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Wealth is a paramount indicator of social wellbeing. Wealthier families are far better positioned to finance independent school and college education, access capital to start a business, finance expensive medical procedures, reside in higher amenity neighborhoods, lower health hazards, exert political influence through campaign financing; purchase better counsel if confronted with the legal system, leave...

In 2019, Americans collectively owed more than $1.6 trillion in student debt, and the number of burdened families has grown rapidly: one in five U.S. households now has student loan debt, compared to one in 10 in 1989. In the face of these overwhelming numbers, many policymakers have begun to offer their own tuition-free and debt-free college...

Wealth inequality is a serious problem in the United States. Disparities between the wealthiest 1% and the bottom half are far larger in this country than in other democratic capitalist countries. Those who are used to dealing with disparity have only seen their situation worsen because of the pandemic. The belief that marginalized communities are responsible...

As of Thursday, August 26, 2021, the federal moratorium on evictions related to COVID was lifted. As many as 35 million people in the United States, whose livelihoods have been negatively impacted by the pandemic-related economic shut down, are at risk of homelessness. What’s more, there are hundreds of thousands of people and families who were...

The rate of evictions and homelessness in America have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. I began writing about the rate of evictions and their disproportionate impact on people of color starting last year on July 19, 2020 and additionally on March 7, 2021, Read more

In November 2020, I wrote a newsletter focused on the issue of cash bail and ways to reform pretrial justice. But until I read Emily Brazelon’s Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration I didn’t know about the role of prosecutors in pretrial detention for those...

The number of people incarcerated in the U.S. has quintupled since the 1980’s to a total of almost 2.2 million people. Our level of imprisonment is five to ten times higher than that of other liberal democracies—nine times Germany’s and seven times France’s. Our justice system has begun to operate as a system of injustice,...

Darnella Frazier, the 18-year-old teen whose video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck contributed to Chauvin's conviction, taught us all an important lesson: it isn't enough to be an innocent bystander. We are witnessing a spike in acts of disrespect, harassment and hate violence in this country. As citizens, we need to take a...

Last week I wrote about Critical Race Theory (CRT)—what it is, how it developed, the current debate about CRT, and the way teachers are being caught in the middle of a culture war. Following the killing of George Floyd last year, schools across the country have worked to address systemic racism and the systemic barriers that...

Image by Katty Huertas for The Washington Post

Newspapers, news shows, and the internet have been inundated with comments about critical race theory (CRT for short) in recent months. Detractors have claimed that the academic movement is “planting hatred of America in the minds of the next generation” and that it teaches children “to...