The hot-button issue of the gaps in achievement in education between white students on the one hand and black and Latino students on the other has multiple aspects: tracking; enrollment in accelerated classes; referral to special education, rates of disciplinary actions; participation in...

Civic engagement is a healthy way to solve problems, is good for community leaders, and is worth the inconvenience or bother that might be encountered along the way. The guide to civic engagement is neither an in-depth encyclopedia nor a step-by-step manual. Less of a how-to, the guide is more...

In 2016, eighty years after the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) drew redlining maps that solidified existing local segregation and gave the green light to suburban development, the residential patterns of race and socioeconomics in the Omaha, Nebraska, region embody those New Deal...

Racism has been so deeply embedded in our culture for so long that actions taken to uproot it have not been entirely successful. After each concerted effort, racism grows back but in a different form. To emphasize the evolutionary nature of these “versions” or “updates” of racism, I...

Since the founding of our nation, education has been valued as a preeminent means of achieving equal opportunity and the social mobility of democracy. A generation ago, however, Professor John Langbein diagnosed a different function of education: the transmission of wealth from one generation to...

#BlackTaxpayersMatterThe world has witnessed the brutal suffocation of George Floyd on a concrete sidewalk in Minneapolis. While this is but one more example of centuries of relentless violence against Black people, many are hoping that this tragic death might be a catalyst for meaningful...

As a whole, the U.S. tax system (federal, state and local) since 1980 has served more and more to increase racialized wealth inequality. The tax system is today operating to entrench the system of advantage based on race that centuries of racial exploitation and unequal access to wealth created....

I am a native Californian who has lived outside of California since 1984. Some years ago, my older daughter curated a playlist of songs about California for me, and among those songs was California Dreamin’—the 1966 classic by the Mamas and the Papas. I heard this song as I was preparing for...

In this essay, we describe and analyze one specific policy proposal—Universal Basic Income (UBI)—that takes an interest-convergent approach to closing the racial wealth gap. In Part I, we provide an overview of the U.S. status quo of extreme economic and wealth inequality, which...