Overview 

We built the largest social movement in US history to fight it, spent billions of dollars in philanthropic and federal funding to end it, yet racial inequality persists such that black unemployment rates are stuck at twice those of whites and racial gaps in wages, income, and wealth are growing. Did we just not spend enough money, or is it something else? Our efforts to eradicate these disparities are suffocating under the presumption that, with the stroke of a pen, our society legislated away all the vitriolic racial animus and caste system upon which the racial order was founded. But racial inequality is the product of a system explicitly designed to generate and continually remake to maintain stasis. The Civil Rights Movement effectively changed the laws but not the underlying structure. Seventy percent of blacks who live in the poorest, most racially segregated neighborhoods are from the same families that lived in those ghettos in the 1970s. Recent study found neighborhoods that had been redlined, a practice thought to have caused and intensified segregation, were significantly more likely in 2020 to experience high levels of pediatric asthmatic ER visits.

 

While we’ve done the hard work of exposing systemic discrimination, we have not devised a concrete, organized plan to dismantle it. We get stuck trying to fix racial disparities without undoing the system that produced them and continues to remake them.

This book outlines a six-pronged plan of SOLUTIONS to confront systemic inequality, offering a blueprint for individuals, communities, organizations, and large institutions like government and industry to finally eradicate racial inequality.

While tackling systemic discrimination feels daunting, most readers will be surprised to know that individuals and small groups—not just government and big institutions--can, have, and are tearing down systemic discrimination. I argue the key to upending centuries of carefully constructed racial stratification is first understanding the specific mechanics of how it maintains the racial order--insight which generates the most effective blueprint for how to dismantle it.

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The benefits to ridding this country of systemic racial inequality are potentially staggering. Research conducted by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank shows that when we systematically underutilize and inhibit the full inclusion of entire segments of our society we forego $5 to 7 trillion dollars of potential growth to the nation’s GDP. Even in the midst of this exclusion, a number of key black innovators have played crucial roles at critical junctures in the U.S.’s development—from Katherine Johnson’s calculations that enabled the U.S.’s first moon landing, to Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett’s leadership of the team at the National Institutes of Health that developed the very first COVID vaccine approved by the FDA and available to inoculate people all over the world. But these were a few exceptions--what other problems would we have…could we have…can we solve if we finally knocked down the barriers to full participation? This book endeavors to show the way to that future.

The disparities we see between racial groups in income, wealth, education, job status, etc. are the end-result of structural discrimination, not the beginning or cause of the problem. They result from, and were structured by, systemic inequality that originated in the past and are reinforced, renewed, and reinvigorated in the present. Our tendency to focus on individual racists rather than systems of inequity, and even our noble efforts to be anti-racists, emanates from the culture of individualism prevalent in the US. From this perspective we have constructed a narrative that holds that racial inequality is caused by individual choices and behavior: one group does better than another simply because it is imbued with higher character and thus, a proclivity toward better choices. Yet, the largest racial wage and wealth disparities are actually between blacks and whites with the highest levels of education and occupational status: those who try hardest experience the most wage discrimination. Shifting the conversation from a focus on individual achievement to unpacking the impact of systemic discrimination situates the perplexing persistence of racial inequality within the context of how racial inequality is created and reproduced systemically.

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Systemic discrimination is thoroughly embedded in our major social and economic institutions--it is remarkably stable. This is because not only has it not been dismantled, but it is vigorously defended and meticulously reinforced. If the system is designed to maintain stability, and do so effectively, then interventions need to be disruptive. Employing a systemic approach would more effectively address racial inequality than approaches that focus on disadvantage and shoring up individual deficiencies. Each chapter of the book details policy prescriptions for addressing system racial inequality at three different levels of change—individual and small networks, community and organization-level, and institution-level, with specific examples of ongoing projects at each of these levels that are showing promising results and could change the game if scaled up properly. Using specific case studies, I show what we can do as individuals, and what collective action groups of individuals as well as organizations and firms can take to effect systemic change.

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