In a book that took as long to research and write as this one, there was an enormous number of authorities, scholars, and researchers who informed my argument and shaped my ideas. Above all, of course, was john a powell, and our more-than-two-decade ongoing collaboration. But that is just the starting point.
Although the book has copious endnotes and extensive citation, I think the sources I’ve read, reviewed, or otherwise encountered and absorbed are worth writing about in their own right. This essay is an attempt to provide a summary of them (without purporting to be comprehensive or exhaustive) and my own thoughts or notes on those sources and materials, especially those that may be of interest to a reader looking to absorb and learn more. Therefore, the focus here is on books, although I also draw attention to some studies and reports, especially those that are closely related or connected to a broader program of study.
Unless otherwise noted, these are books or works I have read carefully and completely. In that regard, this could function, in a sense, as an annotated bibliography or, perhaps, as a literature review. You be the judge. At a minimum, it is an essay on important and notable sources.
There is no “natural” way to organize all of the big books and various studies I’ve canvassed or encountered, so I’ve grouped them into ten broad categories that I think make sense and are hopefully useful to you, the reader.
1. The “Racial Inequality Explained” Books
There are many different types of books on race, racial inequality, racial discrimination, and related matters. Many of the books I will note in this essay touch on these themes. The books I will note in this section, rather than in sections below, generally present a complex and nuanced theory of how racial inequality persists in the 21st century, and the key forces that undergird it, or its broader and more baleful consequences. For that reason, understanding their arguments would be critical to sharpening and defining my views on the same problem.
I will begin by noting with what I think is a brilliant piece of scholarship, Robert Sampson’s epic magnum opus, The Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. The book is based upon a major longitudinal study in Chicago led by the author, and which used this rich seam of data to conduct years of fascinating research to uncover the veins of structural racial inequality. It examines how neighborhoods are constructed, how they relate to power and influence, and the operations of race and class through neighborhood sorting and dynamics. Although the book synthesizes prior journal research, it is such a fascinating and deeply considered book that john and I have probably read it, or revisited parts of it, multiple times, and regularly reference back to it. The book is not the easiest or simplest read, but it can be mined for gems and insights.
Sampson, as I understand it, was the protege of the prominent sociologist William Julius Wilson, who is one of the masters of popularizing the “big thesis” books on race and inequality. Among his books which I carefully read and absorbed for my book were The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, published in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The Truly Disadvantaged is about the problem of concentrated poverty, which is one of the centerpieces of my claims about structural racial inequality as well. When Work Disappears, in contrast, is really about the problem of de-industrialization for urban dwellers, and the effects that had on neighborhood poverty and racial inequality. Both books are very readable, informative, and important.
Wilson is one of those authors, like a few others I will note below, that seems to retreat from and then return back to claims, contentions or arguments they have previously made. As a case in point, Wilson made his first splash with a book I didn’t read, The Declining Significance of Race, and then seemed to return back to this theme with another book I haven’t read, More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City in 2009.
Another author who is masterful at synthesizing sprawling data points to paint a vivid picture is Sheryll Cashin. She churns out books at a remarkable pace, and produced multiple informative and influential books that informed my work here while I was toiling on the manuscript. In particular, I want to note White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality (2021), which I regard (and told her, when she did her book talk on UC Berkeley's campus) as basically an explication of structural racism. Although not necessarily a better book, a more influential work on my manuscript was her 2014 book, Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America. Although I believe that it is the trifecta of place, class, and race that structures opportunity in America inequitably, I think her book was an important polemic, even if I don’t agree with every part of it (you can listen to her “debate” with Richard Rothstein here). And even where I don’t agree with her, I find her data and arguments to be important. One other book I will note of hers is a much earlier work, which john powell thought was very important when it was released, was The Failures Of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (2005). I have definitely read parts of it, but I can no longer remember if I’ve read the entire thing.
Another author familiar with controversy, and an important scholar, is Robert Sampson’s student, Patrick Sharkey, and his book Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality. This brilliant and thin book studies families over generations and shows how certain interactions of racial segregation and poverty concentration perpetuate intergenerational economic immobility. I highly recommend this read. I haven’t read his 2018 book, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, but my impression – from a distance – is that Patrick shifted his focus to examine the harmful effects of crime on neighborhoods at a time, and the positive role that police can play in mitigating it, when the movement leaders and broader racial justice enterprise was focusing on the problems in the criminal justice system and policing. Sharkey’s work in this period was in tension with swelling abolitionist sentiment. It was not as well received (again, just my impression) as I think it probably would be today. That said, I haven’t read his work on this front, so I am not able to assess it for myself, just that his work on inequality, housing and segregation is very important and strong.
A book that I really enjoyed and found well developed and written was David Troutt’s The Price of Paradise: The Costs of Inequality and a Vision for a More Equitable America (2013). I don’t know why this book didn’t get more attention or commentary, let alone citation. It is very good, and a clear precursor to a bunch of books that make similar arguments, but were published a decade later. Among the latter are Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (2021), Eduarto Porter’s American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise (2020), and Ian Haney Lopez’s Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (2015).
I read The Sum of Us and American Poison after my manuscript was completed and in the final stages of editing, but I found both books to be good and well written, although not necessarily revelatory based upon the research I had already done. McGhee’s concept of “drained pool politics” is an important metaphor, and Porter found and uncovered some important sources that I hadn’t seen, most notably the works of Danielle Allen. Lopez is a dear friend of the Institute, and his work is important, but more from a political messaging and narrative stance, so it had less direct relevance to my work than it otherwise might.
Two influential (again, on me) books along similar lines, but which are more about economic inequality than racial inequality are Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It (2017) by Richard Reeves and The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It (2017) by Richard Florida. Aside from the fact that both books are written by Richards and have extraordinarily long, multi-clause subtitles, they are both excellent books authors who have stoked controversy, but for very different reasons. I published a review of these books (along with The Color of Law, mentioned in the next section, by another “Richard”), for our newsletter.
Richard Reeves is now best known for his 2022 book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, but I found his book Dream Hoarders to be brilliant and important. He basically covers similar ground to Cashin, and argues that the upper middle class (think the top 20% of the income distribution, as opposed the elites or top 1%, which the Occupy Wall Street movement focused on) have systematically rigged and hoarded opportunity. There are definitely times I wish he had discussed or focused more on race, but I nonetheless appreciated this excellent book. In addition to some concerns among progressive advocates and equity groups that his research on the struggles of boys and men may be used by reactionary “men’s rights” groups to push a different agenda, Reeves had a controversial term as a strategist for the British government before he joined Brookings.
Richard Florida is undoubtedly best known for his work The Rise of the Creative Class, a book that anticipated the migration of “creative” types – laptop workers, artists, engineers, designers, and other young professionals into thriving urban spaces, and also what would cause gentrification and displacement in those circles. The New Urban Crisis, like Florida’s other scholarly work I’ve encountered, is always impressive and careful but also timely and insightful.
I get the sense that his “creative class” thesis, which to some probably seems like a celebration or valorization of this class, probably contributes to the inadequate attention in social justice or progressive circles that his work deserves. I read The New Urban Crisis as somewhat of a mea culpa (although one he wasn’t obligated to give) for correctly anticipating the dilemmas that would arise from the “rise” of the creative class.
Another book that came out around the same time, but is very similar thematically and argumentatively to Florida’s book is Malo Hutson’s The Urban Struggle for Economic, Environmental, and Social Justice: Deepening Their Roots. I read this book with great enthusiasm, although I ended up using it less than I expected at the time. The diagnosis of the changing economy toward tech and the bifurcating job market between high-skilled and lower skilled workers anticipates the great problems of our times but at the tail end of the Obama era.
I got a cold sweat when I saw a notice for Tricia Rose’s 2024 book Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives—and How We Break Free. I’ve been toiling on my book for so long that I sometimes feared that someone would publish the book I was trying to write before me. Cashin’s 2021 book covered very similar ground in some critical respects, but not in others. Tricia Rose’s book seemed like it might be the same thing. When I read her book I was both relieved and impressed. Although there was a critical number of similar observations and conclusions, it wasn’t even close to the same book.
Do not misunderstand me: I was so impressed with her book that I ended up citing it several times. But her book takes analytical positions that I had previously made in an article I published 18 years ago, and in fact, she cites my essay (and an important journal article by Barbara Reskin, which also cited it). Among the important points that Tricia Rose makes is understanding that systemic racism doesn’t need a perpetrator and that emergent properties (what she calls “meta-effects) can occur simply by system design. This is an important work, and I think it is a wonderful complement to my book. I appreciated her narrative approach and the structure and organization of the book.
Another book on a similar line is the excellent slim volume Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage by Daria Roithmayr, a legal scholar of cartels, among other things, that john turned me onto. Her book is really an excellent primer on how systemic racism works, showing how ordinary systems can maintain and perpetuate inequality. Very influential on me and highly recommended. In fact, I should probably re-read it.
Less influential, but another notable book that came out earlier this century, is by another controversial author, Glenn Loury, with a very sordid and strange history, and not just his oscillations politically and ideologically. That book is The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. I’m not persuaded by his emphasis on stigma as the defining characteristic of race, but I do see this book moving some ground toward a structural understanding of the production of racial inequality.
I read Joe Feagin’s 2006 book Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression many years ago, but while I admired the ambition, I was troubled at the lack of attention to modeling or empirically establishing the theory set out. Perhaps that helped motivate me to write this book?
I took a bit more from George Lipsitz’s 2011 book How Racism Takes Place. I enjoyed some of his insights and memorable phrases, but Lipsitz’s analysis is too much into cultural studies for the kind of empirics I wanted to focus on in my work. I think some readers may really dig his style. Probably his most famous book is The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, which I don’t recall having read, but do remember john referencing frequently back in the 2000's. Lipsitz also has a new book on housing discrimination (broadly defined) that may have had some useful bits (and perhaps more) for my book, but it was published too recently for me to incorporate it in my book. I intend to check it out.
I have a long discussion in Chapter 4 on the intellectual genealogy or historiography of institutional, systemic, and structural racism. Among those sources, I have, of course, been influenced by the sources I mentioned in the text, like Iris Marion Young’s various essays and books. But the one that deserves more elaboration here is Camara Jones' amazing essay entitled “The Gardener's Tale.” There is so much packed into this brief essay that it is astonishing every time I take another look. Her interview on Youtube is something also well worth watching (credit, again, to john powell for showing me this).
Another book that I read long before I started this project, but ended up not specifically adopting into my argument, is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s famous book Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. There have been so many versions of and updates to this book that I no longer know exactly what the current argument is, but the earlier edition I read placed a lot of emphasis on culture and “colorblind racism” as a cause of racial inequality. However this book was not, despite the title before the colon, about either structural or systemic racism. I can see, but haven’t read, that an updated version wades into structural and systemic concepts, but, again, I haven’t seen a new edition of this book. I would characterize this as an important book, but not influential on my work.
I carefully read Ibram X. Kendi’s impressive book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas with awe at the historical detail and the propulsive force with which he makes his case for the evolution of racist ideas. As much as I admire his ability as a historian to document and synthesize, I was and remain skeptical and even critical of some of his attempts to redefine common terms and other forms of wordplay, including his notion of dividing the world sharply into racists and anti-racists, and the various people he denotes as racists, including himself and Martin Luther King Jr. at times. I view his efforts as overly simplistic and lacking nuance.
In his view, at least as repeatedly expressed in this book, anti-racists explain racial disparities in terms of discrimination, which I also think is too simple (for reasons I note below). And within this Manichean framework, Kendi further differentiates between two types of racists. The first group is “segregationists,” “a group [who] has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities,” or who otherwise explain racial disparities in terms of biological or cultural group differences. And the second group are “assimilationists,” people who explain racial disparities in terms of environment. These definitions are not just odd and heterodox; they are problematic.
Segregationists have generally referred to people who want to maintain physical separation of races (in this context), like George Wallace, for a variety of reasons, not just the one he cites. Perhaps even more problematically, assimilationism refers to the idea that one group needs to adopt the culture, language, habits, norms, mores, etc. of another group. The classic example of this is the notion that European immigrants must “assimilate” into American ways of being, or, perhaps most problematically, the notion of “civilizing” indigenous peoples, like Native Americans, by putting them into English-speaking schools and trying to inculcate European ideas, beliefs (like Christianity), and culture. As with his definition of “segregationist,” it is probably true that assimilationists believed in the inferiority of non-white peoples due to environment, rather than biology, or else they would not have attempted to assimilate them. But his definition actually misses the mark in terms of describing the core activity. And in so doing, he is led to some illogical and very troubling conclusions, such as a critique of school integration (which he pushes more stridently in his much thinner, and much weaker volume, How to Be An Antiracist).
If racism is simply the persistence of disparities, then an analysis that reveals the cause of that disparity and generates a policy or remedy for it should not also be racist. Yet, that is what his framework compels in some cases, because it then regards that disparity as an environmental deficiency or structural inequity to be remedied. That would technically make the proponent of such a policy a racist “assimilationist,” according to his definitions. Kendi also objures modifiers to “racism” such as institutional, systemic, and structural, as unnecessary or superfluous. Suffice to say, I disagree with that as well, because these modifiers help us see, more clearly, different dynamics, and signify and help differentiate between various types of conditions or activities.
In contrast, I also read the conservative social critic Thomas Sowell’s Discrimination and Disparities. Sowell is an opponent of race-conscious policymaking, and so I felt his arguments deserved a close inspection. While I agree with some of his premises, I disagree with his conclusions. I think Sowell is correct, in general, that not all disparities (contra Kendi) are caused by discrimination, but that doesn’t mean they are entirely random either. When they are mirrored and panoramic, there is likely an underlying source. And, although not all unequal outcomes are caused by inequality of opportunity, many are. Sowell and Kendi represent problematic extremes, in my view, not of ideology per se, but logic and reasoning.
By far the most important “big” book on race in terms of influencing my analysis, despite its age, is the Kerner Commission report of 1968. The report remains the most important official document on racial inequality, and is simultaneously a big history, a contemporary investigation, a policy roadmap, and an urgent plea for change. Its warnings are as prescient as they were accurate, and its prescriptions are as timely as they seem timeless. The only thing I’d add is that Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s is a wonderful complement, since she covers the smaller areas ignored by the Commission.
2. The Big Histories of Housing & Racial Segregation
When it comes to race in America, a reasonable starting point will often be history, and historians. There are many excellent histories, some national, others local about race, racial discrimination, and racial disparities.
Foremost among them is The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, an excellent national history, and by a dear friend and colleague, Richard Rothstein. Richard broadly makes the case that the United States government, at all levels, played a significant role in creating, fostering, and spreading patterns of racial residential segregation that have sustained structural racial inequality in the United States. His specific argument is that these historical policies generate a corollary constitutional responsibility for government to remedy the harms that flowed from them. He even wrote and published a sequel, Just Action, that tries to demonstrate how to do this.
Part of the reason that The Color of Law is such an important book is because of the immense amount of examples, legwork, personal histories, and specificity Richard gave to what is otherwise, in many respects, not an original thought: that government caused or significantly contributed to racial residential segregation. What makes Richard’s book so powerful is the overwhelming evidence he marshals in support of this insight. It’s a remarkable book, and as compelling as it is important.
I should mention that there are a series of debates that his book has precipitated, not over the facts themselves, but the significance given to those facts. Some critics point out that local government and organized community groups played a primary role in institutionalizing segregation before the federal government ever got involved in housing policy during the New Deal. The evidence for this is not just the factual record, but the fact that racial residential segregation was already visible and high pretty much everywhere by 1930 according to empirical measures, but it wasn’t just a few decades earlier. Richard is correct in showing how the federal government deepened and extended it, through public housing policy, federal insurance policy, etc., and therefore I agree with his thesis/conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it entirely caused that history or was even the principal driver.
A more ideological critique tends to focus on Richard’s emphasis on New Deal policy, as epitomized by this critical essay by Richard Walker in Jacobin, although it shares some elements with the more nuanced historical critique. The thrust of it, however, is to push back against a narrative that Walker characterizes as “conform[ing] to popular conservative ideology that denigrates one of the most progressive moments in American history and government.”
Well, I hate to break it to professor Walker, but he’s really going to hate the work of Ira Katzenlson who has written incredibly important histories that critique the racism built into New Deal policies. Although I barely cited it, When Affirmative Action Was White is a landmark and incredibly important book, synthesizing, in micro-detail, the ways in which federal policy during and after the New Deal essentially subsidized white America in housing, education, and employment. It shows exactly how this happened in revealing detail. I have, however, not read his subsequent book, a door stopper, Fear Itself, which I have heard covers similar ground although has a different focus.
Another influential big/broad housing history that I found quite important was Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson, and which the publisher describes, accurately I might add, as the “first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb.” This remarkable book traces the political, social, and economic forces that drove suburbanization and the effects and consequences of that. Although this is an important history book in its own right, I was particularly interested in Jackson’s explanations for why the annexation movement faltered. There’s a general sense, especially in histories about racial injustice in urban demography and metropolitan development, that the general pattern has simply been that of sprawl and fragmentation. Jackson corrects this misimpression by showing how in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the opposite trend was dominant. Most major cities actually consolidated from numerous smaller cities to achieve economies of scale and afford infrastructure and utilities, like electrification, water, and sewer systems. The reversal of this process is really important and understanding why that happened is something I take up in my book.
A related big history is Zoning Rules! by William Fischel. This book is an incredibly important history of zoning in the United States, and an excellent complement to Crabgrass Frontier because it covers some of the same ground in a similar chronological mode, except it has slight but important differences in argument and evidence. For anyone wanting an explanation for the evolution of zoning in the United States, I think this is probably the best book to read, although it is not necessarily the best history of zoning per se.
Although I am familiar with his argument, because he, and others, reference it several times, I did not read his earlier book The Homevoter Hypothesis, but its key claims might actually play a larger role in my book. His basic argument is that homeowners become a voting bloc that generally block new developments to the detriment of housing production in this country to maximize the value and appreciation potential of their asset. These books are not about housing segregation per se, but they certainly help explain how it has been sustained!
The foundational book, for all other books, on the history of housing segregation in this country has to be American Apartheid by Doulgas Massey and Nancy Denton. When this came out in 1993, it became an instant classic, and so it remains. It shows exactly how America was segregated in housing and the enduring effects of that, especially how racial segregation concentrated neighborhood poverty as well, in a unique racial pattern. It’s not just a history, it is carefully developed sociology, with copious data and empirical evidence and statistics measures of segregation and demography.
Another massively influential book on my thinking and which aimed directly at the problem of concentrated poverty is Paul Jargowsky’s impressive work Poverty & Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (1997). Outside of technical books on subjects like advanced statistics or physics, I can’t remember a book I had more difficulty understanding at first blush, but eventually I learned the strange and important vernacular and lexicon that professor Jargowsky was introducing to me (along with the ability to pull and read census data). This book was a very important primer on the dynamics of poverty concentration and the effects of that on pretty much every aspect of housing and segregation and other dynamics. (Don’t tell john powell, but I still have his copy of this book).
A more recent history of housing segregation, and a more provocative one, is Richard Sander, Jonathan Zasloff, and Yana Kucheva’s door stopper Moving to Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing. Sander is a well-known critic of affirmative action, and so a curious scholar to focus on the harms of segregation and to offer remedies, but his book here has important elements and claims, which, at a minimum, have to be considered. It was well worth the read, and my book review, co-written with Richard Rothstein, may seem harsher than our regard for this book as an intellectual effort. Although partly a synthesis of prior work, it is an important work for its nuance, detail, and scope, as well as some important original insights and contributions to ongoing debates.
Another book on segregation that I found extremely insightful is the Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification by Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder. This book completely changed how I think about residential moves and segregation processes, by using deep research to show how the “pre-search process” is shaped by reference sets and local knowledge in ways that ultimately reinforce patterns of racial residential segregation. A tour de force of blended social science.
A book that came out quite late in the development of my manuscript, but which I think is powerful and excellent, is Jessica Trounstine’s Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities. Her ability to show empirically how segregation harms everyone and leads to divestment of public services is almost unmatched. There are books that make similar claims, but her scholarship is top notch. She is able to make quantifiable empirical claims that back up her arguments in ways that are almost singular.
A book that covers similar ground, and which I also have immense appreciation and respect for is Myron Orfield’s Metropolitics. The way in which he demonstrates the relationship between local taxing and expenditure decisions alongside race, poverty, and opportunity, is basically unparalleled. It prompted me to dig much deeper than I would have, especially into the Census of Government records, and I think there is still an enormous amount of ground to mine and excavate there based upon the initial work started here. I read both the original and revised editions and they are remarkable books (again, I think I might have john powell’s copies).
I don’t typically recommend edited volumes, but there are at least two worth noting here. The first is Social Spatial Segregation: Concepts, Processes and Outcomes, a book that was recommended by a former colleague, Heather Bromfield. This book was absolutely amazing, although the focus tends to be on Europe. I was blown away with nearly every chapter, learning new things about segregation studies, methodologies, typologies, empirical research, and simply dynamics of different ethnic and religious groups in Europe.
The second edited volume I enjoyed and read avidly was Segregation: The Rising Costs for America (2008). This volume was less original, but had concise and clear synopsis of many major thinkers, including Douglas Massey. I suppose one other edited volume of note I should mention is one that john and I contributed to, entitled The Fight for Fair Housing. Our chapter focused on the problem of place versus mobility interventions, and how to overcome that debate by focusing on opportunity (a topic I spend a lot of time covering towards the end of this essay). I can’t say I’ve read the entire book, but I did like the other chapters I examined. This is definitely worth having if you care about fair housing.
3. The Local Histories of Racial Segregation
In addition to these big books with a national lens, there are a plethora of really important “local” histories that have been written, and which filigree or provide critical detail on the dynamics that caused, shaped, or otherwise produced harms of segregation.
The first one I’ll mention, because it left such an indelible impression on me, is Thomas Sugrue’s spectacular book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. This is a template for how to do a big local history with impeccable detail, finely crafted argument, and a readable style. I should mention, parenthetically, that I read and enjoyed (but did not incorporate much into my book from) Detroit Resurrected by Nathan Bomey, about the municipal bankruptcy. It functions nicely as a coda to Sugrue’s book.
Another highly regarded “big” local history, but one that I never got around to reading, is Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. Richard Rothstein highly recommended it to me, and I wish I had read it, but never could prioritize it over other works. I will probably get to this at some point. There were, however, other books I did read about Chicago. A book I read years ago, but found to be quite powerful narratively is There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America by Alex Kotlowitz, set in Chicago’s infamous vertical public housing projects.
There are plenty of other good local histories. I still haven’t finished it yet, but I put a dent into the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize Winner Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. It adopts the hook of focusing on a few families to anchor the multi-generational narrative but the subject matter is really the city and region of Boston. Another book I’ve only skimmed, but want to read is Lawrence Lanahan’s similar history of Baltimore, entitled The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore's Racial Divide. More than a history of harm, this book also tracks the progression of the case of Thompson v. HUD, a landmark case upon which john powell served as an expert witness back in 2005, and upon which I did some minor research assistance for his report.
Another book I haven’t read, but want to, is Dan Immergluck’s Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta. Dan is an excellent writer and scholar, so I am sure this is a good book, but it came out too late for me to absorb factoids into my book, but the arguments here figure into my arguments in Chapter 5 on what I call the “New Great Migration.”
Another very good “local” history of racial discrimination and segregation is Gene Slater’s Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America. This is a dense but impressive narrative of California’s housing history, and how segregation was built brick by trick, and then defended from policy intervention and reform. I ended up citing this book in several places for the nuggets and gems I hadn’t seen anywhere else.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention Alex Schafran’s book about racial residential segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, entitled The Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure of Politics. There is so much I like about this book, but I think my favorite parts are how Alex complicates simple narratives about change and mobility, and widens the lens to see larger regional patterns. His analysis dovetails brilliantly with works like Trounstine’s on fiscal inequality, and what he regards as “unfinished” places. Timely and deeply relevant.
Although not strictly histories of segregation, there is a subgenre of books describing interventions to segregation. I have already mentioned two: Just Action and The Lines Between Us. Other important ones include the brilliantly titled Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto by Alexander Polikoff, one of the lead attorneys in the landmark fair housing case of Dorothy Gautreaux of Chicago. I have not yet read this book, but I have scanned it and it seems like an excellent history of the case and the outcomes of the remedy (again, it’s on my "to read" list).
Another book in this subgenre is the simply entitled Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty by Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin, and John Goering. This book follows a congressionally funded housing experiment ran in 5 cities in the mid-1990s, and based upon the learnings from Gautreaux. This intervention has been enormously influential, especially after more recent studies by Raj Chetty on the long-term positive effects.
Another very good book in this subgenre is Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb by Douglass Massey and a bunch of co-authors. Like the previous two mentioned books, it covers a critically important policy and legal intervention and the positive effects it had. I don’t remember whether I read this through, but I remember being impressed by the parts I did read.
4. School Segregation
There are a number of important books written about educational inequality and race, and, often, they are about the harmful effects of economic and racial segregation within schools, between schools, or within or between school districts. In my previous work at the Kirwan Institute, a big portion of it was on school diversity policies, and educational equity, so this was not a literature I needed to canvas in order to be deeply informed about it. That said, there were some sources and scholars whose work was particularly important or influential to my argument.
I will start by noting the work of Rucker Johnson, who is affiliated with the Institute as a faculty cluster member. Rucker authored a very influential white paper study on the long-term effects of desegregation, which I describe in detail in the book (a similar study from 2022, which I also cite, produced similar findings). Subsequent to that study, he published a book (which I have only scanned, partly because I have already drafted the sections covering this subject matter) that covers similar ground, but was aimed for a more popular audience, entitled Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. I did, however, attend a cool event we held for Rucker, to accompany the launch of his book. The enthusiasm was palpable.
Another important and influential body of work comes from the Civil Rights Project, originally at Harvard, and then later at UCLA, led by Gary Orfield, who wrote the 2009 report Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge. Like clockwork, they use the anniversaries of Brown v. Board of Education to produce a quinquennial (every 5 years) report on regress from the ideal or aspiration of school integration. I don’t remember whether I read the 2004 report, but subsequent reports include 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2024.
Even more than these reports, the product that probably had the most impact on me was their policy guide, entitled Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration - A Manual for Parents, Educators, and Advocates. This glossy, magnificent report was an amazing piece of research and advocacy. It had compelling data, a sweeping narrative, startling, factoids, and empirical findings, and solid guidance. Since a lot of my work at that time was working with school districts to try and promote school diversity, I regularly cited research from this report.
Erica Frankenburg is a frequent co-author on these various pieces, and also an important scholar of this work, and related issues, including the effects of charter schools on school segregation/integration. But one of her reports I wanted to mention that I really appreciated was a white paper she published for the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard, where she worked with great people like Susan Eaton (who has also written a book on this issue) and Andrew Grant-Thomas, a dear former colleague. Erica’s paper is entitled Voluntary Integration After Parents Involved: What Does Research Tell Us About Available Options? I recall using it several times to support my applied efforts with school districts to design integrated plans.
Like Susan Eaton’s book, there are plenty of “local histories” of school segregation or their effects. Although I didn’t rely upon it in my book, I admire and enjoyed Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School by Pamela Perry. It was a deep ethnographic study that showed how racial identity was formed in school buildings. Another similar work would be Prudence Carter’s Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. and South African Schools, which I also read, and admired the multi-level investigation that melded the social, the political, and the cultural to give a richly textured view of how race shapes identity and human capital development in two very different, but strikingly familiar, contexts. Prudence has published a notable edited volume with an important title, Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance, which I have scanned, and another title, Keepin' It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White, which I haven’t seen and so can’t comment upon. But my favorite piece of hers would be her research article “Education’s Limitations and its Radical Possibilities,” which I not only cite, but quote.
There are lots of other important educational studies and scholars which I have read or otherwise absorbed and could mention, including the works of Amy Stuart Wells, Roz Michelson, Jesse Rothstein, among others, but the other scholar whose work in this area whose work I have followed most closely must be Sean Reardon. Although I am most interested in Sean’s research on neighborhood economic segregation, he has also done ground-breaking work studying school segregation.
In particular, he led the “Educational Opportunity Project,” a fantastic interactive mapping and data tool that examines educational outcomes. You can put in any school district, county, city or even school in the entire country, and get instantaneous data on student performance, and the demographic breakdown, including the test scores disaggregated by race, gender, and class. A few years later, they absorbed another tool into that project, called the “Segregation Tracking Project,” that also allows users to see how segregated those schools and districts are.
There are other sources that try to map educational segregation nationally, using interacting mapping technology, such as this fascinating school diversity mapping tool from the Washington Post, but nothing that approaches the sophistication and complexity of the Educational Opportunity Project.
Around the same time I discovered these tools, I also came across another that was launched on Vox that I was very impressed by, and it modeled how to make schools more integrated than they naturally would be. It pulls up every district in the country, and indicates whether it replicates neighborhood segregation or not. It shows a direct comparison with how schools are currently zoned and how they could be, or would be if they just replicated neighborhood demographics. An amazing tool.
Over time, I came across more and more great content by Alvin Chang at Vox, including, but not limited to, an essay on how school segregation keeps poor children of color out of more affluent, and whiter schools, an excellent piece on school “secession” movements which I cite in my book, and an assessment of how school segregation is getting worse. These pieces used to be freely accessible, but unfortunately are now behind a registration paywall (although I’m sure you can use the Wayback machine to access them without the interactive capabilities).
While I am mentioning reports and articles, I should note another excellent source I found well after I had started this project. It is a report by the Century Foundation (which has excellent repositories) on school segregation in the U.S., which I cite repeatedly. It also has another data dashboard attached to it, which seems similar to the Segregation Tracking Project, and in fact, appears to have one of the same co-leads (Ann Owens).
5. The Criminal Justice System Polemics
Another large and very prominent body of writing pertains to critiques of the criminal justice system in terms of race and racial inequality. To label them all “polemics” may appear trivializing, although that is not my intent here. These works are all critical of the current criminal justice system and its effects, although they don’t all share the same argument or claims.
Although not the first, undoubtedly the most influential and high-profile work is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I had the privilege to be an “in-house” reviewer while she was working on this manuscript at the Kirwan Institute during my time there, so I saw how brilliant it was even before it became a phenomenon. Her argument is that the criminal justice system – and especially the emergence of mass incarceration and the so-called “carceral state” – has become essentially a new iteration of racial caste in the wake of the dismantling of Jim Crow. She develops this argument mainly along lines that were later adopted by other books, such as Dog Whistle Politics, that the backlash to civil rights was leveraged by politicians such as Nixon and others to build a new political coalition hostile to racial justice and policies that would remedy racial inequality. What’s different here is that Alexander argues that the War on Drugs became a critical vehicle for this hostility and, with it, racial social control that created a new punitive caste of people with collateral sanctions and besieged communities of color.
As I noted, Michelle’s work is not the first along these lines, but is one of the most clarifying and startling as well as compelling in its style and presentation. Her writing is vivid and rousing. An important book that came out a year before hers was The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad that makes related arguments, although with a different focal point. He focuses more on the trope of Black criminality as a driving element in a more punitive system.
Among the earlier and important works are Race, Crime, and the Law (1998) by Randall Kennedy. Kennedy documents a variety of critical ways in which the criminal justice system not only fails to protect or serve communities of color, but exacerbates and perpetuates inequity. Another roughly contemporaneous work that has been updated multiple times since is The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America (1996) by Samuel Walker, Miriam DeLone, and Cassia Spohn. This book covers the myriad ways in which race intersects with the criminal justice system, not just policing or punitive sentencing or even courts and trials.
Another important scholar doing work in this genre is John Pfaff, who has conducted a number of important studies, and who summarized a good deal of his arguments in his notable book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration-and How to Achieve Real Reform (2015). In some ways, his book is a critique of Michelle’s thesis, but not her broader point. Rather than emphasize the War on Drugs as the cause of mass incarceration, Pfaff puts more emphasis on the competitive elections of local prosecutors, and especially the tendency over the 1980s and 1990s for local prosecutors to become more zealous in their charges, pursuing longer and more punitive sentences. Pfaff’s studies claim that the War on Drugs is overstated as a cause of mass incarceration because federal incarceration is so small relative to state and local incarceration, and that drug war prosecutions, while having risen, are not the main driver of the growth in the rates of incarceration. It is possible, however, to see these dynamics as interlinked, and part of a “vortex” of more punitive policy, prosecution, and punishment, as I do in my book.
Another revealing but somewhat heterodox view is advanced by James Forman Jr. in his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017). Forman argues that Black politicians, community leaders, and their allies were critical in creating the War on Drugs and its product of mass incarceration. He shows, meticulously, how local Black city council members and state and federal legislators played a critical role in more punitive sentencing laws and drug laws. Reading all of these books together shows just how complex the origins of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration were, and that a simplistic view that regards these laws and policies as mere backlash underestimates how well-meaning many of them were. It somewhat complicates the narrative that Alexander establishes with her landmark book but hopefully illustrates the points that I make in mine about structured racial inequality.
Another book with a perspective that embraces the full complexity of this is Chris Hayes’ A Colony Within a Nation (2017), which I didn’t read in its entirety, partly because it was covering ground I’d already known, and didn’t end up getting to it until much later, but I appreciated the insights and even quoted it at least once.
There are a number of scholars who focus on pieces of the criminal justice system, whether it is policing or jury trials, the challenges of public defenders, or the problem of “re-entry.” Among those are Bruce Western, who may be the leading scholar on so-called “collateral sanctions” of criminal records. I cited this study repeatedly, although not his longer book, Punishment and Inequality in America, which I have sadly not yet read.
There has also been important work on punishment and criminal justice enforcement in specific contexts, such as schools, and the so-called “School to Prison Pipeline.” I thought well of a book by the same name by Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen and Damon T. Hewitt. I must, however, give special mention to the work of Jim Freeman, who used to be at the Advancement Project (in California), and who did absolutely spectacular work on this front with his reports and advocacy during his tenure there.
I encountered Jim’s work at the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, where I heard him lead a conversation on these issues. Jim was directing a project called “Ending the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Track” that had a raft of important resources and a nifty website. Among the pieces I wish to note is his incredible report “Test, Punish, and Push Out: How “Zero Tolerance” and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth into the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” which so carefully documented and demonstrated how students of color were affected by so-called “zero tolerance” enforcement policies relating to suspension and expulsions.
6. The Human Capital Histories and Social Capital Studies
A big part of my book is how certain investments create what Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen denote as “capabilities” or are otherwise known as capacities. Understanding how and when investments work to do this is important, and a key part of my research. Her book, Creating Capabilities, did not figure as importantly as their prior work, but the concept is a critically important conception of the development and pursuit of opportunity.
One book in this genre, and another doorstop of a book which I read mid-way through the development of this manuscript, but which I found both incredibly impressive and equally insightful, is The Rise and Fall of American Growth by the economic historian Robert Gordon. The book argues that certain technological breakthroughs created a special moment in history that allowed rapid economic growth that are unlikely to be repeated (at least, that’s what I recall more than a half decade after reading it). What I enjoyed about the book, however, was more its lessons in economic history, and particularly the point that investments in human capital helped unleash post-war prosperity.
There are a number of other excellent books that make similar points. I remember reading most (but I can’t remember if I finished) American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (who is an affiliated faculty member with our Institute!). Another book along these lines, which I skimmed and scanned, but didn’t read chapter by chapter, was Bob Putnam’s big door stopper (but very readable) The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. john powell strongly recommended this book to me (and also very much liked Fear Itself, but again, I can’t read everything!). I read the key parts of this book, and got the point, although folks looking for books along these lines might find this the perfect one.
Another book along these lines, although more focused, is the landmark book The Race between Education and Technology by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz. This book is so widely known that I didn’t even have to read it to cite it for its main argument, that the United States leaped ahead of the rest of the world in economic growth in the post-war period, in large part, because of our investment in secondary and post-secondary institutions.
A more influential book on me, based not only on the timing of its release (earlier in my manuscript development) but also its thesis was Bob Putnam’s 2015 book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Narrating the gulf between halcyon opportunity-rich post-war period in which he grew up and the struggles of his hometown today, Putnam is trying to draw attention to the so-called “opportunity gap.” I ended up not using this book as much as I anticipated, but I did find its focus affirming to the contours of my argument.
I probably shouldn't admit this, but transparency is important: I also read Charles Murray’s 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. I ended up not using much of it, but the thesis is essentially very similar to Our Kids, but more narrowly focused on white communities. Murray is the very problematic (some might reasonably say “racist”) author of The Bell Curve, and seemingly a believer in racial differences in IQ. Despite my deep reservations about Murray, his book Coming Apart does correctly diagnose at least a few of the problems for why the opportunity gap is growing, and not that differently in some regards than, say, Dream Hoarders or Our Kids, although Murray, as a right-wing libertarian-conservative, is deeply skeptical of government interventions and supports. I actually attended a talk that Murray gave on campus (probably around 2014, long before his infamous cancellation in 2017), and when I attempted to probe him on some points of disagreement, he rudely brushed me off.
In addition to the human capital books, another influential and related sub genre are the social capital books. The starting point has to be Robert Putnam’s most famous work, undoubtedly, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which has also inspired a Netflix documentary. This book argued that the decline in social capital, epitomized by clubs like bowling leagues, has had harmful consequences for Americans. Putnam either helped inaugurate or stimulated deep interest in the idea and measurement of social capital. Since then, there have been many fascinating attempts to study this dynamic, some of which are brilliantly described in Sampson’s previously noted work, The Great American City, like a clever "letter drop" experiment.
There are a bunch of other books that have sought to examine the significance and nature of social capital and social relationships. One book that john recommended and which I found fascinating and incredibly important was Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives – How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do. I wish I had had time to go back and reread this, but it had many nuggets of insights that I tried to incorporate into my model of opportunity structures.
There are also a bunch of studies that try to diagram, parse, or otherwise understand the nature of social networks. The most famous, The Strength of Weak Ties, is a study I cite. But there are also other, important studies on this, which I mention in the book as well, including a major study led by Raj Chetty based upon Facebook accounts, finding, unsurprisingly, the power of social connections to upward mobility. And that is a perfect transition to discussing those studies now.
7. The Economic Mobility Studies
One thing that readers will quickly encounter in my book are numerous summaries of studies on economic mobility. Perhaps the most astonishing advancement (one might call it a revolution) in any given research area during the period of researching and writing my book occurred in the study of the dynamics of upward economic mobility. When I began my project, there had been decades of research on socio-economic mobility and upward (and downward) trends, but there was a burst of interest that resulted in several major collaborative projects that are worth mentioning in some detail.
Until relatively recently, most of the studies I’ve found studying this issue used data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), the longest running longitudinal household survey out of the University of MIchigan. A typical example is this research article by Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist with the Federal Reserve, describing use of PSID data to calculate rates of upward mobility, or intergenerational income mobility, and which also summarizes research based on it by decade.
Mazumder credits Tom Hertz with being the “first to comprehensively analyze racial gaps in intergenerational mobility,” in his 2005 work, which I cite in my book, entitled “Rags, riches, and race: The intergenerational economic mobility of black and white families in the United States.” This inaugurates a whole new field of study, and I have done my best in the book to summarize the main findings and trends. Mazunder made their own major contribution to this body of research, in several papers which I cite several times, including a 2014 research paper descriptively entitled “Black–White Differences in Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the U.S.” These papers, and others, generally calculate the rate at which Black and white children, born into the lower quintiles of the income distribution, make it either out of poverty, or leap to the top.
The PSID is the longest running, but not the only data source that can be used to make such calculations. Another major source are the National Longitudinal Surveys apparently conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As best I can tell, this was the source that Richard Reeves used for his breathtaking and brilliant essay for the Brookings Institute entitled “Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream.” This incredible essay was one of the first places where I saw what are now called “intergenerational transition matrices,” a fancy term for simple graphs that show rates of upward mobility. (Scroll down until you see a graphic entitled “Social Mobility Matrix: Race.” It is well worth it).
As I note in my book, there are slight discrepancies in findings among these papers and reports, but the differences can be attributed to the sampling and data sources. It was not until Raj Chetty revolutionized this research by getting access to federal tax records, that sampling and surveys would no longer be needed, and direct comprehensive observation would be possible. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At the time I was conducting initial research for my book, I kept encountering amazing papers and reports from what I later learned was the “Economic Mobility Project” at the Pew Charitable Trusts. I will mention a few of the papers I read and cited. One of the main papers from that project I read avidly and which I relied upon was the 2012 paper Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations, which was an important update to an earlier paper I hadn’t seen prior to this. In any case, it was a comprehensive look at the state of the research and produced new findings as well.But other notable papers, not all of which I cited, include this, this, and this one by Julia Isaacs and Isabel Sawhill, among others. The paper I mentioned earlier, by Bruce Western, apparently also came out of this project. But another 2009 paper, by Patrick Sharkey, which I very much admired, also came from this project, entitled “Neighborhoods and the Black-White Mobility Gap.”
Then, not long after that project wound down, the Gates Foundation formed what would be called “The US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty,” which john powell was invited to join, and included many luminaries who had studied this issue, including Raj Chetty. The Mobility Partnership produced a number of important papers and findings, mostly summarizing research in the field.
More important would be the formation of Chetty’s team, under the initial banner of the “Equality of Opportunity Project,” and then later Opportunity Insights. These papers were initially released pre-print, but then, within a few years, found publication in many of the world’s most prestigious economic journals. In the book, I try to cite the print journal version, but my original reading was often of the pre-print report, and I read each paper, as they were released, with great care and methodically, making copious margin notes.
Chetty kicked off this revolution with two papers that came out, as best I can recall (and can tell from web searching), in the first half of 2014. The first was entitled “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility,” and revealed that Chetty and his team had access to a new trove of data from which they could conduct far more precise and sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of economic mobility, including identifying key correlates and predictive variables. Those findings were produced in the much longer subsequent paper, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.” This was the foundation for all of the subsequent research.
A subsequent pair of papers initially released in 2015, but not published until 2018, dug into the data further to examine the childhood effects of neighborhoods on adult outcomes by examining moves, entitled “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects” and “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II: County-Level Estimates.” A logical follow up was released in 2015, and was a longitudinal follow-up to the Moving to Opportunity experiment noted earlier, entitled “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” and co-authored with one of the original MTO experts, Lawrence Katz.
Most of the papers examine relative mobility, seeing how children do relative to their cohort, rather than compared to their parents. Chetty et. al. released a paper in 2016 examining the latter, and seeing if that had changed over time. It had, but the reasons were complicated.
The next big paper directly relevant to my book was released in 2018 in its pre-print form, and then published in 2020, entitled “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective.” This was the paper that really focused on and dug into the dynamics of race and economic mobility. Upon release, the New York Times would often do accompanying coverage and data visualizations and even interactive toolkits, but they really knocked it out of the park with this one.
But Chetty and his team worked with the Census Bureau to publish in 2018 a public interactive tool, dubbed the “Opportunity Atlas,” which allows users to see where upward mobility exists at varying levels of geography, along with an accompanying paper. This was the first time that the team drilled down below the commuting zone or county level to the census tract. I can recall, waiting eagerly for years for that data to finally be released.
Around 2017, Chetty and his team also released a paper studying the effects of college matriculation and graduation on different adult outcomes. One paper tried to see what types of institutions and colleges were the best launching pad for low income students to better adult outcomes (I love this paper), entitled “Mobility Report Cards: Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States.” Once again, the New York Times produced some phenomenal coverage, data visualizations, and interactive tools. In 2023, Chetty produced another paper that examined how income affected admissions decisions, not just adult outcomes, at the most selective colleges and universities. Once again, there was amazing coverage and interactive components by the New York Times. Although not based on a Chetty study, it is worth mentioning here two pretty amazing studies on admissions or affirmative action with great data visualizations by the New York Times.
From the beginning, the Chetty team subscribed to the idea that the elusive concept of social capital played a critical ingredient into upward mobility. But when they got access to the Facebook accounts, they could measure this directly by mapping social networks and their relationships. The result was the paper noted in the previous section, titled “Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility” and “Social Capital II: Determinants of Economic Connectedness.” The results are summarized in my book.
Lastly, and most recently, of relevance to my book is a 2024 paper by Chetty et al that examines changes in race and class dynamics in relation to economic mobility, appropriately titled: “Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility.” Once again, the New York Times coverage was phenomenal. I think the newspaper headlines were a little bit misleading because despite the top line findings that race gaps declined, they were still larger in absolute terms than the class gaps. As usual, reality is complicated and nuanced.
8. Opportunity Modeling and Mapping
Before and at the same time that all of the aforementioned research was underway trying to measure the rates of intergenerational mobility with greater precision, there was a parallel body of research and scholarship trying to model varying conceptions of opportunity and opportunity structures.
In my view, the foremost scholar in this field is George Galster. His work is as fascinating and imaginative as it is brilliant and rigorous. In particular, there are two works from the 1990s that left an indelible impression upon me, but which I didn’t encounter until a decade after they were published. The first is his 1995 journal article, with Sean Killen, entitled “The Geography of Metropolitan Opportunity: A Reconnaissance and Conceptual Framework,” which was the first work I’d ever seen that tried to create a detailed model for opportunity structures, and work out how the actual opportunity set interacted with people’s ambitions, drives, and aspirations. It’s an amazing paper, perhaps only surpassed by the longer and more detailed report he did a few years later for Fannie Mae, entitled “An Econometric Model of the Urban Opportunity Structure.” Both are “must reads.” But it was not until I read his 2012 paper “Urban Opportunity Structure and Racial/Ethnic Polarization” that he clearly mapped it to race that it crystalized key insights for me (although I saw a draft of it in 2008).
It was Galster, who in that work, formulated and elaborated upon the idea of an “opportunity structure.” So imagine my surprise and interest when I saw a notice for Joseph Fishkin’s 2014 book Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity. This brilliant book takes the idea of opportunity structures to its utmost extent, imagining how that conception affects both how we think about equality of opportunity, access to opportunity, and interventions to improve both. I can’t recommend this book enough. Although it arrived after I had already formulated the basic structure and argument of my book, I definitely integrated many insights into my argument. I also highly recommend Stephen Rich’s review of it in the Texas Law Review. For once, a book lives up to the publisher’s hype!
Another book that I read with similar avidity was the (freely accessible) edited volume, The Dynamics of Opportunity in America: Evidence and Perspectives. Close readers will see many citations to chapters in this volume in my book, and for good reason. This book covers very similar ground, but with even broader scope. I especially enjoyed the chapter discussing “gates, gaps, and gradients” by Henry Braun, and the chapter by Tim Smeedling. But they were all consistently high quality. Richard Reeves even wrote the closing chapter.
I had originally proposed that my book be titled “Structural Racism: Opportunity and Race in America,” but the editor didn’t understand what I meant by “opportunity.” Thinking about this book, I proposed to insert the words “the dynamics of” into my book title, and it instantly clarified for the editor my intended meaning.
As important as these pieces are, the foundation for me, and the entry point for this entire line of work, is john powell’s conception of “opportunity-based housing,” which he formally presented and published in a 2003 journal article. The basic idea is to direct public investments and community development strategies, such as subsidized housing investments, into higher opportunity environments, so that the beneficiaries of these policies will have better life outcomes. john sought to move policymakers beyond the narrow and simplistic definition used in the MTO experiment, just income, and look at a range of conditions and factors, including the quality of the local school, the health of the environment, and the social milieu.
It was not long before john had an opportunity to put this approach into practice. He was hired as the lead expert witness for the remedial portion of the major fair housing case, Thompson v. HUD, noted earlier as part of Lawrence Lanahan’s book about the case and Baltimore. But what I didn’t mention earlier is how john’s expert report was really the first, way back in 2005, to set out a detailed model for differentiating neighborhoods by level of opportunity, and on the basis of a variety of factors and indicators, not a single or few ones. It was a conceptual breakthrough in my view.
Bear in mind that this report was being crafted at the same time that Hertz was publishing the first major study on race and economic mobility. john’s innovation, with a capable team at the Kirwan Institute, eventually became known as “opportunity mapping.” And, under the auspices of this general approach, john created a program at the Kirwan Institute called “communities of opportunity.” This program began creating maps for all kinds of different localities, and for a variety of purposes, from school investments to job creation and infrastructure projects. These reports would also map where people of color lived in relation to neighborhoods designated as high or low opportunity, and the results were startling, well before Raj Chetty created his opportunity atlas or decomposed upward mobility rates by neighborhood.
Emblematic is this report, “The State of Black Ohio: At A Crossroads on the Pathway to Opportunity,” from 2010. With detailed maps from regions all over the state of Ohio, the report “found nearly 3 out of 4 Black Ohioans were living in the State’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods (what we term “low opportunity neighborhoods”), compared to 1 in 2 Latinos and 1 in 4 Asians and Whites.” Similar findings could be found in reports on Massachusetts (which found that 90% of Black and Latino households resided in the lowest opportunity neighborhoods), Connecticut; Austin, Texas; Puget Sound; King County, Washington; Duval County, Florida; Portland, Oregon, and New Orleans.
9. The Wealth Experts
Although not a special focus of my book, I draw upon the work of scholars and researchers who have studied wealth inequality and the racial wealth gap in particular. I also spent a lot of time getting to know sources of data, especially the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, to understand differences between studies and the limitations of them. Although I read and reviewed the sources described here, in the end, I mostly relied upon studies directly drawn from the Federal Reserve’s Survey, including this one.
The classic, possibly foundational work on the racial wealth gap is Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas Shapiro’s 1995 book Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. More pertinent to my book, however, were Shapiro’s subsequent books, The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (2005), and especially Toxic Inequality: How America's Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future (2017). Once I learned how to get direct access to the federal reserve survey, however, I was able to get the more recent data rather than that which was in print in these books. I have tables that summarize and synthesize the survey data in my book so you can see how the racial wealth gap has changed overtime.
The economists Sandy Darity and Derrick Hamilton have also done important work studying, not only what is called “stratification economics” and the racial wealth gap, but also what to do about it. I was particularly impressed with the short but brilliant study entitled “A subaltern middle class: The case of the missing “Black bourgeoisie” in America.” The study examines several different policy interventions to see which interventions could make the most difference in reducing the racial wealth gap, and concludes that only a reparations policy would produce more than a minimal effect (see Table 6). Darity is one of the nation’s leading experts on reparations, and his book on it is well worth looking at, but together with Hamilton, they have done extensive work looking at the concept of Baby Bonds, which I mention in the book, and some of the variant proposals, including birthright funds and the like, as well as various policy proposals that have been propagated based upon these concepts. Not all of this research made it into my book, but I will plan to use it elsewhere.
Another big history I will mention is Tomas Piketty’s famous Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This is a book I read quite carefully, and although it is not directly germane to my book, one thing I did take away is the point that government spending – especially investments in human capital – play an important role in mitigating wealth inequality. Contrary to the libertarian fantasy of a small government, the healthiest societies are those that have a robust, social state and a relatively large portion of GDP going into things like education and healthcare. The countries that actually have a small social state are often dysfunctional.
But one other book which I cite multiple times and which I found quite impressive was Dorothy Brown’s 2021 book The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans–and How We Can Fix It. She did an incredible job showing how different aspects of the tax system create racial inequities. I tried to incorporate her key findings into my argument.
I did not actually get around to reading it (yet, but I listened to several interviews with the author), but Andre Perry’s 2019 book Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities may have important insights into this dynamic that were relevant to my book as well.
10. The Zoning Books
This is essentially a new subgenre or species of book that has only just recently emerged given the recent fights over restrictive zoning policy. I would begin by noting them, but I’ve already mentioned Fischel’s books Zoning Rules! and the Homevoter Hypothesis.
The first book that should be mentioned here is Sonia Hirt’s Zoned in the USA. Outside of land use and city planning cases and text books, I think Sonia sort of inaugurated books on zoning restrictions. And, what is more remarkable is how good the book is, and how thorough and careful her history is.Conor Dougherty’s Golden Gates is a breezy but admirable attempt to narrate the California housing crisis, including the fights over zoning. I also read Key to the City by Sara Bronin, but ended up not using it, for a variety of reasons. I scanned but did not read Stuck by Yoni Applebaum.
I did not read, but had flagged, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by Nolan Gray, America's Frozen Neighborhoods: The Abuse of Zoning by Robert C. Ellickson, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See by Richard Kahlenberg. I may, eventually, get around to these, but I am concerned I am already expertly knowledgeable enough that little can be gleaned from the effort. And, of course, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson came out too recently for me to incorporate anything into my book, but I haven’t read it yet either but plan to do so.
There are possibly other categories of materials I could list, including the various health studies, but at the expense of excessive length 10 categories seems sufficient. In any event, I hope you found this essay illuminating and useful. As always, if you have any feedback on this or about my book, feel free to email me.
