1

The Racism Profiteers

Anna Jones wasn’t sure what to expect. When the Chicago Public Schools closed fifty schools in 2013, she was certainly concerned about the effects of displacing so many children and families. She was particularly worried because so many of the school closures were concentrated in black and brown neighborhoods that had long been neglected by the city’s power structure and were thus struggling with issues of poverty and violence. But she also believed Mayor Rahm Emanuel when he said that the closures were necessary because those schools were “underutilized.”¹ She was willing to accept him at his word that the result would be better educational experiences for the tens of thousands of students who would be affected, including her four young children. So, the following fall, she entered the new school year with an open mind.

Her attitude shifted immediately once she saw the actual impact of the closures on her children’s schools. When she dropped her daughter off for her first day of kindergarten and saw that her class had fifty-four students and just one teacher, she cried. Then she saw how her children’s teachers didn’t even have enough books and paper to go around for every child. The elementary school was so overcrowded that her son’s pre-K class had to eat lunch on the floor of the school gym. To make matters worse, her already severely underresourced local schools had faced multiple rounds of budget cuts in recent years, forcing them to eliminate staff, valuable student programs, extracurricular activities, and portions of the curriculum, such as art, music, and world language classes. Those effects, combined with the impact of the closures, meant that in many schools there simply weren’t nearly enough educators, support staff, and educational resources to create a healthy learning environment and meet the diversity of children’s needs. “What I saw was nothing short of a catastrophe,” she says.

As a result, day after day, month after month, Anna was tormented by the knowledge that her children were not receiving the education they needed. She didn’t blame their teachers. Anna knew them well, and she recognized that they were quality educators who loved the kids that they taught. She also knew that those teachers’ skill and devotion were not enough to overcome the horrendous conditions under which they were forced to work. Anna tried her best to help out and even volunteered extensively at her children’s schools, but still it wasn’t enough. It was painfully obvious to her that her children, along with countless others in their schools, were being failed by their policy makers. She was also acutely aware of how inequitable the education system had been and continued to be, and how her kids’ chances at a good life were diminishing by the day because of it. “They don’t have to deal with this in privileged neighborhoods where white folks are,” she says. “They just don’t. And I’m happy for those children. They should be educated—properly. Those families should have access to everything they need to meet the needs of their children. But so should we on the South Side of Chicago.”

The last straw for Anna came when the Chicago Public Schools announced that they would be closing Walter H. Dyett School in 2015. Dyett was a treasured community institution and the last traditional, open-enrollment high school in the area. Anna had desperately wanted her children to attend Dyett, so when the closure was announced, she was heartbroken. “My kids had already lost so much,” she says, “I couldn’t stand to see them lose this as well.” So she decided to join together with the many other concerned parents and community members to try to persuade the mayor and the school system to reconsider.

Their large community coalition attempted to arrange meetings with the mayor and the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, but they were ignored. They tried writing letters, but got no results. They engaged in multiple protests—still nothing. They even worked with education policy experts to create their own research-based plan for improving Dyett. For months, they did everything they could think of to show their public officials how beloved Dyett was and how important it was to the community, but were repeatedly brushed aside. “No one listened to us,” Anna says. “When we saw how the mayor and other political people disrespected our community, we knew we had to take drastic action.”²

That action came in the form of a hunger strike. Anna and eleven other community members decided that they wouldn’t eat until Mayor Emanuel agreed to keep Dyett open and adopt the community’s school improvement plan. For thirty-four days, Anna and others went without food. Many of the hunger strikers suffered serious health complications and lost dangerous amounts of weight. Several became so ill that they were forced to drop out. Anna herself had to be hospitalized at one point, but she insisted on continuing. Meanwhile, the mayor was hosting ribbon cuttings on shiny new charter schools in more affluent neighborhoods across town. The protest only ended because the remaining hunger strikers realized, Anna says, that “the mayor would leave us out there to die.”

Why would someone endanger themselves by taking such an extreme measure as going without food for over a month? Because, Anna says, “seeing my children being starved of education was killing me more than not eating would.”

All of us face obstacles and threats to our well-being at some points during our lives. Fortunately, for most of us the obstacles are usually rather small, the threats are minimal, and we don’t have to face either very often.

However, many US residents aren’t so lucky. For these individuals, every day can feel like walking through a minefield where one small misstep could end your life as you know it.

Carlil Pittman’s minefield starts bright and early in the morning. Every day, when he gets in his car to drive to work or to take his kids to school, he does so with the understanding that there is a high likelihood he will be pulled over by the police. (He typically gets pulled over several times a week, and sometimes it’s several times a day.) When he is at home, a patrol car drives down his street and past his house at least every hour, and sometimes every fifteen minutes. Even when he was in high school, it seemed that there was always a school resource officer (SRO) nearby, patrolling the hallways. Carlil is twenty-six years old, and while he doesn’t have a criminal record, he has never known a world in which the police weren’t a nearly constant presence in his life.

He has been stopped, questioned, searched, and asked if he is a gang member more times than he can count. Sometimes these incidents have been deeply humiliating, such as when an SRO pulled Carlil’s pants down to his ankles in the middle of a crowded school hallway during a search. Other times they have been frightening, such as the numerous times that officers have drawn their guns on him during routine traffic stops, or when he has been pulled over and officers have been aggressive with him while his kids were in the car. “People try to say this is about ‘public safety,’ ” he says. “But my question is, are they really trying to keep me safe, or do they think they’re keeping other people safe from me? Because having cops around all the time doesn’t make me feel safe. It makes me feel like a target.”

“Tough on crime” has been a popular slogan for many politicians over the years, but Carlil has observed up close what that actually looks like in practice. He has seen the pain that it has caused. He has watched as far too many families have been torn apart by it, including his own. He has witnessed many times over how easily the overwhelming and hyperaggressive police presence in his community has led to the needless incarceration of his loved ones and neighbors. Even as a teenager, he repeatedly saw how, in his heavily policed high school, what would normally be considered minor school disciplinary issues led to his friends and peers being put in handcuffs, arrested, and taken to jail. He tries not to blame the individual officers who are policing him, because he knows that they are, for the most part, just doing the job that they have been told to do. Nevertheless, he has seen enough over the years to know that he has to treat all officers as a threat. “They don’t live in our community, and they don’t understand our community, but they’re very quick to come in and label the people of our community as criminals, or criminals-to-be,” he says.

What really bothers Carlil, though, is the lack of investment in his community for anything other than the police and the criminal justice system. Because while there has been an enormous dedication of resources to ensure that individuals who are empowered to arrest and shoot him are never far away, there seems to be no such urgency to address the severe employment, health, housing, and education needs of people in his community. “They don’t invest in the schools or in making sure that people have good-paying jobs and health care,” he says, “so of course there are lots of people who struggle to feed their families, who have mental health issues, and who have drug and alcohol issues. But instead of providing social workers or counselors or other people who can give them the help they need, here they send in the cops. And those people wind up behind bars, or worse.”

Carlil knows that nobody in his community is immune from that particular fate, including himself. He also cannot escape the realization that the world has been, for most of his life, openly hostile to his very existence: “It often seems like society has been patiently waiting for me to make a mistake and give it a reason to get rid of me just like it’s gotten rid of so many other members of my family and community.”

Imagine what it would be like to leave your house every morning without knowing whether you would ever be able to see your family again. You would say goodbye to your parents, siblings, children, or other loved ones, and you wouldn’t know if you were doing so for the last time. You wouldn’t know whether they would be there when you returned at the end of the day, or if you would even be able to make it home to see them again.

For most people, that sounds like it could be the plot of a horror movie. For Mónica Acosta, it has been her daily life for decades.

Mónica was born in Mexico and moved to Colorado with her family when she was three. She is now thirty-four years old, and for most of her life, she has lived with the constant, paralyzing fear that she, her family members, and her friends would be deported; that one day she would be snatched up by ICE and sent to a place entirely foreign to her, or that suddenly her family and friends would be gone. Disappeared. “I’m always worried about my safety and that of my loved ones,” she says. “It never stops. So even if I call someone and they don’t answer, I immediately assume the worst.” Her concern hasn’t been unwarranted, either. She has had many of her loved ones taken from her life by the immigration system, including her mother when Mónica was just a teenager. It was ten years before they would be able to see each other again. Because her mom was pregnant at the time, Mónica didn’t even get to meet her youngest sister in person until she was ten years old.

All throughout her life, Mónica has been reluctant to leave the house for anything other than school or work out of fear that she wouldn’t make it home. While she has lived in the United States for over thirty years, was a stellar student, and has been an exemplary employee and community member as an adult, she has to take anxiety medication every day because her living situation—indeed her very existence—has always been so precarious. She has almost always had to hide aspects of herself, to be extra careful every minute of every day, to make sure that she never lets her guard down. “I’ve never really felt like I could trust anyone,” she says. “There’s a level of paranoia that becomes a part of you. And along with it there’s so much day-to-day stress, anxiety, depression, and illness. Hiding yourself like that—it literally makes you sick, both mentally and physically.”

Even now, after being able to acquire temporary legal status as a “Dreamer” through the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), she is afraid to put down too many roots. “How can I do the things my friends are doing, like buying a house and having children,” she wonders, “when there would be a chance that I could be forced to leave? A chance that I could be separated from my child, like my mother was from me?”

The experiences of Anna, Carlil, and Mónica are certainly not unique to them. On the contrary, there are millions of people who have to endure the same type of daily burdens that they do. Millions of people who cannot escape these constant, unwelcome reminders of their inferior status within US society. An unavoidable side effect of that is a type of persistent emotional and psychological torture that comes from the knowledge that their lives, or the lives of their children, are not valued as much as others. They have to live with the fact that all available indications have made it abundantly clear that our society simply doesn’t care as much about their well-being as it does about other people. They have to somehow stomach the undeniable reality that it is far more acceptable to inflict harm on them than it is to do so on others.

Even worse is that this devaluation of their lives comes not from the actions of private citizens, but rather from our government institutions. It is government action (or inaction) that has them living in fear that their children won’t be able to escape the burdens of inequality; that has them terrified that they might wind up as the next George Floyd or be added to what is already the largest incarcerated population in the world; that has them uncertain of whether they will even be able to wake up in their home tomorrow and see their loved ones again. There are many types of injustices that our government has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on people of all races and ethnicities. However, this particular brand of injustice is very nearly the worst sort of horror that can be inflicted on a person by their home government. And not to minimize the inequities faced by other marginalized people, but in the United States, our most atrocious treatment is almost exclusively reserved for the residents of black and brown communities.*

The best way to learn about how these dynamics affect communities of color across the United States is to, of course, hear directly from those who live in those communities. Thus, I must confess that I was quite reluctant to even write this book. I have dedicated my entire career to supporting the leadership of the people most affected by systemic racism, to creating spaces in which they can tell their own stories and then assisting them as they work through the democratic process to have those stories heard and responded to appropriately. So the last thing I would want is to undercut their leadership by offering my version of their experiences.

However, what I have also learned over the years is that, as a society, we systematically ignore the lived experiences of people of color to a shocking degree. That is especially true for people of color from low-income and working-class communities. There are just very few platforms for the residents of these communities to share their perspectives. (Consider this: When was the last time you saw a news story on a prominent TV network or an article in a mainstream publication that included more than a short sound bite or quote from a person directly affected by systemic racial injustice? It almost never happens. These are horrific, ongoing crises, and yet the people suffering their effects are virtually invisible in the public conversation about them.) So this book is intended to be one such—albeit limited—platform to share a set of perspectives that too often go ignored. The goal isn’t for readers of this book to adopt my views on racial justice, but rather to persuade more people to listen to what people of color are saying about the challenges they face and how they should be addressed. Indeed, that is how I have learned virtually every worthwhile thing I know about these subjects.

Of course, it is also true that I bring my own perspective on the American racial divide. That comes from having had an uncommon set of opportunities to see what both sides of that divide look like up close. In fact, while the first half of my life was spent growing up on one side of it, the second half has been devoted to working closely with communities that are firmly on the other side of it. Through those experiences, I have seen both the best and the worst that America has to offer its people. In fact, the gap between those experiences is so large that it would probably be more accurate to describe what I have observed as two entirely distinct Americas.

In the first America that I came to know, I lived in predominantly white, midwestern communities, attended predominantly white schools and churches, and worked alongside predominantly white coworkers. During this period, I had what could fairly be described as a typical white middle-class American experience. It was spent mostly in suburbs, on university campuses, and in sections of cities that were populated with mostly college-educated white professionals. If you could imagine a composite of the environments depicted by The Wonder Years, Saved by the Bell, The Breakfast Club, Animal House, Friends, and Legally Blonde, you wouldn’t be too far off.

The other America with which I have become familiar consists of a broad group of primarily low-income and working-class African American and Latinx communities across the country. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that the experiences of their residents are representative of all people of color in the United States. Many families—of all socioeconomic levels—have undoubtedly lived very different lives. I also cannot claim to understand anywhere near the full depth of the injustices these communities face; nor do I purport to be a spokesperson for them. However, I have spent most of the past twenty years learning as much as I could about those communities from their residents while being immersed in the policies that shape them.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, I have observed that the residents of these communities of color share a set of common experiences, some of which are similar to what I experienced in the predominantly white communities I grew up in, and some of which are remarkably different.

Let’s start with the similarities between those two Americas. The one that stands out the most is this: each was filled with people who, on a daily basis, would make significant, and frequently heroic, sacrifices to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of their family and their community. The numerous people I met like that during the first half of my life were responsible for putting me on the path that led to the second half of my life. And the multitudes of people I have met like that during the second half of my life are my constant source of inspiration.

Now for the differences. The most significant is this: across those two Americas, residents’ lived experiences with their government have been so divergent that it can be difficult to fathom how we have been able to claim that they are both part of the same society.

For example, in the white communities that I was a part of, it was largely taken for granted that residents would have access to quality public schools, health care, housing, parks, and community centers. In the communities of color, however, residents are continually told—usually by white policy makers—that there are insufficient resources for such things. Nevertheless, policy makers always seem to be able to locate enough resources to fund additional police, jails, prisons, prosecutors, and ICE officers in these communities.

In those white communities, law enforcement had virtually no presence in people’s day-to-day lives beyond routine traffic stops, despite the fact that many of the people I knew as a teenager regularly engaged in what is considered elsewhere to be criminal behavior. When our lawlessness was so extreme that the police did feel compelled to intervene, we usually encountered a genial “Officer Friendly” type. These officers treated us as if they were our mentors, and typically the most severe consequences any of us received from them were a stern look and a verbal warning. When I describe this to residents of communities of color—particularly those under the age of thirty-five—they think I am making it up.

Where I grew up, we were repeatedly told that we could achieve whatever we wanted, and the opportunities and assistance available to us made us believe that to be true. It was obvious to us that the society around us had prioritized our healthy development. In the communities of color, however, the pervasive lack of resources and developmental support provides many young people with daily reminders that the society they live in isn’t invested in their success. It is heartbreaking to see how clearly young people perceive and internalize that they are not being properly cared for, and it is tragic how many of them become alienated from their families, schools, and other community institutions as a result.

In the white communities, it was taken for granted that virtually everyone who wanted to work would have access to a good job. In the black and brown communities that I have become familiar with, such quality, living-wage jobs are frequently rare to virtually nonexistent. The jobs that are available often barely pay well enough to survive on, and sometimes they don’t even reach that level. People who work so extraordinarily hard—often at multiple jobs—that they are left with little to no time with their children and other loved ones are nevertheless often just one slip-up, just one illness, just one missed paycheck from calamity for their families.

When I was young, we never had to worry that we were being poisoned by our drinking water or that our schools and homes were located on land that was unsafe for our health. In the communities of color, residents have no such luxury, and are typically the ones harmed first and most severely by environmental degradation.

In the communities I grew up in, when white people made mistakes, typically they were simply not allowed to fall through society’s cracks. Missteps were met with compassion, soft landings, and as many “second chances” as were needed. (If not for this feature, the many poor choices made by this particular author during his youth could have produced some very different life outcomes.) Within black and brown communities, however, people who make mistakes—even small children—often find that their government institutions have “zero tolerance” for them, and they are punished severely and oftentimes discarded accordingly.

In the white communities, residents were typically encouraged to participate in civic life, and when a problem arose with regard to some government function, residents were usually able to hold their policy makers accountable and address it through their democratic institutions. In the communities of color, residents are almost never allowed to play any sort of meaningful role in shaping the policies that affect them. Instead, people who are usually largely unfamiliar with those communities are nevertheless allowed to impose their own views on what is best for the residents, and then when the inevitable problems arise, they typically ignore community input and pushback.

None of this is to suggest that there aren’t plenty of people who have struggled in those white communities for a variety of reasons, and plenty of others who have been able to flourish in the communities of color. Of course there have. But it is undeniable that government action and inaction have forced the residents of those black and brown communities to live exponentially more difficult lives than the residents of those white communities I grew up in years ago. Simply put, within those white communities, it was made far easier for us to succeed in reaching our goals, and far more difficult for us to fail. In contrast, within the communities of color, it often takes nearly superhuman efforts by families to get ahead.

What is even worse is how hard communities of color have had to fight just to attain such obviously inequitable opportunities. It typically requires massive, long-term collective efforts merely to achieve the subpar conditions described earlier. Community leaders have to be constantly vigilant and beat back an endless series of public policies that threaten the well-being of their people. They have to assume this immense responsibility just to give the residents of their communities a chance at a better life. In many cases, they have to do so just to raise the odds that their people can avoid being killed by the same dynamics that have taken so many other lives around them. Meanwhile, there is no such imperative within white communities. I have lived in many, all across the country, and while each faced challenges, at no time did those communities have to fight for their basic survival. That particular distinction may just represent the most fundamental form of white privilege that there is.

Who Benefits?

How can it be that we have allowed so many of our people to suffer needlessly? After all these years, how can we still have such profoundly inequitable schools? How can we still have a mass criminalization and incarceration system that has devastated communities across the country? Why are we still forcing millions of immigrants to live in perpetual fear of deportation? How do we have a health care system that doesn’t address all people’s needs? Why do we allow people to be paid poverty wages? Why haven’t we taken decisive action to protect our environment? How can we allow so many of our people to be effectively shut out of our democracy? These are obvious, catastrophic, and long-standing policy failures affecting huge portions of the US population, and particularly communities of color, so why haven’t we been able to address them? It isn’t because we aren’t capable of fixing them—we absolutely are. And it isn’t because there are good and valid justifications for them. On the contrary, each one of them is morally indefensible. There is no “other side of the story” that justifies the immense harm they cause. There is no pros-and-cons list that you can make where the value of the pros come close to reaching the severity of the cons. So why have these problems persisted and even grown over time?

In short, it is because they have supporters. In particular, they have extraordinarily wealthy and powerful supporters who benefit from these problems not being fixed.

By this point, most Americans are aware of the shocking, and rapidly expanding, wealth inequality in our country. To give just one example, the four hundred richest American individuals now have far more wealth than the combined total of all sixteen million black households in the United States.³ Most people also have some sense of how that concentration of wealth translates into an outsize influence for certain wealthy Corporate America and Wall Street executives in shaping policy. What most do not fully grasp is how much economic and political gain these individuals have realized as a result of racial injustice. For these racism profiteers, the enduring racial divide creates both lucrative moneymaking opportunities and the social, economic, and political inequality that fuels their extreme wealth and power. In other words, the unjust education, criminal justice, and immigration policies that have been so thoroughly devastating for millions of individuals like Anna Jones, Carlil Pittman, and Mónica Acosta are, for the ultra-wealthy, desirable.

The following chapters describe how, and why, ultra-wealthy leaders from Corporate America and Wall Street are the driving force behind many of the public policies that uphold systemic racism and cause severe harm to communities of color across the country. For example, you will learn how the Koch family, Bill Gates, the Walton family, Mark Zuckerberg, and a handful of others have spent billions of dollars in aligned efforts that are dismantling the public school system and directly causing the suffering of Anna Jones and countless others. You will come to understand how the nation’s mass criminalization and incarceration system, which forces Carlil Pittman and many more people like him to navigate a gauntlet of police officers and other law enforcement officials every single day, can be traced back to the leaders of many of the largest and best-known corporations in the United States, Wall Street banks, private prison companies, and the Kochs’ network of ultra-wealthy allies. You will also discover how many of the same individuals and organizations have played a significant role in the creation of the extreme anti-immigrant policies that have plagued Mónica Acosta and millions of other migrants for decades.

If there is one thread that ties all these dynamics together, it has been the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is the primary vehicle through which the ultra-wealthy have organized themselves politically. It has a reported three hundred–plus corporate members and two thousand legislative members who work together—usually secretively—on legislation that advances those corporations’ common agenda.⁴ ALEC is incredibly prolific; over one thousand of its “model bills” are introduced every year in state legislatures across the country, with one in five of them being passed into law.⁵ While that legislation covers a broad range of issues, a large percentage of it has been directed at protecting, expanding, and benefiting from systemic racism. In other words, perhaps the most powerful force advancing strategic racism in the United States is an organization whose current and recent members represent a “Who’s Who” of US corporations, including Walmart, Google, Home Depot, AT&T, General Electric, Coca-Cola, Ford, ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Foods, Verizon, Pfizer, Chevron, Bank of America, Microsoft, Visa, Coors, General Motors, American Express, Koch Industries, Facebook, UPS, Eli Lilly, Time Warner Cable, Comcast News Corporation, Dell, Amway, IBM, FedEx, Anheuser-Busch, Dow Chemical, McDonald’s, State Farm, Northrop Grumman, Procter & Gamble, and Wells Fargo, along with hundreds of others.⁶

As ALEC’s activities have been brought to light in recent years, some of these corporations and the high-profile individuals who run them have tried to disassociate themselves from the harm being caused by their political activity and affiliations.⁷ However, that hasn’t meant that they have stopped promoting systemic racism; they have simply changed their tactics. Overall, most ultra-wealthy racism profiteers have made it clear that they have no interest in ever truly changing course. Strategic racism is far too valuable to them for that. On the contrary, they are escalating their efforts. As just one example, chapter 5 describes how ALEC and others are leading efforts to rewrite the US Constitution so that it is more aligned with their agenda.

Looking in the Mirror

It must be said that while the ultra-wealthy are the primary beneficiaries of racial injustice, they are not the only ones. It may be uncomfortable for many to think about, but if we examine our collection of public policies carefully and honestly, we soon learn that many, many millions of other working-class, middle-class, and wealthy white Americans have reaped, and continue to reap, significant benefits from the injustice heaped upon people of color. Some of the most obvious examples include the major role that slavery, the seizure or annexation of tribal and Mexican land, and Jim Crow–era legalized segregation have all played in establishing the foundation of inequities that continue to persist today.⁸ However, it would be a grave mistake to limit our thinking to those examples that occurred before many of us were even born.

For example, most American adults attended public schools that were funded in significant part by local property tax revenues. Such systems frequently result in profoundly inequitable funding structures, the impact of which has been particularly devastating for communities of color.⁹ That injustice has received considerable attention over the years. What is almost never discussed is the flip side of that issue: how children from other communities benefit from that inequity. For example, let’s assume a white student in a relatively affluent community has an additional $3,000 in taxpayer dollars dedicated to her education every year, compared to a student of color in a nearby community.¹⁰ In a classroom of thirty students, that amounts to an additional annual investment of $90,000 that could be used to hire a teacher’s aide, buy classroom computers, and otherwise enrich the educational experiences of those children. Now let’s say there are five thousand students in each of these two districts. The more affluent district would receive an additional $15 million per year. Over the course of that one white child’s K–12 journey, that would mean an additional $195 million in taxpayer dollars was invested in her education system, compared to the neighboring system with the student of color.

Similarly, most American adults have, at some point, worked within a company that pays some of its employees poverty or near-poverty wages, and among those workers there was likely a heavy concentration of people of color.¹¹ If at any point you were receiving higher wages than they were, then it must be acknowledged that the failure to pay adequate wages to your coworkers probably resulted in an increase to your own income.

Along the same lines, if you, like almost everyone, pay for goods and services that are priced more cheaply because some of the employees of the companies providing them aren’t paid a living wage, then you are receiving a sizable economic benefit while the low-wage workforce that is disproportionately black and brown struggles to survive.

If you own a home in a predominantly white community, it is likely that its value is higher as a result of a combination of policies, practices, and racial biases that depress home values in communities of color. For example, very similar or even identical homes in two adjacent communities can be separated in economic value by tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of these dynamics.

When social services are underfunded in communities of color and the tax bills of white communities’ residents are lower as a result, if you reside in one of those white communities, it is likely that you profited from harm being done to others.

We could go on and on about the myriad ways in which white people have been able to utilize their political, economic, and social power to advance their interests at the expense of people of color. Moreover, there is much to be said about the profound advantages associated with not having to face the various slights, indignities, and outright discrimination that many people of color regularly encounter. But even if we put those things aside and just focus on the few factors mentioned here, the fact is that by the time most white people reach middle age, they have accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits as a result of this type of systemic racism. When those benefits accrue across generations, even middle-class individuals can essentially inherit millions of dollars in educational and economic benefits from racial injustice. Again, this isn’t to say that every white person has benefited from all of these factors, or that there aren’t also people of color who benefit from these dynamics. The point is that for a great many white people in particular, even those of us who may not feel like we were born with a silver spoon in our mouths often benefit from an enormous, but sometimes difficult-to-perceive, head start in life. And even the poorest and most marginalized white people in the United States still benefit from privileges they are afforded that similarly situated people of color are not.

Complicity

The uncomfortable truth is that white Americans—yes, all white Americans—have allowed ourselves to become accomplices to racial injustice on a massive scale. Whether we choose to admit it or not, we all share responsibility for allowing systemic racism to persist and grow deeper and deeper roots over time. We all have to own up to the fact that our collective response to these long-standing, widespread inequities has most often been to exhibit apathy or neglect. We have simply failed to see what was going on under our noses, and when we did see it, we have collectively failed to do enough to stop it. That is an absolute tragedy, and we shouldn’t sugarcoat it.

Of course, our contributions to racial injustice go beyond our general myopia and passivity. For systemic racism to survive, it needs people to actively defend and promote it. The ultra-wealthy have certainly taken on much of that responsibility, but they cannot preserve the system alone. They need foot soldiers. They need legislators who will support their preferred policies. They need voters to elect those legislators. They need people to help shape a public dialogue that advances their priorities. They need the public to resist social change efforts. Without these troops on the ground, the ultra-wealthy would be grossly outnumbered, and the entire system of racial injustice would fall apart.

Thus far, however, there has been no shortage of recruits, the vast majority of whom have been white. So who are these people? You might know someone who you think belongs to this ignominious group. Maybe it’s a racist uncle or neighbor. Or maybe you don’t have anyone in particular in mind and you just think of this group as a collection of nameless, faceless bigots. Maybe you pin it on those who call themselves the “alt right” (as if they were these cool, alternative thinkers—the Kurt Cobains of conservative politics—rather than just being a sewing circle for pathetic racists). Or perhaps you primarily think of them, as I once did, as out-of-touch dinosaurs.

The one thing that all of these definitions share in common is that they imagine the defenders of systemic racism as societal outliers. We all have this tendency to try and put some psychological distance between ourselves and those we believe to be culpable. We tell ourselves, “They are the racist ones, not us.” What we fail to see is that systemic racism is like the most contagious of diseases; if you are anywhere in the vicinity of it, you are going to get infected.

Indeed, the sad reality is that almost all of us have spent time as foot soldiers for the ultra-wealthy. Almost all of us have supported elected officials who defended or advanced the policies underlying systemic racism. (This isn’t an exclusive club. It includes perhaps every US president, most members of Congress and state legislatures, and nearly all locally elected officials.) Almost all of us have expressed support, at one time or another, for the ideology at the root of racial injustice. Almost all of us have, on occasion, been hesitant to support social change efforts because we thought they were unnecessary or went too far in addressing racial inequities. Of course, people of color aren’t immune to these dynamics either. Yet there may not be a single white person in America who hasn’t made a contribution to systemic racism at some point.

I was blind to these realities for a very long time. During my youth, while I was certainly aware that I had family members, coworkers, and neighbors who held what I thought to be backward views on issues of race or who supported the politicians responsible for racial injustice, I attributed it to a generational gap. Later on, when I became a lawyer and started spending my days confronting the individuals responsible for doing the day-to-day dirty work of defending systemic racism, it was still quite easy to draw distinctions between myself and them. When I looked at them sitting on the other side of the negotiating table, or casting their votes in the legislature, or going on TV to rally support for their position, I didn’t see peers. I saw historical relics clinging to the vestiges of white supremacy.

However, now, as I have aged, when I hear people in my life express troubling views on race or support politicians who defend the status quo, or I look across the negotiating table at the people defending racist policies, I am startled to discover how similar we are. Most of them are products of the same generation as me. We were raised with the same values. Many of us went to the same type of schools, or attended the same types of churches, or enjoy the same TV shows, movies, and hobbies. Thus I finally came to realize that it isn’t old, ignorant white men who are upholding racial injustice. I couldn’t pin it on people I assumed to be fundamentally dissimilar from me. On the contrary, I had to acknowledge that we were alike in far more ways than we were different—and how at earlier points in my life we wouldn’t have been different at all. I also had to recognize that systemic racism had now become my generation’s badge of dishonor to wear. And just as it was passed down to us, soon we will pass it along to the next generation, unless we find a way to withhold this cultural inheritance from them.

Racial Miseducation

These experiences allowed me to finally understand how the US racial divide is preserved year after year, generation after generation. It’s because those who defend that divide are reproduced with remarkable efficiency. A large part of that comes from the values and beliefs handed down to us. Rugged individualism. Pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. A firm belief that America is a meritocracy. All of that contributes to the creation of a culture that discourages us from acknowledging and addressing systemic racism.

Of course, that doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility for allowing racial inequities to fester, but it is nevertheless true that the vast majority of us haven’t been provided anywhere close to the whole story on these issues. On the contrary, and as will be discussed in the following chapters, systemic racism is effectively hidden from our view. Then we are further dissuaded from helping to address it by the persistent myth that we are a “colorblind” or “post-racial” society. This fallacy tells us that racial injustice is a thing of the past, that any lingering issues aren’t that severe, that those that do persist are mostly the result of individuals’ moral failings, and thus there is nothing to be done at the systemic level to fix them. (To put it another way, the colorblind approach is based on the sophisticated “I’m Gonna Close My Eyes and Pretend the Bad Things Aren’t Happening” theory and its elegant companion, the “When the Bad Things Keep Happening, It’s Your F–ing Problem” corollary.) As a result, when it comes to issues of race, while most of us think of ourselves as being conscientious and good-hearted, in reality we are largely clueless and confused. That is why so many white people believe that they are the ones most victimized by discrimination, and why the mere assertion that “black lives matter” causes so many white people to lose their minds.¹²

Our miseducation doesn’t end there. On the more unsavory side, we have all been inundated since birth with both subtly and overtly racist messages. That people of color were different from “us” and didn’t share “our” values. That “they” were inherently lazy, irresponsible, prone to criminality, and less intelligent.¹³ Our highest level of scorn was supposed to be reserved for low-income people of color who supposedly drag down the rest of us because of the many “handouts” and “special privileges” they receive. These beliefs have resulted in some truly troubling views and theories around people of color and issues of race (which, for whatever reason, countless other white people have felt comfortable sharing with me over the years, as if I were their own personal race psychiatrist). Yet even if we didn’t consciously subscribe to those vile and ignorant beliefs, decades of exposure to them in various forms surely had some effect on how we viewed the world. How could they not?

For my part, while my family ensured that I would avoid accumulating the most egregious versions of these biases, I must admit that the values and beliefs that filtered down to me through other influences made me self-centered and egotistical. They convinced me that because of my educational and professional achievements, I was more worthy of a good life than others. And that those who received worse grades, got lower SAT scores, attended less-esteemed universities, or had less-prestigious jobs were less deserving. These were all key elements of the culture that shaped much of my development and that of so many others like me.

Ultimately, I had to reexamine my own education. I had to recognize that the stories middle-class and wealthy white folks tell ourselves about how we were self-made men and women who succeeded because of our greater merit and superior work ethic were pure fantasies. They were either patently false or omitted essential elements of the story. (For example, yes, I worked hard to get to where I am, but lots of people who weren’t given the types of opportunities that I was given work just as hard or harder. Plus, it’s easy to work hard when the institutions charged with your development have made a clear investment in your success.) Additionally, I had to unpack the many ways in which the culture I was raised in had effectively dehumanized people of color in my eyes and the eyes of my peers; how the effect had been for us to actually value their lives less than those of others.

That was Step One. Step Two was coming to realize that my life and the lives of other white people like me are also far more difficult than they need to be. However, it isn’t because of the people of color whom we have been encouraged to disregard, look down upon, and resent. It’s because we have the same people inflicting needless harm on us and our families that they do.

Colorblind Profiteering

People all across the United States, of all races and ethnicities, face a wide variety of day-to-day challenges. However, the most serious may be this: Most of us go from our births to our deaths without our lives being appropriately valued and without having a meaningful role in shaping the decisions that most affect our lives.

What does that mean? That the systems we all encounter day to day aren’t centered on what we all need to lead a good, fulfilling life, and our opportunities to exercise some control over our lives through the democratic process have been, or are being, stripped away. It means that the country we love, or at least want to love, too often doesn’t love us back.

This was made painfully apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic when our government—spurred on by the large corporate members of ALEC—displayed an extraordinarily callous indifference to people’s health and safety in the rush to send adults back to work and children back to school.¹⁴ However, these dynamics have long manifested themselves within many aspects of our lives and plague both white people and people of color—though of course, overall, not in anything approaching equal fashion. For example,

1.In the United States, most adults with children send them to public schools to learn what they need to help them grow into healthy, successful adults who can achieve their dreams. However, those schools are increasingly deprived of the resources required to meet our children’s needs. In far too many schools, the curriculum is narrowing, class sizes are growing, teachers are undermined, and young people aren’t receiving an education that engages them and speaks to their interests and their lives.¹⁵ Rather than education being about the well-rounded development of our children and valuing them for who they are as individuals, our policy makers typically prefer one-size-fits-all initiatives and pay far too much attention to standardized test scores and whether our children are being educated to, as is often said, “compete in the global economy.” (To my knowledge, no parent has ever walked out of a hospital with a new baby dreaming about the day when their child would become more economically valuable than someone else’s child in Asia, Africa, or South America.) These dynamics push countless young people out of school and away from their educational path. Even those young people who are able to make it through to college find that our government has drastically reduced its investment in higher education, thus shifting the costs to students and families and leaving them saddled with massive amounts of debt.¹⁶

2.To make a living, most of us are more than willing to work hard. However, we increasingly have to work much harder for much less income and fewer benefits.¹⁷ Many of us are at constant risk of losing our jobs to someone—whether in the United States or another country—who is willing to do it for less money. We are told that our compensation is determined by “the market,” which is another way of saying that many of us are paid the lowest amount our employers can get away with, regardless of whether it is sufficient to support an adequate standard of living. Meanwhile, the executives and investors in the companies most of us work for have accumulated extreme wealth while the rest of us are left with far too little economic security and time to enjoy life with family and friends.

3.In the United States, we treat health care as a privilege and not as a right. Among other things, that means that if we can’t afford the exorbitant cost of private insurance and then suffer or die from a preventable illness, or go bankrupt in paying for medical costs, then it is treated as our own fault. (Shouldn’t we all be deeply embarrassed that hundreds of thousands of Americans per year have to resort to GoFundMe campaigns to pay for their medical care?)¹⁸ It also means that our health care system has become far too focused on the profitability of insurance companies and other corporations at the expense of supporting health care professionals in meeting the full array of physical, mental, and behavioral health needs of the people and communities they serve.

4.There is nothing more important to our collective future than the health of our planet—our very survival as a species depends upon it. Yet many of our policy makers and business leaders continue to endanger us all by neglecting or opposing efforts to address climate change and provide all people with a clean and healthy environment, purely because it is in their individual economic and political interests to do so.

5.Over the past forty-plus years we have spent a huge percentage of our national wealth to create perhaps the largest system of mass incarceration, criminalization, and surveillance that the world has ever seen.¹⁹ We have also built the most expansive (and expensive) military and national security system of all time.²⁰ Aside from being ineffective at creating truly safe and healthy communities, all of these systems have diminished the humanity of tens of millions of people, including those who have been needlessly degraded by the criminal justice and immigration enforcement systems, had their privacy violated, been harmed as a result of unnecessary military aggression, have had to enforce unjust policies, and—like many US troops—had their lives put at risk without sufficient cause. In short, we have made astounding investments in systems that have been deeply harmful to our own people, and to people around the world, instead of putting our money into systems that meet our most pressing education, employment, health, housing, and environmental needs.

6.In recent years there has been a determined effort to dismantle the social safety net, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social welfare programs. As a result, many people who are experiencing challenging periods in their lives—including those who have lost their jobs, lost their homes, are experiencing health issues, are attempting to escape unhealthy or abusive relationships, have to care for their children or an aging family member, or are aging themselves—are finding it increasingly difficult to have their basic needs met and live with dignity.

7.The United States is a pluralistic society with a population that comprises a marvelous tapestry of differences. However, too often our laws, policies, and political rhetoric lead not to the celebration of our diversity, but rather to attacks and discrimination against those identified as being different from an artificial set of norms. In the process, they impede our ability to recognize our common humanity and obscure the fact that all of our lives have equal value. Additionally, our policy makers cynically exploit the differences between us around hot-button social issues—such as abortion, gun control, and immigration—to build a base of support that allows them to advance other political agenda items that are much higher priority for them, but far less popular with voters. To make matters worse, when people do face widespread injustice on the basis of their differences, or circumstances clearly indicate the need for policy change on one of the hot-button social issues, our policy makers consistently fail to respond with meaningful efforts that address the root causes of the problem.

8.Currently, in our country, because of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, restrictions on our voting rights, attacks on labor unions, and other efforts to allow our politics to be dominated by the ultra-wealthy, our democratic processes have deteriorated to the point that Corporate America and Wall Street executives have far more control over most of the policy decisions described in this list, and thus our lives, than all the rest of us have combined.²¹

While these certainly aren’t the only systemic issues facing our people, they do constitute a large percentage of the most pressing, day-to-day issues faced by the vast majority of US residents. What they all have in common is that regardless of your race or ethnicity, when you examine the factors that devalue your life and make it harder than it has to be, virtually all roads lead back to the same place. The individuals who benefit most from racial injustice are the same individuals who benefit most from the challenges facing white people.

When the relentless pursuit of profits is allowed to take priority over people and the planet, the ultra-wealthy benefit. When the public embraces the perversity of an education system that pushes more of its students out and a criminal justice system that pulls more people in, the ultra-wealthy benefit. When tax breaks for the rich are prioritized over vital services to low-income, working-class, and middle-class families, they benefit. When education becomes less about what our children need and more about what Corporate America needs, the ultra-wealthy benefit. When we permit “public safety” to be used as a justification for repressive law enforcement and military strategies, they benefit. When the underfunding of our public institutions paves the way for the functions of those institutions to be privatized, they benefit. When our democratic structures are allowed to deteriorate, and communities lose their right to self-determination, the ultra-wealthy benefit. When we create competitive systems that aren’t designed to meet everyone’s needs but rather to help only a select few “winners” while the “losers” are made to believe that they deserve less, they benefit. When people become convinced that resources are scarce and that one community’s gain is another’s loss, they benefit. When people and communities are pitted against each other and are convinced to resent each other for their differences, they benefit.

As will be discussed, not only do the ultra-wealthy benefit, but they have been at the forefront of all these efforts to ensure that our public policies are aligned with their interests and not those of the vast majority of US residents. As a result, a very small number of people have become absurdly wealthy and powerful on the backs of the rest of us. This isn’t an entirely new problem, of course, but it is an escalating one. Unfortunately, too many of us, and especially white people, have been conditioned to acquiesce to these realities. However, there is nothing inevitable about underresourced schools, widespread public health deficiencies, high unemployment rates, poverty wages, environmental degradation, mass criminalization, perpetual war, plutocracy, and widespread discrimination. These aren’t unavoidable aspects of American life. On the contrary, these are problems that we have created for ourselves. And they can be changed.

There is no good reason why our government cannot be set up in a way that honors the life of every person, that allows all people to have a voice in shaping the decisions that affect their lives, and that creates a just and equitable society. There is no reason why we cannot truly have a government that is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” As will be described in chapter 5, there is no reason why the resources currently being used to severely harm people of all races and ethnicities couldn’t be repurposed to address our most pressing social problems and meet all people’s basic needs. This type of transformative change is within our grasp. But to get there, we need white people to recognize that racial justice isn’t somebody else’s fight. It has to be our fight too.

Divided and Conquered

The future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country…. It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they’re going to face and deal with and embrace the stranger who they’ve maligned for so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a n****r in the first place. I am not a n****r. I am a man. But if you think I’m a n****r, it means you need it…. You, the white people, invented him, and you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it is able to ask that question.

—James Baldwin, The Negro and the American Promise²²

Imagine that there are a series of races pitting two teams against each other: Team A and Team B. They are grueling and perilous races, so much so that many members of each team won’t survive, and all participants get bruised and bloodied along the course. In each race, Team A is given a huge head start—though many of its members somehow fail to notice it—and in most races, they win as a result. Team A’s members exult in each victory, overjoyed with their dominance and all too willing to share their theories about how the individual and collective failings of Team B explain their defeats. Their gloating, flaunting of their success, and general shortsightedness understandably irk Team B, and over time hostilities grow between the teams. Meanwhile, the organizers of the races are desperately hoping that the disadvantages given to Team B, Team A’s pride in its victories, and the hostilities between the teams accomplish two things. First, that they prevent anyone from noticing that the organizers have taken most of the races’ prize money for themselves. Second, that the teams never stop to ask themselves, “Wait, why are we even competing against each other in the first place?”

The principle of divide and conquer (or divide and rule) is almost as old as government itself. It’s far older than the United States of America, though we may have perfected it with our racial divisions. Our wealthiest citizens have been expertly stirring up conflict between white communities and communities of color pretty much since the first white US inhabitants got off of their boats from Europe and saw that there were multitudes of brown faces staring back at them.²³ For white people, that has often meant directing our anger at our own lot in life toward people of color. They are the convenient scapegoats and the group that fulfills our apparent need to feel superior to someone, both of which serve to distract us from what the ultra-wealthy are doing. It’s an old trick that seemingly never stops working.²⁴ We get thrown a few crumbs and guard them as if our lives depended on it, never bothering to think about what would be possible if we all were able to share the whole pie.

As will be discussed later on, there is much more pie to be had, but it will remain uneaten unless white people join the fight for racial justice and find their common interests with people of color. Of course, white people shouldn’t need self-serving reasons to address systemic racism. We should do it because our government is causing human suffering on a massive scale. Millions of our neighbors are being devastated by systems that are benefiting the rest of us, and nobody should be okay with that. While there have been many periods during US history—such as during the post–Civil War Reconstruction and the 1960s civil rights movement—in which we have taken steps forward on issues of race, we have always stopped far short of creating true equity. Instead, we have been content with “making progress.” But as James Baldwin asked decades ago, how much longer are people of color supposed to wait for this “progress” to actually produce a racially just nation?²⁵ How many more people, or generations of people, have to face the devastation of systemic racism before enough of us become compelled to act? For nearly the entire history of our country, people of color have been told to wait, to be patient, and that eventually their time would come. Yet generation after generation has passed without us honoring our stated commitment to equality and without doing what is necessary to ensure that all our people are able to enjoy the full benefits of living in the United States. Removing that noxious stain from our collective morality should be more than enough justification to make a commitment to advancing racial justice.

Beyond that, we must all understand that combating racial injustice is an essential element to all Americans’ well-being. While it is true that the lives and voices of low-income, working-class, and middle-class people of all races are undervalued, it is especially true for people of color. Systemic racism is the rotten core at the center of the injustice that plagues us all, and there is no substantially better world that can be created on top of such a deeply flawed foundation. Thus we all need to analyze why we, as a collective whole, have developed such a high level of tolerance for racial inequities. And if we are serious about building a society that works for all people, then we need to be honest about the ways in which our current society fails to do so. Systemic racism is a huge, and unavoidable, part of that equation.

Additionally, and as a purely pragmatic matter, when a group of people has consolidated as much wealth and power as these ultra-wealthy Corporate America and Wall Street executives have, a divided resistance will inevitably fail. Those individuals have far too much influence over the media and political, economic, and legal systems to have their power threatened by a public that is split along racial lines. Thus, it is going to take all of us working together to build a just, equitable, and truly democratic society.

Unfortunately, our house is on fire, and white people are acting like the smoke is coming from a barbecue to which we weren’t invited. People of color continue to fight back against systemic racism in large numbers; in fact, they have never stopped. Their efforts have often been the only thing standing in the way of even worse policies being implemented. They have also been the driving force behind the racial justice advances we have made, demonstrating over and over the power of organized and strategic mass movements. Yet while there is an abundance of white people who are strong advocates around issues of poverty and virtually every other righteous—and often unrighteous—cause, white people who will publicly stand up for racial justice consistently, over time, are alarmingly rare. To be sure, there are many white folks who will show up at an occasional rally or give to charities supporting low-income communities of color. However, there are very few who put in sustained work or resources toward truly addressing the root causes of racial injustice. Instead of fighting for real solutions to systemic racism, white people have a long history of limiting our support to superficial, symbolic, or “race-neutral” reforms that tend to be far more effective at making us feel better about race relations than they are at actually addressing the inequities faced by people of color.

Even those self-described liberals and progressives who do advocate for policies that explicitly address issues of race rarely prioritize the issues facing communities of color. Time and time again, in political and advocacy circles, racial justice priorities are the first things to be compromised.²⁶ In determining how to present issues for public discussion, racial justice topics are the first to be deemphasized or cut altogether. The justification is almost always that it must be done to more successfully appeal to white constituents. In practice, what this usually looks like is white people telling other (mostly) white people not to talk about race for fear of alienating all the other white people. It’s not a good look.

Given that history, one cannot blame people of color for feeling pessimistic about whether white people will ever step up around racial justice issues. Many have become discouraged to the point that they have resigned themselves to the idea that white people will never get this right. When taking a long view of US history, who can blame them? For far too long, they have been largely isolated around these issues, creating a thoroughly unhealthy us-versus-them dynamic.

However, there is still hope. I do not believe that there is a shortage of compassion or capacity within white communities; it’s just that our better angels aren’t directed at racial justice efforts often enough, or they are misdirected altogether.²⁷ Nevertheless, white people can, and have, played meaningful roles in advancing racial justice when they are given the facts and are willing and able to receive them. I also believe that there are millions more out there who are primed to join the fight for racial justice. These are the multitudes of white people who continually find themselves frustrated over, and even pained by, racial inequities, but aren’t quite sure what to do about it, as though they had a splinter in their mind. Folks who feel compelled to pitch in and help those from underresourced communities. People who realize that their well-being is inextricably linked to that of people of color. And those who just want to bring a little more justice into the world.

This goes well beyond party politics, Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives. Those are categories and affiliations that should always be secondary to the larger moral questions of how we are going to engage with and support each other as human beings. Moreover, none of our mainstream political groupings have done nearly enough to advance racial justice. Thus, we need to move beyond provincial politics in order to assemble the latent army of conscientious white people out there who can help to create a stronger and more unified America by working together in solidarity with communities of color and other marginalized communities. That is what the following chapters are about: identifying how we can work together to undo the damage that has been done and build something better in its place.

To be clear, no one is asking for “white saviors” to swoop in and save the day. However, we do need white folks to start stepping up more often and in more meaningful ways with their time, energy, and resources to support the racial justice movement alongside any other justice movements (gender, economic, LGBTQIA+, climate, etc.) with which they identify. Because while we are the key ingredient in continuing to prop up the strategic racism that mostly benefits the ultra-wealthy, that also means that we are uniquely well-positioned to help tear it down in ways that benefit people of all races and ethnicities.

That doesn’t mean that every white person has to become a racial justice advocate overnight. Fortunately, just ten individuals coming together within a community can have a major impact. If one hundred white people from each state devoted themselves to racial justice advocacy and joined the people of color already in the fight, the results would be profound. If one thousand white folks came together from every state, it would create a major sea change. If ten thousand from each state got organized and devoted themselves to supporting the efforts of communities of color and advancing their mutual interests, it would be revolutionary. This may seem pie-in-the-sky to some, but these folks are out there, and this is all eminently feasible.²⁸

This also happens to represent the worst nightmare of the ultra-wealthy: that masses of white people and people of color come together to imagine the world we can build together once we stop to ask, “Wait, why are we even competing against each other in the first place?”

*To be clear, many of the dynamics faced by other communities of color, people of color living in predominantly white communities, low-income and working-class white people, women of all races, LGBTQIA+ individuals, persons with disabilities, and other marginalized communities are similar or even identical in some cases. The intent here isn’t to minimize those experiences, but rather to focus on a particularly egregious form of injustice to hopefully raise awareness of the need to address all such inequities in a comprehensive and intersectional way.