Converting Prisons to Campuses

• Former inmate Kerwin Pittman purchased a former North Carolina prison through his nonprofit, RREPS, transforming it into a $2 million transitional housing, job training, and support hub to curb local recidivism.

Launching Clean Energy Reentry Careers

• Houston partnered with local non-profits to run the “Vulnerable to Vibrant” program, training 50 formerly incarcerated residents as certified solar installers while securing pathways to union apprenticeships.

Restoring Voting Rights at Scale

• Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger restored civil rights, including voting and jury service, for more than 60,000 formerly incarcerated individuals, marking significant progress and fostering hope for those who had previously been denied.

Re-electing Reform-Minded Prosecutors

• Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi won reelection on a progressive platform, cutting youth transfers to adult court and contributing to a 43% drop in homicides since 2021.

Capping Debt Cycles with Legislative Reform

• New Virginia state laws impose a 10-year statute of limitations on court debt and allow incarcerated individuals to pay off court fees at community service rates, ending lifelong debt traps.

Linking Economic Opportunity to Public Safety

• A report by the Brookings Institution demonstrates that violent crime across urban, suburban, and rural communities strongly correlates with economic hardship, proving that targeted investments in youth and neighborhood revitalization directly reduce crime.

  

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Introduction

In my book on the eight racial myths America still believes, the fifth is the ‘access to genuine justice’ myth: With some egregious exceptions, Black people are treated fairly by our criminal justice and policing systems.

To address this myth, my final chapter outlines proposals to accelerate progress toward full racial justice.

Today, I want to share stories that inspire hope, even as recent policy changes have challenged progress.

Former inmate buys prison to create housing and job training for other ex-convicts

This is perhaps the most inspiring story among many.

It has been eight years since Kerwin Pittman was released from prison after serving 11.5 years for conspiracy to commit murder, having started his sentence at age 18.

Once released, he committed himself to social justice advocacy work, starting a Goldsboro, NC-based nonprofit, Recidivism Reduction Educational Program Services (RREPS, https://rreps.net/).

As recently as 2021, 44% of the 13,000 people released from prison in North Carolina returned to jail or prison within two years. Pittman aims to lower this rate for those returning to the Goldsboro area, a town of 35,000 in eastern North Carolina.

In the eight years since his release, Pittman has launched an anti-recidivism hotline, mentorship programs, a Father’s Day bailout initiative to reunite families, and a mobile recidivism reduction center.

Late last year, Pittman and his organization purchased a former jail for $275,000 to establish the Recidivism Reduction Campus. He’s likely the first returning citizen to purchase a prison in U.S. history.

Over the next two years, he plans to fund a $2 million renovation of the facility that will become a center for transitional housing (for as many as 300 returnees), “mental health support, workforce training, life skills resources, case management, and more.”^[1]

A graphic illustrates the significant impact RREPS achieved in 2025.

In highlighting his work in an article in GoodGoodGood, Pittman says, “This moment isn’t just about me. It’s about every person who has been counted out, every family waiting for their loved one to come home whole, and every community that deserves healing. It’s about showing this country that when we invest in people, especially those closest to the pain, real change happens.”

Job training program gives formerly incarcerated people a fresh start as solar installers

For the past three years, the city of Houston has partnered with the Black United Fund of Texas and the Green Thumb Academy “to train Black, low-income, and formerly incarcerated residents for jobs in clean energy.”^[2]

Since 1987, the Black United Fund has supported underserved communities through self-help programs, resource distribution, and fund allocation.

The Green Thumb Academy (TGTA) is internationally accredited and dedicated to developing the next generation of professionals in construction, green energy, and STEM fields. Its programs offer entry-level and journeyman-level training, paired with robust job placement services. A central focus of its mission is to empower individuals from all communities to achieve economic self-sufficiency and contribute to sustainable development.

Recently, all three entities partnered on a 22-week solar installation training program that led to the certification of 50 formerly incarcerated residents, a starting pay of $18 an hour during training, and a pathway to a union apprenticeship.

The program, dubbed “Vulnerable to Vibrant,” is part of a strategy for Houston’s Black neighborhoods to confront long-time environmental disparities, “from contamination to extreme heat and flooding.”^[3]

Many of the training participants hailed from Houston’s Fifth Ward, where “residents unknowingly lived on a plume of coal tar, toxic waste from a neighboring rail yard that was abandoned and leached into the soil. Eventually, cancer clusters began to develop in the neighborhood. Today, residents are expected to die two decades before residents born in more affluent and white Houston neighborhoods.”^[4]

The program previously received substantial funding from the federal environmental justice initiative but lost a $20 million EPA grant last year due to recent reductions in diversity, equity, and inclusion funding. As a result, the organizations worked quickly to secure alternative funding and maintain the program.

Remarkably, many of the trainees have access to ‘green’ jobs, since Texas is second in the nation for solar energy use and “employs the third most people in the U.S. solar industry.”

Virginia governor restores voting rights for thousands of formerly incarcerated people

The United States has long been an outlier internationally for denying voting rights to millions of Americans with criminal convictions. In stark contrast, the vast majority of European countries fully restore voting rights to those with criminal convictions.

In America, laws vary from state to state, but overall, approximately 4.4 million people remain disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. This figure has increased by the millions due to mass incarceration policies here from the 1990s to the present; as you may know, in any given year in the U.S., about 2 million people are behind bars, just about the highest rate of any nation in the world. ^[5]

As we all know, these policies have disproportionately affected African Americans and other people of color.

That is why it was very encouraging news last month that Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger restored voting rights to more than 60,000 Virginians who had completed their sentences and streamlined the rights-restoration application process (See restore.virginia.gov).^[6]

Virginia is one of three states “with a constitution that permanently disenfranchises citizens with past felony convictions — leaving restoration of rights entirely to the Governor’s discretion. The civil rights restored by Governor Spanberger include the right to vote, serve on a jury, run for public office, and become a notary public.”^[7]

Eight other states apply lifetime bans to specific disqualifying offenses. ^[8]

At the opposite end of the spectrum, those incarcerated in Maine and Vermont never lose their right to vote, maintaining the ability to cast ballots even when behind bars.

In the meantime, 23 states disenfranchise citizens while incarcerated, and 14 others do so during parole and probation. Many of these states’ policies have changed just in the last decade through “a combination of legislative change, amendments to state constitutions, court victories, and executive action.”^[9] Previously, many more states had policies similar to Virginia’s.

Overall, U.S. policies on disenfranchisement are far more restrictive than those of most other industrialized countries.

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Norfolk Reelects its Reform Prosecutor, Capping Years of Heated Debate

Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi has served as the city’s attorney since 2021, at the tail end of the pandemic, when violent crime was high in the city. He won, then, on a reform agenda.

He won again last summer, despite a candidate from his own Democratic Party arguing that he was weak on crime and despite opposition to his candidacy from the city’s mayor and sheriff, the police and fire unions, and local business leaders.

Because of Fatehi’s progressive, justice reform policies, “[h]omicides last year dropped to their lowest since 2015; they were down 43 percent compared to 2021, the last year before Fatehi took office.”^[10] In 2021, he ran on a platform in which he “vowed to break with the traditional culture of prosecutors who ‘feed mass incarceration,’ and to counter Norfolk’s legacy of segregation and redlining that, he said, have impoverished the city and spurred crime.”^[11]

The biggest shift since Fatehi became City Attorney has been an enormous reduction in the number of children transferred to adult court, a move that typically subjects them to much harsher sentences. Any move to transfer a child to adult court must go through Fatehi or his deputy.

Fatehi hopes that now that a Democrat is back in the Virginia governor’s office, opportunities for statewide criminal justice reform are more likely. We saw above a significant one, the restoration of voting rights. Yet Fatehi and his colleagues across the state believe far more can be achieved in subsequent legislative sessions.

Already this year, Virginia signed into law:

• “A limit on how long court debt can be collected (statute of limitations). As of January 1, 2027, the statute of limitations on court debt collection will be 10 years for both the general district court and the circuit court, a significant change from the previous 30 and 60 years, respectively. Such debt will no longer be a lifetime burden. Virginia’s court fines and fees system has long trapped people, especially Black Virginians and people with low incomes, in cycles of debt that can last decades. This legislation also extends the period before debt can be sent to collections from 90 to 180 days. This aligns with the interest accrual, gives people more time to find work or plan their finances, and simplifies a system that previously required them to track multiple deadlines. …

• A new law that allows people to apply their work toward court debt at the jurisdiction’s community service rate — typically minimum wage — and credits work dating back to July 2023. By helping people reduce their debt at a meaningful rate, this reform supports successful reentry and reduces uncollectable court debt for the state. Currently, people working while incarcerated are paid between 27 and 90 cents per hour. That choice has roots in Virginia’s long history of exploiting Black people for labor and limiting people’s ability to get ahead.”^[12]

Both of these new laws will reduce debt and financial obligations for those in the justice system in Norfolk and beyond.

According to the Commonwealth Institute of Virginia, future priorities for the state legislature to pass in 2027 include:

• “The right to counsel at first appearance (CAFA). Early decisions about bail and pretrial detention can determine whether someone keeps their job, housing, or family connections. Yet too many people face this moment without legal representation. These impacts fall most heavily on Black Virginians and people with low incomes. People who can afford private attorneys are 45 times more likely to secure pretrial release. …

• Eliminating constitutional fees, specifically jury fees and counsel fees. These costs are charged to people already deemed unable to pay, even though they are tied to constitutional rights. Research shows these fees unfairly impact Black and low-income Virginians, generate little revenue for the state, and often result in uncollectable debt that is costly for the state to pursue.”^[13]

If passed, the impact on Virginians, especially Black Virginians, will mean a fairer shot in the justice system than they currently have.

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The path to public safety requires economic opportunity: Trends and solutions in urban, suburban, and rural communities

While researching my book, Brookings Institute’s Metropolitan Policy Program was a constant and important resource.

This spring, its authors published a report, “The path to public safety requires economic opportunity: Trends and solutions in urban, suburban, and rural communities,” that examines how closely the economy and public safety are linked, whether in our densest cities or our least-populated rural towns. In particular, they reveal that investing in youth, families, and neighborhood revitalization leads to significant reductions in violence and advances economic prosperity in communities that need it most.

It’s no surprise that in cities, “poverty, neighborhood investment, and segregation are strongly correlated with higher rates of violent crime,”^[14] with murder rates 3 or 4 times higher in high-poverty neighborhoods than in wealthier ones in the same city. It was a surprise to the authors to see the same correlation in rural and suburban areas as well.

They investigated real-world interventions, from urban to rural settings, and recognized the crucial importance of what they term opportunity-creating policies and interventions.

Specifically:

• Bolstering employment and job training programs led to reduced youth arrests.^[15]

• Engaging, educating, and supporting youth, from workforce training and school-based programs to early childhood services and mentorship.^[16]

• Improving the neighborhood conditions that contribute to crime.^[17] Two programs in Philadelphia led to a 29% reduction in violent crime in one and a 39% reduction in firearm assaults in another.

These findings are not hypothetical nor academic. Here are seven specific interventions that show how jurisdictions are applying these learnings to make substantive differences in safety and the local economy.

1. Public-private partnerships to reduce crime and invest in youth in Birmingham, Ala.

2. Private-sector-led collaborations aim to reduce violence through hiring and economic investments in Chicago

3. Taking a “whole of government approach” to advance safe and opportunity-rich neighborhoods in Baltimore (I’ll write more about this in my next newsletter)

4. Engaging justice-involved individuals in the transition from coal to clean energy in Southern West Virginia

5. Advancing inclusive innovation and talent development across urban, rural, and tribal communities in Greater Tulsa, Okla.

6. Strengthening workforce development and inclusive growth across Western New York’s urban-rural divide

7. State policies to bolster workforce and economic opportunities for returning citizens in states like Arkansas, Tennessee, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah^[18]

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Conclusion

National news coverage can make it seem as though progress on racial equity and justice is stalled.

However, these stories demonstrate ongoing progress, from local and state elections to workforce programs and economic policies that uplift communities from Birmingham, Alabama, to rural West Virginia, and all of this continues to turn the tide in a far better direction.

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Footnotes

^[1] Kamrin Baker, “Former inmate buys prison to create housing and job training for other ex-convicts,” GoodGoodGood, March 3, 2026, https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/former-inmate-buys-prison.

^[2] Kamrin Baker, “Job training program gives formerly incarcerated a fresh start as solar installers,” GoodGoodGood, May 3, 2026, https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/solar-panel-installation-job-training-incarceration-texas.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Adam Mahoney, “In Houston, A Program Turns Sunlight into Second Chances for Incarcerated Texans,” Capital B, October 14, 2025, https://capitalbnews.org/solar-jobs-houston-epa-funding-trump-cuts/.

^[5] Nicole D. Porter, et al, “Out of Step: U.S. Policy on Voting Rights in Global Perspective,” The Sentencing Project, June 27, 2024, https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/out-of-step-u-s-policy-on-voting-rights-in-global-perspective/.

^[6] Ja’han Jones, “Virginia governor restores voting rights for thousands of formerly incarcerated people,” MSNow, July 31, 2026, https://www.ms.now/opinion/virginia-voting-rights-formerly-incarcerated-spanberger.

^[7] https://www.governor.virginia.gov/newsroom/news-releases/2026/july-releases/name-1121876-en.html.

^[8] Nicole D. Porter, et al.

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] Daniel Nichanian, “Norfolk Reelects its Reform Prosecutor, Capping Years of Heated Debate,” BOLTS, June 24, 2025, https://boltsmag.org/norfolk-virginia-reelects-reform-prosecutor-ramin-fatehi-capping-years-of-heated-debate/.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] “Virginia’s Criminal Legal System Will be More Fair After This Legislative Session — What Changed and What’s Next,” The Commonwealth Institute, May 5, 2026, https://thecommonwealthinstitute.org/tci_blog/virginia-criminal-legal-system-reforms-session-2026-updates/.

^[13] Ibid.

^[14] Hanna Love, Amy Liu And Bethany Krupicka, “The path to public safety requires economic opportunity: Trends and solutions in urban, suburban, and rural communities,” The Brookings Institution, March 11, 2025, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-path-to-public-safety-requires-economic-opportunity/.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Ibid.

^[17] Ibid.

^[18] Ibid.

I’m volunteering to convene this statewide hearing in Bowie on September 17, 2026, all day. This hearing comes on the heels of three other statewide hearings in NC, PA, and FL in the last year.

In all three states where these hearings were convened, many dozens of people (sometimes more) from near and far (across the state – and beyond) came to bear witness to the environmental justice (EJ) issues plaguing their own communities and propose the solutions they’d like to see.

Will You Help Me Get The Word Out To Your Communities And Networks?

Please email me: steve@publicengagementassociates.com

If you know people who would want to attend, send them to this registration site: https://form.jotform.com/262106078924155.

[This site also includes reports from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Florida.]

You can watch a 2.5 minute video from Pittsburgh for the PA meeting here:

The issues people bring to People’s Hearings include:

1) just and renewable energy systems;

2) equitable infrastructure and land use;

3) land stewardship and self-determination;

4) legacy pollution and cumulative impacts;

5) water quality and access;

6) sustainable agriculture and food justice

as well as issues well beyond traditional definitions of EJ.

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Who is behind this important effort?

From the National People’s Hearing Tour website

https://www.peopleshearing.com/

At every People’s Hearing, community representatives testify to a live audience, which includes invited national leaders who serve as formal witnesses. The witnesses commit to lift up stories and solutions through national writing, advocacy, and networking, bringing the messages of each hearing to future hearings, and building coalitions across participants at each stop of the national tour.
‍
The Tishman Center for Environment and Design at the New School in NYC is using its longstanding expertise in community-based scholarship to document and analyze the testimonies, connecting the people’s wisdom to specific calls to action and policy priorities.

https://www.tishmancenter.org/

Our Purpose is:

To uncover the national policy priorities that communities can see ourselves reflected in and that we would be willing to support.

I hope you will support and help promote this important convening!!

Best,

Steve

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1. Holistic Family Engagement

Institutions expand access by recruiting entire families, embedding (where relevant) bilingual staff in local high schools, and establishing campus familiarization early through early college programs.

2. Aggressive Cost Reduction

Colleges prioritize absolute affordability by optimizing financial aid, leveraging grants, and matching tuition to community college rates to allow low-income students to graduate debt-free.

3. Relentless Student-Centric Support

Universities invest in multi-disciplinary advisory teams—covering academic, career, and financial literacy—alongside essential wraparound resources like drop-in childcare, food pantries, and free tutoring.

4. Data-Driven Regional Mobility

Schools track localized student data and tailor curricula to regional economic needs, creating incubators and corporate apprenticeships that convert degrees directly into living-wage careers.

5. Institutional Alignment & Belonging

Successful campuses foster a culture of inclusion by hiring faculty and staff from similar socio-economic backgrounds and aligning leaders, staff, and practices around on-time graduation and student success.

Introduction

Last week, I wrote about the Urban Institute’s racially equitable, upward mobility model, sharing examples from Dallas County (TX) and Winnebago County (IL).

This week, I want to explore a different model for economic mobility: one focused exclusively on education and used by Public Agenda, a national, nonprofit, nonpartisan research-to-action organization.

A Quick History on Access to Higher Education

Access to quality education has long represented a critical pathway for American youth to move up the socioeconomic ladder. In the U.S., that pathway was first available primarily to land-owning elites and to men. For many years, few American youth could even imagine continuing beyond elementary or middle school because they were needed on farms and in factories.

After World War II, higher education became much more accessible to those men who served in the military, through the GI Bill, a bill that, in practice, largely excluded African Americans.

Brown v. Board of Education, in principle, provided a new avenue for access to higher-quality K-12 and higher education, but it took decades of struggle for that access to become real.

Women were also largely excluded from higher education until the 1960s and 1970s; in subsequent decades, their participation increased dramatically.

The size and diversity of postsecondary institutions expanded significantly in the post-Civil Rights era, yet as the price of admission increased at four and five times the rate of inflation, higher education remained out of reach for too many students, especially those from lower-income backgrounds.

As a result, access to higher education remains a significant challenge for many Americans across race, and especially for African American, Latino, and Native American students.

Against that backdrop, Public Agenda’s work focuses on the institutions that are not only expanding access, but also translating higher education into measurable economic mobility for students from lower-income households.

Public Agenda: Pathways to Economic Mobility

Through its Pathways to Economic Mobility initiative, Public Agenda identifies and supports higher education institutions that help students from low-income backgrounds improve their financial status and earn fair wages through higher education.

Public Agenda believes that no matter where students start, their adult earnings should not depend on their family’s wealth.

Over the past three years, Public Agenda has visited 19 higher education institutions across California, Illinois, Michigan, and Texas and produced in-depth case studies examining how their policies and practices have positively affected the lives of low-income students.

They spoke with hundreds of administrators, faculty, staff, and students across the country and found that these colleges and universities, among many others, are doing exceptional work by opening their doors to students with low incomes and setting them on a path to competitive wages.

Three Stories from Public Agenda’s Work

The following three Texas institutions serve distinct and diverse student populations, but each shows how intentional policies and supports can improve outcomes for students from lower-income households. (I selected these three because each institution and the student population it serves are so significantly different.)

Houston City College (HCC)

Houston City College’s Southeast College is one of HCC’s six community college campuses. The system as a whole serves nearly 50,000 students. At Southeast College, 39% of students are Hispanic, and 25% are African American.^[1]

Southeast College targets student recruitment by zip code and focuses on whole families, not just young adults. It places a special emphasis on high school students because many of their parents and grandparents have only a primary-level education.

Southeast embeds recruiters at local high schools to help students understand the full range of postsecondary options.

Texas is unique in that the state makes completing the FAFSA a high school graduation requirement for students seeking state-level financial aid.

Financial aid staff at Southeast work both with seniors in high school and already matriculated students to remove individual barriers that arise for each student.

Southeast’s campus “houses a high school designed to serve dual credit students. Located next to East Early College High School, the campus supports seamless integration between the high school and the college.”^[2]

The college offers a variety of strategic campus resources: free drop-in childcare; tutoring; an entrepreneurial maker space; a food pantry; metro cards for buses and trains; and a career closet for students to access clothes for interviews and internships.

Many Southeast staff grew up in nearby communities and share similar types of backgrounds as their students.

Advisors are critical to Southeast’s success with students. Each advisor completes an intensive training program, is assigned a specific student caseload, and supports first-generation students, students beginning a second career, and students returning to complete coursework from years earlier.

Like many community colleges, Southeast partners with local companies to provide specific workforce-focused curricula and coursework. Many companies offer paid apprenticeships while students are enrolled and employ them after graduation.

University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley (UT-RGV)

Founded in 2013, UT-RGV is only 13 years old and has grown into one of the largest Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the U.S.

UT-RGV says its mission is to create “opportunities for people to attend college and graduate without debt—building wealth for their families and the Rio Grande Valley.”^[3]

Its student-centered culture has helped to drive growth in enrollment of 10,000 over the past decade. The many who graduate contribute immediately to local economic development through work in health care, launching new businesses, and conducting locally relevant research that improves communities in the Valley.

As one might expect from a college located along the Texas-Mexico border, about 95% of UT-RGV students are Hispanic, most with Mexican or Mexican-American heritage.

As at Southeast College, UT-RGV’s bilingual recruitment staff, most of whom are also first-generation college graduates, are embedded in local high schools.

The university’s mission revolves around affordability by maximizing financial aid, minimizing time to completion, and reducing student debt.

Its financial aid staff include a TEXAS Grant coordinator, a Federal Pell Grant coordinator, financial aid counselors, default prevention staff, and staff dedicated to aid programs.

Staff have found that aggregated data on Hispanic students nationally are largely irrelevant to their university, so they focus on collecting data on their students and local communities that provide the greatest insights for the specific experiences of their Mexican-American student population.

Lastly, the university focuses heavily on entrepreneurship for students interested in starting their own small businesses. Beyond teaching entrepreneurship skills, it has also established business incubators in cities in and around the Rio Grande Valley. This focus advances the university’s vision of not only building wealth for families, but also contributing to regional growth.^[4]

Prairie View A&M University

Prairie View A&M University is a 150-year-old Historically Black College and University (HBCU), based in Texas. Its entire history has focused on upward mobility for Black students who, historically, have come from lower-income backgrounds.

Prairie View’s president, Tomikia LeGrande, has focused much of her effort over the past three years on minimizing student debt and improving time to degree completion for all Prairie View students.

When she arrived, PVAMU students faced the highest average student debt in the state, even though the university had the state’s third-largest number of Pell Grant students.

The university began a campaign to encourage students to earn 30 credit hours annually, require students to declare a major after accumulating 30 credits, promote summer sessions as a third semester, and, crucially, optimize financial aid to “make the cost per credit hour equal to or less than community college credits.”^[5]

PVAMU recruits heavily from local public schools and coordinates a significant K-12 partnership program, hosts Saturday academies available to all public school students, and organizes summer camps for students in local school districts across the greater Houston area.

The university offers a comprehensive array of student success and support services to all students, regardless of economic background. As John Gardner, Associate Vice President for Student Success, says: “We do not differentiate services by income level. We design supports thinking about the most needy student. If the services we design can support them, they can support anyone.”^[6]

All students have access to 150 hours of free tutoring each year, and the university has invested in a special fund to advance students’ academic and professional growth outside the classroom, including study abroad and participation in national research conferences.

PVAMU instituted the PV Cares advising system, which provides each student with a career coach, a financial literacy counselor, and an academic advisor beginning in freshman year. Students retain the same staff throughout their four years.

Further, staff members support students “dealing with food insecurity, housing insecurity, or insufficient cash to purchase books.”^[7]

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Common Themes Leading to Student Success^[8]

Of course, there is much more to each institution’s story than I cover here. The links in the footnotes provide access to the case studies for each college. Although each story is different, Public Agenda has found that these institutions share several common themes.

1. Committing to providing a college education that is affordable, if not free, for students with lower incomes. In the 19 institutions they’ve studied thus far, Public Agenda found that 86% of full-time undergraduate students at these schools attend for free, as tuition and fees are kept below the average Federal Pell Grant.

2. Completing degrees on time is critical. Because too many students in higher education never complete a degree, these schools view completion rates as a universal success metric. In the U.S., completing a degree has become a predictor of positive economic outcomes over a lifetime.

3. A shared, institutional culture committed to student success is also key. Both new and long-time presidents played central roles in changing the culture of these institutions. “High-performing colleges and universities align on key practices such as student support, advising, and data use. This helps students enroll in the courses they need and stay on track to graduate.”^[9]

4. Creating a welcoming campus for prospective students, community members, families, and, of course, current students is essential to an ongoing feeling of belonging, of being part of the family.

You can explore Public Agenda’s Pathways to Economic Mobility Initiative through this embedded link.

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Conclusion

These three success stories—and the sixteen that accompany them on Public Agenda’s website—have occurred even as the external economic and educational environment has presented challenges, both known and unexpected.

Inflation continues to strain people’s wages, especially for new graduates. High levels of employment do not necessarily translate into living wages, which can restrict upward economic mobility, at least for a time.

K-12 school systems continue to struggle to produce graduates ready for college-level work across all fifty states.

Current federal immigration policies continue to leave many immigrant communities fearful about their livelihoods, their ability to attend school, and their long-term ability to remain in the country.

Yet despite these factors, postsecondary education remains among the best tools for advancing racially equitable economic opportunity in our nation. We need far more institutions to make the investments necessary to help more students from lower-income households achieve the same success.

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Footnotes

^[1] Urban Institute, “Houston City College,” Pathways to Economic Mobility, https://publicagenda.org/resource/emcs/case-studies/houston-city-college/.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Urban Institute, “University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley,” Pathways to Economic Mobility, https://publicagenda.org/resource/emcs/case-studies/university-of-texas-rio-grande-valley-emi-toolkit/

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Urban Institute, “Prairie View A&M University,” Pathways to Economic Mobility, https://publicagenda.org/resource/emcs/case-studies/prairie-view-am-university/.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Urban Institute, “Common Themes,” Pathways to Economic Mobility, https://publicagenda.org/resource/emcs/thematic-analysis/.

^[9] Ibid.

I very much look forward to reading after hearing her excellent presentation that places a magnifying lens on Prince George's County (where I live) and what Professor Karyn Lacy (U of Mich) says

"reveals the connection between a long legacy of racist policies in America and the struggle among local leadership in an iconic middle class suburb to provide residents with the kinds of amenites that are taken for granted in neighboring middle-class White suburbs. 

Find her book here: https://lnkd.in/eFU9kQwD.

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“The only reason unjust systems exist is that that the masses of people silently give their consent and believe these systems are necessary—whether for their security or survival.” John Lewis

Bottom Line Upfront

1. Defining Upward Mobility. Economic mobility extends beyond basic financial security to include power, autonomy, dignity, and belonging, requiring systemic intervention to dismantle historical barriers and ensure lasting prosperity.

2. Educational & Career Pathways: The Dallas Model. Through long-term cross-sector collaboration via the Commit Partnership, Dallas expanded early childhood and career-focused education, raised living wages, and reduced young adult poverty rates.

3. Financial & Structural Inclusion: The Credit Coalition. To combat severe racial wealth disparities, Dallas established the Credit Coalition as part of its racial equity framework, formalizing community networks to expand access to credit and strengthen financial stability.

4. Targeted Local Governance: Winnebago County’s Strategic Focus. Winnebago County (Illinois) aligned local institutions with community feedback to create targeted, non-duplicative initiatives focused on housing affordability, literacy, and financial security to uplift marginalized populations.

5. Institutionalizing Opportunity: Maryland’s Structural Blueprint. From Howard County’s consolidated opportunity center to the state’s pioneering cabinet-level Department of Social and Economic Mobility, Maryland shows how public infrastructure can integrate workforce, housing, and social equity services.

Economic mobility.

This was a term I barely knew before I began writing my book in 2020. Since then, I have come to see it as one of the most useful ways to understand whether our communities are truly creating opportunity—or simply describing inequality in more sophisticated language.

In my book, I not only traced our nation’s history of racial oppression, exclusion, segregation, and injustice, but also outlined how to address the resulting inequities and exclusions systematically.

Achieving far greater economic mobility for African Americans is a critical component of that agenda and will require coordinated systems change at the local, regional, and national levels.

Today’s newsletter looks at how communities are defining economic or upward mobility and what they are doing to make it more of a reality locally.

The Urban Institute defines economic mobility as “the ability of individuals and families to move out of poverty and achieve lasting prosperity.”^[1]

Urban’s framework for upward mobility articulates a comprehensive, systems-based view that must be enacted to achieve substantive progress for residents and communities.

For Urban, racial equity must be embedded in both processes and outcomes to ensure that mobility strategies serve those most harmed by structural barriers.

Urban Institute has worked closely with more than a dozen communities to apply these concepts in on-the-ground projects, seeking to boost upward mobility while addressing the root causes of racial inequity.

Here are some stories from the Urban Institute’s work.

DALLAS

Dallas: The Commit Partnership (for young people)

Young people in Dallas face challenging circumstances. Seventy-five percent of students in the Dallas public school system experience economic disadvantage. More than 90% of students in the system are students of color (22% of whom are African American).^[2]

For the better part of fourteen years, numerous public and nonprofit organizations have collaborated to build “an inclusive and prosperous region where economic opportunity is shared equitably rather than predicted by race, place, and socioeconomic status.” Their long-term goal is that more than 50% of 25- to 34-year-old residents, irrespective of race, will earn a living wage.

In 2025, the share of that age group earning a living wage rose to 31%, up from 22% in 2012. Since 2017, Dallas has seen its young adult poverty rate fall from 16% to 11%.^[3]

Commit Partnership has led this decade-and-a-half effort.

What did Commit and its partners focus on to see such significant change?

• Increased Pre-K participation

• Adoption of high-quality instructional curriculum

• Evaluating and paying its best teachers to work in the most challenging schools

• Expanding early college and career high schools

• Increasing the number of advisors to support students in their transition to college or career

• Ongoing collaboration with 9 two- and four-year higher education institutions

• Significant financial support from local and regional philanthropies^[4]

Since 2012, the school system has seen very significant increases in pre-K enrollment, 3^rd grade reading levels, 4^th grade math performance, 8^th grade science performance, high school Algebra 1 performance, college readiness, and postsecondary persistence and completion.^[5]

This is systemic, collaborative impact in action.

Read more about this effort in a 2025 report here: Commit's Report .

The Dallas Credit Coalition (for all adults)

Despite Commit’s success, Dallas has struggled to become a more inclusive city. “In 2016, Dallas was one of the lowest-ranked American cities (270th of 274) for economic inclusion, a measure of opportunity for all people to contribute to and benefit from local economic prosperity.”^[6]

What does that level of poor inclusion look like?

“In 2022, Black and Hispanic households in Dallas held a median net worth of $6,607 and $23,223, respectively, compared with $203,474 for white households.”^[7]

To improve economic inclusion, the city committed in 2018 to embedding equity into service delivery and budgeting through its Dallas Resilience Strategy. By 2022, the city council had adopted a comprehensive racial equity plan and a set of ‘big audacious goals’ to make the city more economically inclusive. ^[8]

By joining Urban’s Mobility Action Learning Network (MALN), the city took steps to formalize a loose network of organizations in the financial security ecosystem into the Dallas Credit Coalition to support more directly equitable access to credit and inclusive financial security for residents, ultimately “advancing equity, inclusion, and social justice so all Dallasites can thrive.”^[9]

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WINNEBAGO COUNTY, NORTHERN ILLINOIS

Winnebago County designed its upward mobility process to “address unmet needs through a uniquely positioned approach that no other organization in our community currently offers.”^[10] In other words, they sought to create an initiative that would not duplicate work already underway by the county government or community-based organizations.

They brought together leaders from the planning council, the housing authority, the city of Rockford, public schools, the health department, and a local college, among other organizations.

After a year of data, program, and policy analysis, and stakeholder engagement in 2024, the coalition spent much of 2025 engaging with the community (those with lived experience) while developing plans across multiple workgroups:

• Opportunity-rich and inclusive neighborhoods

• High-quality education

• Rewarding work

• Healthy environment and access to good healthcare

• Responsive and just governance

Working across these groups, they ultimately developed nine mobility action proposals and narrowed them down to three priority initiatives:

1. Housing affordability (every resident has access to safe, affordable housing)

2. Effective public education (every child thrives through literacy and lifelong learning)

3. Financial security (every family achieves lasting financial stability)^[11]

Each priority area identified key results statements, a prioritized list of root causes to address, and a central, strategic action to pursue through a set of community partners from the private, nonprofit, and public sectors.

The overall effort is being championed by a nonprofit, Bridges Out of Poverty, that helps families with lower incomes increase their incomes, improve their educational attainment, reduce their debt, and reduce their need for state or federal benefits.

Why are these initiatives in Texas and Illinois important from a racial equity perspective?

This Illinois county has an estimated population in which nearly 36% are residents of color (11.6% Black). For the county’s African American residents, the median household income is just above $34,000, compared with the overall median of nearly $67,000.^[12] So all of these policies, when fully implemented, will have a disproportionately positive impact on the African American community.

In Dallas, the vast majority of students who are Commit’s focus are students of color, and as a result, we see significant increases in academic performance across grade levels over a decade, followed by substantial increases in living wages for young adults (25-34 years old).

Urban’s Mobility Action Learning Network

The above are just two examples of communities that have maintained a focus on racial equity and upward mobility despite the national political headwinds against doing so.

Urban’s Mobility Action Learning Network is in its fifth year, serving communities ranging from 58K to 1.4 million and supporting and sustaining Mobility Action Teams in 26 locales.

Urban Institute has many more case studies of jurisdictions it collaborates with across the country on upward mobility agendas.^[13]

It currently supports cities of various sizes in building coalitions for systems change, including places as diverse as Alexandria, Virginia; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Hammond, Indiana; New Orleans, Louisiana; New Haven, Connecticut; and Santa Barbara, California.

Concurrently, it supports cities and counties in measuring impact on economic mobility, including Mecklenburg County, North Carolina; Pima County, Arizona; Rochester, New York; Providence, Rhode Island; and Shelby County, Tennessee.

MOBILITY PROGRESS IN MARYLAND

Beyond the communities Urban Institute works with, other efforts also point the way to more effective economic mobility for those in our communities who need it.

In Howard County (MD), a physical, government interagency location focuses on upward mobility; and statewide in Maryland, a new, Cabinet-level agency focuses on economic mobility.

Howard County, MD: New Economic Mobility Center

Closer to my home, Howard County, Maryland, announced earlier this year that it had purchased a 100,000-square-foot building to serve as the county’s new opportunity and economic mobility center. County residents were hit hard in 2025 by reductions in the federal and federal contractor workforces. As 2025 began, 50,000 county residents worked for the federal government or federal contractors.^[14]

A number of the county’s key departments will co-locate at this new center, including Housing and Community Development, the Office of Workforce Development, and the Maryland Departments of Labor and Education.

The center now features a new childcare facility for county government employees, nonprofit workers, and other community members.

Federal cuts have accelerated the need for greater collaboration and innovation at the local and regional levels; hopefully, efforts like these can focus more holistically and comprehensively on the needs of residents seeking to reestablish their careers and work paths while supporting their families in the interim.

State of Maryland: Department of Social and Economic Mobility

In that vein, last October, Governor Wes Moore of Maryland announced the creation of the state’s Department of Social and Economic Mobility, headed by a colleague of mine, Walter Simmons, who led Employ Prince George’s, our county’s workforce development agency.

This new agency will “support social equity programs across State government and streamline Maryland’s approach to supporting small and disadvantaged businesses.”^[15]

According to the governor’s office, this department is the “first cabinet-level agency in the United States focused on removing structural barriers to upward mobility.”

The department now integrates the work of the following: (1) The Governor’s Office of Small, Minority, and Women-Owned Business Affairs, (2) The Office of Social Equity, and (3) The Office of Minority Business Enterprises.

The mission for the new department is to advance social and economic mobility for all Marylanders by removing barriers, investing in inclusive opportunities, and aligning state resources to support historically underserved communities and businesses.^[16]

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Conclusion

To achieve economic mobility means that you not only have enough money and savings to pay for basic needs like food and shelter (economic success) but that you are able to make your own life choices and help shape community rules (power & autonomy), and you are treated with respect and feel your work helps the community (dignity & belonging).

But, people cannot surmount systemic barriers to upward mobility on their own.

Therefore, communities must ensure residents can access the supports all people need to achieve economic success and experience greater power and autonomy.

That is what we’re seeing with every community in Urban’s upward mobility coalition and in countless other communities still dedicated to a racial and economic equity agenda.

Postscript

In my next post, I will focus on the work of Public Agenda, a nonprofit research organization that supports higher education institutions in implementing one element of economic mobility: the ability of individuals from low-income backgrounds to improve their financial status and earn fair wages through higher education. They believe a student’s adult earnings should not depend on their family’s wealth.^[17]

^Footnotes

^1] Urban Institute, “Upward Mobility Framework,” https://upward-mobility.urban.org/framework

^[2] Commit, Inc., “The 2025 Dallas County Economic Mobility Report,” https://media.commitpartnership.org/share/6CoLxoij40gEO7u3TM74

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Andrew Campbell, Alexis Weaver, “How the City of Dallas’s Equity Commitments Sparked an Upward Mobility Coalition,” Urban Institute, July 17, 2025, https://upward-mobility.urban.org/how-city-dallass-equity-commitments-sparked-upward-mobility-coalition

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] “Dallas Financial Empowerment Center,” City of Dallas Office of Community Care and Empowerment, https://dallascityhall.com/departments/community-care/Pages/FEC.aspx

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] “Winnebago County Upward Mobility Action Plan,” Bridges to Prosperity Northern Illinois, October 2025, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6670870f3348e6020361879d/t/68e94c207187007befecd5f3/1760119840532/Winnebago+County+Upward+Mobility+Action+Plan.pdf.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] “Winnebago County, Illinois,” U.S. Data Explorer, https://usdataexplorer.com/county/winnebago-county-il/.

^[13] “Mobility Action Learning Network: How 26 Communities are Advancing Opportunity and Equity,” Urban Institute, https://upward-mobility.urban.org/mobility-action-learning-network-how-26-communities-are-advancing-opportunity-and-equity-0.

^[14] “Howard County Executive Calvin Ball Announces New Opportunity and Economic Mobility Center,” Howard County Government, December 4, 2025, https://www.howardcountymd.gov/News120425.

^[15] “Governor Moore Announces Appointment of Walter L. Simmons as Acting Secretary of the Maryland Department of Social and Economic Mobility,” The Office of Governor Wes Moore, September 30, 2025, https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press-releases/governor-moore-announces-appointment-walter-l-simmons-acting-secretary-maryland-department-social.

^[16] “Building opportunity and mobility for all Marylanders​,” Department of Social and Economic Mobility, https://economicmobility.maryland.gov/Pages/default.aspx.

^[17] “Pathways to Economic Mobility,” Public Agenda, https://publicagenda.org/initiative/pathways-to-economic-mobility/

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“We are too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.”

Marcel Proust

BLUF: Bottom Line Upfront

• Perspectives on Diversity: While a vast majority of Americans continue to view racial and ethnic diversity as a profound asset to our culture, consensus surrounding the importance of institutional diversity initiatives has experienced a sharp political divergence.

• Faith-Driven Financial Relief: Grassroots, interfaith coalitions in Virginia and Tennessee are actively dismantling systemic economic displacement by wiping out catastrophic rent debts for vulnerable families and securing millions for affordable housing.

• Reclaiming Underserved Neighborhoods: Maryland’s new “Just Communities” designation funnels nearly $400 million into historically redlined jurisdictions while simultaneously expanding clemency orders to undo the legal scars of past cannabis convictions.

• Confronting Historical Terror: A groundbreaking Maryland commission has laid bare the institutional complicity behind historical lynchings, proposing dozens of restorative policies to offer meaningful symbolic and material reparations to the Black community.

• Redefining Remedial Justice: Overriding an executive veto, Maryland lawmakers have established a commission to explore an expansive framework for slavery reparations that reaches far beyond simple cash payouts to encompass housing, education, and structural relief.

• A Century-Delayed Promise for Tulsa: Tulsa has unveiled a $105 million “Road to Repair” package to bring long-overdue cultural, housing, and educational restitution to the descendants of the devastating 1921 race massacre.

• Racial Precedent in the Pacific Northwest: By settling a monumental lawsuit to compensate families displaced by decades of discriminatory urban renewal, Portland has established a critical precedent for acknowledging the multi-million-dollar loss of generational wealth in segregated neighborhoods.

• Systemic Healing from the Roots: The National Collaborative for Health Equity is partnering with 15 communities nationwide to uproot embedded racism through a holistic framework centered on narrative change, legal reform, and economic equity.

• Clean Water, Finally a Victory in Flint: Following a decade of relentless local activism, Flint has finally replaced nearly all of its lead pipes, securing clean, safe water for tens of thousands of properties after a catastrophic environmental crisis.

• Unlocking Ancestral Legacies: Expansive new digital archives launched by Ancestry and Enslaved.org are granting millions of African Americans unprecedented access to the lost records of their pre-emancipation family histories.

  

Our Nation’s Views on Racial Diversity

I started my last newsletter by discussing American attitudes toward interracial marriages in the U.S. If you remember, attitudes have changed dramatically over the past half-century.

Let’s look at a recent Pew Research Study that examines overall views on racial diversity on America’s 250th anniversary.

The good news continues, somewhat.

Despite the White nationalists in power right now, 75% of U.S. adults (and 66% who are Republican or lean that way) view racial and ethnic diversity as a positive for our nation, and nearly 2/3 say it has a positive impact on our culture.[1]

On other views, the news is a bit less positive.

While nearly two-thirds of Americans believe it is very or somewhat important for employers to promote racial and ethnic diversity, that share has declined from 75% just seven years ago.

While a majority of Republicans believed it was important in 2019, today only 40% do, a drop of 21 percentage points. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats do.

While 65% of Democrats believe diversity efforts have made society more fair, 57% of Republicans believe they have made it less fair.

Providing Economic and Housing Relief

Last week’s newsletter also included several stories about cities providing medical debt relief to thousands of Americans.

The good stories don’t end there.

Virginia megachurch donates $1M to wipe out rent for 300+ families and keep them from being evicted

In Alexandria, VA, the Alfred Street Baptist Church, a 223-year-old historically Black church, donated $1 million to cover the back rent for 338 tenants in city-based public housing who owed between $50 and nearly $30,000. This action prevented those 300+ families from almost certain eviction.

Members of the city’s Interfaith Council (of which the church is a part) plan to hold one-on-one meetings with every resident “so they can make plans and provide resources to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” [2]

How Nashville’s Interfaith Coalition is Bridging Divides to Build Economic Equity

Meanwhile, in Tennessee’s capital, the Nashville Organized for Action and Hope (NOAH)—a multiracial and interdenominational coalition of churches, synagogues, mosques, labor unions, nonprofits, and community organizations—

“is working to dismantle systemic racism by ensuring residents are engaged and educated on the economic and social issues impacting them. … In 2014, NOAH was established as part of Gamaliel, a national nonprofit that trains faith leaders in building diverse community coalitions and grassroots movements”[3]

NOAH has four programmatic and advocacy task forces focused on justice, housing, education, and economic equity.

Their biggest impact has been in affordable housing, where they have “leveraged $108 million to create over 6,000 affordable housing units” in the last 13 years and have successfully advocated for zoning changes to provide more middle-income housing.

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There are many structural reasons so many low-income households struggle with rent, including the high cost of housing, persistent inflation over the past six years, the proliferation of low-wage jobs, and the rising cost of everyday goods and services. Too many Americans still rely on the charity of others, which is always welcome but almost always insufficient to meet their needs, whether in suburban Virginia or in countless regions throughout our 50 states.

Maryland I: Addressing Discriminatory Policies in 400 Communities

This month, Maryland approved the “Just Communities” designation for 419 census tracts across the state. The communities will be prioritized for nearly $400 million in funds during the 2026 fiscal year.”[4] The funds will come from the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development.

The designation targets neighborhoods and communities that have been historically underserved and disinvested for many decades. These communities have been affected by exposure to environmental and health hazards, financial and residential redlining and segregation, and high rates of imprisonment.

The five-year designation will affect Baltimore, Baltimore County, and Prince George’s County the most, since nearly three-quarters of the state’s designated areas are in those three jurisdictions.

At the signing of the legislation, Governor Moore also expanded a clemency order he launched last year, adding nearly 7,000 pardons for those convicted of simple cannabis possession in the state. Last year, Moore pardoned more than 175,000 convictions for misdemeanor cannabis possession under the Expungement Reform Act.[5]

Maryland II: A Commission to Hold the State Accountable for Lynching

A commission established by the state of Maryland six years ago completed its work earlier this year, issuing a report that documented “how law enforcement, politicians, judges, and media contributed to either the deaths or lack of justice for victims or the systemic racism that empowered White mobs to act with impunity.” [6]

The commission found that for the 38 public hangings, burnings, and mutilations, no individual or entity was held accountable for the resulting deaths. As its report noted, lynchings were not merely the gruesome killing of Black citizens; they were acts of terror intended to cow and silence the Black community.

The report offers 84 policies to correct this massive harm, ranging “from cash compensation to strengthening current due-process protections, law school scholarships, integrating the history of racial terror into school classrooms, and an array of ‘symbolic reparations’ that include apologies and memorials.”[7]

Although it is too soon to know how the Governor or the state legislature will respond to the recommendations, the Governor’s office said, “Gov. Moore believes the work of repair demands urgent, measurable action—and his administration will keep delivering results that expand opportunity and close gaps that have held Black Marylanders back for generations.”[8]

Maryland III: Potential Slavery Reparations?

This spring, the Maryland legislature overrode Governor Moore’s veto to create a commission to study potential reparations for slavery in the state. Moore indicated he wanted to move forward with more immediate and viable repair work, particularly for communities that have historically been left behind.

“Potential reparations outlined in the bill include official statements of apology, monetary compensation, property tax rebates, social service assistance, as well as licensing and permit fee waivers and reimbursement. Reparations could also include assistance with making a down payment on a home, business incentives, childcare, debt forgiveness and tuition payment waivers for higher education.”[9]

This study of reparations in the state stands in stark contrast to the current political and rhetorical attacks by the Trump administration across the nation against diversity, equity, and Black history.

In a Pew Research study from a few years ago that I cited in my book, 70% of Americans—and far higher percentages of White Americans—do not support monetary reparations for African Americans.

As we can see, Maryland is taking a broad view of what “reparations” might entail, far beyond direct monetary payments.

Tulsa Announces Reparations for Its Massacre a Century Ago

The White massacre of Black residents in Black Wall Street in 1921 resulted in the murder of 300 people, the burning of more than 1,000 homes, and the destruction of—believe it or not—35 city blocks. It became known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Greenwood (aka Black Wall Street) was truly a city within a city, featuring Black-owned grocery stores, cafes, a movie theater, music venues, and cigar and billiard parlors.

Last June, after victims and their descendants waited for 124 years for any hint of repair, the City of Tulsa announced that descendants of survivors would be offered reparations. The city announced a $105 million financial package (“The Greenwood Trust”), still to be raised.

The massacre was neither the beginning nor the end of intentional and systemic racism in Tulsa. As Tulsa’s Mayor, Monroe Nichols, says, “The massacre was hidden from history books, only to be followed by the intentional acts of redlining, a highway built to choke off economic vitality, and the perpetual underinvestment by local, state, and federal governments.”[10]

At this writing, there is only one survivor still living, and she’s 111 years old.

The city’s plan, titled Road to Repair, is organized to provide repair across three areas:

• $60 million for cultural and historical preservation to clear neighborhood blight, improve existing buildings, and fund the city’s Kirkpatrick Heights-Greenwood Master Plan

• $24 million for housing assistance, including the expansion of homeownership for descendants

• $21 million for a legacy fund for scholarships, small business grants, and land development[11]

Reparations in Portland, Oregon?

Reparations conversations have risen even in what seem to be unlikely locations.

Portland, Oregon, which in 1970 was 94% White and 5% Black, is now a much more racially diverse city (only 66% White), but its Black population remains in the single digits (6%).

As small as the Black population was in the mid-19th century, its primary Black neighborhood, Albina, was known as Jumptown for its vibrant music scene, though, like all Black communities then, it was racially segregated from the rest of the White city.

Like all American cities in the 20th century, it carried out racially discriminatory policies, from redlining to urban “renewal,” the latter of which carved up Black neighborhoods, causing major displacement.

A few years ago, local Black organizers filed a lawsuit against the city to hold “public agencies accountable for the racist policies that displaced families decades ago.”[12]

The city settled the suit last summer, agreeing to pay $8.5 million to survivors and descendants of those displaced intentionally.

The property and land the city seized through eminent domain were originally intended to enable the expansion of a local hospital; however, that expansion never occurred, and decades later most of the land remains vacant.

The Emmanuel Displaced Persons Association 2, comprising survivors and descendants, in collaboration with graduate students from Portland State University, estimated the loss of residential wealth among Albina homeowners at $100 million.

Obviously, the settlement falls far short of providing full restitution for the loss in wealth. It sets an important precedent for the harm inflicted by a city government for decades, harm that was never acknowledged or compensated for until now.

Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

As I was preparing to publish this article, I came across the website of the National Collaborative for Health Equity, which works with 15 U.S. communities to examine how the belief system around systemic racism became embedded in our nation’s culture and structures and to “design and implement effective actions that will permanently uproot it.”[13]

NCHE builds this work around five pillars:

• Narrative change

• Racial healing and relationship building

• Separation

• Law

• Economy

In the map below, you can see the 15 communities that the collaborative is partnering with:

Flint, MI FINALLY replaces the lead pipes that caused a citywide crisis in 2016

As we all know, getting local and state governments to respond to crises often varies by the racial makeup of the community affected. As we saw with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, this happens at the national/federal level too.

Flint, historically a Black-majority city, experienced a lead-in-the-water crisis a decade ago, through no fault of its own. At that time, an unelected emergency manager appointed by Republican Governor Snyder decided that Flint would no longer purchase its water from Detroit and would instead build a pipeline from Lake Huron and, in the meantime, use the polluted Flint River as its source of potable water.

The river, which for decades had served as an unofficial waste-disposal site for many private industries, began flowing through the city’s century-old pipes, further corroding them and allowing massive amounts of lead to leach into the residential water supply.

One result? “Nearly 9,000 children were supplied lead-contaminated water for 18 months.”[14]

There is no safe blood lead level for young children, as their bodies absorb 4-5 times more lead than adults, severely harming their central nervous system and permanently lowering IQ.

So, what’s the good news? After a decade of advocacy by local community organizers, Flint has replaced nearly all of its lead pipes, finally restoring clean water to nearly 30,000 properties.[15]

An Expansion of Ancestry Records for Those Who Were Enslaved

The final pieces of good news were announced this month: African Americans now have access to data, information, and research on the experiences of enslaved people. Two websites—Ancestry.com and Enslaved.org—announced that they had significantly expanded their record collections to include “never-before-seen information about enslaved people in communities where courthouse and community records were otherwise destroyed or lost.”[16]

Enslaved.org, based at Michigan State University, says that the information it has released “makes information regarding 2 million Black Americans born before emancipation in the 1900 Census available for discovery and download.”

These new data initiatives will enable millions of African Americans to make discoveries about their families prior to 1870.

Ancestry.com: https://www.ancestry.com/.

Enslaved.org: https://enslaved.org/.

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Footnotes

[1] Kiley Hurst, “How Americans view racial diversity ahead of the country’s 250^th anniversary,” Pew Research Center, March 25, 2026, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/25/how-americans-value-racial-diversity-ahead-of-the-countrys-250th-anniversary/.

[2] “Virginia megachurch donates $1M to wipe out rent for 300+ families and keep them from being evicted,” GoodGoodGood, April 9, 2026, https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/virginia-church-million-dollar-donation-stops-evictions.

[3] Kaitlyn Ridel, “Social Justice in Action, “How Nashville’s Interfaith Coalition is Bridging Divides to Build Economic Equity,” NCRC, March 4, 2026, https://ncrc.org/social-justice-in-action-how-nashvilles-interfaith-coalition-is-bridging-divides-to-build-economic-equity/.

[4][4][4] Christian Olaniran and JT Moodee Lockman, “Maryland launches effort to address ‘discriminatory policies’ in nearly 400 communities,” CBS News, June 19, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/maryland-gov-moore-cannabis-convictions-housing-disinvestment/.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Erin Cox, “Maryland studied its complicity in lynchings. Are reparations next?” The Washington Post, January 3, 2026, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2026/01/03/lynchings-maryland-reparations/.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Brian Witte, “Maryland to consider slavery reparations after Gov. Wes Moore’s veto is overridden,” The Washington Post, May 15, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/16/wes-moore-reparations-vetoe-maryland/.

[10] “City Announces Reparations for Tulsa Race Massacre,” Equal Justice Initiative, June 12, 2025, https://eja.org/news/city-announces-reparattions-for-tulsa-race-massacre/.

[11] “The Greenwood Trust,” City of Tulsa, June 2025, https://cityoftulsa.org/mayor/road-to-repair/the-greenwood-trust/.

[12][12] Marianne Dhenin, “ ‘We Opened a Door Nobody Knew Existed’: How Displaced Black Families Won Reparations in Portland,” Next City, July 28, 2025, https://nextcity.org/ubranist-news/we-opened-a-door-nobody-knew-existed-how-displaced-black-families-won-repair.

[13] “THRT Movement Building,” National Collaborative for Health Equity https://www.nationalcollaborative.org/our-work/trht/.

[14] “Flint Water Crisis: Everything You Need to Know,” National Defense Resources Center, July 1, 2025, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know#summary.

[15] Matt Lavietes, “Flint replaces most lead pipes 10 years after the Michigan water crisis,” NBC News, July 2, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/flint-replaces-lead-pipes-10-years-michigan-water-crisis-rcna216442.

[16] Russell Contreras, “Websites expand ancestry records of enslaved people,” Axios, June 19, 2026, https://www.axios.com/2025/06/19/websites-expand-ancestry-records-enslaved-people/.

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• Shifting Cultural Milestones: Decades of evolving public sentiment have yielded a profound transformation in American attitudes, evidenced by a massive rise in approval and rates of interracial marriage since the mid-20th century.

• Reclaiming Capitol History: In a poignant symbolic shift, the U.S. Capitol welcomed a statue of 16-year-old civil rights pioneer Barbara Rose Johns—whose 1951 student walkout helped dismantle school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education—permanently replacing a Confederate general.

• The Economics of Heritage: Defying federal pushback against racial justice initiatives, several GOP-controlled states are heavily investing millions into Black history museums and monuments, driven by both historical preservation and the undeniable billions generated by civil rights tourism.

• Corporate Accountability for Henrietta Lacks: Decades after Johns Hopkins auxiliary doctors harvested and distributed her cells without consent, the estate of Henrietta Lacks achieved another major milestone toward equity by securing an undisclosed settlement from pharmaceutical giant Novartis.

• Systemic Relief for Medical Debt: Municipalities and states nationwide have aggressively wiped out billions in medical debt, delivering a crucial victory for racial justice by relieving a financial burden that disproportionately cripples Black families at 1.5 times the rate of White adults.

• Preserving Historic Black Spaces: Through the tireless vigilance of local advocates, America’s long-neglected history is being reclaimed—from the hard-fought protection of sacred African burial grounds in New York and D.C. to the grand opening of Maryland’s 1,000-acre Freedman’s State Park.

  

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Introduction

Like me, you may grow increasingly distressed by the day as opponents of racial justice and Black progress besiege the nation with one deliberate hit after another, in the name of achieving supposed color-blindness or in combating so-called discrimination against Whites.

That’s why, on a daily basis, I track not only the stories that show how our nation continues to backtrack on so many of these issues but also those that demonstrate that important progress continues despite the backlash that followed—from the aftermath of the George Floyd racial uprisings to the Trump administration’s racially discriminatory actions over the past 15 months.

This newsletter and my next one (and maybe the next two) will spotlight those efforts.

Interracial Marriage

Although not strictly an equity or justice issue, but a marker of how attitudes have changed: In 1961, only 4% of Americans approved of marriage between Blacks and Whites. Sixty years later, 94% approve.

In 1980, only 4% of Whites and 5% of Blacks were in interracial marriages; Now it’s 11% for Whites and 18% for Blacks. Rates are quite a bit higher for Latinos (23%) and Asians (32%).[1]

A New Statue at the U.S. Capitol

The latest addition to the Emancipation Hall at the U.S. Capitol’s Visitor Center is a statue of Barbara Rose Johns, then 16, who in 1951 organized a walkout of hundreds of Black students from a rural high school in Virginia to protest overcrowding and dilapidated school facilities at their school for Black students, compared with the town’s White high school.

The classrooms in her school “were located in free-standing tar-paper shacks that lacked proper plumbing, with no science laboratories, cafeteria, or gymnasium.”[2]

Her Farmville, VA, school became one of five cases the NAACP took to the U.S. Supreme Court for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.

Her statue replaced that of a Confederate general.

New Black History Museums in Republican-controlled States?

In spite of the current administration’s efforts to erase Black history and so-called ‘wokeness’ in federal facilities and on federal websites, some GOP-controlled state legislatures have taken the opposite tack: investing in Black history museums.

You read that right.

· North Carolina has invested $60 to construct one dedicated to the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction

· Texas has invested $17 million for two Juneteenth museums

· Florida invested $1 million in planning funds for the state’s first Black history museum

· With the help of local Republicans, the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park in South Carolina received an investment of more than $5 million to expand its facilities and exhibits.

A compelling reason to invest despite the Trump administration’s efforts to dissuade?

How about $2.4 billion in tourism revenue for South Carolina’s famed International African American Museum in Charleston, which opened almost three years ago.

Or the $500 million economic impact generated by annual visitors to the numerous new Civil Rights sites in Birmingham, AL, including Equal Justice’s Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.

Lawsuit on Behalf of Henrietta Lacks’ Estate is Finally Settled

In my book’s chapter on health inequities, I wrote about an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, who came in for treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951 for vaginal bleeding, when the hospital’s doctors discovered a malignant tumor on her cervix.

She died later that year at thirty-one, but Hopkins used her cancer cells without her or her family’s knowledge and distributed them worldwide, enabling historic discoveries in cancer, infectious disease, and immunology.

Although Hopkins did not profit from the distribution, many companies did. Yet no one ever compensated her family for the use of her cells. For decades, “doctors and scientists repeatedly failed to ask her family for consent as they revealed Lacks’s name publicly, gave her medical records to the media, and even published her cells’ genome online.”[3]

In early 2026, Novartis settled a lawsuit by her estate. Although no details on the settlement have been released, the lawsuit sought “the full amount of its net profits obtained by commercializing the [stolen] HeLa cell line.”[4]

This is the estate’s second undisclosed settlement, the first of which was with Thermo Fisher Scientific, a biotech firm. The estate also has at least two other outstanding lawsuits, one with Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical and the other with Viatris Pharmaceuticals.

States, Cities Provide Medical Debt Relief to Thousands

What do Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Lexington, and Paducah (KY) have in common?

They’ve all launched impressive initiatives over the past year to erase medical debt for their constituents. While Americans have battled with rising costs for a half-decade (with a significant, recent bump up during the war with Iran), finding help to alleviate that pain has been hard to find.

Here’s what we’ve seen:

• Arizona erased more than $400 million for more than 350,000 Arizonans[5]

• Michigan, in collaboration with the nonprofit Undue Medical Debt, relieved medical debt for more than 200,000 Michiganders to the tune of $144 million[6]

• New Jersey, also in partnership with Undue Medical Debt (UMD), has conducted six rounds of medical debt relief for more than $1.4 billion, impacting 828,000 New Jerseyans[7]

• North Carolina wiped out $6.5 billion in medical debt for more than 2.5 million North Carolinians[8]

• Pittsburgh, abolished $58 million in debt for 43,000 Pittsburgh residents[9]

• Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government is working with UMD to eliminate $90 million in debt over the course of three years, impacting more than 10,000 residents[10]

• Paducah Action, a local nonprofit in Paducah and McCracken County (KY), partnered with UMD to erase $4 million that impacted more than 2,000 residents[11]

Why is this important from a racial equity and justice perspective?

Nationally, Black adults—who have lower average incomes and lower average wealth than Whites—are disproportionately impacted by medical debt, with rates at least 1 ½ times that of White adults.

From the Undue Medical Debt (formerly RIP Medical Debt) website:

Since 2014, Undue Medical Debt (also known as RIP Medical Debt) has abolished billions of dollars in medical debt. Our unique approach provides immediate financial and emotional relief to burdened families while we also collaborate with like-minded partners on upstream changes to the healthcare financing system.

Over the past 12 years, UMD has erased more than $40 billion in medical debt, providing relief to more than 27 million Americans.

https://unduemedicaldebt.org/our-outcomes/

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Saving Historic Black Cemeteries

America has long treated historic Black cemeteries with neglect and disrespect, from the era of slavery through the Jim Crow era and into urban ‘renewal’ and massive suburban development.

In Washington, DC, advocates have worked tirelessly for six decades to preserve the gravesites of thousands of enslaved and free African Americans. This spring, the Black Georgetown Foundation launched “a campaign to educate the public about the often-overlooked properties and their historical significance.” Two adjoining cemeteries—Mount Zion (est. 1808) and Female Union Band Society (est. 1842)—served as stops on the Underground Railroad.

Over the past few decades, descendants have repeatedly fought off development threats from both the private sector and the federal government to take over the land. The DC Preservation League recognizes the site as one of the most endangered historic places in the region.

The Foundation recently secured $1.6 million to continue its work.

In Flatbush, Brooklyn (NY), residents learned during the pandemic that New York City’s government planned to build an affordable housing development on African burial grounds. They formed the Flatbush African Burial Ground Coalition (FABG-C) to protect the grounds from further desecration (much of the grounds had already been developed decades earlier with a school, an avenue, and an underground sewer system).[12]

Although they succeeded in stopping the high-rise development, they haven’t yet established a memorial at the site because the site has been turned over to the city’s Parks Department and the lot is now fenced in.

Since 2024, the Parks Department has been engaged in a multiyear design process for a new park commemorating the burial grounds, but advocates from FABG-C have characterized the efforts to date as insufficient. The design phase is expected to be completed by this fall, and residents still hope to significantly influence the design of the park’s remembrance wall.

In New York and Washington, DC, we see the importance of local activists serving as community guardians of these historic sites, even as their paths to progress remain littered with speed bumps and detours.

A New Maryland State Park that Celebrates Black Triumph

Built on a site filled with “vines and tall grasses [that] hid the homes of a Black family who triumphed over the horrors of slavery,”[13] the state of Maryland opened Freedman’s State Park on 1,000 acres in northeastern Montgomery County this May.

“The park encompasses farmland once owned [in the 1800s] by Enoch George Howard, his wife Harriet, and their family who helped shape the Civil Rights Movement in Maryland.”[14]

Howard, the founder of the AFRO-American Newspaper, was a successful farmer and businessman, and a frequent lender to Black families who had very limited access to capital.

By the late 20th century, the site, which the Parks Department had converted into hunting grounds, still featured Howard’s original stone house and other long-neglected buildings. Angela Crenshaw, the Maryland Park Service’s first Black director, ensured that, beginning in 2023, the property’s buildings would be restored and paved the way for the full development of the historical state park.

Some areas of the park are now open, while others are under construction or rehabilitation. Public tours are expected to be available later in 2026.

Summary

The backlash against racial equity and justice has dominated headlines in the last couple of years, but as these stories show, important, undeniable wins happen beyond the main stories of the day.

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Footnotes

[1] Jonathan Rothwell and Telli Davoodi, “Interracial cooperation in the United States: An analysis of relationships across race and their effects on work, family, and friendships,” Brookings Metro, February 18, 2026, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/interracial-cooperation-in-the-united-states/.

[2] Rachel Treisman, “Her 1951 walkout helped end school segregation. Now her statue is in the U.S. Capitol,” National Public Radio, December 17, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/12/16/nx-s1-5645727/barbara-rose-johns-capitol-statue.

[3] “Henrietta Lacks: science must right a historical wrong,” Nature, September 1, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02494-z.

[4] Brian White, “Novartis settles with Henrietta Laccks’ estate over use of her ‘stolen’ cells to advance medicine,” Associated Press, February 26, 2026, https://apnews.com/article/henrietta-lacks-lawsuit-novartis-cells-medicine-89fa08519ee04a2ef68fa296c31c55b9.

[5] Alexis Dominguez, “Gov. Hobbs announces erasure of $429M in medical debt for thousands of Arizonans,” AZ Family Digital News, July 16, 2025, https://www.azfamily.com/2025/07/16/gov-hobbs-announces-erasure-429m-medical-debt-thousands-arizonans/

[6] Colin Jackson, “Medical debt erased for thousands of Michiganders,” Michigan Public, July 17, 2025, https://www.michiganpublic.org/health/2025-07-17/medical-debt-erased-for-thousands-of-michiganders.

[7] Erin Vogt, “NJ Wipes Out Another $86M in Medical Debt – Thousands Get Surprise Relief Letters,” NJ1015.com, January 2, 2026, https://nj1015.com/new-jersey-medical-debt-relief/.

[8] Gary D. Robertson, “North Carolina effort wipes out $6.5 in medical debt for 2.5M people,” AP News, October 13, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/north-carolina-medicaid-hospitals-medical-debt-a4c100691bf5bd3743b4e72354ec268b.

[9] Caitlyn Scott, “City of Pittsburgh, Undue Medical Debt partnership to relieve medical debt from 43K Pittsburgh Residents,” WTAE, July 29, 2025, https://www.wtae.com/article/pittsburgh-undue-medical-debt-partnership-relieve-medical-debt/65533209.

[10] Anabel Peterman, “In Two Kentucky Cities, Two Different Models to Erasing Medical Debt,” Next City, March 2, 2026, https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/in-two-kentucky-cities-two-different-models-to-erasing-medical-debt.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Leina Gabra, “Residents Halted Development on a Historic Burial Ground. Now They Want a Say in What Comes Next,” Next City, January 13, 2026, https://nextcity.org/features/historic-flatbush-african-burial-ground-memorial.

[13] Julie Scharper, “Unearthing history: Maryland’s new state park celebrates Black triumph,” The Baltimore Banner, September 18, 2025, https://www.thebanner.com/community/local-news/enoch-george-howard-freedmans-state-historical-park-PPNYJ5IL5JAYPOVXO4ROL5JSEY/.

[14] “Maryland Park Service Dedicates Montgomery County’s Freedman’s State Park in Honor of Howard Family, African American History, Maryland News – Department of Natural Resources, May 15, 2026, https://news.maryland.gov/dnr/2026/05/15/maryland-park-service-dedicates-montgomery-countys-freedmans-state-park-in-honor-of-howard-family-african-american-history/.

From late October to late December last year, I wrote a series of articles about the Trump administration’s concerted march toward greater authoritarianism. That march, as you know, has continued into the first half of 2026, all without consulting Congress or obtaining its explicit agreement.

• Expanded ICE surges into multiple cities, most notably Minneapolis, killing two local protesters and wreaking havoc in the city for more than a month

• Investigating the liberal nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center and indicting former FBI Director James Comey for a second time. These actions aim to suppress dissent and silence opponents.

• Attempting to appoint two pure loyalists to key leadership positions, especially the director of national intelligence, whose primary qualifications have been utter fealty to the president

• Taking the country to war in Iran for a meandering, incoherent set of reasons other than to demonstrate the supreme power he can wield

• Proposing a rule that would give the president’s appointees the power to “approve or deny funding … to a wide array of organizations,” including the removal of funds, particularly for activities that don’t support Trump’s agenda

• Continuing to spread disinformation through his acting attorney general that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, thereby laying the groundwork for making the same false claims if the Republicans lose the midterm elections in November

• Claiming fraud in the California primaries while the state counted millions of mail-in ballots, again blatantly attempting to deceive the public about current and future elections[1]

The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Peace and Democracy Around the World

Trump’s unremitting campaign to assume more power than any U.S. president has ever held and to accumulate unseemly wealth for himself, his family, his already-rich collaborators (domestically and internationally), and his countless sycophants led me to devour Gideon Rachman’s 2022 volume, The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Peace and Democracy Around the World.

For a decade, I’ve read countless articles and several books to understand not only how Trump came into power a decade ago but also how he sustained his movement for ten years running.

I thought I had a working understanding of the variables that elected him to the presidency and helped him maintain an almost religious following among a core segment of voters (and non-voters).

However, I didn’t understand it enough.

Rachman’s book shows that the Trump phenomenon in the U.S. follows a pattern of self-styled strongmen (and, yes, all men) who have risen to power across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Americas since the beginning of the 21st century. The Age of the Strongman features chapters on:

• Putin in Russia (the first to take and sustain power)

• Erdogan in Turkey

• Xi Jinping in China

• Modi in India

• Orban (Hungary) and Kaczynski (Poland) in Eastern Europe

• Boris Johnson in Britain (viz a viz Brexit)

• Trump in the U.S.

• Duterte in the Phillipines

• Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS, Saudi Arabia) and Netanyahu (Israel in the Middle East)

• Bolsonaro in Brazil

• Abiy Ahmed in North Africa

• The battles with the extreme right in France and Germany

The Authoritarian Playbook

Although the context of each leader’s rise is different, the playbook that is followed has remarkably similar features:

• Demonstrating a persistent contempt for the rule of law

• Showing little tolerance for immigrants and minorities

• Pretending to stand up to global elites while standing up for ordinary people (a stance usually reserved for the majority ethnic or racial group)

• Demonstrating disdain for the courts and other democratic institutions

• Cultivating a cult of personality and a personalistic form of one-man rule

• Promoting a xenophobic brand of nationalism that stirs fear, grievance, and reactionary populism

• Inspiring the largest following among those ‘left behind’ in small towns and rural areas

• Allowing little tolerance for dissent and protest

• Invoking nostalgia for a supposed glorious past

• Enabling corruption that grows to an unseemly level within the loyal ranks

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Trump and his closest advisors didn’t invent any of these features, but they have fully adopted the playbook.

After a series of failures to implement many of the above features during his first term, the president and his closest allies, both inside and outside the federal government, have achieved far greater success in systematically deploying the playbook during his second term.

While Putin, Jinping, and bin Salman implemented their strongman approach within already autocratic political systems, the rest emerged from democratic or quasi-democratic systems.

In his review of Rachman’s book, Guardian journalist Simon Tisdall writes that Putin’s approach has “been emulated around the world by other reactionaries hostile to globalization, liberalism, and the western-led, rules-based international order.”[2]

The consequences of these rulers in power don’t stop at their national borders. Putin has gone to war with Ukraine, arguing that it should be part of Greater Russia. Jinping has taken over Hong Kong with an iron fist and is likely to pursue Taiwan to reunite Greater China in the not-so-distant future.

In Hungary, Orban built massive border walls to keep out all Middle Eastern immigrants. (He was recently ousted in a democratic election by a populace tired of his regime’s rampant corruption.)

Ahmed in Ethiopia started a mini civil war against a minority group (the Tigrays) that had long held power.

Netanyahu has continued to consolidate power with the extreme-right in Israel, enabling him to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip, systematically consolidate territory in the Palestine-controlled West Bank, and demolish most of southern Lebanon, with checks on his power few and far between.

With Trump, if we take him seriously, he believes it is our nation’s rightful duty to rule over Venezuela and potentially Cuba, and to propose annexing Canada and Greenland. All while his actions in Iran have caused inflation not seen in 3+ years, and the working and middle classes are being further besieged in the process.

If any of this intrigues you, I strongly recommend Gideon Rachman’s book, The Age of the Strongman.

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Footnotes

[1] Although I informally track all of these activities just from a daily read of the news, all of the above bullets come courtesy of ProtectDemocracy.org’s ongoing threat tracker. https://protectdemocracy.org/threat-tracker/.

[2] Simon Tisdall, “The Age of The Strongman by Gideon Rachman review – a rogues gallery of autocrats,” The Guardian, April 14, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/apr/14/the-age-of-the-strongman-by-gideon-rachman-review-a-rogues-gallery-of-autocrats.

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AND, I have another part of my life, as a facilitator and consultant on public policy issues, so thought you might be interested in what I posted to LinkedIn this morning:

I have been a consultant and facilitator since 1993, when I completed my degree in organization development at Johns Hopkins. BUT I’ve never had my very own website … until now -- 

https://www.stevebrigham.net/!

Today, I’m launching a site that describes the highly impactful facilitation I provide, with a special focus on high-priority policy issues and sector-wide strategy. Please take a look and let me know what you think … and if you know an organization that might require these services, please send my web link along. Also, just so you know, I'm still working directly with Public Engagement Associates, Kimberly Sescoe and Hala Harik Hayes. Thanks!

If you know anyone who needs expert facilitation on complex policy issues to find important levels of shared agreement among stakeholders, the public, or both, please have them get in contact with me.

Steve

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Three decades ago, I read two Wade Davis books—Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire and Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures—that shook me.

Davis, an anthropologist and ethnobotanist, spent his career studying indigenous cultures up close. Shadows in the Sun is a collection of stories drawn from disparate parts of the world—Amazon jungles, the Arctic Circle, the forests of island Southeast Asia—showing how these cultures interact with nature and the earth, which are so foreign to modern humans.

Light at the Edge of the World is a beautiful, cinematic, image-driven book that again explores the unique visions of life held by an array of indigenous peoples and tribes. Davis spotlights what these cultures have to teach the ‘modern’ world while exposing the voracious forces of capitalism that have threatened indigenous peoples for centuries and continue unabated today.

Davis’ books enlightened me at the time. Yet he could never truly grasp the depth of these cultures as an outsider.

I was delighted, then, when my 22-year-old daughter (headed to the Peace Corps in Guyana in less than 2 weeks for 2 years) suggested a book she had just finished, written by an indigenous woman who grew up in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Nemonte Nenquimo

The book—We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People—is a harrowing, 20-year tale of a girl growing into a young Indigenous woman as she navigates threats to her people and homeland. It is also a captivating, absorbing look into the psyche of a woman who perceives and experiences the world in a fundamentally different way from those of us mesmerized by Western thought and reason.

Nemonte Nenquimo, the author from the Waorani tribe in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, begins her story at age 6, when she became more fully aware of the presence of an evangelical missionary living with her tribe, who was committed to manipulating tribe members into embracing the word of the Holy Bible and shunning their heathen, sinful ways.

At fourteen, after receiving a Christian baptism in her home river (the Curaray), she leaves behind what she was taught about plant medicines, shamanism, and foraging for the ways of civilization.

As a missionary teen, she sees that the multinational “progress” brought to tribes similar to her own in Ecuador and Peru has not only devastated tribal homelands through clear-cutting forests but also caused horrific levels of pollution as a consequence of intensive drilling and pipelining in these former forest lands.

Worse, she sees how such “progress” has devastated the peoples of the forest, leaving them dependent on the government and the oil companies for poverty wages and handouts, which are decimating any semblance of their forest cultures and ways of knowing.

As a young adult, she begins to see her ancestors in her dreams, who deliver clear messages urging her to defend her tribe, her homeland, and the way of life of her people and numerous other indigenous tribes across the Amazon.

An Alliance of Indigenous Peoples

Over the course of half a decade, she joins in solidarity with indigenous leaders from four other tribes and with her new life partner, Mitch Anderson (founder of Amazon Frontlines), to defend their homeland against corporate and government interests that have tried to trick and manipulate their way into seizing vast swaths of their forest.

After a long campaign, her alliance of Indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon secures a landmark victory protecting 500,000+ acres of rainforest.

Her coming-of-age story is remarkable on its own, despite repeated rape and sexual assault by a missionary father figure and the austerity and sterility of her brief missionary life in her mid to late teens, as we see her gradually evolve into a jaguar warrioress determined to save her homeland.

What I found riveting was her storytelling prowess, through which she brilliantly conveys how she and her people read the land, perceive the forest’s aliveness, discern and share their dreams, and live in direct relation to the nature and earth that surround them.

The Essence of Jaguar

In Waorani tradition, the jaguar is both a feared predator and a spiritual entity. The Waorani believe the souls of their ancestors roam the forest as “spirit jaguars,” carrying memories, songs, and healing powers. Nemonte intuits that a jaguar she encounters on a trail and later in a dream is the spirit of her brother, Victor (Mengatowe is his indigenous name).

For Nemonte, the jaguar empowers them in the fight against colonizers, oil extraction, and deforestation. It represents the determination required to stand up to outside forces that threaten their territory and way of life.

It’s not just indigenous tribes that are endangered in Ecuador—jaguars are highly threatened as well. The Amazon region in eastern Ecuador now hosts no more than 2,000 cats and remains under heavy pressure from agriculture, mining, drilling, and contact with outsiders.

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Are We Capable of Honoring Uncontacted Peoples?

After finishing the book, I came across an article in The Guardian celebrating the official marking of land for Brazil’s uncontacted Kawahiva people after a nearly 30-year battle. The land preserved there is almost double the size of the land preserved in Ecuador. The Kawahiva are one of 29 tribes verified by the Brazilian government as uncontacted peoples] but it is estimated there may be nearly 100 more yet to be verified.

The Kawahiva agreement could be in peril, however, if the current president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, does not win reelection in October, as his opponent is more aligned with groups bent on expanding farming, logging, and mining throughout the Amazon.

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The present-day experience of these Ecuadorian and Amazonian tribes parallels the devastation wrought by European and American forces on the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas from the 16th through the 20th centuries.

A powerful read. I encourage you to support their efforts: https://amazonfrontlines.org/.

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I’ve spent the past month making my way through an exceptional book: A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War, by William G. Thomas III.

The story takes place in my county, Prince George’s, Maryland, and traces five generations of African Americans who fought for their freedom from slavery through the courts from the late 1780s until the beginning of the Civil War.

It ties into a local story that remained in the news for several years when Georgetown University sought to make amends for selling enslaved people to plantation owners in Louisiana to save the institution from bankruptcy in the early 19th century.

The Jesuits in the DC area owned plantations throughout Maryland, including a large one (White Marsh in Bowie) no more than 3 miles from my house. In fact, in 1791 at White Marsh, the Jesuits decided to found Georgetown while also resolving to sell people they enslaved who they considered too old for productive work.

The remarkable story begins at White Marsh, where Edward Queen, Charles Mahoney, and several other enslaved people owned by the Jesuits sued for their freedom in the same year (1791). According to Thomas, this lawsuit “opened the floodgates. For at least seventy years and five generations … the enslaved families of Prince George’s County staged more than a thousand legal actions against hundreds of slaveholding families who found themselves defending slavery in court.”

Think about that. If you’re like me, you might picture the generations of people who endured slavery as having no choice but to quietly and passively pine for their freedom, given how punishing, retributive, and vindictive life on plantations was. The stories of the Queen, Mahoney, and other families at White Marsh and other Jesuit plantations prove otherwise.

Not only did hundreds win their freedom in the courts, though that freedom was at times tenuous, but their cases also built momentum throughout the first half of the century to challenge the legitimacy of slavery in U.S. law. Thomas writes, “to my surprise, their freedom suits exposed a central myth of American slavery: the idea that slavery rested on a solid, fundamentally legitimate, legal basis in Anglo-American law and constitutionalism. To a shocking degree, it did not.”

Thomas, it turns out, discovered during his research that he had a personal stake in telling this story. He’s a descendant of the Duckett family, a major slaveholder and owner of a plantation that abutted White Marsh. Allen Bowie Duckett, whom Thomas Jefferson appointed as a justice to the District of Columbia’s Circuit Court, defended the Jesuits against the freedom suits filed by the Queen family. Not only that, but the Ducketts enslaved some of the last generation of the Queen family until the very end of the Civil War.

The stories Thomas tells are deeply inspiring and profoundly disheartening. The sheer courage the Queen, Bell, and Mahoney families showed year after year, decade after decade, as they took their “owners” to court, always with the odds against them and often facing the threat of their families being torn apart, sold, and shipped to Louisiana. Across generations, many hundreds from those families won their freedom, yet hundreds never did.

After the Civil War, descendants of the enslaved families founded two farming communities—Fletchertown and Duckettsville—by gradually buying up plots of land in what is now considered “Old Bowie.”

This book hit close to home. For me, the American period of slavery feels so long ago. Yet getting to know the intimate history of White Marsh, the perversity of the White Jesuits, and the mindset of White plantation owners to preserve their “property” no matter the obstacle, the legal argument, or the moral obligation made it all too real and present.

And so much of it happened just a fifteen-minute walk from my home.

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The Persistence of Colonial Nomenclature. Maryland remains tethered to its 1632 charter, creating a historical irony where the state continues to honor oppressive British rulers.

The Infrastructure of the Plantation Economy. Maryland’s geography reflects a history rooted in a plantation economy driven by the “headright” system, which granted 50 acres for each person brought to the colony, including enslaved individuals. Towns like Bowie, Hyattsville, and New Carrollton—named after Charles Carroll, the state’s largest enslaver—stand as monuments to the wealthy elite who profited from this global system of enslaved labor.

Institutional Contradictions in Public Education. Honoring enslavers like Gabriel Duval or Samuel Ogle contradicts the mission of inclusive education. Are we truly comfortable elevating human rights abusers to an honored status? Failure to rename these institutions actively normalizes white supremacy.

A Mandate for Symbolic Change. Although renaming entire municipalities remains impractical, we should focus on changing the names of schools and streets. Reclaiming these spaces to honor the achievements of African Americans after the Civil War is crucial for aligning our public identity with the pursuit of true human dignity.

Introduction: The Persistence of Colonial Nomenclature

Maybe I’m a bit unusual, but it’s bothered me for a long time that my state, Maryland, has so many place names that reflect its origins as an English colony.

King Charles I of England named the colony ‘Maryland’ in honor of his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, back in 1632.

The colony was established under a charter granted to George Calvert, the 1st Lord Baltimore. Lord Baltimore refers to the title held by the Calvert family in England. As a result, we have Baltimore city and county, as well as Calvert County.

My county, Prince George’s, is named after Prince George of Denmark, who was the husband of Queen Anne of Great Britain in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

Just south of us, Charles County is named after Charles Calvert, who was the 3rd Baron Baltimore at that time. Charles was the grandson of George Calvert, the 1^st Baron Baltimore, and the son of Cecil Calvert, the 2nd Baron Baltimore.

In case you’re wondering, we have a Cecil County named after the 2^nd Baron Baltimore.

You get the idea. For some reason, despite declaring independence from England in the late 18^th century, we kept a multitude of place names from our oppressive British rulers.

That never made much sense to me.

I predict those names will not change in the future (bold, I know).

Prince George’s: A Land Still Tied to Names of Prominent Enslavers

We also need to look across the state – especially in Prince George’s – and ask why, even today, so many places are still named after prominent owners of enslaved people.

Remember that Maryland was established as a plantation colony where land was the main source of wealth for White people. The British granted land to well-connected White men through a ‘headright’ system, under which they received 50 acres for each person they brought to the colony. This included enslaved people.

Therefore, for many hundreds of White men in Maryland, this became a path to great wealth, especially because Maryland’s economy depended heavily on enslaved labor on plantations to produce tobacco for northern European markets such as France, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany.

In Prince George’s, just like in other parts of the state, many towns were named after the wealthy families who owned plantations and the people enslaved on them.

Let’s start with the city I live in: Bowie. It’s named after Oden Bowie, a former Maryland governor and a wealthy plantation owner who owned more than 100 enslaved people in the lead-up to the Civil War.

The community where I live in Bowie includes the Old Bowie Mansion, part of Oden Bowie’s former plantation. On the property, our community honors the legacy of those who were enslaved and lived and died there.

Place Names that Highlight Prominent Enslavers

Maryland never changed these names after the Civil War. If you’re a Prince Georgian, you’ll recognize them all. They include:

1. Bladensburg, named after Thomas Bladen

2. Brentwood, named after the plantation of the same name owned by Robert Brent

3. Edmonston, named after Captain James Edmonston, head of a prominent slaveholding family in the 18^th century

4. Fort Washington, named after George Washington, a president, and yes, a prolific slaveholder

5. Hyattsville, named after Christopher Clarke Hyatt, whose family was a prominent member of the established landowning and slaveholding class.

6. Mitchellville, named after John Mitchell, a large plantation owner of Essington Hall, whose plantation covered much of the area now called Mitchellville

7. New Carrollton, named for Charles Carroll, the largest single owner of enslaved people in Maryland

8. Oxon Hill, named after the Oxon Hill Manor, the estate of Thomas Addison, with multiple estates that used enslaved labor

9. Seat Pleasant, named after the estate of the same name owned by the Williams-Berry family

10. Walker Mill, named for the Walker Family, who owned a grist mill worked by enslaved people

Deeper research would likely reveal more towns and places than I have quickly listed here.

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It’s Not Just Municipalities

However, place names linked to plantation owners extend beyond towns and unincorporated areas.

The county has Addison Road and Addison Metro Station named after Colonel Thomas Addison, who owned 14,000 acres in the county and nearly 100 enslaved Africans.

Duval High School, where my son attended during his freshman year, honors U.S. Supreme Court Justice Gabriel Duval, who also operated a plantation with a large enslaved population.

Gwynn Park High School in Brandywine is located on the historic Gwynn Park estate owned by plantation owner Andrew Jackson Gwynn.

A 2020 petition led by county residents asked the county school board to rename Samuel Ogle Middle, Benjamin Tasker Middle, Andrew Jackson Elementary, Charles Carroll Middle, Francis Scott Key Elementary, and William Paca Elementary because they all honored owners of enslaved people in the 1700s and 1800s. Their list did not include several other elementary, middle, and high schools named after enslavers.

In many places, people probably don’t know the history behind place, school, and road names. They’ve always just existed, so there’s no need to question or explore them. In Simsbury, CT, where I grew up, I attended Latimer Lane ES and Henry James Junior High. I have no idea who those schools were named after or the stories behind the names.

Although there were likely sporadic protests during the latter part of the 20th century to change names associated with slave owners and Confederate leaders, very little renaming happened until after the 2015 murders of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. This was followed by reactions to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, and a watershed moment after the murder of George Floyd.

Much of the renaming of streets and schools took place in the South, including in states such as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. A U.S. military naming commission renamed nine Army bases (some of which have been renamed under this administration) and hundreds of streets and buildings on military bases.

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Elevating Enslavers No More?

So, this makes me ask: Where do Maryland counties stand on this issue? How aware are residents of just how widespread this phenomenon is?

Are we truly comfortable with continuing to elevate individuals who committed horrific human rights abuses to an honored status in our public spaces, especially if we don’t even acknowledge their role in the institution of slavery?

This lack of action allows us, as a state and as counties, to continue normalizing white supremacy and a history rooted in slavery and systemic racism in the state and my county.

Don’t schools that maintain the names of slave owners send an incompatible message to their students about the mission of education and the obligation to provide a safe, caring, and inclusive environment for all students?

Instead, don’t we want to honor the free Blacks, free Whites, and enslaved people who fought for a century to end the brutal reality of the plantation system (in 1860, the state had nearly 90,000 enslaved people).

Don’t we want to honor the Black and White individuals who have achieved great things since the end of the Civil War?

In Prince George’s, I know we won’t rename my city (Bowie) in my lifetime, and it’s unrealistic to expect any municipality honoring former slaveholders to change theirs either in that time.

But we can certainly change the names of schools, streets, and other entities across the county that are named after White men who profited from the worst kind of exploitation of human beings.

What’s happening in your community on these issues?

I’d love to hear your perspective.

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Advocating for issues we care about is never easy or simple.

You need to find people who care as much as you do about an issue and encourage them to take collective action.

You must work together to persuade those in power to meet and consider your issue and perspective.

You have to seek out early wins if possible and small wins if you can’t.

You need to be prepared for the long run.

And persuade others to discover their endurance as well.

This applies to just about any issue.

Today, I won’t write about national issues or racial issues as I have for most of 2024 and 2025.

Instead, I want to share a story that is very local and very personal.

2005

I moved into the planned community of Fairwood in unincorporated Bowie, Maryland, in 2005. Unincorporated means that although we share the name Bowie, we do not pay city taxes or receive city services.

[Twenty years later, new neighbors still believe they live within city limits until they’re told otherwise — sometimes weeks, months, or even years later!]

When our family moved in, my daughter was nearly two, and my son wouldn’t be born for another three years. We were already thinking about which public school our kids would attend. The local ‘boundary’ elementary school was neither in great shape (it was over 100 years young, built in 1900!) nor high performing; in fact, it ranked in the bottom 20% in Maryland for reading & math scores.

In all their promotional materials, the developer, at the time Rouse Associates, emphasized the location of a future elementary school, prominently situated along the main avenue.

2006

However, when we moved in, we quickly realized that this piece of land was just a parcel Rouse had set aside in case the county school system decided to build there.

Our community HOA already had an education committee in place, but I believed that a committee operating within the HOA governance system wouldn’t be enough to organize a ‘movement’ to advocate for the new school.

So, I created the Fairwood Education Task Force and started meeting with my county council member, my school board member, and staff from the Capital Improvement Program (CIP), which is responsible for renovating existing facilities and building new schools.

The task force quickly organized community-wide meetings to meet with school system officials, and our core organizing team had several meetings with elected officials.

2007

We realized that the developer had to proactively offer the site to the school system.

We made sure that happened.

Before the system would approve the 15-acre parcel, it had to conduct an environmental and soil study. We made sure that was done.

We had to persuade the school board that enough students already lived in our neighborhoods to justify building a new school – by that time, our community was only halfway complete. More than 900 homes had been constructed out of the 1,800 planned.

We conducted a community-wide survey by going door to door, methodically built an email list, and regularly tabled at the community pool and the local Safeway. Within three months, more than 200 households completed the poll. It showed that the average family in the poll had 2 or more kids either of school age or soon-to-be school age.

2008

After two years of lobbying, the school board approved a 794-seat elementary school for our community.

But we weren’t finished.

I wrote a report on what were considered best-in-class elementary school facilities, and we distributed it among the full school board and the system’s executive staff.

The superintendent invited our core team to a meeting, where he gave us permission to be directly involved in selecting the architectural firm to design and build the school.

2009

Once a firm was chosen, we lobbied to be part of the design team to offer community insights and perspective on creating an exemplary elementary school. During that year of planning, we collaborated with the architect to organize and lead three community-wide meetings to gather input early, provide feedback on initial designs, and review the final design for any adjustments.

Our core team, now expanded to six members, co-authored a research report describing what an exemplary school would look like once it opened. We shared it with all elected officials and the superintendent and his senior staff.

2010

Once the architects finished the school’s design, the school board approved it in late spring 2010, allocating $3 million for FY 2011 (which started July 1, 2010) to begin construction.

The state, which provides all new schools in the state with funding, added $2 million for the first year.

About fifteen years ago, building a new elementary school in our county cost around $22-23 million. For the second year of construction, the county and state would need to allocate a combined total of $17+ million.

For comparison, the cost to build an elementary school in the county in 2026 is approximately $75 million, more than three times what it was a decade and a half ago.

As you might expect, our community was thrilled by this approval. Some residents had been working toward this since the first house was finished in 2002. It seemed the day had finally come when all new residents could look forward to a new school in the community within 24 months.

Alas, that never happened.

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Three months after the school’s approval, I attended a school board meeting in early September of that year, and to my astonishment, the board chair announced that they were removing our school from the CIP docket.

Apparently, over the summer, as the system continued to wrestle with the loss of student population across the district following the Great Recession, they could no longer justify building our school.

2011

Our team spent four months meeting with board members, the superintendent and his executive team, and our county council member, but they refused to change their decision. As they started their budgeting process for school construction and repairs for FY 2012, our Fairwood ES was not included in the capital improvement budget spreadsheets.

After five years of relentless advocacy and effort to advance our school, I resigned from the task force.

2012-2024

Over the next decade, different groups of my neighbors kept advocating for the new school to be added back to the CIP rolls, but to no avail.

Then, remarkably, as the school system launched a new strategy two years ago to build many schools through a public-private partnership (or P3), our school ended up back on the rolls! The board approved the construction of the new school in 2024.

Construction on a school with a new and different design began this past September!

The school is scheduled to open in late August 2027, 25 years after the Fairwood community was established, and new neighbors were misled by the developer’s promise of a new school opening soon. https://www.pgcps.org/offices/capital-programs/projects/fairwood

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Here’s the school (finally!) under construction:

When the school was approved to be built in 2009-2010, I had hoped that my son would be in the inaugural Pre-K class, a school he could walk to.

Instead, he will graduate from high school (hopefully with honors!) in May 2027 and start college the month the new school opens, after attending two different public elementary schools, a public middle school, and first a public, then a private high school in Prince George’s.

Reflections

So any activist can expect advocacy to be a long-haul effort.

Early advocates might not be there when the efforts ultimately succeed.

There is seldom a straightforward path to success.

Success relies on endurance, continuous adjustments in strategy and tactics, and always keeping the final goal in sight. In this case, a new school!

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Postscript

I know I have been out of writing practice over the past two months. Honestly, I had to refocus my efforts on my consulting and facilitation work while also experiencing deep writer’s burnout (and human exhaustion) from writing lengthy newsletters every week for 18 months, first about the key issues and ideas from my book, It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field: Overcoming 8 Racial Myths, and then tracking the impact of the current administration’s attack on racial equity and democracy, as well as our nation’s descent toward authoritarianism.

So please bear with me as I regain my footing to figure out how to shape this newsletter in the months to come!

Introduction

In my book, I highlight the significant expansion of funding for more affordable housing solutions nationwide, with a special focus on African American households, which have the highest rates of severe housing cost burden in the country.

In today’s post, I focus on a niche solution with strong potential for many of our metropolitan regions.

In recent years, the tiny home movement has evolved into a surprisingly versatile and powerful tool for communities addressing some of today’s most urgent social problems, from mass displacement after natural disasters to chronic homelessness.

Below, you will find five inspiring examples that reveal how tiny home communities are moving from a niche trend to (hopefully) a mainstream solution, providing not just shelter but also stability, safety, and a new sense of hope for thousands. They are also an essential part of a larger portfolio to solve our nation’s affordable housing crisis.

They Provide Rapid, Large-Scale Shelter After a Crisis

Nowhere is the power of tiny homes as a first-response tool more evident than in Hawaii. Two years after devastating fires swept through Maui, 900 residents have been relocated to a tiny home village that is historic not only for its size—the “second largest in the nation”—but also for pioneering a new model for disaster recovery. The project shows that tiny homes can be deployed quickly and at scale to help rebuild entire communities, offering a faster path to stability than traditional methods.

While the scale of the Maui project demonstrates the power of a coordinated, top-down response, other examples show that the most profound change can also be driven from the ground up.

[“Two years since Maui fires, 900 Hawaii residents move into historic tiny home village: ‘Second largest in the nation’,” https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/hawaii-tiny-homes-maui-fires.]

L.A. is Choosing Housing Over Jails

The city of Los Angeles faced a choice: build a new jail or find an alternative use for its resources. It chose the latter, constructing a housing complex for homeless residents from repurposed shipping containers. This decision marks a profound policy shift—a move away from the cyclical costs of punitive measures, such as incarceration, toward supportive solutions that build long-term community stability and reduce strain on emergency services. It’s an innovative reallocation of both civic funds and focus.

Beyond reallocating funds, this movement is also rethinking the very design of supportive housing to meet the specific needs of vulnerable populations.

[“Instead of a new jail, LA built a shipping container housing complex for homeless residents,” https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/shipping-container-housing-la-homeless.]

Design Can Create Tailored Communities for Target Populations

One tiny home neighborhood was created as an all-women community, with rents starting at $450 per month. The residents are ambitious, hoping their home becomes a “nationwide blueprint” for others. This highlights a crucial advantage of the tiny home model: its flexibility. These communities can be tailored to meet the unique safety and support needs of specific demographics, fostering a sense of security and belonging that a one-size-fits-all shelter often cannot provide.

And if tailored communities represent one end of the design spectrum, another pushes the boundaries of innovation even further, focusing on radical mobility and individual autonomy.

[“In this all-women tiny home neighborhood, rent starts at $450. Residents want it to be a nationwide blueprint,” https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/all-women-tiny-home-neighborhood.]

A Tiny Solution Based on Mobility and Autonomy for the Unhoused

Pushing innovation to its limits, one man invented tiny mobile homes compact enough to fit on the back of a bicycle. Designed to combat rising homelessness, these ultra-small shelters offer a unique form of support. This example radically redefines the minimum requirements for a personal shelter, emphasizing individual autonomy and mobility for unhoused individuals who are constantly on the move.

“Man invents tiny mobile homes that fit on the back of bicycles to combat rising homelessness,” https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/tiny-tiny-homes-solution-to-homelessness.

A Millionaire Making a Difference on Local Housing

In Canada, a tech millionaire named Marcel Lebrun took matters into his own hands by building a village of 99 tiny houses for his homeless neighbors. The project is a powerful reminder that the responsibility for social change doesn’t rest solely with governments or large nonprofits. It showcases the immense, direct impact a single, committed individual can have on a local crisis, shifting the narrative from passive waiting to proactive, neighborly action.

This spirit of proactive problem-solving isn’t limited to private citizens; it’s also beginning to reshape public policy in surprising ways.

[“Tech millionaire builds village of 99 tiny houses for homeless neighbors in Canada,” https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/marcel-lebrun-tiny-house-neighborhood-for-homeless.]

A High-Tech Solution to the Housing Crisis

Pioneering a new frontier in sustainable urban development, the Corduroy Castles micro-community in Olivehurst, California, leverages advanced 3D-printing technology to create a resilient, affordable solution to the state’s housing crisis. Through the innovative collaboration of 4dify and Endemic Architecture, these 1,000-square-foot concrete structures (yes, quite a bit larger than the traditional “tiny” home) are printed with impressive efficiency, producing nearly indestructible shells that are fire-resistant, mold-proof, and even bulletproof.

By drastically reducing labor costs and traditional construction timelines, this project serves as a scalable blueprint for the future of automated homebuilding, while also providing high-quality homeownership at (thus far) below-market rates and potentially serving as a benchmark for climate-adaptive design in larger-scale developments.

[“California’s first 3D-printed neighborhood is nearly complete. The concrete homes are bulletproof and fire-resistant,” https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/california-3d-printed-homes-corduroy-castles.]

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Conclusion

These examples—born of crisis, compassion, and civic courage—demonstrate that the tiny home can be far more than a lifestyle accessory and may serve as a foundational tool for rebuilding lives with dignity and community. The ingenuity on display, from Maui to Los Angeles, challenges us to look beyond established systems and ask a critical question: What other intractable problems are waiting for a solution that is simply smaller, smarter, and more human-centered?

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Preface

It seems like ages ago since I released my book, It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field: Overcoming 8 Racial Myths to Even the Field. Those 18 months have passed all too quickly. I committed back then to writing regularly on Substack until I had addressed all the major issues, challenges, and potential solutions the book covered. (63 newsletters total - the links to them can be found throughout this post)

The book’s release came 4 months before the 2024 election, when significant progress on racial equity and justice issues, at least at the national level, felt possible. No election result could have reversed progress on equity and justice more than the election of Donald J. Trump.

In 2025, I have continued to track progress despite backlash against progressive racial policies and practices, while publishing more than a dozen newsletters focused on the damage the Trump administration continues to inflict, and this fall, I have recounted the major steps he and his administration have taken to march our nation toward authoritarianism.

I believe the beginning of 2026 is an important opportunity to revisit the historical, racial issues and the transformational proposals I put forth in my book. I’ve organized them into sections so you can explore a like set of issues in full.

Introduction to the Book (6 newsletters)

My formative years were, in a word, [very] White. I spent a decade of my youth blanketed in a world so homogenous that I was largely blind to the racial dynamics that shaped our country. In my lily-white town, race was an abstraction, something read about in history books, not a lived reality that influenced my (or my peers’) opportunities, health, or safety. My perspective was clearly and profoundly limited by where I grew up. The playing field appeared level enough to me because I was surrounded only by people who, like me, had been given a clear head start.

Although I certainly had some experiences in high school, college, and post-college that made me more sensitive to race and more aware of my prejudices, but it wasn’t until I moved to Washington DC (known affectionately aback then as “Chocolate City”) where I waded far more intentionally into Black-and-White experiences that fundamentally rewired my understanding of America and fully reorganized my social world.

It was in this new environment that I had to truly confront my own whiteness. I came to understand it not as a culture or heritage in the way I saw my neighbors celebrating theirs, but as an unexamined set of privileges—an unwarranted advantage baked into the very systems I was now seeing with fresh eyes. This personal awakening, this journey from quasi-ignorance to unsettling awareness, is the foundation for everything I wrote in my book. Because the myths that shielded me in my youth are the same collective myths that prevent us, as a society, from truly addressing the unlevel field of race and opportunity in America.

1. No, It’s Never Been Level Playing Field, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/no-its-never-been-level-playing-field.

2. Some ‘Color’ (finally) in my Lily-White Town, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/some-color-finally-in-my-lily-white.

3. A White Boy’s Formative Years Around Race, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/a-white-boys-formative-years-around.

4. A Decade Blanketed in White, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/a-decade-blanketed-in-white.

5. The Move to Chocolate City, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-move-to-chocolate-city.

6. A Wedding in Black and White, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/a-wedding-in-black-and-white.

Setting the Overall Context for the Unlevel Playing Field (7 articles)

To build a more just future, we must first have the courage to dismantle the fictions that uphold our unjust present. To discover a transformational future on race, we must first deconstruct, based on facts and evidence, the foundational myths that prevent meaningful progress. For it is only by recognizing myths and lies for what they are that we can begin to build a reality grounded in truth and equity.

1. The Intersection Between Racism and Place, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-intersection-between-racism-and

2. My Whiteness … and the Unwarranted Advantage of Whiteness, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/my-whiteness-and-the-unwarranted.

3. Much of White America Clings to the Myth of a Level Playing Field, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/much-of-white-america-clings-to-the.

4. 28 Think Tanks & Advocacy Organizations that Significantly Influenced My Book, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/28-think-tanks-and-advocacy-organizations.

5. The Fourteen Books that Catalyzed Writing My Book, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-books-that-catalyzed-my-book.

6. The Racial Reckoning that … ultimately, wasn’t, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-racial-reckoning-that-ultimately.

7. The Seven Lessons We Still Haven’t Learned from Katrina, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-seven-lessons-we-still-havent.

Myth One:

The Overarching Myth—America Provides an Equal Playing Field for All (2 newsletters)

The most pervasive and powerful myth is the one much of white America still clings to: the idea that the United States provides a level playing field for all. This is the myth I was raised on. It’s the bedrock of the American dream. But a clear-eyed look at our history and present reveals a different truth. The playing field was never level. In fact, it has been intentionally and systematically tilted for centuries through what can only be described as a long history of white affirmative action—policies and practices designed to lift one group at the expense of others.

1. The Race Myths We (still) Tell Ourselves, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-race-myths-we-still-tell-ourselves.

2. The Long History of White Affirmative Action, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-long-history-of-white-affirmative.

Myth Two, the Where We Live Myth I:

Any Segregation in Housing and Neighborhoods that Blacks May Experience is Now Strictly a Result of Individual Choice (1 newsletter)

Look at the map of any American city. The fault lines of this tilted field are etched into our very geography—in the highways that divide, the neighborhoods that prosper, and those starved of investment and quality of life. First, we are told that housing segregation is simply a matter of choice. This belief conveniently ignores the generations of redlining, restrictive covenants, and discriminatory lending practices that engineered segregation. It is a comforting fiction that allows us to see deep structural inequality and call it freedom. But it is not a choice; it is the enduring legacy of a system designed to separate and disinvest.

1. Any Segregation in Housing and Neighborhoods that Blacks May Experience is Now Strictly a Result of Individual Choice, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/any-segregation-in-housing-and-neighborhoods.

Myth Three, the Where We Live Myth II:

If Blacks Have Worse Health Outcomes than Whites, It’s Because of Their Own Poor Choices (4 newsletters)

And this myth of housing choice provides the perfect cover for the next lie—the cruel fiction that health is solely a matter of personal responsibility. This narrative misses the point. The stark health inequities between Black and White Americans are far more the result of systemic causes than of personal behavior. When our nation systematically denies marginalized communities (all too frequently, African American) access to fresh food, clean air and water, and quality healthcare facilities—and when they are subjected to a century of environmental injustices—the result is predictable and devastating health disparities. Place, not personal choice, is a primary determinant of health.

1. If Blacks Have Worse Health Outcomes than Whites, It’s Because of Their Own Poor Choices, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/if-blacks-have-worse-health-outcomes.

2. The Starkness of Health Inequities between Blacks and Whites, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-starkness-of-health-inequities.

3. Health Inequities Have Systemic Causes, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/health-inequities-have-systemic-causes.

4. Century-Long Environmental Injustices: Can We Repair and Redress to Benefit African American Communities? https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/century-long-environmental-injustices.

Myth Four, The Access to Economic Opportunity Myth:

If you work hard enough, everybody has the same opportunity to get a job, start a business, and build wealth (3 newsletters)

We are told to believe in the nobility of hard work, and we should. But we must reject the fiction that hard work competes on a level field. It does not. Not when we have denied generations of Black entrepreneurs access to capital, when hiring companies discard Black resumes because of a name, and when political and economic elites (primarily White) systematically extract wealth from Black communities before it can take root. The data reveal deep and persistent economic inequities. Hard work is essential, but it cannot overcome a rigged system alone.

1. The Investments We Need to Make in Upward Mobility, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-investments-we-need-to-make-in.

2. The Fiction of Equal Economic Opportunity, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-fiction-of-equal-economic-opportunity.

3. Economic Inequities Across the Board, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/economic-inequities-across-the-board.

Myth Five, the Access to Educational Opportunity Myth:

Black People Now Have the Same Access to Quality Education as White People Do (2 newsletters)

The parallel myth in education is equally damaging. We must dispel the notion that Black people now have the same access to quality education as White people. The unlevel playing field begins early. Our system of funding schools through local property taxes ensures that children in wealthier, whiter districts receive far better-resourced education than those in poorer communities of color. If K-12 is not a level playing field, how can we expect higher education to be? The disparities are baked in long before college applications are completed.

1. Dispelling the Myth, ‘Blacks Now Have the Same Access to Quality Education as Whites Do’, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/dispelling-the-myth-blacks-now-have.

2. If K-12 is not a Level Playing Field, is Higher Education?, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/if-k-12-is-not-a-level-playing-field.

Myth Six, The Access to Genuine Justice Myth,

With Some Egregious Exceptions, Blacks are Treated Fairly by Our Criminal Justice and Policing Systems (2 newsletters)

Finally, we must confront two of the most deeply and dangerously held myths about American justice and the trajectory of civil rights.

We are told the criminal justice system is fair, barring a few exceptions. This is a profound fallacy. Let us be clear: America has never had one justice system. It has always had two: a prejudiced system for Black people, and a separate, kinder one for whites. The persistent lack of police accountability is not a modern phenomenon but an echo of a long and painful past. It is not a system with a few bad apples; it is a system producing predictable and racially biased outcomes.

1. Throughout Our History --- A Prejudiced Justice System for Blacks, A Separate Kinder One for Whites, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/throughout-our-history-a-prejudiced.

2. For African Americans, Why So Little Police Accountability for So Long?, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/for-african-americans-why-so-little.

Myth Seven, The Embracing Blacks’ Access to Rights and Progress:

The Days of Restricting the Rights and Progress of Blacks is Long Gone (5 newsletters)

Perhaps the most dangerous myth is that the fight is won—that the days of restricting Black Americans’ rights and progress are long gone. This is demonstrably false. We are living through a period in which hard-won rights are being systematically dismantled. The promise of the Voting Rights Act has been deferred, as its key provisions were won—and then undone. Threats like Project 2025 signal an organized effort to further impede Black progress. Progress has never been a straight line, and it has never been guaranteed.

1. Impeding Black Progress, the threat of Project 2025, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/impeding-black-progress-the-threat.

2. A Promise Deferred: How the Voting Rights Act Was Won — and Undone, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/a-promise-deferred-how-the-voting.

3. Much of White America Clings to the Myth of a Level Playing Field, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/much-of-white-america-clings-to-the.

4. An Egregious Elimination of the Black Vote in Newbern, AL, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/an-egregious-elimination-of-the-black.

5. A Promise Deferred: How the Voting Rights Act Was Won — and Undone, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/a-promise-deferred-how-the-voting.

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The Fergusons of America (4 newsletters)

The story of Ferguson, Missouri, is not a single tragic incident in a single town. It is a microcosm of the systemic rot we have just discussed. It is where the abstract myths we tell ourselves become painfully, undeniably concrete. Ferguson is what happens when generations of unlevel playing fields finally collapse under their own weight. Because a chapter on Ferguson didn’t make the final cut for my book, I was glad to explore the story more fully on Substack.

In my “Fergusons of America” posts, the myths weave together into a suffocating reality. Because housing was segregated and starved of investment, economic opportunity was strangled, which in turn eroded the tax base needed to fund quality schools. This left a generation of young people without pathways to prosperity, making them vulnerable to a predatory justice system that treated them not as citizens to be protected but as a source of revenue to fund the city. Each systemic failure reinforced the others, creating a closed loop of disadvantage. Ferguson was not an accident. It was the inevitable result of a society that refused to address its foundational inequities, choosing instead to believe in fictions of fairness.

In the ten years since a police officer murdered Mike Brown, we are forced to ask uncomfortable questions. Have the underlying systems truly changed? Have we addressed the tilted playing field, or have we merely patched a few cracks in a crumbling foundation? Don’t get me wrong, Ferguson has made important progress. But there are hundreds of Fergusons across the country, and without fundamental, transformative change, we are very likely to see other Fergusons emerge, fighting the same battles again and again.

1. The Fergusons of America, Part I, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-fergusons-of-america-part-i.

2. The Fergusons of America, Part II, Ongoing Systemic Racism & Segregation Leads to Profound Economic and Health Inequities, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-fergusons-of-america-part-2.

3. The Fergusons of America, Part III, Systemic Racism’s Impact on Education and Criminal Justice for African Americans, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/fergusons-of-america-part-3.

4. Reviewing Ten Years of Progress in Ferguson, Missouri, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/reviewing-ten-years-of-progress-in.

Intro to Racial Equity & Justice Solutions (6 newsletters)

Having deconstructed the myths and diagnosed the systemic failures, I pivoted from analysis to action. When I wrote the book, I wanted to ensure it didn’t end with a mere understanding of the history. I also wanted to put forth a pragmatic yet audacious vision of what is possible. I aimed to write the book’s last section as an integrated strategy to build the equitable future we deserve, not as a menu of options, even though progress on each is important.

1. Transitioning from Distressing Histories to Possible Futures, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/transitioning-from-distressing-histories

2. Intro to Solutions – Investing in Racially Equitable Communities to End Our Continuing Forms of Apartheid, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/intro-to-solutions-investing-in-racially.

3. Supporting Racial Equity Despite Our Current Climate, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/supporting-racial-equity-despite.

4. Exploring the Grassroots Reparations Movement: What Might it Add Up To?, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/exploring-the-grassroots-reparations.

5. Amidst the Objectionable Tr*mpian Landscape, Racial Equity Perseveres (more good news), https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/amidst-the-objectionable-trmpian.

6. Progress in Racial Justice and Racial Equity Continues to Counteract the Ongoing Backlash, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/progress-in-racial-justice-and-racial.

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Investing in Racially Equitable Communities to End Our Continuing Forms of Apartheid (7 newsletters)

It is time to invest in racially equitable communities and finally end our ongoing forms of apartheid. The intersection of racism and place is the root of many of these inequities. Therefore, our solutions must begin there, with transformative investments in housing and community infrastructure.

1. Housing Solutions, Part I, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/housing-solutions-part-i.

2. Changing Zoning from Exclusionary to Inclusionary to Fundamentally Redress Century-long Wrongs, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/changing-zoning-from-exclusionary.

3. The Transformative Investments We Need in Housing, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-transformative-investments-we.

4. (Some) Heartening Progress toward Greater Racial Equity in Housing, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/some-heartening-progress-toward-greater.

5. Repair and Redress for the Damage of “Urban Renewal” Highway Projects, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/repair-and-redress-for-the-damage.

6. Century-Long Environmental Injustices: Can We Repair and Redress to Benefit African American Communities?, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/century-long-environmental-injustices.

7. Progress on Racial Injustices as a Counter to the White Backlash, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/progress-on-racial-injustices-as.

Transforming Pathways to Economic Prosperity (10 newsletters)

Yet true equity requires more than fair housing; it requires building an economy that works for everyone. This isn’t about tinkering with the existing model. It’s about fundamentally rethinking American capitalism, which has, for too long, prioritized extraction over shared prosperity. It’s time to build an economy that invests in everyone.

1. Six National & Local Economic Initiatives that Advance Equity, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/six-national-and-local-economic-initiatives.

2. American Capitalism Just Doesn’t Cut it for Most Americans: Time to Build a More Equitable Economy, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/american-capitalism-just-doesnt-cut.

3. Creating a Sovereign Wealth Fund that Works for All: Rethinking Capitalism Part I, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/creating-a-sovereign-wealth-fund.

4. Time to Finally End ‘Voodoo Economics’ & Create an Equitable Tax Code, Rethinking American Capitalism Part II, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/time-to-finally-end-voodoo-economics.

5. Massive Investments in Equitable Workforce Training that Aligns with Our Growing Economic Sectors, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/massive-investments-in-equitable.

6. And Yet, There’s Still Progress on Racial Equity and Justice, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/and-yet-theres-still-progress-on.

7. Ignore Tr*mp: Here are the Transformative Federal Investments We Need for Black Entrepreneurs, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/ignore-trmp-here-are-the-transformative.

8. To Build and Sustain Massive Private Investment in Black Businesses & Entrepreneurs, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/to-build-and-sustain-massive-private.

9. Can We Finally Win Reparative Justice for Black Farmers? A Distressing History, a Bold Proposal, and Local Sparks of Inspiration, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/can-we-finally-win-reparative-justice.

10. The Investments We Need to Make in Upward Mobility, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-investments-we-need-to-make-in.

Shortening the Arc that Bends Toward Full Racial Justice (4 newsletters)

Finally, we cannot build an equitable future on the foundations of a biased justice system. We must shorten the arc that bends toward full racial justice. This requires a comprehensive approach to meaningful police reform that emphasizes accountability, smart decarceration strategies, and a complete rethinking of rehabilitation and reentry to ensure that a prison sentence does not become a life sentence of closed doors and blocked opportunities.

1. Shortening the Arc Bending Toward Greater Racial Justice: Police Reform, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/shortening-the-arc-bending-toward.

2. Several Solutions to Point Our Criminal Justice System in the Right Direction, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/several-solutions-to-point-our-criminal.

3. Strategies to Move Us toward Greater Decarceration, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/strategies-to-move-us-toward-greater.

4. Rethinking Rehabilitation and Reentry, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/rethinking-rehabilitation-and-reentry.

Conclusion

Justice reform cannot succeed in a community denied economic opportunity, and economic opportunity is meaningless without safe housing and a healthy environment.

The solutions, like the problems, are inseparable.

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Meanwhile … in such a crazy year, it has been a challenge to find time to read books, but I somehow read eleven in 2025!

History We’re Never Taught

The two most remarkable were:

1. Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital by Chris Myers Asch & George Derek Musgrove, https://uncpress.org/9781469654720/chocolate-city/.

Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation’s capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between the U.S.’s expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. The book also highlights the city’s rich history of local activism and activists’ struggle to make their voices heard in an undemocratic city where residents have lacked full political rights from its inception. Ultimately, the book traces D.C.’s massive transformations — from a sparsely inhabited plantation society into a diverse metropolis, from a center of the slave trade to the nation’s first Black-majority city. [Drawn from UNC Press’s promotion of the book]

And

2. Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. French, https://wwnorton.com/books/born-in-blackness.

Born in Blackness places Africa and Africans into the center of our thinking about the origins of the modern world. French provides a remarkable account of five centuries of global history that undermines many of the mythical narratives taught about the sources of Europe’s (and America’s) strength, wealth, and expansion. The wealth in the U.S. and Europe would have been unimaginable without Africans; Africans’ resources, capital and labor played an important role in powering the emerging global economy.” [Drawn from a book review by Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History]

Groundbreaking & Paradigm Shifting

Those two books, and the next three that follow, I somehow read between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, not an easy feat given the sheer length of the first two (400+ pages, both).

All three were remarkable in their own right.

3. We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance by Kellie Carter Jackson, https://www.kelliecarterjackson.com/we-refuse.

“A fascinating array of histories that highlight the ingeniousness, efficacy, and relatability of Black political maneuvering across several centuries of oppression…By astutely delineating how Black resistance strategies have always existed on a spectrum between the binary of nonviolence vs. violence, Carter Jackson demolishes an unnecessarily rigid distinction.” [Drawn from a Publishers Weekly review]

4. Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises by Marjorie Kelly, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736352/wealth-supremacy-by-marjorie-kelly/.

“Kelly identifies a key driving force behind the multiple global crises we face today: financialization, … in which there is too much financial wealth in too few hands. Economists have warned for decades about the problems created by financialization: economic injustice, society-wide fragility, planetary crisis, monopolies, asset poverty, and deep damage to democracy. It’s a problem as big as the climate crisis, but far less visible. That’s because capitalism is like the air we breathe: we are so steeped in its premises that we don’t question how it functions or whom it benefits. Our present economic difficulties, Kelly argues, are the logical outcome of a system based on “wealth supremacy” – the idea that wealth and the wealthy matter more than everyone else. By examining the ways in which this bias toward wealth is embedded throughout our culture and economy, Kelly lays the foundation for delegitimizing the current system and imagining and building the next system: a democratic economy. [From Democracy Collaborative’s description of the book]

5. Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America by David Sirota & Jared Jacang Maher, https://www.levernews.com/master-plan-the-hidden-plot-to-legalize-corruption-in-america/.

“Master Plan pulls back the curtain on a half‑century strategy that rewrote the rules of American politics—turning wealth into power, stripping oversight and decriminalizing corruption at the highest levels. The book covers:

The blueprint – How Lewis Powell’s confidential memo (before his service on the Supreme Court) became the secret manifesto for corporate takeover.

The players – From Joseph Coors to Roger Ailes to Leonard Leo—and how they built a machine to dominate politics.

The turning point – The Citizens United case and how a speculative lawsuit became the legal scaffolding for unlimited dark money.

The threat today – Why disclosure laws are crumbling, how dark money came to dictate elections, and how the John Roberts Supreme Court enabled it all.” [Exerpted from the Publisher book site]

Poverty in America

The next two books deepened my understanding of the full extent of poverty in the U.S., how it has come about, and how we move toward ending it.

I especially love the work of Reverend William Barber, who has been a genuine inspiration to me since his Moral Mondays campaign in North Carolina nearly two decades ago. He’s a remarkable man, a gifted organizer, and a wonderful orator.

6. White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy by Reverend William Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324094876.

Barber challenges the very definition of who is poor in America, by surfacing the the lies that prevent us from seeing the pain of poor white families who have been offered little more than their “whiteness” and angry social media posts to sustain them in an economy where the costs of housing, healthcare, and education have skyrocketed while wages have stagnated for all but the very rich. Asserting in Biblically inspired language that there should never be shame in being poor, White Poverty lifts the hope for a new “moral fusion movement” that seeks to unite people “who have been pitted against one another by politicians (and billionaires) who depend on the poorest of us not being here.” [Excerpted from the book’s website]

7. Poverty By America by Matthew Desmond, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675683/poverty-by-america-by-matthew-desmond/.

“In Poverty by America, Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow. This book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.” [Excerpted from the publisher’s website]

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Racial Justice and Equity

The next two books spotlight powerful ways we as a nation can address serious challenges African Americans face from chronic disinvestment, oppression, and discrimination.

8. Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It by Andre M. Perry, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250869715/blackpowerscorecard/.

“Historically, Black Americans’ quest for power has been understood as an attempt to gain equal protections under the law. But power in America requires more than basic democratic freedoms. It is inextricably linked with economic influence and ownership—of one’s self, home, business, and creations. Perry draws on extensive research and analysis to quantify how much power Black Americans actually have. Ranging from property, business, and wealth to education, health, and social mobility, Black Power Scorecard moves across the country, evaluating people’s ability to set the rules of the game and calculating how that translates into the ultimate means of power—life itself, and the longevity of Black communities. Along the way, Perry identifies woefully overlooked areas of investment that could close the racial gap and benefit everyone.” [Excerpted from the publisher’s website]

9. Arrested Mobility: Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement by Charles T. Brown, https://islandpress.org/books/arrested-mobility#desc.

In Arrested Mobility: Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement, Brown examines why mobility is not afforded in the same way to everyone. He argues that the legacy of structural racism and White supremacy has led to disinvestment and over-policing in Black communities and communities of color, thwarting opportunity, as physical mobility and social mobility are intrinsically linked. This experience for Black people around the world is what Brown refers to as arrested mobility. In the book, Brown also shows how un-arresting mobility creates an opportunity not just for a better society for Black people, but for all people. Arrested mobility is detrimental to our society as a whole, not just the people it directly harms. By not providing equitable access to jobs, community resources, and public spaces, we are limiting the potential of a large percentage of our population to participate and contribute to society. Change is possible. We can un-arrest mobility together. [Excerpted from the publisher’s website]

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Community-Focused

The final two books intersect with the community engagement work I’ve conducted over the last quarter-century. Rich Harwood has been a pioneer in bringing about genuine community-led change in cities and towns across the country for three decades.

Rob Fersh has also been a pioneer in the conflict resolution and collaborative problem-solving space for three decades and is joined by the current president of the organization he founded (Convergence), Mariah Levison in producing a practical set of strategies to bring together stakeholders from across the political spectrum to solve complex public policy issues.

10. The Little Field Guide for Sparking Community-Led Change: 10 Essential Questions to Build Civic Confidence and Momentum by Richard C. Harwood, https://greenleafbookgroup.com/titles/the-little-field-guide-for-sparking-community-led-change.

Drawing on over 35 years of experience leading change in communities across all 50 states and 40 countries worldwide, Harwood reveals ten essential questions that are often overlooked in community change initiatives. With inspiring stories of transformation and actionable strategies, this field guide is a must-read for those ready to step forward, meet communities where they are, and forge sustainable momentum that creates a new trajectory of hope. [Excerpted from the book’s website]

11. From Conflict to Convergence: Coming Together to Solve Tough Problems by Robert Fersh and Mariah Levison, https://www.wiley.com/en-us/From+Conflict+to+Convergence%3A+Coming+Together+to+Solve+Tough+Problems-p-9781394198566.

In From Conflict to Convergence: Coming Together to Solve Tough Problems, Fersh and Levison deliver an incisive, hands-on guide to de-escalating conflict and constructively engaging with those you disagree with to find better solutions to problems. In this book full of real-life stories and examples, you’ll find a collection of tried and tested strategies you can employ immediately as you negotiate and navigate your most seemingly intractable conflicts. You’ll learn how finding what the authors call “higher ground” can advance your interests even when facing people and groups you think you have little in common with and how this can set the stage for longer term cooperation. [Excerpted from the publisher’s website]

My First 4 Books for 2026? (yes, all easy and light reading!)

• 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann (bestselling author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)

• Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust by Adam Kahane

• My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathways to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem

• Fast Track: Navigating Narrative Strategy, Power, and the Case for Justice by Tiffany Manuel

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I can no longer remember what prompted me to buy Nigerian artist, King Sunny Ade’s album “Juju Music” back in April 1983 at my favorite record store in Worcester, MA (Al Bums).

I do know I was looking to branch out from pop hits and rock music that were endlessly played on FM radio back then.

Although I found Ade’s songs a bit repetitive in style, I remained intrigued, and my new foray into African music continued into that Fall.

My second purchase, Baba Olatunji’s “Drums of Passion,” filled me with a rhythm I’d never heard before. He issued it in 1960, as (I believe) the first traditional African (Nigerian) record widely released in America. It remains one of my all-time favorites. In 1985, I took a one-day drumming workshop with Olatunji at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. Forty years later, I can still feel those rhythms vibrating inside me.

A year or so later, I branched out into more contemporary West African music. I found “New Africa,” a compilation of artists: Manu Dibango (Cameroon), Fela (Nigeria), Toure Kunda (Senegal), and Mandingo (The Gambia). Each artist had a unique flavor and expanded my interest in the music.

My favorite musical artist in the 1980s was Peter Gabriel (UK). His third and fourth albums featured songs clearly influenced by African musical traditions, including “Biko” (about the death of South African dissident and activist Stephen Biko) and “Rhythm of the Heat.” In the early 1980s, Gabriel launched his Real World music label and his annual global music festival, World of Music, Arts, and Dance (WOMAD).

His label and festivals featured musicians from around the globe with a significant emphasis on West African musical artists. Several years after launching WOMAD, he took the festival on tour, and I was grateful to attend one in Columbia, Maryland, in 1989.

WOMAD and Real World music introduced me to: Papa Wemba (Congo), Farafina (Burkina Faso), Geoffrey Oryema (Uganda), Fatala (Guinea), Doudou N’Diaye Rose (Senegal-astounding traditional African percussion), and Ayub Ogada (Kenya).

The latter album by Ogada simply astounded me: his Kenyan Luo folk music, on which he sang in a beautiful, lilting voice while playing the nyatiti (an 8-stringed lyre), is gorgeous and mesmerizing.

Gabriel’s smash hit album, “So,” also featured the amazing Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, who provided backup vocals on the Top Ten hit “In Your Eyes.” Listening to him on that track and then seeing him live at a Gabriel concert in Madison Square Garden in December 1986 began my lifelong love affair with N’Dour’s music.

Once I discovered Youssou, I learned about Baba Maal, also Senegalese, who had an equally distinctive voice and musical style. I still love listening to “African Woman” from his 1994 album, “Firing in Fouta.”

Perhaps my all-time favorite African artist is Benin’s Angelique Kidjo!!! I discovered her music in the early 1990s, collected her first six albums, and she remains one of my top 3 favorites on Spotify. Her earliest albums remain my best-loved: check out Logozo, Aye, Fifa, and Oremi, in particular.

By the late 1990s, I had grown increasingly fond of Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti (known simply as ‘Fela’), having encountered him briefly on the second African album I purchased (see above). Fela was a groundbreaking musician who, with his band Africa ’70, launched “Afrobeat” in Nigeria in the 1970s. He was the son of a Nigerian women’s rights activist and became an outspoken critic of the Nigerian military rulers of that era.

and

Per Wikipedia, “in 1970, he founded the Kalakuta Republic commune, which declared itself independent from military rule. The commune was destroyed in a 1978 army raid that injured Kuti and his mother, the latter fatally. He was jailed by the government of Muhammadu Buhari in 1984, but released after 20 months.”

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Nearly all of his songs run 10-20 minutes. In particular, I love “Zombie,” “Water No Get Enemy,” and “No Agreement.” The musical about his life, “Fela,” ran on Broadway for more than a year and received 11 Tony Award nominations, winning three. I saw this amazing musical when it came to the DC area in the summer of 2023.

Afrobeat is a riveting blend of American funk, soul, jazz, and highlife. After discovering Fela, I found other Afrobeat artists, including Tony Allen, Orlando Julius, and Manu Dibango.

Femi Kuti, Fela’s oldest son, continued with his own Afrobeat music, following in his papa’s footsteps. He continues to pump out compelling music today.

Singers like Burna Boy (Nigeria) have popularized Neo-Afrobeat in recent years.

And Afrobeat music that retains much of its original influences remains popular worldwide, with bands such as Abayomy Afrobeat Orquestra, Ikebe Shakedown, Antibalas, The Budos Band, Jungle Fire, and Bixiga 70.

There are several dozen artists I have left out of this recounting, but my listing could go on and on. Hopefully, any of the bands above sound intriguing to you, and you’ll give them a listen.

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And if you have other African musical artists you think I should check out, send them along!

With much love,

Steve

Introduction: A Coherent Strategy of Democratic Erosion

Authoritarianism rarely arrives with a sudden rupture; it advances through the steady corrosion of democratic norms and institutions. The actions and policies detailed in this analysis are not isolated incidents of political discord or scandal. This analysis documents a deliberate pattern of weakening the rule of law, dismantling checks and balances, and concentrating power within the executive branch. This document synthesizes and analyzes these tactics, drawing exclusively from the provided source materials, to provide an evidence-based assessment for an audience concerned with governmental accountability and the preservation of constitutional integrity. The findings detail a coherent strategy to politicize independent institutions, subvert justice, and erode the civil liberties that form the bedrock of American democracy.

1.0 The Concentration and Expansion of Executive Power

A core component of the authoritarian playbook is the systematic expansion of executive power at the expense of co-equal branches of government, a strategy that seeks to dismantle constitutional guardrails designed to prevent the concentration of unchecked authority. The administration’s pursuit of the Unitary Executive Theory, as outlined in “Project 2025,” mirrors a playbook successfully executed by leaders in Hungary and Turkey, who leveraged similar tactics to consolidate control and hollow out their democracies from within. This section examines the ideological framework and specific actions driving this effort to concentrate authority in the executive.

1.1 International Precedents and Domestic Ideology

The blueprint for expanding executive authority has been demonstrated with alarming success in other nations where leaders have methodically dismantled democratic checks and balances.

• Viktor Orbán (Hungary): Operating under a self-described “illiberal Christian democracy,” Orbán has used his party’s super-majority to rewrite the constitution, rule by decree under an indefinite state of emergency, curb press freedom, and capture independent institutions, including state universities, which have been turned into organizations run by his political allies.

• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey): Erdoğan eliminated the position of prime minister to consolidate full executive authority in the presidency. This has enabled him to issue decrees, purge more than 130,000 public employees from the civil service and academia, and use anti-terror laws to jail journalists and activists, giving him effective control over nearly 90% of the national media.

In the United States, this push for executive dominance is guided by the Unitary Executive Theory, a legal doctrine claiming the President possesses exclusive and overriding authority over the entire executive branch. “Project 2025” serves as the explicit blueprint for implementing this theory, aiming to centralize power in the presidency by eliminating institutional independence and prioritizing political loyalty over competence.

1.2 Catalog of Executive Overreach in U.S. Governance

Guided by this ideology, the administration has undertaken a wide range of actions designed to bypass constitutional and legal constraints on its power. These actions demonstrate a clear pattern of governing by decree and defying legal and legislative oversight.

• Deployment of Federal Forces: The administration has sent federal troops and anonymous, masked federal agents onto the streets of American cities.

• Impoundment of Funds: It has illegally impounded billions of dollars in Congressionally-appropriated funds, usurping Congress’s fundamental “power of the purse.”

• Elimination of Oversight: It has systematically fired independent inspectors general across federal agencies, removing critical watchdogs responsible for preventing corruption, waste, and abuse.

• Defiance of Judicial Orders: The administration has openly defied court orders that have blocked its policies, including those preventing the deployment of National Guard troops.

• Usurpation of Budget Authority: It has unilaterally slashed the federal workforce and impounded funds for specific programs and states without congressional approval.

• Extra-Constitutional Justifications: The administration has repeatedly claimed that Article II of the Constitution grants it the authority to bypass Congressional statutes and court precedents, particularly in matters of immigration, federal employment, and spending.

1.3 The Weaponization of Emergency Powers

A particularly dangerous facet of executive overreach has been the administration’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act. This 19th-century law grants the president emergency powers to deploy the U.S. military on American soil for domestic law enforcement. While legally intended for genuine insurrections where a state cannot enforce federal law, the administration has sought to apply it to situations far below that threshold, labeling peaceful protests or low-crime cities as “criminal insurrections.”

The unconstitutional intent behind this threat was made explicit in the president’s own words during a speech to military leaders, where he stated, “It’s a war within. We’re under invasion from within,” and suggested, “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard.” Such a move would violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which establishes a clear separation between civilian law enforcement and the military.

1.4 The Enablers of Executive Lawlessness

This rapid expansion of executive power has been facilitated by the capitulation and active enablement of the other branches of government.

• Congress: The Republican-led Congress has largely neglected its constitutional oversight responsibilities.

  • It abdicated its “power of the purse” by allowing the administration to impound funds and make rescissions to an already-approved budget.

  • It failed to block the unauthorized creation of entities like the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which operated without Congressional oversight.

  • It permitted the unauthorized dismantling and weakening of federal agencies, including USAID and the Centers for Disease Control.

• The Supreme Court: The Court has actively emboldened the administration through a series of key rulings.

  • Its landmark decision granting the U.S. president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaged in official acts has been the single most significant factor fostering a “regime of executive lawlessness.”

  • It has reversed nearly a century of precedent by allowing the president to fire members of independent commissions, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, without cause.

  • It has limited the power of district courts to issue nationwide injunctions, thereby weakening judicial checks on executive orders.

This consolidation of power has provided the foundation for a direct assault on the institutions designed to ensure accountability and uphold the rule of law.

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2.0 The Politicization of Institutions and the Weakening of the Rule of Law

The politicization of independent institutions is the primary mechanism by which the rule of law is subverted. When nonpartisan government bodies are captured for political ends, the principle that all citizens and officials are accountable to a fairly enforced set of laws begins to crumble. This section details the methodical process by which the administration has replaced evidence with obedience and justice with political loyalty, thereby undermining the foundations of impartial governance.

2.1 The Systematic Capture of Independent and Democratic Institutions

A key strategy has been the purging of officials in nonpartisan and oversight roles who produce facts or render decisions that contradict the administration’s political narrative. This transforms independent agencies from bodies accountable to the public good into instruments of political will.

• The dismissal of over 20 Inspectors General (IGs) across the federal government, crippling independent oversight and eliminating watchdogs who, in the previous fiscal year, recovered nearly $15 billion through investigations with another $35 billion in potential savings.

• The firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner after the agency released disappointing job numbers, undermining trust in federal economic data.

• The termination of dozens of career prosecutors from the Department of Justice, including those working on January 6th insurrection cases, in a move described by one expert as “unheard of.”

• The removal of top intelligence and cybersecurity officials who provided assessments that contradicted the president’s desired political assumptions regarding Venezuela and Iran.

This campaign has been so effective that conservative legal professor Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, concluded:

this administration has systematically, ruthlessly, and successfully eliminated, with one exception, all internal legal resistance.

2.2 The Subversion of the Rule of Law

The principle that no one is above the law has been methodically attacked through a series of actions aimed at weaponizing the legal system against perceived enemies and shielding political allies.

1. Weaponization of Prosecutorial Power Against Political Opponents: The administration is actively pursuing indictments against a list of political opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Leticia James, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Senator Adam Schiff, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

2. Attacks on the Judiciary and Media: In an unprecedented move, the administration sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland over an order blocking migrant deportations. It has also filed lawsuits against news outlets such as CBS, the Wall Street Journal, and the Des Moines Register while threatening others like the New York Times and CNN.

3. Prioritizing Loyalty Over Law: An executive order was issued to prioritize political loyalty over expertise in federal hiring, a direct assault on the nonpartisan civil service. This principle was further demonstrated by the deployment of anonymous, masked federal officers—described by one Reagan-appointed federal judge as an “armed masked secret police”—to operate without visible identification.

Weakening legal and institutional guardrails has enabled the administration to manipulate public perception through the systematic propagation of disinformation.

3.0 The Propagation of Falsehoods as a Tool of Governance

In an authoritarian context, disinformation is not merely a political tactic but a strategic tool of governance. The consistent and deliberate propagation of falsehoods serves to control public narratives, create public cynicism, and manufacture false grievances. These manufactured narratives are then used to justify punitive policies, consolidate power, and erode public trust in independent sources of information.

3.1 A Pattern of Pathological Deception

The administration’s use of falsehoods is built on a long and well-documented history, which has scaled from personal business dealings to national political strategy. This pattern began long before the presidency with the promotion of the Obama birther conspiracy theory. Upon taking office, this approach was immediately institutionalized. Within 24 hours, the press secretary falsely claimed the inauguration drew the largest crowd in U.S. history, a lie later defended by a presidential counselor as the presentation of “alternative facts.”

This set the tone for an administration that, according to a Washington Post fact-checker, made over 30,000 false or misleading statements during its first term.

3.2 Fabricated Narratives to Justify Policy

False claims are consistently deployed to distort public understanding and create political justification for specific policy goals across a wide range of issues.

3.3 The Amplification of Deception by Loyalists

Top officials are expected to amplify and legitimize the leader’s falsehoods, demonstrating loyalty by participating in the deception.

• Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, claimed the Obama administration engaged in a “broad treasonous conspiracy” to undermine the president.

• Stephen Miller, a top domestic policy aide, described peaceful protests in Portland as an “organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers.”

• JD Vance, the Vice President, falsely claimed that “30 million illegal immigrants” had “flooded the country,” blaming them for the housing crisis.

This coordinated disinformation is often deployed to target specific groups, creating scapegoats to distract from systemic problems and unify a political base.

4.0 The Systemic Corrosion of Democratic Processes and Civil Liberties

The practical consequences of expanded executive power, politicized institutions, and state-sponsored disinformation converge in a direct assault on democratic processes and individual rights. The strategies previously documented are not abstract; they manifest in the undermining of elections, the normalization of corruption, and the systematic erosion of civil liberties for vulnerable communities. This section examines these manifestations.

4.1 The Assault on Electoral Integrity

A multi-pronged strategy is underway to undermine the U.S. election system, fueled by the disinformation detailed in Section 3.0 and enabled by the executive overreach documented in Section 1.0.

• Partisan Gerrymandering: Building on the blueprint of Operation REDMAP, which reshaped congressional maps after 2010, the administration is now encouraging an aggressive new tactic: mid-decade redistricting. In states like Texas and Florida, partisan legislatures are redrawing maps outside the normal decennial census cycle specifically to dilute Black voting strength and create durable partisan majorities.

• Election Denial as Official Policy: Election denialism has transitioned from a conspiracy theory into official administrative doctrine. The administration has appointed known conspiracy theorists to federal posts overseeing election “integrity” and has directed the Department of Justice to demand unredacted voter rolls from states, paving the way for mass voter purges under the pretext of preventing fraud.

• The Legal Attack on the Voting Rights Act: The landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 faces a potentially final blow. The pending Supreme Court case, Louisiana v. Callais, threatens to invalidate Section 2, the last major provision protecting against racial vote dilution. If Section 2 is struck down, states would be severely restricted in their ability to create majority-minority districts, which would drastically reduce Black and Brown political representation.

4.2 Fostering Corruption and Enriching Elites

Corruption, defined as the “misuse of public power for private gain,” has become a recurring feature of governance, blurring the lines between public service and private enrichment.

• Monetizing the Presidency: Public office has been openly leveraged for financial gain. At the president’s Mar-a-Lago club, annual memberships have risen from $20,000 in 2016 to an estimated $1 million in 2025, and the Trump International Hotel became a hub for foreign leaders and corporate lobbyists seeking to curry favor during his first term.

• Nepotism and Influence: The president’s family has engaged in ventures linked to their public roles. Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund for his inexperienced private equity firm, and a new club in D.C. called “The Executive Branch” is selling $500,000 memberships for access to top administration officials.

• Corporate Capture: Elon Musk was appointed to head the unauthorized Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This unelected position granted him vast power over the very agencies responsible for regulating his businesses, including Tesla, SpaceX, and X, epitomizing the merger of oligarchic influence and executive authority.

• Deregulation for Personal Gain: The administration has pivoted to embrace cryptocurrency. This includes launching $Trump coins, pardoning the founder of the crypto exchange Binance (who pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations), and disbanding the Justice Department’s unit for investigating cryptocurrency crimes.

4.3 Scapegoating Communities and Erasing Civil Liberties

Authoritarian leaders frequently personalize systemic problems by scapegoating a vulnerable group, unifying their base against a perceived “common enemy.” The administration has weaponized the state in a full-scale assault on the African American community, using its anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) campaign as justification.

1. Personnel Purges: The administration has fired numerous senior Black officials from federal agencies and has targeted agencies with high percentages of Black women for the largest workforce reductions. The federal government, historically a ladder to the middle class for Black Americans, is being systematically dismantled as a source of stable employment.

2. Punitive Policymaking: Policy decisions have inflicted disproportionate harm on Black communities. This includes deep cuts to federal funding for minority-serving schools, the cancellation of NIH grants for sickle cell disease research, the defunding of environmental justice initiatives addressing asthma and lead exposure, and the shuttering of the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA).

3. Erasure of History: A systematic effort is underway to control the historical narrative. Black history artifacts have been removed from the Smithsonian, thousands of federal datasets related to racial equity have been deleted, and hundreds of books on race and Black history have been banned in states following the administration’s lead.

4. Weaponizing the State: Government power has been used to intimidate and repress. The National Guard has been deployed exclusively to cities with Black mayors, including Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Charlotte. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has effectively ended fair housing enforcement, causing legal settlements for housing discrimination to plummet.

These targeted actions against a specific community represent a broader attack on the constitutional principle of equal protection under the law.

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5.0 White Christian Nationalism

5.1. 🚩 Historical Precedence for White Dominance

The roots of the current crisis lie in historic Christian doctrines like the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny, which justified the belief in the superiority of Western Christianity and White European civilization. This foundational idea of America as a “New Zion” has fueled a defensive mobilization among White Christians—whose share of the U.S. population has declined from 54% in 2008 to 42% today—against perceived threats to their dominance in a rapidly diversifying nation.

5.2 🏔️ The Authoritarian, Anti-Democratic Ideology

Christian Nationalism is underpinned by three movements (Reconstructionism, Dominionism, and Catholic Integralism) that reject democracy and embrace authoritarian rule to establish a “biblically ordered society.” Dominionists specifically aim to conquer the “Seven Mountains” of society—including government, media, and education—seeking Christian control over all public life.

5.3 Political Support and Extremist Beliefs

The movement has established itself as an ideological keystone in the Republican Party, with more than half of Republicans identifying as Christian Nationalist “adherents” or “sympathizers,” compared to 30% of all Americans. A high percentage of adherents (67%) and sympathizers (48%) believe their preferred political candidate was divinely ordained. This deep conviction is linked to troubling beliefs, including that one-third of adherents/sympathizers believe patriots may need to resort to violence to “save the country.”

5.4 The Policy Blueprint: Project 2025

The movement’s goals are being codified into comprehensive policy via Project 2025, a blueprint developed by over 100 conservative organizations, with self-described Christian nationalists serving as key architects. The project’s proposals aim to eliminate the separation of church and state by promoting federal funding for private religious schools, gutting anti-discrimination laws, and imposing a patriarchal, “biblically based” social worldview on federal policy and family structures.

5.5 Key Figures and Policy Impact

Adherents of Christian Nationalism are strategically positioned throughout the administration and Congress, including the Speaker of the House and numerous high-level officials. Their policies are actively eradicating diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, advancing a maximalist unitary executive theory, and enabling mass deportations aimed exclusively at immigrants of color, all while framing political opposition as the “enemy within” engaged in a moral or spiritual war.

Conclusion: The Democratic Covenant Reversed

The evidence presented in this analysis reveals a coherent and deliberate pattern of democratic erosion. The politicization of independent institutions, the subversion of the rule of law, the systematic propagation of disinformation, and the calculated erosion of civil liberties are not disconnected events. They are mutually reinforcing components of a broader strategy to concentrate power, dismantle accountability, and reverse the democratic covenant in which the government is accountable to the people.

The drift toward authoritarianism is not inevitable, but it is accelerated by neglect. The framework of democracy is at risk of being quietly taken apart. This moment demands unwavering vigilance from both institutions and citizens. It calls for the urgent strengthening of protections for nonpartisan civil servants, agency watchdogs, and inspectors general. It requires that courts enforce accountability for executive overreach and that a free and independent press be defended. The rule of law survives only if we insist that truth, not political loyalty, governs the exercise of power.

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To access my individual articles from the past few months, see below.

The Trump Administration’s Authoritarianism (2025)

1. The Slide Toward Authoritarianism: https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/the-slide-toward-authoritarianism?r=6hzgs

2. Eroding the Guardrails: How Expanding Executive Authority Undermines Constitutional Democracy: https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/eroding-the-guardrails-how-expanding?r=6hzgs

3. Core to the Authoritarian Playbook: Politicize Institutions, Weaken the Rule of Law, & Erode Civil Liberties: https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/core-to-the-authoritarian-playbook?r=6hzgs

4. Undermining Our Election Systems https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/undermining-our-election-systems?r=6hzgs

5. Fostering Corruption and Enriching the Elite Class: https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/fostering-corruption-and-enriching?r=6hzgs

6. Quashing Dissent and Punishing Enemies: https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/quashing-dissent-and-punishing-enemies?r=6hzgs

7. Deliberately Propagating Falsehoods: Another Authoritarian Playbook Strategy: https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/deliberately-propagating-falsehoods?r=6hzgs

8. Scapegoating Vulnerable Communities: African Americans & the Trump Policy Nightmare: https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/scapegoating-vulnerable-communities?r=6hzgs

9. White Christian Nationalism—The ‘Why’ Driving the U.S. Toward Authoritarianism: https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/white-christian-nationalismthe-why

Other Relevant 2025 Articles on the Trump Administration

1. Trump’s Warp Speed Implementation of Project 2025: ... & The Profound Disruption of Racial Justice and Equity, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/trumps-warp-speed-implementation.

2. Can Trump Erase Black History? Detailing his hell-bent efforts, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/can-trump-erase-black-history.

3. How Our Nation’s Racial Falsehoods and Fictions Line Up with the Tr*mp Administration’s Torrent of Orders, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/how-our-nations-racial-falsehoods.

4. Tr*mp 47: Rapidly Stripping Away Equity and Equality in Public Education, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/trmp-47-rapidly-stripping-away-equity.

5. Tracking the Full-on Whitelash of the Tr*mp Administration, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/tracking-the-full-on-whitelash-of.

6. Trump’s Big, Ugly Bill: Enrich the Wealthy, Leave the Many Further Behind, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/trumps-big-ugly-bill.

7. How the Calculated Madness of Tr*mp, M*sk, and D&GE is Dramatically Affecting My County, State, and Region, https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/how-the-calculated-madness-of-trmp.

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Bottom Line Upfront

• Resistance Is Widespread, Coordinated, and Relentless
  Contrary to claims of disarray, opposition to authoritarianism has emerged across every sector and geography. From mass mobilizations to courtroom battles to watchdog investigations, resistance has taken many forms—quiet and loud, local and national—operating continuously rather than episodically.

• Civic Mobilization at Historic Scale — Millions in Motion
  Organizations like Indivisible have transformed outrage into disciplined, nationwide action. Through decentralized, simultaneous protests and sustained civic engagement, millions of Americans—many organizing for the first time—have demonstrated that popular resistance can be both massive and methodical.

• The Rule of Law as a Frontline Defense
  An unprecedented legal counteroffensive—spanning civil rights, immigration, labor, the environment, education, and ethics—has slowed, blocked, and exposed authoritarian overreach. Hundreds of lawsuits, investigations, and transparency actions have turned courts, agencies, and state governments into active arenas for democratic defense.

• The Guardians of Transparency: Watchdogs on Watch

  A tireless network of organizations serves as a vital oversight mechanism, monitoring federal actions daily to expose corruption, protect whistleblowers, and ensure government accountability remains a priority.

• Democracy Endures Through Collective Stewardship
  Hope does not rest on any single institution or leader but on a dense ecosystem of advocates, bridge-builders, funders, and everyday citizens committed to pluralism. Though the work is exhausting, the persistence of this infrastructure affirms a central truth: democracy survives not by inertia but by people who refuse to surrender it.

  

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Introduction

I by no means believe that our slide toward authoritarianism will result in the fatal loss of democracy in our country.

But, I do believe that what this administration is attempting is the greatest threat to our nation’s system of governance in more than a century.

I also believe this administration came in incredibly well prepared to wreak havoc on our democratic systems throughout this term, intent on consolidating power for MAGA and the far-right for the long term.

Finally, I believe this administration aspires not only to consolidate MAGA power but also to return our government and society to White and male dominance not seen here in decades.

Where the Resistance Lives

On some days, it may seem impossible to stop or counteract the decline of our democracy. Project 2025’s heft and breadth were unleashed the moment Trump placed his hand on the Bible on Inauguration Day.

Some pundits have expressed regret about how inadequate the response from those who oppose Trump has been.

I am not one of them.

Instead, I have been impressed by the response in most quarters to counter Trump at every turn.

If you’ve followed my posts over the past two months, you’ve seen the lengths the administration has gone to pursue its brand of authoritarian democracy. You may have found them all distressing, leaving little hope.

That has not been my intent.

I have simply wanted to bring fully into the light the extent to which the administration has been moving, full throttle, on nearly every front, and to emphasize that we must pay acute attention to what he and his administration are hell-bent on achieving, and that it must be countered every last day he is in office.

So let’s do a scan of where the resistance has primarily lived these last twelve months.

Indivisible: Largest Citizen Mobilization Ever

I’ll start with an organization and coalition that has organized by far the largest single-day protests –two of them!—in U.S. history: Indivisible.

Their “No Kings” protests in June and October have mobilized more than 10 million Americans to take to the streets to demonstrate the sheer level of opposition to the administration’s authoritarian turn. The brilliance of Indivisible’s strategy is to hold protests simultaneously in thousands of locations across every state in the union.

This has required a level of mobilization never before seen on the political left or right. … with many hundreds of Americans learning to organize for the first time in their lives, mobilizing their communities in defiance of the Trump regime.

Indivisible provides actions that millions of Americans can take on a regular basis, whether it is calls to members of Congress to stop the impending war with Venezuela, pushing back against Republican redistricting bent on rigging the 2026 midterm elections, or halting the administration’s illegal actions on the federal budget (i.e., impoundments and rescissions).

If you have yet to be involved in the Indivisible movement, find out more here: https://indivisible.org/take-action-now.

Lawsuits and Investigations

Many nonprofit and advocacy leaders in America began to plan for resistance to the Trump/Project 2025 agenda months before our corrupt president began his second term.

Democracy 2025, funded by Democracy Forward, pulled together nearly 300 legal and advocacy organizations last fall to “ensure swift legal challenges and responses to harmful and anti-democratic actions expected in the first days of the Trump-Vance administration.”[1] This new coalition is now comprised of more than 650 members, doubling in size over the past 12 months. You can find more information on Democracy 2025 HERE.

You can read more about the impact of Democracy Forward, the coalition’s parent organization, over the past year in a report (“Courage is the New Currency”) they published this month—Report. The report lays out some of the results from the more than 150 lawsuits it has filed against the administration and the 250+ investigations it has launched.

They provide a resource page for how to get and stay involved in the fight: https://democracyforward.org/get-involved/.

Organizations Pursuing Lawsuits

If you have interest and concern on specific issues, check out these organizations and the battles they’re waging:

Civil and Human Rights

• The Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, https://www.naacpldf.org/.

• National Urban League, https://nul.org/news/news-releases.

• National Fair Housing Alliance, https://nationalfairhousing.org/issue/affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing/.

• Lambda Legal, https://lambdalegal.org/litigation-library/.

These organizations, among many others, have filed suits on many of the administration’s anti-equity and discriminatory executive orders.

Immigrant Advocacy

• National TPS (Temporary Protected Status) Alliance, https://www.nationaltpsalliance.org/.

• CASA, https://wearecasa.org/policy-agenda/.

• The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), https://raicestexas.org/legal.

• Americans for Immigrant Justice, https://aijustice.org/

These organizations, among many, many others, have challenged the administration’s severe immigration policies, including asylum restrictions and terminating protected status programs.

Labor

• American Federation of Government Employees, https://www.afge.org/

• American Federation of Teachers, https://www.aft.org/action.

• United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, https://uaw.org/.

These unions, among others, have challenged federal layoffs, grant freezes, and other federal workforce-related policies.

Environment

• Natural Resources Defense Council, https://www.nrdc.org/court-battles.

• Earth Justice, https://earthjustice.org/our-work.

These organizations, among others, have sued over environmental deregulation and the freezing of clean energy funds.

Higher Education

Numerous universities and national education associations have sued on issues like student visa restrictions, grant cuts, and free speech rights on campus.

Law Firms

• Perkins Coie LLP

• Jenner & Block

• Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr

• American Bar Association

These firms, among others, have sued to block executive orders that target firms’ ability to interact with the federal government or strip attorneys of security clearances.

State and Local Governments

Nearly two dozen state attorneys general (often led by NY and CA) have taken legal action against the administration on federal funding, immigration, and environmental policies.

Cities and towns have also filed lawsuits, sometimes on an individual basis and other times, collectively. This includes the City and County of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, among numerous others.

This week, The New York Times published an article this week compiling major lawsuits filed over the past year, by category:

• Federal agency cuts

• Birthright citizenship

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion

• DOGE-Department of Government Efficiency

• Education

• Elections

• Environment

• Federal funding

• Federal workers

• Immigration

• Public data

• Tariffs

• Transgender rights

You can access that NYT article here: https://democracyforward.org/get-involved/ (gift link)

Litigation Tracker

The nonprofit organization Just Security publishes a regularly updated litigation tracker that currently tracks more than 550 legal challenges. LINK.

I would ask you to take a quick look at the excellent legal work Lawyers Defending American Democracy has done this year while mobilizing thousands of lawyers to stand up for the principles of democracy and the rule of law. Click here for their end of year report: LINK.

I’m a regular donor to the national advocacy organization Common Cause, which has worked in myriad ways to protect our democracy by advocating for voting rights, campaign finance, and government ethics since its founding in 1970. Read more about their work here: https://www.commoncause.org/priorities/.

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Watchdog Groups on the Administration’s Ethics and Transparency

It is a daily battle to stay on top of the unethical and nontransparent actions of this administration, but these sixteen organizations (among others) have meticulously and tirelessly monitored and tracked many hundreds of those actions this year.

• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the nation’s largest public interest law firm focused on protecting the civil rights of all people, especially defending the right to free expression and assembly, https://www.aclu.org/

• American Oversight regularly sues the administration for access to public records, https://americanoversight.org/

• Brennan Center for Justice tackles issues relevant to government power, money in politics, and voting and elections, https://www.brennancenter.org/

• Campaign for Accountability investigates federal corruption, https://campaignforaccountability.org/our-priorities/.

• Campaign Legal Center focuses on campaign finance, ethics, redistricting, and voting & elections, https://campaignlegal.org/.

• Constitutional Accountability Center works to preserve the rights and freedoms of Americans and protect the integrity of the judiciary, https://www.theusconstitution.org/

• Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), files lawsuits on government ethics and corruption, https://www.citizensforethics.org/legal-actions/.

• Democracy 21 monitors and seeks accountability for the administration’s anti-democracy efforts, https://democracy21.org/trumpwatch.

• Free Speech for People advocates for free and fair elections, reliable and secure voting systems, public campaign finance reform, and federal corruption, https://freespeechforpeople.org/about/.

• Government Accountability Project defends federal government whistleblowers through legal action and spearheads legislative campaigns to facilitate truth-telling and improve protections for whistleblowers, https://whistleblower.org/our-story/.

• Issue One, a bipartisan organization focused on free and fair elections, defending the Constitution, fighting money in politics, and ensuring ethics & accountability, https://issueone.org/.

• People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy organization focused on protecting democracy, defending voting rights, stopping censorship, fighting for fair courts, and stopping far-right extremism, https://www.peoplefor.org/mission-overview.

• Project on Government Oversight investigates corruption and abuse of power in the federal government, https://www.pogo.org/.

• Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan, anti-authoritarian group using litigation, advocacy, research, and technology to stop the consolidation of power and defend dissent, https://protectdemocracy.org/about/.

• Public Citizen, a national advocacy organization pushing for reform to reduce the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics, https://www.citizen.org/topic/protecting-democracy/.

• Sunlight Foundation, making government and politics more accountable and transparent, https://sunlightfoundation.com/.

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Bridge Building Organizations

If you are interested in finding organizations that are helping thousands of Americans walk this country back from the brink of hyper-polarization and discover common ground on contentious issues among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, here are more than a dozen organizations using various methods to bring Americans closer together rather than further apart.

• Braver Angels: Organizes debates, workshops (Red/Blue), and 1:1 conversations to depolarize America.

• Living Room Conversations: Promotes guided conversations between people with different beliefs.

• Listen First Project: Works to increase listening and dialogue to bridge divides, part of the Bridging Movement Collaborative.

• National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD): Supports efforts to bring Americans together for productive dialogue.

• The Civil Conversations Project (On Being Project): Offers guides and resources for better conversations on tough issues.

• Unify America: Uses tech and games to teach civic skills and reduce polarization.

• BridgeUSA: A youth-led movement fighting political division through dialogue.

• Bridge Alliance: A network of organizations working to unite Americans.

• Common Ground Committee: Focuses on finding common ground.

• Interfaith America: Engages religious diversity to combat hate and polarization.

• Urban Rural Action: Connects diverse local volunteers on community projects.

• The Reunited States Project: Uses media to connect Americans across divides.

• Alliance for Peacebuilding: Offers resources and connects to local peacebuilding efforts, including Police2Peace.

Hopefully, you find at least one useful resource to help you get engaged or financially support efforts to move our nation back from the brink.

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Democracy Funders

There aren’t many philanthropic organizations nationally that fund in the democracy space. Fortunately, the Democracy Fund, led by a colleague of mine, has been a major investor in democratic practices for fifteen years. They have been funding aggressively over the last 24 months in preparation for what was coming this year and are continuing that aggressive funding into 2026. Read more about it here: https://democracyfund.org/idea/how-democracy-fund-is-shifting-to-meet-the-moment/.

Conclusion

I have found 2025 emotionally exhausting, even though I have been nowhere near the front lines fighting these endless battles or the target of a government gone wrong, as so many have been.

Yet I end the year with hope because of what so many have done and will continue to do to preserve our democracy.

As the holidays roll in, I raise a glass to all of us who will continue the fight into the new year!

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Footnotes

[1] “280-Organization Coalition Launches Multimillion-Dollar Legal Effort To Combat Threats to People, Democracy Expected in Trump-Vance Administration,” Democracy Forward, November 14, 2024, https://democracyforward.org/updates/280-organization-coalition-launches-multimillion-dollar-legal-effort-to-combat-threats-to-people-democracy-expected-in-trump-vance-administration/.

Introduction

There are many theories about why our nation elected someone twice who is not only boorish and a grifter but also amoral and anti-democratic.

The ever-increasing wealth and income gap has played a role.

And it’s mattered that our society has increasingly left the working class behind.

Insidious social media algorithms that corral us into hyper-partisan camps have also played a role.

As has the antiquated electoral college system that perpetually leaves millions of Americans wondering why we still rely on its gross flaws.

So too have the endless wars in the Middle East that have rendered the populace exasperated and cynical.

So has cable news by fueling the culture war that has all but broken U.S. politics.

However, I believe an overlooked and major cause of our current social and governance crisis is the growing influence and aggressive efforts by a well-organized and increasingly powerful Christian movement within the MAGA universe: White Christian Nationalists.

The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and the New Zion

Since the nation’s founding, Christianity has been a powerful force in its politics.

Before the nation’s inception, the Doctrine of Discovery heavily influenced European powers. Established by papal edicts in the late 15^th century, the doctrine effectively claimed that “European civilization and Western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races and religions.”[2] These edicts justified, morally and religiously, taking over so-called ‘undiscovered lands’ from indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans across the globe for more than 400 years.

The dual mythologies of Manifest Destiny and America as the New Zion extended the doctrine of Discovery into the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Before the Civil War, our nation’s leaders used Manifest Destiny to describe America’s God-given right and duty to expand across North America. It extended the idea of the providential purpose of White Europeans to ‘overspread’ the continent and fully embraced American exceptionalism and Protestant destiny.[3]

Throughout American history, we’ve seen a powerful notion that America is the New Zion, a divinely chosen and model Christian nation and spiritual promised land.[4]

The Ever-Strengthening Religious Right: 1980s-2010s

The Religious Right, a term widely used to describe highly conservative Christians in the 1980s and 1990s, has nurtured and expanded an ultra-conservative movement for decades.

It aggressively opposed the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education, forcefully fought all forms of Civil Rights activism from the 1940s through the 1960s, and strongly opposed (and still opposes) feminism, gay rights, and anything considered a threat to the nuclear family and traditional values for fifty years.

In the 2000s, it expanded its campaign to secure right-wing judicial appointments at all levels, especially to the Supreme Court, and greatly increased the political influence of previously disengaged White evangelicals.

Over the past 20 years, the most influential religious group to emerge nationally has been advocates of White Christian Nationalism.

Nearly two decades ago, the election of a Black president in 2008 served as a wake-up call for them. Over the past decade, Christian nationalists have become more alarmed by the growing number of people who are neither White nor Christian. This has led to increased mobilization for their nationalist cause.

Their core fear? Losing a White Christian nation … forever.

When the nation elected Obama in 2008, 54% of the population was still White and Christian. Fifteen years later, that percentage declined to 42%.[5]

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) releases an annual poll focused on religion in America. In this year’s findings, they discovered that “while only 30% of the public agrees that America was ordained by God to be a promised land for European Christians, majorities of white evangelical Protestants (56%) and Republicans (52%) affirm this statement.”[6]

That majority of Republican and evangelical believers drove Trump to victory.

Three Intersecting Streams of White Christian Nationalism

Scholars trace Christian nationalism to three distinct but overlapping Christian movements: (1) Reconstructionism; (2) Dominionism (New Apostolic Reformationists and Pentecostalists); and (3) Catholic Integralism.

Let’s briefly examine each of the three.

Christian Reconstructionism originated in the mid 20^th century. “This political theology holds that all of creation, including political orders, operates under the law of God. Because God has given humankind dominion over his creation, Christians should unapologetically exercise that God-given authority over every sphere of life, including the secular political realm.”[7]

Dominionism has gained popularity more recently. It describes a political movement that aims for Christians to govern their countries based on their interpretation of the Bible. It is a prophetic and charismatic movement that seeks Christian dominance in politics and culture.[8]

Dominionism follows the seven mountains mandate—”the belief that the church has been divinely authorized to gain control over seven key areas of society: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. It is that final and most important mandate—government—that generates a Christian nationalist agenda to take dominion over the nations and bring the kingdom of God to earth.”[9]

More recently, Catholic Integralism has arisen in response to the perception that the Vatican has shifted to the political left. “They see liberalism not just as a political ideology but as a rival (false) religion that competes with God for the allegiance of human hearts, insofar as the liberal state remains neutral in religious matters, even including the accommodation of heretical and blasphemous views, and does not privilege the truth of the Catholic Church in a country’s laws and policies.”[10]

All three strands of Christian nationalism effectively “reject democracy and are comfortable with authoritarian rule as long as it brings about a “biblically ordered society. … They all seek to make religion the dominant force in shaping how society functions. While they may have different visions of what that should look like, they agree on the goal.”[11]

There’s much more to say here about all three strands. If you’d like to read further:

1. Nilay Saiya, “The varieties of American Christian nationalism,” Cambridge University Press, May 13, 2025, LINK.

2. Selcuk Gultasli, “Professor Ingersoll: The Theocratic Blueprint of Christian Nationalism, Reconstructionism, and Catholic Integralism Behind Trump’s Agenda,” Populism Studies, February 14, 2025, LINK.

3. Ian Ward, “Doug Wilson Has Spent Decades Pushing for a Christian Theocracy. In Trump’s DC, the New Right Is Listening.” Politico, May 23, 2025, LINK.

Who Believes In Christian Nationalism, And What Do They Believe?

Earlier this year, PRRI released the results of interviews with over 22,000 American adults that examined Americans’ support for Christian nationalism more closely. The study revealed that more than half of Republicans identified as either Christian National “adherents” or “sympathizers,” compared to 30% of all Americans.

PRRI asked interviewees about their level of agreement, on a scale of 1 to 5, with five questions:

1. “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.”

2. “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.”

3. “If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.”

4. “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.”

5. “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

Fortunately, 37% of Americans see themselves as skeptics of Christian nationalism, and another 29% reject it outright. Still, that hasn’t stopped the administration from pushing a fake mandate for Christian nationalist policies.

As Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, says: “At the dawn of a second Trump administration, the threat white Christian nationalism poses to the promise of multiracial, multifaith democracy is plainer than ever. … This survey illustrates how this dangerous political theology is driving support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and how thoroughly it has established itself as an ideological keystone in both the Republican Party and American evangelical churches.”[12]

Unsurprising, the support for Christian nationalism is found in highly conservative, Republican-dominant states:

• Mississippi and Oklahoma, 51% support

• Louisiana, 50%

• Arkansas, 49%

• West Virginia, 48%

• North Dakota, 46%[13]

Yet ‘support’ for Trump is not even the appropriate term here. “Two-thirds of Christian nationalism Adherents (67%) and nearly half (48%) of Sympathizers agree that God ordained Trump to be the winner of the presidential election.”[14]

That is stunning. This deep belief in divine intervention on behalf of Trump is accompanied by other deeply troubling beliefs:

• High percentages of adherents and sympathizers believe that immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” and that those who are entering the country illegally today are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

• About one-third believe that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

Christian nationalism opposes so-called woke culture and nearly all types of immigration, while also advocating for minimal separation of church and state. At the household level, it maintains a patriarchal family setup, with the father as the head and “a submissive wife, one who submits to her husband’s authority and … whose primary role is a mother and homemaker.”[15]

Christian nationalists believe that our nation is a distinctly Christian country engaged in a mortal struggle with internal enemies, specifically “secular humanists, feminists, and then more recently Democrats and the woke.”[16]

Several prominent Christian nationalist believers are now strategically positioned in the administration.

How Project 2025 Intersects with White Christian Nationalism

It is crucial to understand not only who supports the principles of Christian nationalism but also how those principles have become woven into ultra-conservative, MAGA policies.

Enter Project 2025.

Twice, I’ve written at length about the Project:

• Impeding Black Progress, the threat of Project 2025 (October ’24) https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/impeding-black-progress-the-threat

• Trump’s Warp Speed Implementation of Project 2025 … & The Profound Disruption of Racial Justice and Equity (March ’25), https://levelthefield.substack.com/p/trumps-warp-speed-implementation

The Heritage Foundation organized more than 100 conservative organizations to develop and publish Project 2025, a far-right blueprint to reshape the country into a truly Christian nation. Even though Trump disavowed Project 2025 on the campaign trail last year, 32 of the 38 primary authors of the project served in the administration during Trump’s first term.

Russell Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist and director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term, served as a primary architect of Project 2025.

After Trump’s defeat in 2020, Vought founded a think tank, The Center for Renewing America (CRA), which published a set of priorities for a second Trump term that included Christian nationalism and the invocation of the Insurrection Act as the first executive order to quash all protests and dissent.

During his time at CRA he said that only immigrants who had “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history”[17] should be able to cross our borders legally.

Project 2025 proposed severe restrictions on the rights of gays and lesbians and on reproductive rights, adopting “one particular Christian theological-political worldview as the default to drive a wide range of government policy decisions impacting the lives of tens of millions of Americans.”[18]

It also promoted federal funding for private religious [Christian] schools and called for the Department for Health and Human Services prioritize policies that “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family” — also referred to as “heterosexual, intact marriage,[19] and to turn away parents from foster care agencies who can’t pass a religious [Christian] litmus test.

It proposed changes to employment policy in ways that align with:

“The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family.” 

It continues under a subsection called “Sabbath Rest,” where he opines, “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day. … Unfortunately, that communal day of rest has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism.”[20]

Achieving a federal government that is directly informed by Christian nationalist teachings served as the overarching goal of Project 2025 and White Christian Nationalists broadly.

Vought now serves again as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, with far greater power and influence than he had in the first term.

Where We Find Christian Nationalists in the Trump Administration

Within his first three weeks in office in 2025, Trump established a task force aimed at ending “anti-Christian weaponization” of government and unlawful conduct targeting Christians.[21]

Hailed by those on the religious right, it was panned by many faith leaders and civil liberties groups who questioned why the nation needed a task force to protect the nation’s dominant religious group.

Trump was clearly pandering to his Christian nationalist base.

Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy writes that:

“Trump’s anti-Christian bias taskforce will lead to a further chilling of free speech, political opposition, and investigations of corruption. We will see public funds flowing directly to religious institutions, and the insertion of the Bible and sectarian messaging in public schools, town meetings and other places that serve religiously diverse populations. The intention is to make anyone who is not onboard with their agenda feel that they don’t belong.”[22]

Let’s examine some individuals, outside of Vought, whom Trump has appointed to his administration who clearly have Christian nationalist and anti-democratic leanings.

• Paula White heads the White House Faith Office. She is a wealthy televangelist who made headlines several years ago when she called the Black Lives Matter movement the Antichrist.[23]

All the faith leaders connected to her office are Christian. Some of them openly identify as Christian nationalists. One of them, William Wolfe, who is the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, believes mass deportations are a key Christian issue. He says, “We actually believe it is directly related to the preservation of America as we know it.”[24]

No other faith traditions are represented in her office.

• Vice President J.D. Vance has labeled the constitutional separation of church and state as a “lie” and a “fabricated whopper.” He recently attended a 2024 Christian revival led by Lance Wallnau, a well-known Christian nationalist, and provided video remarks at the Nehemiah Project Pastors Summit this fall, hosted by David Lane, another prominent Christian nationalist.

• Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, is closely linked to a Christian nationalist church in Idaho led by Douglass Wilson. Wilson operates a national network of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Hegseth openly displays anti-Muslim tattoos, and in his recent book, he declared his intention to wage actual war within the U.S. He reaffirmed this stance in a meeting with hundreds of top military leaders two months ago. “He believes absolutely in the idea of the ingathering of Israel as a stage toward the Book of Revelation in the Bible. So, he sees Israel’s war on the Palestinians as biblical prophecy and one that must be supported for the sake of Christendom.”[25]

• Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel and an ordained Southern Baptist minister, is a strong believer in what’s promised in the Book of Revelation. He states there’s no such thing as a Palestinian because “I’ve read the end of the book,” referring to Revelations where Christ’s return defeats the forces of evil, including the Beast, the false prophets, and Satan. Most Palestinians are Muslim.

• Anthony Tata, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who claimed President Obama “was secretly a Muslim working on behalf of Islamic terrorists.”[26]

• Rachel Cauley, communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, gave a lengthy interview in 2022 to “the explicitly white nationalist website Counter-Currents. (The editor-in-chief of Counter-Currents authored a book called The White Nationalist Manifesto and wrote about “Hitler’s Significance for Our Struggle.”) After the interview gained wider online attention, it seemed to be removed from the website.”[27]

We see adherents to Christian nationalism in key posts in Congress:

• Mike Johnson, U.S. Speaker of the House, who has publicly stated that his “biblical worldview means that all authority comes from God and that there are distinct realms of God-ordained authority, and that is the family, the church and the government. … and [The U.S.] is a republic founded in this biblical worldview.”[28]

He also hangs an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his office, a symbol associated with Christian nationalism, one also flown by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito outside his summer home. You regularly see this flag at Trump rallies and it was a common flag flown during the January 6^th insurrection.

The organization behind the flag’s newfound popularity says that it “exists to honor the Lord by networking elected officials who are believers in Jesus Christ, who regularly attend and display a commitment to an evangelical, Gospel-centered church and who will commit to live and govern based on biblical, constitutional and Federalist principles.”[29]

• U.S. Senator Ted Cruz is a follower of Christian dominionism (whose adherents believe that Christians are mandated to take control of government) and has frequently expressed his belief that America is a Christian country.

• U.S. Representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, describes herself as a Christian nationalist and believes it’s “an identity” that her Republican party needs to embrace. She has been an important figure in the last several Congresses until recently announcing her resignation.

These are by no means all of the adherents and sympathizers in the administration or the halls of Congress, but this gives you a flavor for how embedded it has become this year.

Impact on Policy

I’ve discussed the impact of the administration’s policies in several posts over recent months, not all necessarily influenced by White Christian nationalism. Here’s a quick reminder of some policies where its influence is clear:

• Eradicated diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives throughout the federal government and ended so-called “radical indoctrination” in public schools

• Shut down the Department of Education and issue an executive order to provide parents’ federal vouchers to choose private religious schools for their kids

• Whitewashed Black history in federally funded museums

• Created a Religious Liberty Commission that denies church-state separation and advances evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity (at the expense of all other faiths) in its recommendations

• Weakened and gutted anti-discrimination and civil rights laws and policies

• Pursued a maximalist version of unitary executive theory to comprehensively eliminate any guardrails that ensure Congress has an equal say and role in our democracy, while frequently challenging the equal role of federal courts.

• Eliminated any programs focused on environmental racism

• Enabled mass deportation exclusively of immigrants of color

• Politicized the government at every level through Schedule F reforms, forcing thousands of civil servants to serve the president’s aims, not the public’s interest

• Purged African Americans and women from the highest ranks of the military.

Again, this list is nowhere near exhaustive but helps us understand the range of policies where Christian nationalist views have prevailed.

Conclusion

In a speech to hundreds of U.S. military commanders in September, Trump discussed the need to counter the “enemy within.” While he was referring to both illegal immigrants and “uninhabitable” Democratic cities, it also served as a clever signal to Christian nationalists.

The “enemy within” is a common evangelical expression to refer to spiritual warfare against the devil that does not cease until the enemy is glorified with Christ.

For Christian nationalists, the “enemy within” includes the ‘radical left,’ “woke” culture, immigrants trying to “replace” Whites, affirmative action, feminism, the ‘Deep State,’ and increasingly, simply Democrats.

David French, a conservative Christian and New York Times columnist, wrote recently:

“MAGA Christianity has a different message. It says, ‘We will defeat you.’ 

In its most extreme forms, it also says, ‘We will rule over you.’ 

That’s not revival; it’s revolution, a religious revolution that seeks to overthrow one political order and replace it with another, … putt[ing] their version of Christianity at the center of American political life.”[30]

Seven years ago, I facilitated two national summits that brought together more than one hundred liberals and conservatives alike to examine how to “protect democracy” from a Trump administration bent on bending rules, breaking norms, and ignoring key provisions of the Constitution.

The moderate panic of participants in those meetings seven years ago pales in comparison to the urgency and severe concern most of them now feel.

There is no easy way to contest what this administration is doing. In his second term, he has surrounded himself with true believers from the Christian nationalist and MAGA movements who have no interest in preserving our fragile, multiracial, and multifaith democracy.

Everything I’ve recapped this morning has an unsettling momentum, but I refuse to end on a fatalist note. Instead, I’ll quote from a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times:

Somehow MAGA has swept in and made us a frightened nation, stagnant, callous, and backward. I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. Eventually, Americans, restless as any people on earth, will want to replace threat with hope and resume our national pilgrimage.

When that cultural and spiritual shift occurs, a lot will change in our religious and political life.[31]

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Footnotes

[1] Richardson, H. C. (2023). Democracy awakening: Notes on the state of America. New York, NY: Viking, p. xi.

[2] Rob Boston, “Untangling the roots: In his new book, scholar Robert P. Jones exposes the disturbing links between Christian Nationalism and white supremacy, Americans United, March 28, 2024, https://www.au.org/the-latest/church-and-state/articles/untangling-the-roots-in-his-new-book-scholar-robert-p-jones-exposes-the-disturbing-links-between-christian-nationalism-and-white-supremacy/.

[3] Donald Scott, “The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny,” National Humanities Center, 1986, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-material/the-religious-origins-of-manifest-destiny/.

[4] Steven Grosby, “America: The Israel of Our Time,” Law & Liberty, June 25, 2018, https://lawliberty.org/book-review/america-the-israel-of-our-time/.

[5] Boston.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Nilay Saiya, “The varieties of American Christian nationalism,” Cambridge University Press, May 13, 2025, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/varieties-of-american-christian-nationalism/B78994104CA1CCBBAC34A20E3AA2A980.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Selcuk Gultasli, “Professor Ingersoll: The Theocratic Blueprint of Christian Nationalism, Reconstructionism, and Catholic Integralism Behind Trump’s Agenda,” Populism Studies, February 14, 2025, https://www.populismstudies.org/professor-ingersoll-the-theocratic-blueprint-of-christian-nationalism-reconstructionism-and-catholic-integralism-behind-trumps-agenda/.

[12] “Across all 50 States, New Survey Finds Strong Correlation Between Support for Christian Nationalism and Voting for Trump in 2024 Election,” Public Religion Research Institute, February 4, 2025, https://prri.org/press-release/across-all-50-states-new-survey-finds-strong-correlation-between-support-for-christian-nationalism-and-voting-for-trump-in-2024-election/.

[13] PRRI.

[14] Natalie Demaree, “Do voters believe God divinely ordained Trump to be president? What new poll finds,” The Miami Herald, December 16, 2024, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article297191099.html.

[15] John Blake, “White Christian nationalists are poised to remake America in their image during Trump’s second term, author says,” CNN, January 12, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/12/us/white-christian-nationalism-du-mez-cec.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Alexander Ward, “Trump Allies Prepare to Infuse Christian Nationalism in Second Administration,” Politico, February 20, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/20/donald-trump-allies-christian-nationalism-00142086.

[18] Liz Hayes, “Project 2025: A Christian Nationalist playbook outlines a broad scheme to overthrow American democracy and install a theocracy,” Americans United, May 29, 2024, https://www.au.org/the-latest/church-and-state/articles/destroying-life-and-liberty-a-christian-nationalist-playbook-outlines-a-broad-scheme-to-overthrow-american-democracy-and-install-a-theocracy/.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Eradicates Anti-Christian Bias, The White House, February 6, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-eradicates-anti-christian-bias/.

[22] Adam Gabatt, “Trump has put Christian nationalists in key roles – say a prayer for free speech,” The Guardian, April 16, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/16/christian-nationalists-trump-administration.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] A New Crusade? Trump Taps Christian Nationalists Pete Hegseth & Mike Huckabee to Top Posts, Democracy Now, November 15, 2024, https://www.democracynow.org/2024/11/15/jeff_sharlet_pete_hegseth_pentagon_extremism.

[26] Ja’han Jones, “Defense secretary taps MAGA extremist to push military ‘cultural refresh,’ “MSNOW, October 2, 2025, https://www.ms.now/top-stories/latest/anthony-tata-department-defense-cultural-refresh-rcna235053.

[27] Tom Dreisbach, “Multiple Trump White House officials have ties to antisemitic extremists,” NPR, May 14, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5387299/trump-white-house-antisemitism.

[28] Katelyn Fossett, “‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule,’ “ Politico, October 27, 2023, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/27/mike-johnson-christian-nationalist-ideas-qa-00123882.

[29] Appeal to Heaven,

https://www.appealtoheaven.org.

[30] David French, “Something is Stirring in Christian America, and It’s Making Me Nervous,” The New York Times, October 16, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/opinion/christianity-charlie-kirk-revolution-revival.html.

[31] David Brooks, “How to Replace Christian Nationalism,” The New York Times, November 13, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/opinion/christian-nationalism.html.