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Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone, and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the creator, producer and show host Dr. Christina Yesler, and today I am pleased to be joined by Dr. Angela Sims, who is the author of Fighting for a How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle Class Suburbia. Welcome to the show, Dr. Sims.
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C
Thank you so much for having me.
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A
I am so glad that you're here and that we're going to talk about this book together. To start us off, will you please tell us about yourself?
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C
Sure. I am from the Washington, D.C. metro area, so I grew up in Prince William County, Virginia, about 20 miles south of the District of Columbia. And I was raised with my younger brother Josh. And my parents are Everett and Joan Sims. So grew up in suburbia and I now study suburbia. So it's a very full circle experience in that regard. Grew up, you know, very precocious, curious, you know, enjoyed in high school, everything from debate to basketball and track to student newspaper. So I feel like I've always had a pretty expansive sense of being. But I think that also reflects my Christian faith, which is really deepened probably in the last 10 to 15 years in terms of really grounding me in my sense of purpose. And so one of the things we often talk about in our, in our Christian faith is speaking truth and love. And so it's this, this tension that we're asked to navigate, very, to navigate with, with the Holy Spirit's help, which is where you're speaking with compassion and seeking everyone's full maturation and their realization of their potential and, and nurturing that. And so it's that lo care as well as speaking the truth. And so I think part of what I do as a scholar, what I did as a policy professional after I went to undergrad, I did a policy. I earned a policy degree and then worked in the federal government. So whether it's my policy work or now my academic work, I think it is this meditation on speaking truth and love, specifically the truth of how race, this imposition of supposed difference among human beings that is not biologically real, but a political category that's used to essentially differentiate among human beings. And so again, in the Christian tradition, this is to me, a smack in the face to God. And as much as we're calling some. Some people trash and some people treasure, and so the idea of the imago dei, we're all made in the image of God, really also grounds my work, you know, so speaking truth in love, honoring everyone's humanity, and then thinking about how our social systems do and do facilitate that to some degree, but also actually actively militating and said to the extent that they are allowing some people to hoard at the expense of the majority, and then we're given various narratives and ways of sort of making that complicity feel less contradictory. Than it is, but it's actually the case, I think that again, speaking truth and love, that we need to have the maturity to stare at these hard truths and then from there with that knowledge to set, as we talked about it before, the call to set, the intention that we're going to do better wherever we are in terms of our sphere of influence. So I would say that I am a black Christian woman who's committed to social justice and who truly enjoys her work, delights in it. And as much as it means that I feel like I'm living into my call to be who God has created
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A
me to be, one of the things we're curious about here is how people found their path to where they are now. You give us a lot of glimpses into that in the book. The book very generously opens in the preface with taking us through a lot of your personal history. We meet your maternal grandparents, your parents, your sibling. We see you as a child asking lots of questions and we see adult you now answering some of those questions that you had when you were younger. But the path from there to here, we're always curious about that. So when you, when you think back to when you're getting ready to go to college, did you imagine you would be Dr. Sims, the professor, I think, graduating from.
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C
I guess I've been going back to like high school and then to college. That sort of arc of, let's say, 18 to 22. As with many young people, you're, you're figuring things out and you have a sense of yourself to some degree because, you know, you've lived, you know, for almost a couple decades or maybe a little bit more by the time you graduate. So I think I've always had a certain amount of ambition and I think that's a fair word for it. Not in the sense of wanting to lord over people, but like a strong sense of wow, this is a big world and there's so much in it. And I can't wait to get out there and make the most of what God has given me. You know, with an eye toward doing that in community, but yet, you know, with, with, I think an unabashed sense. I think as women we often are socialized to not admit that we have goals, that we have interests, and it's okay, you know, again to pursue those as long as it's again with the, the well being of everybody in mind. So I think at that point that, that 18 to 22 year old Angie was very interested in politics and policy and even running for office. So I think at that point, I remember I was in ROTC for the first two years of college because I had in high school read Colin Powell's book, his autobiography. And so I was like, okay, if I'm a woman and I want to be president of the United States, I clearly need to have military background because you already have this deficit because of your gender. So you need to essentially prove your fitness for the role. So I think I had these very specific senses of. A specific sense of, like, what I needed to do to be ready for the highest office. In this case, I was, you know, aiming for the presidency. I think I also was thinking about government as, in some ways, as a panacea, as a cure all for all that a society. So as a black person, I think there are ways in which I think my parents complicated the history a bit. But I think that, you know, again, in keeping with my research and what I've talked, what I've learned from other black folk is that there's still in the end, a sort of what I would call linear sense of progress where we're, you know, we look at slavery, we say, look, we don't have trouble slavery anymore. We look at Jim Crow, say, look, we don't have Jim Crow anymore. And for those of us who are middle class, who have had the benefits of the opening of opportunity structures to some extent, so access to college, access to white collar employment, access to suburbia, there is a way in which certainly we can point to things being different, and I think that is to be celebrated. But I think what would come, you know, as I moved out of my 20s and into my policy degree and then policy work in the federal government, was this recognition that government was multiple things at the same time. And again, it's not that I didn't have a sense of that. Like, I had a sense that it was the law to have slavery and that we had to fight a whole civil war to end it, and that there were constitutional amendments and those sorts of things. But this linear piece, I think, is what really had to be destabilized. And I think really, you know, we'll get to it eventually, but gets to the book where it's really trying to give us a vocabulary for being able to think about. About how you can both have change in a direction that's inclusive and continue to have systems that actively restrict people based on social status in ways that still benefit essentially the elite group of white men, or we would say now their progeny. And certainly to say that there hasn't been Some opening of opportunity structures and that all white people benefit to the same degree from racial capitalism, which is profit generation through, through racial difference. But I think that 18 to 22 year old Angie really didn't have that complexity. But I think what she did have was, as I said, this desire to go out into the world and to make a difference for positive change so that more people could have the experiences that I had as a middle class black girl. I think some, some questioning that she needed to work through which I've done it through therapy, through prayer and, you know, my faith, and through, you know, friends and community around what it means to be a black person who has privilege and the ways in which often that will mean that white people in power will ask you to not just be complicit in your own oppression, but actually to police other black people and to tell them that, you know, they too could be like you if only they would change their behaviors as opposed to thinking about the brutalizing system that actually creates exceptions, so called exceptions like me, in order to maintain the system as one that is not contradictory and lacking integrity. So I think my work is also a way of me giving back to my community to say, no, here are the systems. For whatever reason, I was given access to these resources. But it shouldn't be the case that it's a select few of us that get access to these opportunities. And then the aspect of it that's still, again, this contradiction is to be able to hold multiple things at once along the lines of even as you have the growth of the black middle class, which certainly my parents benefited from, they both went to historically black colleges and universities and were upwardly mobile themselves in many ways. I've more so socially reproduced is to say that you had those opportunities for my parents happening at the same time that you had the rise of mass incarceration. So that gets back to, you know, the role of the black middle class, which is not only are we asked to be complicit, not only are we asked to serve as these sort of exceptions for white folks seeking to validate an unjust system, but also we end up, you know, creating, I think, tensions within our own community as we continue to reinforce the, the idea that black people who are economically distressed have done something, have done something wrong, as opposed to, you know, the whole host of things that, you know, we could unpack in terms of our social status. And so, so for me as person, it's an offering to us as a black community to say, here's the truth that we exist in? And how can we very intentionally be strategic about the kinds of social justice movements we have, both in terms of petitioning the government for redress, which includes things like reparations. But then also, how can we as a community, with all of its complexity within our community, still have a basis for solidarity, of truly seeing everyone and honoring everyone?
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A
The book has a preface, an introduction, and six chapters. And the introduction and the conclusion, which is chapter six, both outline the book for readers. It's written with great intention for the to be digestible by the readers and understandable because, as you've alluded to, you go through a great deal of history, and then you take us through a lot of systems and you break them down. You explain how they're interrelated. And in many ways in popular culture, people talk about a system being broken. And you take us through system by design and function and what they're doing and how they're doing, which is a lot for a reader. And so you have a great deal of intention. By outlining it all in the introduction and then giving us a summation of all chapters in the conclusion, both in the preface and in the acknowledgments, you take us into the making of the book as well. So I can see how intentionally designed this book was. It's called Fighting for a Foothold, How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle Class Suburbia. You chose a particular region in the United States to look at for your study. You have ties there, and you tell us that you lived in Maryland for two years while conducting research for this book. In the back are two appendices, and they take us through the actual making of the book, the interviews that you had. They give us the interview questions. They break down all the different categories of income, of age groups, of the people that you spoke to. The 58 respondents we see you going to meetings and sitting in and really listening and being part of things. And you tell us that one of the overarching questions you asked again and again is, what is the story of Prince George's County? So I'll ask that question of you because I know that is what in many ways inspired you to start on this journey. When I ask you, what is the story of Prince George's County? What is your answer?
- [14:23]
C
Sure. Thank you for acknowledging and highlighting the fact that I did try to not only be intentional about telling my own story and telling the scholarly story and the social science story that's empirically based on all the things that we expect from social sociology, but also I was thinking about it in terms of how I read books as a graduate student and how I read books as an undergraduate and now as a professor, how I assign work. And I know that often, because of the limits of the syllabus, we often could only assign the intro or the conclusion or maybe one. The intro or the conclusion of one empirical chapter. So I. My intention was also just to break it down in a way that would allow people to cherry pick if they wanted to. Like, I, of course, I want people to read the whole book, cover to cover. Every author does. But I'm also very aware of our limitations in terms of time and attention. So I also just want to, you know, say that that's also there by design. I think you can get the core messages, you know, from the intro, the conclusion, and then the internal chapters are really there to break down concepts along the lines of, you know, I think, you know, core aspects around public goods and services and taxes as people might come to them from their various points of interest. Okay, so Prince George's county, it's an interesting, you know, sort of full circle moment, as I. Or it was a full circle moment and still is in different ways now in terms of deciding to make Prince George's county the central of my research. So, as you said at the outset, I'm from the dmv, not to be confused with the Department of Motor Vehicles, but dc, Maryland and Virginia. So I'm a native. I think the first letter line in my book is I'm a daughter of the dmv. So I very much consider myself to be a native of that region. But I didn't choose that region as my research site because I'm from there. As I was considering where to study the black middle class, one of the ways in which we think about case selection in sociology is through what Michael Borovoy calls an extreme case warrant, meaning that if you're doing statistical analysis, often you're thinking about a sample that won't be representative of the population. When you're a qualitative researcher like me, what you're actually doing is intentionally deciding where you're going to do your research, because you want to be able to think about mechanisms and how they'll adhere in particular ways under certain conditions. So the conditions I was looking for in terms of this extreme case warrant was an extreme case of black people having the economic and political and social. Social capacity to overcome the history of slavery and Jim Crow. So the question is, you know, given that we've had the modern civil rights movement, which gave us The Civil Rights act of 64, which prohibited discrimination in education and housing, I'm sorry, education and employment, and prohibited discrimination in public accommodations. We have the Voting Rights act of 65, 1965, which prohibits barriers to the ballot block. So it, you know, ends things like poll taxes and then has this pre clearance provision for jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination. And we have the Fair Housing act of 68, which prohibits discrimination in the rental and sale of housing. So we have this triumvirate and other laws that really create that substrate that my parents, as I said, leverage to become middle class. But, you know, the question is, you know, to what extent are black folk who have middle class status actually realizing the same material conditions as their white counterparts? Because if we're claiming that America is a meritocracy, that truly you advance in this country based on hard work, based on your, your human capital, that is, your degrees and your skill set and a little bit of luck, then we should not see glaring gaps between racial groups. And so, and so the question was, okay, now that we're, you know, at that point, I was, it was 2016, you know, where can I actually study? You know, a sort of a place where, if it's going to happen, a best case scenario, if it's going to happen, where would we see it? So because I was interested in politics and I understand the way that federalism works, which is the shared authority between levels of government, national, state and local, I also recognize that it would be important to think about a concentration of black people in a single local jurisdiction. And that's important because local jurisdictions are conferred authority by states. And then those local governments have mayors or they have, in the case of Prince woods county, county executive, who then has political authority to make decisions on behalf of the county, both in terms of what's funded, in terms of local taxes and. And in terms of the kinds of policy that will inherit. So that gives me, you know, the concentration of affluence, right, in terms of the residents and their class composition and that I wanted political authority. So can black people actually make decisions that shape their life chances? So that's why Prince Richards county rose to the top. Because even though we might think of areas like Atlanta, the Atlanta region, you have, you know, the black middle class is more spread out between, say, Atlanta and DeKalb and Cobb County, Houston, another large black middle class area, but more spread out. Charlotte, Louisiana, New York. We can think of a lot of places that have black populations that are middle class, but again, they're more diffused. And so Prince Riddles county has the highest concentration of black middle class people in the United States. And they've had political authority, black led government since the mid-1990s. So the story of Prince Richards county is a story of black people realizing, at least to some degree, the return to their class status. Right. So that's the positive side. That's the okay, yes, we are doing something different than we have been doing before. And so I think the story of Prince Richards county is two pronged. One of seeing the promise of how black people are able to now leverage climb those opportunity structures in ways that allow them to improve their quality of life. And it's also a story of how even when black people play by these rules, they still don't get the same returns as their white counterparts do in terms of things like public goods and services quality. And not only that, the end up subsidizing white folks wealth accumulation because they're forced to absorb many of the things that white folk are able to prevent themselves from having to be responsible for by virtue of how political boundaries essentially cordon off property taxes and other taxes that are raised specifically in local jurisdictions and that are actively tethered to racial capitalism. So things like the market value of homes is a function of racial capitalism, a function of the different levels of investment that government and private actors have made into black people and into the spaces that they occupy. So it's really trying to connect the dots along the lines of history and also political economy of metro areas. And then thinking about this race class interaction that we've had since the founding of the United States.
- [20:54]
A
The introduction is called the Suburban Black Middle Class in Socio historic and Geographic Context. And in that section of the book you tell us that racial status is still the primary access determining material and social resource distribution in the United States. I think many people would find that surprising, right?
- [21:16]
C
I mean, there are other statuses, right? There's race. In sociology, race, class and gender are what I would call the big three. Of course there are others. Religion, sexuality, age, disability. I argue that race is still the synch non second to none category. Not to dismiss class and gender and all these other social statuses as being consequential. But when I say defining, I think it's helpful to go back to the very beginning of this country to think about who founded it and what were their interests and what are the things that they did to create a stable social order. So what they were seeking to create in the United States was inherently unstable, which is you had elite white men who Were the people who had been given, in quotes, you know, authority from England to Great Britain, the king to go to land which of course, we all know was occupied by people already, but they were given this authority. That's why I put it in quotes, to take this land. Okay, so at first we know they're looking for gold. They're, you know, seeking to make money. Right. It's a profit motivation, if we're looking, at least at the Jamestown colony. But, you know, eventually they decide that they're going to settle. So. Right. This is how we get this idea of settler colonialism. So they're going to remain, but they are very clear about the fact that they're looking to use commodity production and other kinds of what we would call sort of nascent capitalism. We are quite at the modern form of capitalism, but sort of this period of moving from feudalism to capitalism. And so we have this, like, mercantile capitalism regime. And so it's not clear what the labor arrangements will be, but if it was a combination of indentured servants from Europe who are having their passage paid across the ocean and then working for a period to pay for that passage and room and board, you have enslaved Africans, some of them would arrive and find ways to attain manumission or run away. And so you have the elite white men seeking to establish this colony, maintain it. And then you have people of European descent and African descent. We had a quite established racial category. And the ways we understand white and black now who are essentially doing the labor, who are doing. Doing the work. And then, of course, you have to remember there are. There are. There are indigenous people who are increasingly pushed off of their land. And so you have, you know, essentially indigenous people who are. Who are starting to. Starting to dawn on them that these folk are not going away and that they have a clear set of interests that are in opposition to how natives want to engage the land, which is not to commodify it, but to, you know, be in relationship with it in a way that respects and honors it. You have these poor groups, shall we say, economically distressed groups, who are dependent on the economic system that these elite white men have established. So then the question becomes, for the elite white men is how do we socially reproduce? Right. How do we enable society to actually not only be maintained now for us to reap, you know, these profits that we seek, but also how do we perpetuate it intergenerationally? And so the key for them was the sort of the million dollar question was, how do we get the majority of people to Buy into a system that will actually not benefit them, but get them nonetheless to co sign it, or shall we say, be complicit to various degrees. So the main thing that they. The main tool that they use, we often will say race is a social construction. But my colleague Ruha Benjamin says race is a tool it also constructs. So in this way, race constructs this lie that black people, people who are of African descent, who will be called black, are somehow less human than people of European descent. And because they're less human, the rights to that are conferred to the polity, the people who are human, the citizenry, don't apply to them. Right. This is how you reconcile that. You're going to have the consent of the governed. You're going to have this idea of the universal rights of man, the eloquence we see coming from Jefferson at all as they're writing the Declaration and the Constitution. But that is going to be. There is going to be an exception for this group of people that you're going to call black. And so what that does then is it creates stakes. It creates, as Cheryl Harris calls, you know, whiteness as property. Because now if I'm a white person, even though I may not be rich, even though I might actually be quite poor, economically distressed, at least I'm not black. And the at least I'm not black part means I have freedom of movement, I have freedom of contract. Now, again, these contracts are abusive and exploitative, but I can leave if I want to. We know that this also fuels the westward movement because the white working class is looking to get out from under the planter class. So they keep pushing west. At the same time, the planter class is pushing west to try to extend slavery. White folk who are working class are trying to get out from under that to have a piece of the pie of their own. And so what this means is that whether you're a woman, whether you're working class, if you're white, even though, again, these statuses are shaping your life chances, you have a stake in whiteness. And we see that every political movement that has tried to advance in this country founders on the rocks of race. So if we think about, in our more recent moment, to get an idea of this, we can think about the women's movement, right, and how much work women of color, specifically black women, and I'm thinking of people like Patricia Hill Collins and other black feminists have had to do, and we still have to do to help white women see that if all they want to do is become white men. This is not. There is no reason for solidarity along gender lines. And this is still an issue because today, you know, white women still, you know, earn more, have more access than white women. They black women, they actually were the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action through the Civil Rights act of 64. And importantly, because they marry white men, they still get the material benefits of white male domination. If we look at class, we look at the movements for unions and other forms of collective bargaining, the things that led to things like the Social Security act and the Wagner act, which gives collective bargaining, and the Fair labor Standards act, which establishes things like the eight hour workday and worker protections. Again, the Congress of industrial organizations was a bit better, but then the. The American Federation of Labor. But all of them did not welcome black laborers, who are the ultimate proletariat class. If you want to think about who owns the meat of production, who's the worker and most exploited, they would not admit black folk on equal terms. So actually, that undermined the. The movement, the workers rights movement and the socialist movement because they refused to honor the facts that black people needed specific kinds of consideration to actually honor the truth of their history of incorporation. So to me, if we look through a number of different lenses, we can see that race continues to militate against actually re envisioning a country that truly includes everyone. Because there's a fear of falling into blackness that people in the ruling class will use to essentially discipline every group so that they will be willing to be complicit. Right? So white women start to back away, I think, from truly including women of color. Why? Because they in some ways want the resources of white men and they want women of color to watch their children and to do reproductive labor that they don't want to do. Working class white people still want to have the privilege of being able to look at black people and say, well, I may not be a rich white man, but at least I'm not like them. And so that undermines the movement. And then finally, you can see who's been killed in the history of our country. So. So political violence is as American as apple pie. We fought a whole civil war. We had Jim Crow and 4,000 people lynched in this country. So very much political violence is part of who we are. And we can see who's killed Lincoln, is killed in many ways by a Confederate supporter and who called himself doing something on behalf of the Confederacy by killing him. We can think about what happens in the 60s with, with Robert. John f. Kennedy killed Robert Kennedy. Killed Martin Luther King, killed. Malcolm X, killed. Fred Hampton, killed. We can just keep going. When do people die? It's when they're starting to bridge these gaps across race and class and gender that's a threat to the system that King called the evil triplet of racism, materialism and militarism. And so, yeah, I stand on that. I think it's important to think intersectionally about all of these social statuses. But the fact that when it comes to race, that is when we get the most squeamish and that's when, when people die, I think shows us the stakes and why we continue to have to revisit this idea at the beginning of is everybody ultimately human and therefore worthy of full human regard? Until we get that correct, we're going to keep stumbling. We're going to keep having a country that will be held together as it is now through violence.
- [29:43]
A
And listeners can find more of the history that Dr. Sims has been summarizing in the preface, the introduction, and in chapter one. And the book has a tremendous number of footnotes where you can find how she is in conversation with other thinkers and scholars who are doing similar work so you can learn even more. The book has two main subjects that the conditions shaping the black middle class quality of life in suburbia are one main subject. And the other is the role of local jurisdictions in mediating that quality of life. And a lot of what you just foundationally laid out is what helps us understand how hard it is to move the needle on mediating that quality of life. You tell us that you focus on public goods and services because they are the material foundation for a high quality of life for most Americans. Can you say more about that?
- [30:39]
C
I think there are so many ways in which we take public goods and services for granted. There's an extreme case of malfeasance. So we can think of something like the Flint water crisis where we go, oh, okay, yeah, we all need clean drinking water. We all use it every day to drink, you know, to have water to drink, to bathe, to cook. And so then when we discover that there's a city where they have, you know, been exposed to lead for a prolonged period of time. And there was, you know, government neglect and really a form of neglect that was truly a decision that, you know, certain people's lives and health mattered and others didn't, you're like, oh, okay, you know, now we're going to pay attention to those pipes that we all just take for granted as, you know, being under the ground and giving us Water, as if it's, as if it's through magic, but it's not magic. You know, your public goods and services, from your schools to your rose to your clean drinking water are all funded through our governing system. And so in this country we have federalism. So the way that that ends up working is that quite a bit of our access to public goods and services, media is mediated through the state government. And so in the Constitution, the US Constitution, there are only two levels of government, national, federal, sorry, national and state. And then the states confer authority to local jurisdictions. So these public goods and services then are so key to things that we doing every day that we just don't notice as being publicly funded. The sidewalks we walk on, the roads we drive on, the water we drink, the schools we send our children to. And so that means that that's, that's sort of the material foundation for so many things that we need to just survive. I mean, at a basic level, food, clothing and shelter, you know, those kinds of core needs are all in many ways still underpinned by these public goods and services. And importantly, when we invest in, invest well in public goods and services, that is our, one of our greatest opportunities to see equity. Because what we're saying is, you know, we're all paying into this public fisk, you know, we're all, we're taxing ourselves to then pay for the material well being that we all enjoy. So I'm sociology, my disciplines, I'm partnered with sociology and urban studies. So in urban studies, one of the things we're always talking about is a built environment and how do we support the built environment. But we have to remember the built environment is, you know, by implication, you know, juxtaposed against what the natural environment, which is that we go back to the state of nature if we don't continue to reinvest in these material resources. And so I live in New York and so we're always kind of, you know, laughing, not laughing about the rats. And I'm like, these rats were on Manhattan long before we were. And they look at us like, okay, y' all want to have these buildings and all these things that make life comfortable for you. You do you, we're going to do us. And it's a reminder to be humble. And this built environment, you know, is, is, is something that we impose because we have a particular vision for how we want to live, but requires continual maintenance. And that means that we have to then take this form of currency we've created called money, and invest in it. And so if we neglect that, and again I. We often notice it when it doesn't work. If we neglect that, we actually start to see a decline in the quality of life in as much as we have a modern ideal quality of life that reflects, as I said, this built environment of certain kinds of infrastructure, from plumbing to roads to bridges, you know, to, you know, formal kinds of school, formal schooling, you know, that we want our children to, to have.
- [33:56]
A
You point out in the book that there are a lot of studies about cities and there are rural studies and you are deliberately looking at suburbia and you are comparing and contrasting why one aspect of suburbia is rising and one is struggling more. When you, when you consider all, all factors for listeners, the socio historical context created the fiscal constraints for Prince George's county and a lot of the constraint factors are outlined in chapter one. One of the places that we start to see the fallout of the uneven distribution of tax dollars and how Americans rely on public goods and services, and yet not everybody will have the same quality of goods and services in where they live and they will not have that same access. One one place where we see that very vividly is chapter three, where we go into the budget allocations and we start seeing the implications of when we have insufficient tax revenue to really fulfill the promise of public goods and services and we see the trade offs and how they reduce quality of life. Can you take us into that section, please?
- [35:12]
C
Sure. So one of the ways I try to convey this unequal distribution was, was two pronged. One, as an ethnographer, what we're looking at is mechanisms. So ethnography is, you know, a way of doing research where you're doing direct observation of the, the community that you are interested in to understand how they make meaning of what they're seeing. And then also you're bringing to bear the theory of your discipline to, to make meaning in terms of how, in the case of sociology, you know, levels of social organization and the power dynamics that inherent, that are shaping different kinds, shaping the, the. The life outcomes of people. So we often will talk about that in terms of life chances. So like the odds that you will graduate from college or the odds that you will face discrimination. Right. So we're constantly looking at these elements of, of exchange and elements of relationships. So the public Goods and services chapter, the one on the budget trade off that you talked about in chapter three is really to me the way in which I try to get as grounded as I can with the ethnographic component of this, which is to say, let's just look at what this county is able to do. As I said, they are the premier majority black county in the country. Let's just literally follow their budget. If they have the affluence that most white middle class counties have, then we should not see a whole lot of struggling. Of course, you know, there's usually always more you want to spend your money on, thanks, then you have money. But there shouldn't be extreme forms of deprivation. So let's see essentially what this fiscal year looks like in terms of them actually making decisions about where to allocate their funds. And so that's the ethnographic put it that I think pair with the interviews of leaders and residents to have their perspective on how this looks. But Anyway, the chapter three is really then walking the reader through fiscal year 2018 where I looked at the budget, development, development process, which roughly speaking, it goes from March through the end of June as the county executive proposes the budget to the council. The council is the appropriating body. And so then the council holds a series of hearings with agencies. So that's, you know, the, the school board and the school chancellor, that's the, or what they call the CEO. Then there's the, you know, the folks that, you know, do the homeowner code enforcement, you know, various dimensions of quality of life. So that is really thinking, you know, helping us to see then as they're deciding. The budget, by the way, is about 3.9 billion from all sources, local, state and federal. How are they allocating this 3.9 billion? The 1 billion I should say that was directly from the state for schools. So that one's not something that they negotiate. And then probably another 500 million from the state that go to other public goods and services. But you know, let's say 2.5 billion is under the discretion of the local, local officials. And so, so what that gave me the opportunity to do was actually see residents come and testify. I want to see more money on this, I want to see less money on that. I was able to see the elected officials, the county council say, okay, you want this. But then, okay, I'm also hearing about another constituent say they want that. Well, we can't afford both of these, at least at the levels that both of these constituents want one or this group wants. So how are we then going to decide between these two groups?
- [38:28]
A
Groups.
- [38:28]
C
And so I call in that book, in that chapter these hard, I call these hard budget trade offs. Because the point is you should have enough money to fund both of those. So an example is thinking about the fact that, you know, schools are already 65% of the budget. So that's the lion's share already of the budget. And if you add in police, that's another 25%. You really only have 10% of the budget left. For everything else you need to fund from health to, to roads, to, you know, your code enforcement, your park. Well, parks are actually separate part of the budget. But anyway, the point is by showing then that, you know, as they're seeking to put more money into the schools, which do still need more money even with the state aid and with what they're already putting in, you're as you're trying to get to a scale that would actually be consequential for the schools, which is going to be, you know, 50 to $100 million. They're like, well, if we take that money away, then we're going to have to, you know, put less money staying in health clinics. Well, we need both health clinics and school schools. I talk about particularly vulnerable communities that, you know, were really struggling to have their, the support they needed from the county. So the adults with disability disabilities community inadvertently was hurt when the county did the right thing, which is to raise the minimum wage. But then because adults with disabilities receive significant state funding, state aid, the county was told, you know, you have to pay the gap between what would be the state minimum wage and the county minimum wage, or, or they can just receive the state minimum wage. But effectively that meant that people that support adults with disabilities were paid less than people who work at McDonald's. And that's no shade to people that work at McDonald's. But that is to say that the work you're doing to support adults with disabilities is certainly worth the compensation of those who work at McDonald's. And obviously all people should be making a wage that they can live on. So that is. So the book, that chapter in the book is really trying to show both, you know, what it is that the county is able to generate through the funding sources that it has, which is property taxes as the main local source, and then what it receives from the state and federal government and then the extent to which that's sufficient for meeting all of the core needs of the county. And so that's also where I start to connect the dots, I hope, from chapter one, from the intro in chapter one around racial capitalism, which is to show that if racial capitalism is, as I said, profit generation through racial difference, then it stands to reason, it's almost axiomatic, that if you to Then tell a local jurisdiction to raise revenue based on the market value of the residences and the commercial, based on the value of, of homes and businesses, that if it's a majority black space, even if it's an affluent black space, they're going to be able to generate less, not only because of the continued stigmatization of black people and anti blackness and white domination, but because black people uniquely bear the burdens of intergenerational deprivations from slavery forward, forward. And so because there's been no meaningful reparations, no meaningful redistribution, what you do is concentrate the harms of prior and current anti blackness in black spaces, even when the black folk are middle class. And then you concentrate the benefits in white spaces who then actually benefit not only from this growing tax base because of the market value growing faster in their areas, but because these white spaces are also proximate to black spaces. They get to benefit from say, low wage workers who live in the black county because it's the more affordable county, while not being responsible for the public goods and services needs of people who are economically distressed, which tend to mean it's going to put more pressure on your budget. So for example, in public schools we know that students that qualify for free and reduced price lunch on average need more support to learn at the same levels as those who have more resources in their homes. So I'm really trying to articulate in that chapter how on both sides of the ledger, both in terms of what the county can generate through its authority and what the county is responsible for, leads to these hard budget trade offs, which then sets the table for what I later do, which is compare the per capita and per people spending in Prince, Georgia county to white to counties that border the county that border Prince, Georgia. So I compare it Prince George's per capita and per people spending to Montgomery County, Maryland and Fairfax County, Virginia, as a way to not only show that, you know, that budget dimension that I was just articulating in terms of the squeeze that it feels from responsibility for high need residents, as well as the lack of capacity to generate revenue, at least at the same levels as white jurisdictions, but then to say, well, okay, now so what? How do we know that this is actually consequential? I say, well, let's, you know, actually look at some measures for neighboring white or wealthier counties. So I didn't do an ethnography in those counties, but I do try to use the budget data to tell a story about, essentially about the region itself as a unit, but then how local jurisdiction boundaries, as I say, bind and amplify the positive and negative consequences of racial capitalism, positive for white folk getting these virtuous fiscal cycles and negative for black folk who have these vicious fiscal cycles. And really thinking about those things as not parallel but actually complementary and mutually informing each other. And so that subsidy effect that I'm talking about really is about this dynamic of geographic proximity, but alongside the ways in which political boundaries really reinforce racial inequality.
- [43:52]
A
And listeners can find more starting on page 140, budget constraints, consequences for Prince George's County's Most Vulnerable Residents. And in that section we see some of the meetings that you were talking about. You provide transcripts. And we see how these budget constraints rates affect use of public spaces. And we see that there's a four year wait list for neighborhood cleanup needs as just yet one more example. Listeners can find more about the fiscal distress with the public schools in chapter four. There's a chart on page 173 that shows the spending and the needs of the school. Chapter five is the Pursuit of Private investment. And in this chapter we look at efforts to overcome fiscal constraints and we're introduced to a problem called retail redlining. Can you share what that is with listeners?
- [44:52]
C
Sure. Listeners may be familiar with redlining as a term, often through these very vivid maps that, as the name suggests, show redlining where you see, excuse me, a city or a town, and you see an area that's shaded in red, an area shaded in green, shaded in blue, shaded in yellow are usually the colors you'll see. And so the red, because these maps were designed initially through the Homeowners Loan Corporation and then later adopted in terms of at least their logics, into the Federal Housing Administration, which then has implications for federal insurance of mortgages. But any case, these redlining maps, maps are showing this idea of risk. And so the red areas are indicating areas that are too high risk for the federal government to invest, meaning they will not insure mortgages in areas that are shaded red and then areas that are shaded green. Those are the areas that are considered the most viable for federal investment. And then the blue and the yellow are sort of these categories in between. And importantly, all areas that had even sometimes as much as just as few as one black resident would be labeled red, meaning they were now excluded from federal insurance. And so that redlining idea is this idea of exclusion. Who is going to be deemed worthy of investment? So it's taking that logic of those residential security maps that then determine federal mortgage insurance policy and now applying it to the retail space. So in the retail Space. What retail redlining is, is, is the decisions that developers and other investors, you know, so that's everybody from folks who would bring a grocery store to people who are opening restaurants to folk who want to provide entertainment venues. The decisions they make about which local jurisdictions to invest in. And so importantly, just to back up for a second, you know, increasingly because we have less money coming in from the federal and state government to local jurisdictions, local jurisdictions are forced to compete heat for essentially the high, you know, the, the residents that are the wealthiest. And so they want as many people who are wealthy, upper middle class and rich as they can as you probable as possible. And they want the kinds of investment that will cater to that population because it has these synergistic effects that reinforce again this mark growth of your tax base through the market value that then allows you to levy a lower tax rate. Because if the, if the, if the value of your properties is going up, your, your, the revenue will come even with a low rate. Whereas for black jurisdictions, they've got to leverage either a higher rate or just cut services, which means you're actually paying more for less in these black areas. So the retail redlining pieces that, and it's still the case, you know, going back to the beginning, that, you know, white men who, elite white men are largely making these decisions about where to invest, where to bring their businesses. And so Prince Richards county, even as a majority middle class county, does not have the same degree of investment that you would expect given its class status. So this is where we're able to see to this earlier point you were making about, well, why is it that we're, you know, you're saying that race is still the synchronon social status category. Like. Well, this is another example of if it's truly about class, why is this county, which if you just run the numbers, is middle class. Why are they not getting the same kinds of investment that the white counties are getting? And I think that's a function of the continued stigmatization of black space and the assumption that most black people are poor. And so I actually talk to people who literally go and recruit investors into Prince George's county and they talk about how much time, energy and money. So again, in this context of already being fiscally constrained, this county is also investing time, energy and money to overcome resistance to actually just having capitalism do what it says it wants to do, which is to come and make money and to allocate resources efficiently. Right? So they're essentially just asking capitalists to be capitalists and not prejudice. And they've got to actually, they have to, to do more work to, to get those same returns and, and actually do the, the work and not often get the return. So in the county, there were moments that you really brought this home, like when the, the first Wegmans opened, which is a high end grocery store. I don't know, you know, listeners are probably across the country, but Wegmans is a high end grocery store that is equivalent to a Whole Foods. So, you know, Whole Foods came to just outside of College park, which is, you know, next to the flagship university, University of Maryland, and which is, you know, in Pritchard's county, in a town called College Park. And so it came there and you know, the, the Wegmans was in central part of the county. So there were these moments where it was like, at last we're being respected. Right? And you know, it's not to say that, you know, you need to be validated by capitalists to feel like you are somebody, to use the words of Jesse Jackson. But it is to say that black folk were tired of essentially spending their money in other jurisdictions, which of course reinforced their economic capacity. They were tired of going across the, you know, the county line to go spend money in these white majority counties to meet the, you know, their desires as middle class folk for the kind of, of lifestyles that they wanted to live. And also the county was tired of not realizing the revenue from that kind of consumption by their residents. And so the retail redlining piece really is a way to think about how again, if we claim meritocracy, if we claim that everyone has a fair shot, when we see that black people are not getting that fair shot, it is a reminder that we still have these continuing ongoing headwinds that really prevent black people from being able to truly experience that supposed rising tide that's lifting all boats.
- [50:08]
A
The book reveals the extent to which the black population is not realizing the same returns to its status as similarly situated white Americans. And you take us through a number of braided relationships, the individual household, the neighborhood, the local jurisdiction, to look at the inequities of material well being. And you take us back to the origins of racial capitalism as conceived in the American colonial project. You look at how it has evolved. And this is laid out through the six chapters, the preface, the introduction, and the appendices that show us how you, how you created your study and how you went about it. The end of the book is asking us to envision institutions for all Americans flourishing. And you say we need an economic and political system designed for all Americans to thrive. On page 220, 245, you talk to us about taxes and you say, when someone says the word taxes, what comes to mind? Many of us think of some form of, of burden. But what if we reframe taxes as funds for communal flourishing in the time we have left? Can you talk to us about some of the policy recommendations you have for, for flourishing in chapter six?
- [51:32]
C
Sure. Thank you for that question. So in light of everything I said, you know, I think it's important to, to not leave with a thud and just a wet blanket of like wah, wah. But they're really saying, okay, you know, let us not feel debilitated by this. Let us be, as scripture would say, sober minded. And I think sober minded means recognizing the truth, the reality for what it is, and then thinking about the influence that we each have in our various spheres and how we are all embedded in these various social systems and what can we do to move the needle forward. And so, you know, just briefly, the you know, theories that I come up with, you know, converging fiscal constraints, which are really thinking about the roles of federalism, the racial and class votes of people in capital and the cumulative effects of anti black racism. Those converging fiscal constraints and that I argue lead to the subsidy, that relative regional burden, which as you've helped us, the readers to recognize, is all underneath what I've called racial capitalism and this exclusion extraction two step that you're seeing. So in light of all of that, the question is, well then what kinds of policies honor that reality, right? Meaning that they are not, you know, putting band aids on a cancer sore, right? Like it's, it's not okay to identify all of these structural issues and then have individualistic solutions like oh, you just need to go to college, oh, you just need to get married. Oh, and we can think about all these things that are often floated as remedies to structural problems. And so I will just flag for those who would say, oh, black people just need to get married more often. I have a colleague who, who just wrote a book called Marriage Inequality. And, and so that that book is really highlighting how even when black people play by that rule, right, they don't get the same returns to their, um, to their, to even um, to marriage and pooling resources that way. Um, so anyway, so the policy recommendations that I have are come in different flavors, not only in terms of levels of social organization, but also what I would consider sort of medium and long term solutions. So the first one is to think about, just to remind ourselves that we're in the the imagination of Nixon and Reagan forward, which is that they slash taxes. So if we think about the tax, the marginal tax rate under Johnson before you had significant tax breaks to wealthy Americans and to corporations, you just. We really just have to start with that as a basic premise because what ended up happening was it was a. It was a one, two punch. Reagan famously said that government is the problem. And so he both started underfunding what we would call pro social health and education and other kinds of human services at the same time that he maintained or increased spending for the military and certainly under Nixon and Reagan also money for policing and other forms, prisons and other forms of social control. So we have to just start with that, that we just have less money in the public fisk in the first place place to negotiate. At least on the discretionary side of the budget, there's the mandatory spending. That's things like Medicare, Medicaid, sorry Medicare and Social Security. But on the discretionary side you've just, you just have less money that's even available for us to even fight over. So first thing I say is we need to raise taxes at the federal and state level so that there's just more money in the public fisc. And then we need to have these discussions about we spend the money on. So one is to raise taxes at. At the federal and state level so that then there's more money to allocate to local jurisdictions so that they're less reliant on property taxes, less reliant on these wealthy residents and the commercial investment. The next thing is to think about how you build coalitions then to actually have that money go to the pro social investments. So at the state level I think it's very important to think about again because local jurisdictions compete that they need to build coalitions that really think about how that that are that recognize all of their needs. So. So that would be an example of that wouldn't in Maryland was that Maryland does have one of the most progressive school aid formulas, meaning the state portion of the school K through 12 budget. And that is as progressive as it is, it's still not enough. But as progressive as it is because of a coalition between Prince George's county, the city of Baltimore, which is majority black and has a much greater share of economically distressed Marylanders and the Maryland Eastern Shore which has a large population of white folk who are poor, more economically distressed, stressed. And so that led to them pushing for increased spending overall on education, but also Money allocated for people who come from economically distressed homes, people who are English language learners, people who have learning disabilities. So that actually increased the budget from the state, which again helps the local governments to not be so reliant on their locally generated revenue. So that's one answer. It's also just these coalitions that need to be cross jurisdictional in states. But then we have to think about, you know, metro areas. And so what's complicated with federalism is that there really is no way way for states to coordinate with each other in the region. Right. So we have a national government that coordinates all 50 states and the territories, but not really the region. So the D.C. area, the DMV, there are certain things that they collaborate on, like say lamata, which is the metro system, the subway system, Washington metropolitan area transit authority. But we need more of those kinds of entities with all the constraints of Omada. Part of the constraints they face is really that they don't have dedicated funds funding. So within the constraints of federalism, I submit that we still need to think creatively about ways for metro areas to collaborate so that no one jurisdiction has the primary benefits of economic development and the other ones the burdens. And so I know that even again in the D.C. area they have this organization called the Council of Governments. And so they've shown proof of concept around things like, okay, we're going to buy salt in bulk because every winter we need salt. So that's great. Salt and bulk sounds like a good start start. But let's think about how we could have a way of considering the economic needs of families who are in distress and who are going to, if they don't make a living wage, therefore going to need to seek resources from the various governments within the region. So is there a way to pool resources so that counties that have more of those populations can actually be supported to allocate everything from food to housing support to the specific kinds of needs young people would have in schools. The other thing I think about is how to hold actors accountable who prey upon black jurisdictions. So one thing we didn't talk about, but that it's also important is that black folks still experience not only this sort of everyday weathering what I in the exclusive extraction two step called the slow speed of extraction, but there's also these fast speeds of extraction which we saw when mortgage lenders descended on black neighborhoods and gave them these toxic mortgages. So, so whereas they were excluded from the Federal Housing Administration backed mortgages that were, you know, fully amortized over the 30 years, you know, Meaningful, you know, even payments, low interest rates, no balloon payments. You know, those were the good mortgages that white folk got for the most part. But black folk got these toxic assets, which meant they had these escalating payments over time or balloon payments. They had variable interest rates. And those blew up in black people's faces. And you know, in the midst of the foreclosure crisis attached to the Great Recession. And in many ways that was even my entry point to Prince Rit was seeing how they were bleeding out from this acute shock, which was on top of this chronic condition that we've been discussing. So I argue that the bad actors, Wells Fargo, bank of America, we know who they are, the Justice Department, you know, did find them to some extent. But remember, the banks were too big to fail, but MLK Boulevard and Main street were not too big to fail. And so I argue that we need meaningful redress, you know, in these situations, such that those bad actors are held accountable not only for the harm they caused at the household level and the neighborhood level, but also for the lost revenue that local drift victims experience because of their loss revenue. So I, you know, this may take new legislation, but I think that there needs to be a way in which you're regulating market actors. And again, we have had deregulation. Not only have we had less tax revenue coming in, but we have had a process of deregulating market actors so that they can engage in these scrupulous behavior. So that's a regulatory regime that honors the needs of all Americans and does not privilege corporations and actually subsidize them them through our tax code. And then the final thing I argue for are what I call, and this is sort of the getting, you know, I've been going successively into sort of the longer term and, and, and sort of more expansive policies, but this would be the most expensive one is reparations, which is thinking about essentially all the different ways from slavery forward that this country has denied black people the resources that they, that they deserve as human beings, like everyone else in this country. And I, I often will say putting as much energy into, to fixing the problems that have been created through racial capitalism as you put the energy into creating them in the first place. And that means also I'm acknowledging that, you know, it's not just this, this household wealth gap, which by the way is like 8 to 1, meaning for every $8,000 a white family has, a black family has one, irrespective of class status, which shows us this cumulative effect of anti black racism and white domination. But really thinking about then how do we invest in people, households and neighborhoods and local jurisdictions in a way that honors the, that exclusion extraction two step. And so that does mean, yes, we can think about cutting a check to families that should have, should have realized wealth in certain ways that should have realized wealth, but have not been able to. But that's also thinking about how, you know, even things like the highways that were built that gutted black communities now have created these heat islands, you know, in places like New York, you could look at the South Bronx and you can look at parts of Manhattan that have, that have larger tree canopy compared to the South Bronx, which has a very little tree canopy. And it's something where like 10 to 15 degrees different, you know, during these, you know, these really hot days. And so, you know, that means when, you know, the, the federal state of local government is thinking about how to invest in New York City, you need to know the history of New York City and you need to target resources to the areas that we know have been deprived systematically of those resources. That means we're thinking about schools. We have to think about where the concentrations are of students who are in, you know, high need and targeting resources there that reflects that need. And so, so again, as much energy and creativity into the fixing and the imagining of flourishing as we have put into the hoarding and the exclusive aspects. And so another thing to remember, even if we're thinking just from an economic efficiency perspective, is this political fragmentation that we're experiencing at local jurisdiction levels or with school districts is actually really inefficient because you now have all of these separate entities trying to go it alone. And so you don't get the economies of scale, you don't get the, this commitment to collective flourishing. Right. I mean, you know, even the idea of a public education used to be grounded in an idea of a public good, something that benefited not just the individual but society writ large, where now it's a consumption idea, right? You know, you, you have school choice to be able to choose supposedly your best school. But I would submit that most white parents don't actively want school choice per se and actually used it, you know, or it exists in a way to sort of siphon energy off to kind of ameliorate the real needs that black families and Latin families have in a context for white families. Because of the way local jurisdictions work and school districts work, they just vote with their feet and move to a jurisdiction where they can hoard resources and then invest in their public schools. They don't need choice because they've already decided that they're going to choose to invest in this one political jurisdiction and make sure that their public schools work. And so I want us just to keep us to keep I want us to have our sociological and political imagination seeded for flourishing such that we really take a step back and think about if we were to design a society that truly meant that all of us would have our needs met, would we have federalism, such that we would have so much authority at the state level that leads to this kind of variation across states and then within states, so much variation across local jurisdictions. And so there may be ways in which this current regime still works, but I think we need to be courageous enough to say that a lot of it doesn't work work. And so then how do we move forward, whether that's in our courts, whether that's in our respective federal, state and local legislatures, to really reimagine. And so I think we start small with things like that coalition I was talking about for increasing the state budget for School eight. And then we start to build from there the momentum we need to both do the agenda setting and the prioritization with that agenda, and then the strategies that we're going to use to hold people in authority accountable and to then even more expensively reimagine, you know, what we want our founding documents to say, say about who we are. We can look across the world at other Western democracies and capitalist countries that do much better than we do, including those that have federal systems like Canada and France. And you don't see this level of geographic and racial and economic variation and experiences of rights that are sensibly either coming from the federal government or from the state government. And so we know it's not a matter of whether we can do better. We know we can do better. It's just a matter of having the political will to do that and truly seeing all Americans, all people that live in this country, citizenship, regardless of whether they're citizens, as fully human and worthy of that kind of investment.
- [64:32]
A
For listeners, the exclusion extraction 2 step is explained on pages 32 and 33 and on page 33, figure 1.3. A macro meso theory of racial and fiscal subordination. It gives you a visual representation of the data. Data as well. Dr. Sims, my final question is what do you hope this episode sparks for listeners?
- [64:59]
C
Well, first of all, thank you so much for such a wonderful conversation and I appreciate the detailed way in which you went through the book and have been able to point listeners to where to hear more about what I've brought up. So just thank you for your gracious and thorough reading of the book and drawing me out so beautifully. So I think the final thing I would say is it's kind of where I left off just a moment ago, which is to say I truly believe that, that we are stunted in terms of where we could be as a country. We could imagine a country where all people truly have their needs met. We know that there is enough for all of us to thrive. I think in the introduction, I talk about the fact that our GDP is something like 30 trillion, if I'm remembering correctly. So if we're just thinking about, like, the, the amount of resources that we have in this country, there is enough for all of us to thrive. My colleague Kinga Yamada Taylo says that, you know, we have to think about the fact that 400 billionaires is fundamentally connected to the fact that we have 40 million people in poverty and that inequality has grown since the 1970s and not. And not shrunk. Right. So these are policy decisions. And that, that even though it can be overwhelming to think about the scale of need and the scale of change that we need to have, it also shows you that this change over time reflects policy decisions. That means we can make different decisions. So my hope is that we would first of all see the stunting that we experience by virtue of continuing to reinforce racial capitalism rather than envision something else. And then I hope that once we're sober, as I said earlier about this reality, that we're then motivated, I hope we're not overwhelmed, but rather motivated to say, well, what can I do? Whether that's, you know, if you're someone who has children in this, in the school system, how can I actually look at the school budget and think about how, yes, I want my child to thrive, but also how this system might actually be reinforcing differences in access to resources across these social statuses of recent class. Whether that's a policy official who's listening, who's thinking about how to allocate the budgets, the budget for, you know, different kinds of public goods and services, and thinking, well, the local government doesn't have enough. Well, think about how you can work in concert with other local jurisdictions to actually petition the state to first of all, have the resources that you need and then to distribute them equitably. So I think we all have different lanes. And so I would hope that this book helps us to think soberly and strategically and gives us tools to think with as we're making those decisions and then ideas for how to move forward with a policy agenda and then also just for the kinds of what I would call consciousness raising amongst each other so that we truly see each other. And you know in scripture we talked about like not bearing false false witness against your neighbor. I feel like in many ways we bear false witness when we don't know each other's stories and when we don't see the broader social system and which we're all embedded in. So I hope this is an opportunity for us to see each other, to honor each other and then to decide to work together, shoulder to the plow together to actually create a society where all of us realize the potential that we have individually and collectively.
- [67:53]
A
Thank you so much for being here Dr. Sims and sharing fighting for a how government and markets undermine black middle class suburbia. You've been listening to Academic Life Life. Please join us again.