Desmond finds hope for a transcending scenario in polls showing that most Americans believe the economy benefits the rich and harms the poor; that the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes; and that there should be a $15 federal minimum wage. Invoking “abolition” as a mantra for the transformation that needs to occur aptly describes his ambition, though advocates for racial equity or reparation for the legacy of slavery, redlining and other forms of racial oppression may wince at his call for universal strategies for all races. The deep irony is that anti-Black policy and rhetoric were central to the creation of savage systems of inequality that harm everyone, and anti-Black processes continue to sustain segregation. But direct efforts to repair the economic and social damage to Black people inevitably produces backlash or is weaponized by the political right to woo voters, as was done with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Desmond admits that Black people have been disproportionately harmed, especially from historic and contemporary redlining and discrimination in housing. But he suggests that the universal reforms he recommends would disproportionately benefit Blacks while broadening political coalitions to end poverty.

This is an important debate. For my part, I have called for the abolition of America’s residential caste system and argued in support of policies that promote racial equity and repair for historically defunded Black neighborhoods — and the citizens who have most suffered predation and disinvestment by government and private institutions. And I applaud local governments that are doing this work. But in wrestling with the conundrum of how to repair the damage of anti-Black racism, I have also been greatly influenced by the late stage thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and contemporary Black civil rights visionaries. They pursued a fusion politics that Desmond also admires.

In the final months of his life, Dr. King envisioned a national Poor People’s Campaign that intentionally built a multiracial coalition to demand an economic bill of rights. In the 2010s, Reverend William Barber II successfully led the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and recently revived a Poor People’s Campaign that brings conservative poor whites into the movement for economic fairness. The North Carolina movement paid off in 2023 expansions to Medicaid in the state, for example. They are a sign of hope in a nation riven by division, racism and hate. I see traction for a bold politics that joins the aspirations of all economically oppressed people, similar to the exciting rhetoric and moral claims of the new-South “Justins” who are building multiracial power in Tennessee by speaking to a rainbow of humans seeking freedom from gun violence and oppression of all kinds. The alternative is more of the same, a nation divided, with systems that elevate the wealthy — and crush others.