more than 40 years.

It was that union job as a teacher that allowed my mother—a single parent, in a working-class neighborhood, on the South Side of Chicago—to raise two boys and have economic opportunities not available to other black men and women of her generation.

Yet as any measure will show, the opportunities for most black Americans were—and still are—much more limited compared to opportunities for whites.

If you doubt that, consider my family today. My grandparents passed down the house they bought in 1954. My mother raised my brother and me there, and my brother and his wife are now raising my 20-month-old nephew there. This past fall, they had to temporarily move out of the house because my nephew had dangerously high levels of lead from the paint and windows in the house. I imagine white families with the income to remediate the lead in aging homes never have to worry about this.

The neighborhood remains segregated, and suffers from the toxic inequality that plagues many black communities today.

That’s the kind of inequality, racial segregation, and seclusion that so many of our fellow Americans want to remain steeped in. So far, the new president has tried to ban immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.; is now trying to take away health care away from millions of Americans; and is preparing to shred the safety net that protects working people and their families when work doesn’t pay enough or they fall on hard times. Trump and Congressional Republicans are also set on destroying the very union jobs that gave families like mine a chance.

We’ve made so much progress, and still have so far to go. It’s time we see our history for what it is, and leave those romanticized notions of Mayberry where they belong—in the past.

O’Reilly’s rant was essentially a love letter to whiteness. It comes from the same place as Dave Chappelle’s famous SNL skit, in which he gets his first tax bill as a rich person and exclaims: “Ah [man]! I just got this money!”

O’Reilly might as well have said, “Ah, man! I just got this whiteness!”

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I. O’Reilly Suffers From “New White Syndrome”

It is said in religion that there’s no zealot like a convert. O’Reilly’s people (the Irish) are converts to whiteness, and a zealot O’Reilly has become. The result is Newly-White Syndrome, a close cousin of Chappelle’s New Money Syndrome. O’Reilly’s overdone chest-thumping about his whiteness reflects the need to hear it aloud—convincing himself as much as us.

O’Reilly surely resents that the English long-regarded the Irish as inferior. He may know that Ralph Waldo Emerson grouped his people with Africans, Indians, and East Asian people—whom he referred to simply as “Chinese”—as individuals who would never “occupy a high place in the human family,” as only the “Caucasian race” could. And he might be aware that Thomas Carlyle opined that the Irish “seem quite unfit for self [-] government.”

This is O’Reilly’s family history. The only glimmer of hope was offered by the head of the American Eugenics Society in 1911: if the Irishman “cleans himself up—very well, we might receive him in a generation or two.”

II. In Search of Whiteness

Bill would’ve had an easier time becoming white in Latin America, where you could literally buy whiteness—a “gracias al sacar.” It was “a royal exemption that provided the privileges of Whiteness.” But in the United States, the English wouldn’t let you buy whiteness. Not outright.

So the Irish intermarried.

Thomas Jefferson thought it took four generations of intermarriage to eliminate inferior blood. By that estimation, many of the Irish who came here in the mid-1800s potato famine were still pushing out mixed breeds when O’Reilly was born in 1949. And O’Reilly – Irish dad, Welsh mom – would be generations from meeting Jefferson’s purity standard.

Therefore, immigrants started changing the things that were within their power—like their names. Allen Konigsberg became Woody Allen. Ralph Lifshitz emerged Ralph Lauren. The Irish and Welsh anglicized with common name changes, like:

Ó Gallchobhair→ Gallagher
Uigínn → Higgins
ap Hywell → Powell
ap Siôn → Jones

And:

Ó Raghallaigh → O’Reilly

Immigrants also jettisoned accents and engaged in what economists call “signaling” to prove their respectability. Wearing “Oxfords, not brogues” is signaling, as is driving a certain kind of car and adopting “WASP sensibilities.” And one of the most important forms of signaling was to play one’s part in the racial hierarchy.

III. Becoming White at the Expense of Black

America is a deeply classed society that is pretending not to be.

It’s easy to see why, with all that loose talk about how “all men are created equal” in our founding documents. But John Adams’ belief that there is always a group of people “who is the last and lowest of the human species” was left out of the Declaration of Independence.  The founders also neglected Ben Franklin’s question about who would choose to be “Slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?”

The founders had their own ideas about who was at the top, middle, and bottom of these hierarchies. Jefferson divided the country into three classes: “Aristocrats, half breeds, pretenders (or, “pseudo-Aristocrats”) at the top; then the “yeomanry, looking askance at those above, yet not ventured to jostle them for the position.” Lowest are “Overseers, the most abject, degraded, and unprincipled race.”

Franklin, likewise, saw three classes: the “better sort” on top, the “middling people,” and the “meaner sort” on the bottom.  He maintained that the middle wouldn’t jostle the top because the masses prefer a “happy mediocrity.”

A group above, a group below, and one in the middle—carrying out the will of the top upon the people below them, in hopes of gaining access to that elusive elite tier.

IV. Misjudging One’s Interests

This ends tragically for everyone except those at the top. For example, in 1974 Boston, a judge ventured that black students were equal to white ones. But black schools were not equal to white ones, which meant they needed to integrate. Rather than send their kids to school with black children, mostly white and poor South Boston set the city on fire.

Meanwhile, wealthy whites stayed clear of the entire fray. They fled to the suburbs, and took their children from the schools and their capital from the city. This left behind a poorer city, with a diminished property tax base to fund the schools, and trapped both poor white and black children in failing schools. By placing their racial interest over their class interest, the white poor misfired, and made their own lives worse off.

The result, Jonathan Kozol observes, is that “poor whites, poor blacks and poor Hispanics now become illiterate together.” Boston’s Busing War proved that trying to become white at the expense of blacks doesn’t work for the reason Frederick Douglass diagnosed more than a century before: Neither rise. It only ends up “prov[ing] that if we cannot rise to the whites, the whites can fall to us.”

V. Until We’re All Free

Once, while defending the Electoral College, O’Reilly told John McCain that the Left “wants to break down the white, Christian, male power structure of which you are a part, and so am I.” Yet for most of U.S. history, McCain’s Protestants vigorously disagreed that O’Reilly’s Catholics are Christians, at all.

Moreover, clinging to that whiteness membership card the way O’Reilly does only shows he doesn’t have a firm grip on it. After all, ‘I’m the white establishment’ is something no actual member would ever say.

Color-struck, yet systems-blind, O’Reilly cannot see that he is playing the indispensable middle management role described by Jefferson, Franklin and others, without which the racial system would fall apart.  He is another “flunkey…to [the] gentry” (Frederick Douglass’s term).

This is why O’Reilly should be the object of our pity, not our scorn. Made to enter whiteness through the side door, O’Reilly’s sad response is to be grateful for the privilege. O’Reilly has not yet learned that whiteness can be a fickle lover. By the time Martin Niemöller got to write those chilling words, “First they came for the…” but “I was not a…” it was too late. The Nazis had already thrown him in Dachau. This is why Fannie Lou Hammer told a white audience in 1971, “Your freedom is shackled in chains to mine. And until I am free, you are not free either.”

Freedom comes only when we reject these assigned social categories, including race.

“When the Irish leave whiteness, there goes the neighborhood,” activist Tom Hayden notes. The Irish should leave whiteness. The existence of any racial establishment in America can never be in the interest of anyone whose last name has an apostrophe in it.

Race is something we have, not something we are. Since it was constructed, it follows that it can be deconstructed. And it should be. It brings as many burdens as benefits, even for white Americans. It would be tragic if O’Reilly never learns this. Still more tragic if America doesn’t.

Now that his administration is taking shape, the answer is becoming very, very clear. His nominee for Attorney General has called the NAACP “un-American,” his nominee for the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development has referred to desegregation as “a failed socialist experiment,” and his chief strategist led the website credited with making blatant racism mainstream again. Now, with the nomination of Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump is signaling an attack on public health—which has pronounced health hazards for communities of color.

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Pruitt’s confirmation hearings begin on Wednesday, and his record is providing ample questions for the process. As Attorney General for Oklahoma, Pruitt has spent much of his career trying to dismantle the EPA. He led state attorneys general efforts to sue the EPA over its Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon pollution from dirty-fueled power plants. As Attorney General, he eliminated the office’s Environmental Protection Unit. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations from oil and gas interests, and then repeated their calls to allow greater pollution—almost verbatim—to the very agency he is nominated to now serve. An investigation found him to be part of a secret, collaborate alliance between attorneys general and the energy industry. He also denies the science of climate change, despite global scientific agreement.

“Pruitt personifies environmental injustice,” according to Earl Hatley, Grand Riverkeeper and co-founder of the Oklahoma-based nonprofit Local Environmental Action Demanded Agency. Hatley expects Pruitt to provide the oil and gas industry exemptions from air and water protections—first by targeting the Clean Air Act, and then by remove fracking regulations. “Oklahoma is an oil state; it always has been,” says Hatley. “We’re trying to fight it, but with people like Pruitt, the pushback is really hard.”

Pruitt’s record of attacking public health, clean air, and safe drinking water safeguards should concern everyone, but African-American and Latino communities face some of the most serious health risks. Due in part to the enduring legacy of discriminatory housing policies, communities of color are more likely to have lead poisoning or contaminated water, be exposed to hazardous levels of air particle pollutants, and have their homes damaged during extreme weather.  In 2007, nearly half of all people of color in the United States—an estimated 46 percent to 48 percent—lived within six miles of a hazardous waste facility.

Given these risks, it is vital for communities of color to have an EPA Administrator who embraces the environmental justice movement, which fights to give communities of color equal access to clean air and water. The EPA has been criticized for ignoring this movement in the past, but in recent years the agency launched a series of actions to support it—including the EJ 2020 Action Agenda, which includes defining priority areas and engaging in community-based work, and provides roadmaps for outreach and engagement with tribes and communities. The EPA also released a mapping tool that illustrates exactly which communities are most exposed to pollution.

This provides some hope to communities of color, but the EPA has much more work to do.

In the wake of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—and multiple cities throughout the United States—marginalized communities are relying on the EPA now, more than ever, to protect their health from the hazards of water and air pollution. The EPA needs leadership that will protect Americans from pollution and climate change impacts, rather than destroy the EPA’s mission to give people clean air and water.

If there was any question about President-elect Trump’s interest in helping communities of color, he answered it himself. He had the option to nominate an EPA Administrator who pledged to support the agency’s mission to set and enforce air and water quality safeguards, work to reduce air and water pollution, and continue to incorporate environmental justice efforts throughout the agency. Instead, he selected a nominee who wants to attack decades of environmental progress, with no record of helping communities of color fight for environmental equality.

With Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator, we have a lot to lose.

But evidence of the flaw in Trump’s plan was right in front of him. The charter school he was speaking at—the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy—is not doing well. The state of Ohio gives the school a grade of D for its students’ test performance.

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School choice is not a new concept. For decades, states have been trying to encourage competition among different school models. That has led to an explosion in the number of charter schools, which are publicly funded but operate outside of the control of local school districts. The trouble is, researchers have found that these schools have mixed effects. In some cases charters improve test scores, while in others students do significantly worse than they would in neighborhood schools. Some districts have also tried giving students vouchers to go to private schools—which Trump has also called for—and have had similarly mixed results.

Many public school advocates argue that even the best charter schools can cause problems, because they drain money from other schools. That raises a big question about Trump’s plan, which would redirect $20 billion in federal funds to let students choose different schools. If that comes from the Department of Education budget, as some analysts expect, it would likely come from the two big buckets of federal money that go to K-12 schools now: $15.5 billion in Title 1 funds for schools with low-income populations and $12 billion for special education. Using that money for vouchers could mean decimating before- and after-school programs, tutoring in reading and math, and other supports for students facing the most serious academic challenges. The plan would also encourage states to dig money out of their own education spending for school choice.

Though his plan is misguided, the education crisis Trump points to is real—and really serious. There’s a huge and growing gap between the academic achievement levels of rich and poor kids. Today, students from wealthy families outscore their low-income counterparts by nearly 400 points on the SATs and are far more likely to graduate from high school.

One of the most successful ways to help low-income kids do better is to reduce income segregation, which has grown by 40% since 1990. That has a serious impact: One eye-popping study found that students from lower-income, less-educated families who attend school with wealthier peers are 68% more likely to attend a four-year college than those who go to an income-segregated school with peers from similar backgrounds.

The study’s author, Gregory Palardy of the University of California at Riverside, said segregation is the single biggest way that U.S. schools shortchange low-income students. Schools serving poor children tend to get less funding, hire less-skilled teachers, and offer fewer advanced courses than their counterparts in wealthier areas. And, Palardy said, poor kids simply have a harder time succeeding when their peers are all facing similar disadvantages. He said lower-income kids are far more likely to succeed if they go to school with more affluent peers who know a lot about college and expect, as a matter of course, that they’ll continue their education beyond high school.

“They rub off on you and your view of the world,” he said.

One of the arguments behind school choice is that it would reduce segregation by letting parents send their kids to schools that are more diverse than their neighborhoods. But studies have found that the proliferation of charter schools has led to greater economic—as well as racial—segregation. There are essentially two sets of charter schools. One enrolls predominantly privileged white students—often pulling them from more diverse neighborhood schools—while another serves mainly poor black and Latino communities.

The importance of integration hasn’t gone unnoticed in education policy circles. Across the country, some school districts are working to reduce economic segregation, and earlier this year President Obama proposed a $120 million grant program to support these efforts. But all these plans depend on higher-income parents’ voluntarily participation, which isn’t always easy to achieve.

Dr. Catherine Cushinberry, executive director of the national organization Parents for Public Schools (PPS), said that richer, white parents may want to keep their children out of poorer, more heavily minority schools because they mistakenly worry that these schools won’t be good for their kids. But, she said, it’s often possible to convince them that a more diverse school has advantages. That’s part of PPS’s mission.

“The source of our beginning, really, is in Jackson, Mississippi in the early ’90s,” Cushinberry said. “It was around this notion of white flight. We’re still dealing with similar issues as we did in 1991.”

Today, PPS supports parent activists in school systems from the Deep South to San Francisco, where rapid gentrification is raising new questions about school segregation. In addition to encouraging school integration, the organization works to get parents involved in improving the schools.

One recent, hopeful story comes from Oktibbeha County, Mississippi. Two low-income, mostly African-American high schools were closed, and the students moved to the more affluent Starkville High. Fearing that wealthier white families would pull their kids from the school, members of PPS Starkville worked with the state legislature, Mississippi State University, and other local groups to help smooth the transition. They found ways to get new funding for computers, books, buses and equipment, and to open new programs—including a pre-K. In the end there was no white flight. A number of white students actually left private schools for the new, more integrated district.

As far as Trump’s plan to increase school choice goes, Cushinberry said there just aren’t enough details available yet for her to comment. But, she said, in the wake of the election, she’s been thinking about how Americans can work together across social divisions.

“Certainly one way to unify communities is around bringing together strong, quality schools,” she said.

That was a common thread of the 2016 Facing Race conference in Atlanta, Georgia, where more than 2,000 activists, community organizers, and journalists from across the country gathered for two-and-a-half days to talk about racial justice. While many people are still scrambling to make sense of Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in last Tuesday’s presidential election, for the maligned and marginalized, it’s less tricky to pluck out the heart of the mystery.

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“I was stunned that I was stunned,” civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander told the audience. Alexander pointed out how widely entrenched—and ignored—black suffering continues to be in the United States. She catapulted the issue to national attention in 2010 with her book The New Jim Crow, which focused on mass incarceration’s heavy toll on black families. But we see this systemic racism tightly woven into other issues too, including the school-to-prison pipeline, the legacy of redlining, and crumbling infrastructure in cities like Flint, Michigan.

Barack Obama’s presidency offered a glimmer of hope that the country was ready for a long-overdue reckoning with this pain. But last week’s election and its aftermath say the exact opposite: After having had a black man in the White House for seven-plus years, white Americans pulled rank. Or as CNN’s Van Jones put it, the election results were “a white-lash against a changing country.”

Exit polls are hardly perfect, but they can reveal important trends. For instance, more than half—58%—of white voters preferred Trump, while 88% of black voters cast their ballot for Clinton. And perhaps more interestingly, while 94% of black female voters supported Clinton, 53% of white female voters showed a preference for Trump. This isn’t to say that all white voters who decided to get behind Trump did so as a direct statement of racism. But, at the very least, Trump’s murky brew of misogyny and racism wasn’t a deal breaker for a broad range of white voters. That shines a light on a galling indifference to the misery and oppression of others.

So where do we go from here?

Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, made it clear that group-specific siloes aren’t the answer. It’s tempting for groups already on the social and political fringes to retreat into enclaves to protect our own, but—especially at a time like this—we have to keep a close watch on the overlapping ways in which oppression operates. “We’re all being attacked, and our movement needs a broader front” in order to keep the needle of progress moving, Garza said. Because at the end of the day, whether you’re black or brown, “we’re all going down together.”

There was also a call for progressive white Americans to do more for, and to do better by, their non-white allies.

“I’m done with ally-ship. I’m done with people who allow themselves the distance of ally-ship,” said Roxane Gay, one of the keynote speakers and the bestselling author of Bad Feminist.

“The people who are calling for healing and reconciliation are well meaning but dangerous, because they’re delusional. They know better. They don’t want to do better,” she added. Gay spoke specifically to what she sees as the performative ally-ship of white progressives. Beyond merely donning solidarity safety pins and parroting Martin Luther King, Jr.—a favorite of many a white progressive—white allies ought to walk the walk. Have those prickly conversations with other white people. Donate money to groups looking to extinguish racism. Stop focusing exclusively on whiteness when talking about post-election anxieties, when people of color are the ones who have been feeling the stab of these anxieties most.

And while white people need to “get their shit together,” Gay said, people of color should have an eye to “infiltrating” what are overwhelmingly white spaces. “We need to think about running for office. Run for city council. Become a member of Congress. Get inside, and suck it up.”

Indeed, Trump’s upset in the presidential race has cracked wide open just how persistent and pervasive American racism has always been. This is a point that many black Americans have been making in the wake of the election. Whenever the United States has seemed to bend toward a more racially inclusive brand of democracy—from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to the Obama era—what has often followed has been an equal and opposite push to reclaim a whiter status quo. We saw it in Jim Crow, and in Richard Nixon’s anti-civil rights administration in the 1970s, and we’re seeing it now. This is America, being America.

There’s a long fight ahead of us. And as Linda Sarsour, the Advocacy and Civic Engagement Coordinator for the National Network for Arab American Communities, drove home on the final day of the conference, it has to be all hands on deck. Our future may depend on it.

“All we have is each other. Ain’t nobody got time for part-time progressives,” she said. “Everyone has a role to play in the movement.”

The majority of voters are still unlikely to face issues on Election Day, but the new burdens fall disproportionately on a select cohort of Americans. Here are the groups of people who will face some of the steepest battles to cast their vote.

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People of color

African-Americans had the highest voter turnout rates in 2012, but new obstacles could keep many black voters from the ballot box this year. Laws that require voters to present photo ID at the polls—which have cropped up in eight states since 2013, bringing the total to 34 states—disproportionately impact African-Americans. That’s because people of color are less likely than whites to have the specific forms of required photo ID, and because these laws are more common in  Southern states (where African-Americans are concentrated).

In addition to obstructive voter ID laws, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans are often plagued by language barriers. While the Voting Rights Act contains protections for language-minority voters, poll workers are not always aware of them (so they might not honor these voters’ rights, for example, to have someone assist them at the polls).

People of color often have to take more time and travel further distances in order to vote. In 2012, black and Latino voters waited nearly twice as long as white voters to cast their ballots, likely due in part to state decisions to restrict early voting. And this year, Native Americans in northern Nevada will have to travel nearly 100 miles round-trip to cast their ballot in November.

Homeless people

First, the good news: in recent years, court decisions and new laws at both the state and federal level have eliminated formal bans on voters who do not live in a “traditional dwelling.” As a result, homeless people are now formally able to register and vote in every state.

But homeless adults—of whom there are at least 400,000 nationally—still face a variety of informal barriers. Some states require voters to provide a mailing address when they register. Other states require voters to prove how long they have lived in a voting district, a task that is understandably difficult for homeless people. And again, stricter voter restriction laws—like photo ID requirements—fall particularly hard on the homeless community, who are less likely to have a driver’s license or other forms of acceptable identification.

People with criminal records

Americans with criminal records, especially those with felony convictions, face some of the steepest—and most convoluted—barriers to the ballot box. In fact, a new study found that a record 6.1 million people are barred from voting this year because of felony convictions.

Because voting for people with felony convictions has not been federally regulated, those seeking to register face a patchwork of state voting laws that range from no restrictions (in Maine and Vermont) to a lifetime of disenfranchisement (in 10 states). Ten states also restrict voting for people with misdemeanors. These restrictions disproportionately impact people of color. In Florida, felony disenfranchisement bars 23% of African Americans from voting, and four other states also suppress the votes of 1 in 5 black citizens.

Unfortunately, the confusion and misinformation around state laws can even discourage eligible Americans with criminal records from voting. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “Many people with past criminal records mistakenly believe they are ineligible to vote.” As a result, many end up staying home unnecessarily on Election Day.

Women

Even though women made up a majority of voters in 2012, voter ID laws are creating new obstacles for them, too. Thirty-four states require voters to present some kind of identification. Roughly 90% of women change their last names when they get married (and often change their names back following a divorce), and many may not realize their voter registration does not match the name on their ID until it comes time to vote. What’s more, women are also more likely to belong to other groups who face barriers at the polls—low-wage workers, seniors, students, and the poor.

Low-wage workers

More than 23 million people—disproportionately women and people of color—work in low-wage jobs. These workers are especially likely to have volatile and erratic schedules, which makes it hard for them to plan to get to the polls. Additionally, only 30 states require employers to give workers time off to vote—and even among states that do provide workers leave to vote, that time off is not always paid.

For workers who subsist on very low wages, the decision to take time off to cast a ballot can result in a difficult financial loss. That may explain the 30-point gap in voter participation along income lines: Less than half of people earning under $30,000 a year voted in the 2012 election, while over 80% of people earning over $150,000 voted. As a point of comparison, 99% of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans voted.

Transgender people

Transgender citizens have become a vocal voting bloc this election cycle, but stringent photo ID laws threaten their ability to cast a ballot. An estimated 27% of trans people lack identification that accurately reflects their gender, in large part because they face uphill legal and financial battles to update their ID documents. For example, in at least 15 states, trans people are required to show proof of a gender reassignment surgery—a task that is simply not possible for those who are unable or choose not to have the surgery.

People with disabilities

People with disabilities face a wide range of voting obstacles, but chief among them are transportation, lack of accommodations at the polls, and poll workers who are ill-equipped to offer help. A full 30% of people with disabilities are unable to drive, which makes it hard to get to the polls in the first place—particularly for those voters who live alone or in rural areas. Even if they manage to make it to their polling location, a lack of ramps or curb cuts and limited support for voters with vision impairments make it difficult for people with disabilities to vote—even though laws like the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and the Americans with Disabilities Act were designed to improve ballot access. These barriers help explain why turnout rates among voters with disabilities—especially those with cognitive disabilities—tend to be lower than voters without disabilities. In fact, it can be difficult for people with disabilities to even register to vote, since most online voter registrations are not accessible for people with vision-related or cognitive disabilities. All told, these barriers to access could account for as many as 3 million votes.

None of these barriers are inevitable. Most are the consequences of policy decisions, some of which were made with the deliberate intent of disenfranchisement. Election Day gives Americans the opportunity to reverse these laws, and to elect policymakers who will work on behalf of those who don’t always have a voice.

You probably aren’t familiar with the Eastside of Charleston, but you know a place like it: It’s segregated by race, and associated with poverty, crime, and violence—derogatively called “the ghetto” or “the ‘hood.” It’s the part of town that you have been cautioned to avoid.

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More and more Americans who struggle to get by are living in these marginalized, disinvested communities where jobs and educational opportunities are scarce, and an increasingly militarized police force is the primary contact residents have with government. But for two years, Americans have been expressing confusion as one neighborhood after another—from Milwaukee to Baltimore to Ferguson to Charlotte—are rocked by protests, looting, and riots after the police shootings of unarmed black men.

Is it really a surprise that many of the renewed outbreaks of civil unrest have taken place in these communities?

Although the impact of living in high-poverty neighborhoods has been well documented, it’s hard to fully explain the toll it takes on a person’s body and soul. Frustration over high prices, high bills, and high unemployment rates is worsened by the bane of many a poor community—the local drug economy.

The vast majority of my neighbors, young and old, did their best to avoid the drug trade. My next-door neighbor was so overprotective of his two daughters that he refused to let them leave the house after 7 p.m. I knew many teenagers who resisted it for years, but faced with no prospects for their future, or for good jobs with good pay, they decided “to go to work”—usually in the summer when they were out of school. Dealing drugs was the neighborhood summer job program. And for many young neighbors who were expelled from school (because administrators are more likely to punish black students than provide more holistic help), the drug trade was less an alternative than an inevitability.

Outsiders often criticized Eastside residents for not taking care of their own community, or not doing enough to stymie the drug trafficking. This victim-blaming ignored the roots of the drug problem—the lack of opportunity, racism, and economic forces outside of residents’ control—and it ignored the role that outsiders played. It was common to see long lines of cars that clearly belonged to nonresidents (that is, mostly whites) trolling every night to the wee hours of the morning, looking to score drugs with no concern over the consequences for families, mothers, or children trying to sleep.

I eventually saved enough money to leave the Eastside, but not much has changed since I left. The kinds of investment in the community that would have convinced me to stay didn’t exist (and still don’t). It was no wonder that those of us who lived there believed the city, state, and even the nation did not respect—or even consider—our humanity.

The Eastside is hardly unique. If you look at the statistics associated with any of the marginalized, predominantly black communities in cities that have erupted in civil unrest, a pattern becomes clear. In Baltimore, an overwhelming majority of public school students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches (which are often used as a proxy for students’ socioeconomic status). The median income in Freddie Gray’s own neighborhood is just $24,006 a year.  A Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Missouri confirmed that the municipal police department engaged in poverty exploitation by targeting blacks for traffic violations, singling them out in a city where 53% of blacks live in poor neighborhoods. Milwaukee has been called one of the most segregated cities in America.

There’s an obvious solution for these communities (and it isn’t gentrification, which simply displaces generational residents). The solution lies in more targeted investments—for example, in jobs or education programs—that give people a chance to succeed. The bleak situation for the 13.5 million people in high-poverty neighborhoods must be ameliorated, or else somewhere, sometime soon, civil unrest will break out again.

That’s how many fewer African-Americans are living in New Orleans now than prior to Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall 11 years ago today. Nearly 1 in 3 black residents have not returned to the city after the storm.

It was the worst urban disaster in modern U.S. history. Eighty percent of New Orleans lay under water after the epic collapse of the area’s flood-protection system—more than 110,000 homes and another 20,000 plus businesses, along with most of the city’s schools, police and fire stations, electrical plans, and its public transportation system.

Unlike last year, when the 10th anniversary meant satellite trucks clogging the streets, this anniversary is unlikely to draw much media attention—which would be a shame if I thought the coverage last year was any good.

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Large stretches of New Orleans were still reeling from the disaster last summer, as those satellite trucks sat parked in the French Quarter.  There, the on-air talent did their stand-ups against the backdrop of Jackson Square and the media rarely ventured to the eastern half of the city, where most of the city’s black residents lived prior to Katrina.

On the east side they might have shot footage of the Seventh Ward, a black working-class community that was still only around 60 percent rebuilt a decade after Katrina. They could have gone to Pontchartrain Park, a black middle class community that the actor Wendell Pierce, who had grown up there, dubbed a “black Mayberry.” Pontchartrain Park was doing no better than the Seventh Ward. Or they might have reported from New Orleans East, a black professional class neighborhood still pocked by boarded-up strip malls and abandoned businesses. It is maybe 80 to 85 percent rebuilt eleven years after Katrina.

Most shocking is the Lower Ninth Ward, where the average resident was living on $16,000 a year before the hurricane. You can still drive blocks there and not see a single home. The neighborhood is still missing more than half its pre-Katrina population.

Yet the great need in parts of the city where the tourists rarely venture was not what the media—or the city’s white civic leaders—were focused on. Instead, the story line was what city officials dubbed the “New Orleans miracle.” In his state of the city address a few months before the 10th anniversary, Mayor Mitch Landrieu declared victory over Katrina: New Orleans was “no longer recovering, no longer rebuilding,” he said.  According to the mayor the city was “America’s greatest comeback story,” and he oversaw a three-month celebration dubbed “Katrina 10: Resilient New Orleans.” For white communities, it was true: Lakeview, a prosperous white neighborhood on the east side that also suffered catastrophic flooding, looks better than it did before the storm because of all the new homes and businesses.

Just a year earlier, Landrieu had protested when a writer for The Atlantic referred to him as the city’s first white mayor in 36 years.  “I don’t see myself as a white mayor or the city as a black city,” he said.

But it’s hard to imagine a black mayor, in a style reminiscent of George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech, triumphantly describing the recovery as a thing of the past when there was still so much suffering in the eastern half of the city.

Katrina was not an equal opportunity storm. A black homeowner in New Orleans was more than three times as likely to have been flooded as a white homeowner. That wasn’t due to bad luck; because of racially discriminatory housing practices, the high-ground was taken by the time banks started loaning money to African Americans who wanted to buy a home.

Nor has New Orleans experienced an equal opportunity recovery—in no small part because of the white civic leaders who openly advocated for a whiter, wealthier city. While water still covered most of New Orleans, Jimmy Reiss, a prominent local businessman and then-head of the Business Council, told the Wall Street Journal that the city would come back in “a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically,” or he and other white civic leaders would not return. That sentiment was paired with a policy approach then-Congressman Barney Frank described as “ethnic cleansing through inaction.”

Now, New Orleans no longer has a public hospital, though prior to Katrina, it was home to the nation’s oldest one. Before the storm, the city was home to thousands of units of affordable housing in a quartet of housing projects locals now call the “Big Four.” Large portions of the Big Four had escaped with little or no water damage. Yet elected officials chose to bulldoze all four anyway. The largest housing recovery program in U.S. history, “Road Home,” was created in the months after Katrina. But money was disbursed based on the appraised value of a home rather than the cost of rebuilding, even though a home in a white community was typically appraised at a far higher price than the same house in a black community. Five years after the storm, a federal judge sided with black homeowners in a racial discrimination suit against the program. But by then officials had already spent more than 98 percent of the $13 billion that the federal government had committed to Road Home.

The irony—the tragedy—is that despite the efforts of people like Jimmy Reiss to make New Orleans a less poor city, something like the opposite has happened. The child poverty rate in New Orleans is now 40 percent—that’s higher than it was before the storm, and more than double the national average. The income disparity between rich and poor is so great that last year Bloomberg declared New Orleans the country’s most “unequal” city. And it’s hardly just the poor who are suffering. The median black household in New Orleans in 2013 was $30,000—$5,000 less than it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. By contrast, median household income in the white community increased by 40 percent over that same period and now stands at more than $60,000.  The same young energy that is helping rejuvenate urban communities across the country is part of the New Orleans story. But that just calls into greater relief those who have been left behind during recent prosperity.

These days, little recovery money is still coming to New Orleans. It might be a flood that explains the sorry state of so many of the city’s working and middle class communities, but New Orleans today is in the same boat as any city that has suffered blight and other ills due to the subprime meltdown and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs. The answer to this widespread suffering is a comprehensive urban plan—one that helps any metropolis with struggling neighborhoods that haven’t benefited from a general uptick in the fortune of the nation’s cities. But, of course, few in power are talking about anything so ambitious.

If 228 years seems like a really long time, that’s because it is. But if current trends continue, that’s how long it will take for the average black family to reach the level of wealth the average white family has today.

The average Latino family fares slightly better—if the current trend continues, it would take them a little more than 80 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today.

Racial discrepancies in income and wealth are nothing new in this country. The troubling thing is that they aren’t improving. A new report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) compares data on white, black, and Latino households over the past 30 years to see just how big the gap is—and the findings are staggering.

Between 1983 and 2013, the average black family saw their wealth grow by a little less than $20,000. Latino families saw a bump of about $40,000. Meanwhile, the average white family’s wealth spiked by more than $300,000.

If current trends persist, the figures get even starker. By 2043, when people of color are predicted to outnumber white people for the first time in the U.S., the racial wealth gap will double—leaving the average white family with over $1 million more in assets than black and Latino families.

Wealth is an important barometer of long-term financial stability. It translates into a first home, retirement security, and the countless opportunities afforded by having savings and investments.  Those without wealth lead a precarious existence – they have no cushion to fall back on if tragedy strikes or when they grow old.

So how did wealth become so skewed along racial lines?

The legacy of overtly racist public policy is partly to blame. Redlining, the practice of deliberately blocking non-white families from obtaining a mortgage, had a devastating impact on homeownership for black and Latino families. From 1934 to 1968—the period marking the biggest expansion of the American middle class—only two percent of Federal Housing Administration mortgages went to non-whites. The effects of that kind of discrimination are still reverberating today.

Unfortunately, current policy has exacerbated the problem. Consider, for example, federal tax expenditures. These tax breaks—all $600 billion of them—are designed to help families pay for college, buy a home, save for retirement, and start a business.  The problem is, the people who need the most help tend to get the least. Working families get an average of $174 each year in tax breaks, while the typical millionaire gets $145,000.

The Internal Revenue Service does not collect data on race, but since we know income is heavily skewed towards white earners—four out of five earners in the top the top 20 percent are white—we can be reasonably confident that these tax breaks are disproportionately benefiting white earners.

The racial disparity continues to grow at the very top of the economic pyramid. On last year’s famed Forbes 400 list, which enumerates the 400 wealthiest people in the country, just seven people are black or Latino. That’s worth noting, since America’s wealthiest citizens control a tremendous amount of the country’s wealth: the top 100 members of the Forbes 400 list own about as much wealth as the entire African-American population (42 million people), while the top 186 members own as much wealth as the entire Latino population (55 million people).

In short, wealth is concentrated in very few hands. And those hands are mostly white.

But just as public policy played a role in growing the racial wealth divide, it can play a role in shrinking it. An important first step would be to conduct a government-wide audit, launched by an executive order from the next president, to understand the role current federal policies play in perpetuating (or closing) the racial wealth divide.

With that data, we can begin to overhaul inequitable policies and take the steps needed to ensure our nation’s wealth-building system works for all Americans.

Maya Angelou’s story does not end with her struggles; it only begins there. She was guided out of silence by the loving hand of an educator. Her teacher did not practice zero tolerance or call a school resource officer to slam young Maya to the ground. She saw the brokenness of a girl child who needed to be drawn gently back into the world. She helped Maya regain her voice through a love of literature and poetry. As a girl Maya was burdened with poverty and brokenness, but she also encountered meaningful opportunities to learn, grow, and discover her talents while experiencing the care of her community. Maya transformed these opportunities into a life of singular accomplishment and remarkable contributions.

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Maya became a fierce advocate for voting rights and human rights, working first with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and later with both Coretta Scott King and Dr. Betty Shabazz.  Recognizing the importance of race and gender health disparities, Dr. Angelou gave her name to the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. In Washington, D.C., she enthusiastically contributed her name to the Maya Angelou Public Charter School offering second chances to young people emerging from juvenile incarceration. Maya Angelou’s path was not always pretty or polite, but it always affirmed that Black Girls Rock and Black Women Matter.

Indeed, Maya Angelou’s story embodies the barriers and pathways for black women and girls we have gathered to discuss today. I believe she would be pleased by this unprecedented gathering of scholars, activists, artists, journalists, citizens, and lawmakers committed to eliminating injustices black women face. I believe she would commend each of the co-chairs for the visionary leadership to develop the first Congressional Caucus for Black Women and Girls. And I believe she would ask of the larger legislative body, “What took so long?”

Vulnerability to Violence

What took so long? After all, it is not safe to be a black girl in America.

Black communities understand how unjust violence perpetrated against black boys is connected to our collective movements for racial justice and social change.  We know how the horrific murder of Emmett Till galvanized the courage of black Americans in the battle against Jim Crow. Because we know these stories we draw on them again and again. When Oscar Grant or Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner or Tamir Rice were taken too soon, we understand their deaths in historical context of racial vulnerability. We can see the need to make change―to keep our brothers.

We less frequently discuss historical violence against black girls and don’t adequately connect these stories to movements for social justice. As a result we think our daughters are safer than our sons. We forget Elizabeth Eckford walking a racist gauntlet toward Central High School in 1957; or tiny Ruby Bridges requiring federal marshals to attend elementary school in 1960, New Orleans; or four little girls murdered in their Sunday school in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.  Girlhood has never been a shield against the brutality of white supremacy. We cannot forget the vulnerabilities of black girls. Yes, we must keep our brothers, but what about our daughters? We must also say their names: Rekia Boyd, Renisha McBride, Mya Hall, Natasha McKenna, Sandra Bland.

We are even more reluctant to acknowledge the violence black girls and women suffer at the hands of black men. According to the Black Women’s Blueprint, approximately 60 percent of black girls will experience sexual assault before they are 18. A leading cause of death for black women 15 to 34 is homicide by an intimate partner. Debilitating injury resulting from intimate partner violence is a health crisis for black women. Yet African American women are less likely to report rape and sexual assault than their white counterparts. When they do seek protection, black women face unique challenges in family and criminal court because many judges perceive African American women as less vulnerable, more hostile, more sexualized, and less worthy of official forms of protection.

Unequal Opportunity

What took so long? After all, black women have less economic opportunity.

Black women work more than all other women, but reap fewer economic rewards. According to a December 2015 report by the National Partnership for Women and Families, a state by state analysis shows black women’s wages range from 48 to 69 cents for every dollar paid to white men.  One in four black women live in poverty, a rate more than double white women’s poverty.

Perhaps even more shocking than black women’s poverty is black women’s wealth. According to a 2010 study by Mariko Chang, the median wealth for a single white man age 18 to 64 was $41,410.  But the median wealth for a single black woman in the same age range was $5. Five dollars is the cushion between these adult black women and an illness, an unexpected expense, a family member who needs help. Five dollars.

Education is not necessarily the answer. Neither the wage gap nor the wealth gap is resolved by educational attainment. Black women with a college degree earn more than black women with only a high school diploma, but the pay gap relative to their white male counterparts is wider. As a 2015 report by the Black Women’s Roundtable states, “It would take nearly two Black women college graduates to earn what the average White male college graduate earns by himself ($55,804 vs. $100, 620).” Finishing college does not ensure long-term wealth accumulation for black women. Lower wages, higher student loan debt, and significant expectations for redistribution within family networks means studying and working hard are insufficient remedies for the systemic economic inequities black women face.

Criminal Injustice

What took so long? After all, the criminal justice system is unfair to black women.

According to The Sentencing Project, the number of women in American prisons is increasing at nearly double the rate of men. These women are disproportionately black women according to statistics from the Department of Justice. The rate of incarceration is almost twice as high for black versus white women, 113 per 100,000 compared 51 per 100,000. Given that nearly 60 percent of these women are mothers who were caring for minor children before their sentencing, the jailing of black women has a devastating effect on black children and communities.

Now consider this: Decades of research show the overwhelming majority of incarcerated women are survivors of domestic abuse, sexual violence, childhood trauma, poverty, and broken foster care systems. When black women are guilty of being victims our response is to lock them away; strip them of parental rights; permanently damage their ability to seek educations, secure housing, start businesses, and choose their elected representatives. And it begins when they are girls. Black girls are suspended, criminalized, pushed out of school and into a juvenile system where they receive disproportionally harsh sentences often in the wake of severe emotional and sexual trauma. Imagine if eight-year-old Maya Angelou had been sent to a correctional facility instead of to the head of the class.

Health Disparities

What took so long? After all, black women’s health is suffering.

Black women have higher rates of hypertension and diabetes. Black women are far more likely to suffer from fibroids and undergo hysterectomies. While HIV-AIDS infections have declined throughout the United States, black women account for 66 percent of new cases of HIV among women. And there is this shocking disparity―black women are less likely than white women to get breast cancer, but more likely to die from the disease. In 2010, the CDC reported breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for black women 45 to 64 years old, a death rate 60 percent higher than for white women.

Perhaps nothing so powerfully illustrates how the bodies of black women carry the burdens of racial injustice as the persistent racial infant mortality gap. Babies born to black women remain twice as likely to die before their first birthday as those born to white women. The gap is not closed by access to health insurance, prenatal care, or education. Black mothers with advanced degrees suffer higher infant morality than white mothers who have not finished high school. The most promising research in this area suggests that black infant mortality may be an intergenerational result of historical experiences of racial inequality. It may be that black women literally carry the legacy of American racism and sexism in our bodies, making both our infants and ourselves ill.

Here I want to pause to note that despite important commonalities, all African American women do not share the same ideas, beliefs, and burdens. Age, region, queer identity, and skin color shape black women’s lived experiences. Black trans women are uniquely vulnerable to public and state violence. Black women living with disabilities face barriers we frequently overlook. Black girls in foster care or struggling with episodic homelessness will have very different challenges than those with more stability. But these variations between and among us do not invalidate the importance of thinking about black women and girls as a group.

I have offered up a lot of statistics. These are data you will hear more about, with more context, from other witnesses throughout the day. Together these data tell us that the intersections of race and gender strongly determine life opportunities for black girls and women. Therefore it is important to think about black girls and women as a meaningful analytic category and to target justice-oriented, community-centered, and culturally literate research and public policy toward addressing the challenges faced by black women and girls. The women you will hear from today represent organizations that have been doing this work for years, often without recognition or adequate support.

Even as we map these profound injustices, don’t get it twisted. Black women are more than the sum of their relative disadvantages―they are active agents who craft meaning out of their circumstances and do so in complicated and diverse ways. The exceptional generative capacity of black girls and women in circumstances of deep inequality is so profoundly incomprehensible to so many they have little choice but to understand it as black girl magic.

How else to understand that black women had the highest voter turnout of any category of voters in both 2008 and 2012, twice choosing an American president while no one asked a single black woman to moderate a presidential debate? How else can we understand that in 2014 black women candidates running statewide in Ohio and Georgia accumulated more than one million votes even though their state parties largely ignored their races? How else to understand that when black women picked up four Congressional seats in 2014, one of those seats was to the first black woman elected to congress from New Jersey, Representative Bonnie Watson-Coleman? And her first order of business was to come here to Capitol Hill and help form this first congressional caucus for black women and girls.

Many call it black girl magic because it seems we can do what no one else can or will do. We seem to bear burdens heavier, run races faster, and absorb brutality more stinging than ought to be possible given how few resources are at our disposal. The legacy of black women’s lives and labors show an unprecedented capacity to survive in hostile conditions. This is not magic. It is grinding work that exacts deep costs from black girls and women. Yes, black women have long made lemonade from the lemons life handed them. The problem is somebody usually sat down and drank it after she made it. That is not justice.

I want to leave you with one final imperative. On July 9, 2014, Tianna-Gaines Turner, an African American mother from Philadelphia, became the only person living in poverty to testify before Representative Paul Ryan’s House Budget Committee on poverty―the only person living in poverty to address the lawmakers creating policy about poverty. Her statement was powerful and clear. She concluded by admonishing the committee with these words:

My neighbors and I know what’s going on in our own communities, more than anyone else. We know our own hardships better than anyone. We have the energy, the grit, the creativity, and the strongest interest in overcoming our struggles. We’re fighting already for our families and our neighbors. We need to be taken more seriously by our state and federal governments.

Nothing about us, without us. Congress should not make any decisions about programs meant to help families living in poverty without people who know poverty firsthand at the decision-making table…. It’s time to call in the experts.

As the work of this historic caucus moves forward, let us follow this rule set by Tianna-Gaines Turner—nothing about us, without us. Black girls must be at the table. Black women must be at the table. Not just the college professors, celebrities, business leaders, and elected officials, but our cousins, our sisters, our grandmas, the girls who didn’t make it out, the ones we locked away, the voices that have been silenced. Let us be the ones who find today’s Maya Angelou while she is yet mute, who remind her she has something to say, and then let us listen while she tells us her story.

This post originally appeared on Elle.com, and was delivered before the Congressional Caucus for Black Women and Girls in April.