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Stereotyped as “model minorities” who excel in the classroom, Asian Americans are more highly educated than all other US groups. Once in the labor market, they outearn White Americans. Some believe this is evidence that White privilege, racial bias, and gender discrimination are fictitious narratives of a liberal “woke” agenda. Others use it as proof that confirms their stereotypes that Asian Americans are inherently smarter and harder working than other groups. While much attention has focused on Asian Americans’ academic achievement, far less research considers whether their later careers mirror their early success. In this issue of RSF, sociologists Jennifer Lee, Kimberly Goyette, Xi Song, and Yu Xie, management scholar Jackson G. Lu, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how Asian Americans fare in the workplace.

The ten articles in this issue examine the ways in which Asian Americans, because of geographic clustering, are advantaged at a national level but disadvantaged at the regional level; how gender, family, and marriage impact Asian Americans in the workplace; and the different ways Asian Americans strategically adapt to the labor market. Robert Manduca and Jane Furey reveal that while on aver-age Asian Americans outearn White Americans at a national level, when compared to Whites living in the same metropolitan area, Asians earn only 88 percent as much. Sharon Sassler and Gabrielle Sorresso find that among computer science professionals, Indian women have a larger gender wage gap than White and Chinese women and experience larger marriage and parenthood penalties in earnings. Sojung Lim and Wonjeong Jeong show that Asian women are more likely to live with extended family than White women, leading to higher rates of employment among Asian women with children. Angelina Grigoryeva finds that Asian Americans are more likely to receive stock-based compensation than White Americans because they are more likely to work in jobs where stock options are provided. Asians and Whites working in the same types of jobs are equally likely to receive stock-based compensation and in similar amounts. Shih-Chun “Steven” Chien and colleagues find that despite being the fastest-growing racial minority group entering the legal profession, Asian Americans are underrepresented in leadership positions. They attribute this pattern in part to employers’ pervasive stereotypes that Asian Americans lack traits typically associated with leadership, such as creativity and assertiveness.

This issue of RSF reveals that the perception of the Asian American advantage in the workplace is illusory, and the contributors shed light on the lived experiences of the “model minority” when it goes to work.

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In their seminal 1997 book Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein laid bare the strategies and challenges of low-income single mothers who were struggling to provide for their families. Even in an era when cash welfare was a federal entitlement, these women struggled to get by. In the thirty years since the book’s publication, many single parents wrestle with income volatility, precarious work schedules, and formal and informal economic support. In this double issue of RSF, economist Elizabeth O. Ananat, political scientist and public policy scholar Carolyn Y. Barnes, sociologists Sandra K. Danziger and Kathryn Edin, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how the policy landscape has changed since welfare reform and how it impacts low-income single mothers’ ability to make ends meet today.

Issue 1 has eight articles that examine how the traditional safety net has evolved and new supports that have been developed since Making Ends Meet. Sarah K. Bruch and colleagues assess changes to the social safety net since the 1990s and find that benefits have become more exclusive, have more constraints, and are less generous. Kelley Fong and Nora McCarthy reveal that, in an attempt to decrease child maltreatment, the child welfare system increasingly provides material resources to system-involved parents, including in-kind donations and assistance accessing childcare. However, parents often avoid obtaining resources through the system because it opens them up to increased state surveillance. Heather D. Hill and colleagues show that access to paid family and medical leave (PFML) varies greatly for single mothers, with two-thirds of single mothers living in states without PMFL.

Issue 2 looks at lessons that can be learned from COVID-era policies, how single mothers currently try to make ends meet, and men’s contributions to families. Natasha V. Pilkauskas and Kevin Bruey find that low-income single mothers, with and without employment, utilize a variety of public and private resources to make ends meet. Despite this, both groups face high levels of material hardship, including food and housing insecurity. Allison Dwyer Emory and colleagues show that nonresident fathers often have trouble making ends meet them-selves and are unable to make up for the loss of cash support post-welfare reform. 

This double issue of RSF showcases the persistence of precarity that low-income families face since Making Ends Meet.

"In this propulsive text, we learn that attending to patients’ social needs can inspire compassion and improve care. All too often, though, these needs are weaponized, stoke race and class tropes, and degrade care, with sometimes horrific results. A harrowing reminder of the urgent need for reform in patient care, Seen but Not Heard is a book that should be read by health researchers, policy makers, and healthcare practitioners alike."
—KATHRYN J. EDIN, William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University

"Seen but Not Heard is a powerful and unflinching book that exposes the profound gap between what health systems record and what patients actually live, revealing how inequality is not merely treated within clinical settings but often reproduced through them. Offering deeply humanizing accounts, Jennifer Silva and Annemarie Hirsch show how racism, poverty, gendered violence, and stigma are translated into medical shorthand, obscuring suffering while shaping care in consequential ways. Urgent and illuminating, this work challenges us to rethink the ethical limits of healthcare as a solution to social inequality and to imagine more just and humane approaches to healing."
—CELESTE WATKINS-HAYES, Joan and Sanford Weill Dean, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor, Jean E. Fairfax Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, and professor of sociology, University of Michigan

"Be careful what you wish for. Jennifer Silva and Annemarie Hirsch show in this gripping book that asking medical professionals to address social determinants of health may sow distrust and harm marginalized women’s well-being."
—STEFAN TIMMERMANS, professor of sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

Medical clinicians, who are already overworked and burned out, are increasingly expected to understand and treat systemic social issues like poverty and racism. One aspect of this is documenting patient’s social risk factors in electronic health records (EHRs). But EHRs do not always give the full story. Critically, they omit patients’ voices and perspectives about their lives, their care, and whether their needs are being met. In Seen but Not Heard, sociologist Jennifer M. Silva and epidemiologist Annemarie G. Hirsch explore the gaps between what clinicians document in EHRs and women’s lived experiences.

Drawing on interviews with 87 non-college-educated, economically disadvantaged women living in rural America and their health records from a large, nonprofit health system, Silva and Hirsch find that the stories that medical records provide and the stories that women tell about themselves differ dramatically. Medical charts often translate women’s suffering into sterile diagnostic codes, prescriptions, and treatment plans. Some women felt heard by their clinicians and believed they received adequate care. Many of these women thought their clinicians went above and beyond to help meet their needs by offering them information on how to apply for benefits like food stamps or childcare subsidies and helping them obtain necessary items like mattress covers and winter coats. More often, however, women felt that clinicians were detached from their everyday struggles to survive, whether that meant keeping their families intact even in the face of violence or finding money to pay the never-ending string of bills.

Silva and Hirsch argue that because the system of healthcare delivery interprets social problems as individual failings, it often reproduces long-standing injurious stereotypes of women as hysterical, recalcitrant, impure, and gluttonous. For some healthcare providers, knowledge about patients’ social risk factors can become a source of control and punishment, such as denying patients care or reporting patients to child welfare services. Patients described clinicians mobilizing harmful stereotypes about marriage and motherhood, race, and poverty during their appointments. Some of the women’s most traumatic experiences in the healthcare system were completely missing from their EHRs. These troubling experiences ultimately deter women from accessing healthcare, discourage them from sharing their experiences with clinicians, and in some cases, make their health and social problems worse. Silva and Hirsch offer several policies and practices that would improve women’s experiences in clinical encounters, such as training clinicians in trauma-informed and culturally responsive care, as well as making national investments in housing, food security, transportation, and environmental research.

Seen but Not Heard is a disturbing but necessary examination of the ways vulnerable women are often failed by the healthcare system and offers solutions that will allow healthcare workers to better address the structural barriers faced by their patients.

"Gender Flashpoints represents a vital contribution to understanding gender as both a major axis of social inequality and a central aspect of personal identity. Through a wide- ranging analysis of what we know about gender—coupled with original research on the activists who are shaping current debates—Abigail Saguy does a masterful job of shining light and lowering the heat on this important but increasingly contentious subject. Her fair- minded insights accomplish the remarkable feat of addressing the variety of issues that have divided scholars and political activists alike while also remaining above the fray. By providing a road map for thinking about the diverse points of disagreement, she has given us a brave book that is a gift to researchers, teachers, and students at all levels.”
—KATHLEEN GERSON, professor of sociology and Collegiate Professor of Arts and Science, New York University 

“Americans have been talking past each other on hot-button gender questions for decades, barely stopping to consider what each other is saying. Gender Flashpoints is a crucial gift: it lays out the terrain, the fissures, the assumptions, and the conflicts that these debates presume. People on all sides of sex and gender debates will find this guide essential.”
—ANDREW PERRIN, SNF-Agora Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University 

“Gender Flashpoints is a terrific book that should be required reading for scholars and students of sex and gender no matter the discipline. It provides a thick, nonjudgmental description of how different individuals and groups within and outside of feminism think about sex and gender. The book is novel and brave in this respect but also in its normative contribution: Abigail Saguy identifies both the collisions and the points of agreement that can provide the basis for rigorous dialogue and potential resolution.”
—DORIANE LAMBELET COLEMAN, Thomas L. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law

Americans are deeply divided about gender. Like other issues in the US, debates about gender are extremely polarized and can spark intense anger and conflict. These “gender flashpoints” include gender identity, gender and parenting, gender-neutral restrooms, the use of identifying pronouns, and participation in women’s sports. Even the term gender itself has become contested. In this divisive social context, advocates on both sides have reduced complex issues to all-or-nothing propositions. Many people are confused about these topics, embarrassed about what they do not know, or afraid that they will be called bigots if they say the “wrong thing.” In Gender Flashpoints, sociologist Abigail C. Saguy gets to the root of these major disagreements about gender.

Saguy interviews activists across the full political spectrum about a wide range of contemporary debates over gender to better understand points of contention as well as surprising areas of agreement. She finds that at the crux of many of these debates are disputes about the goals of gender-related advocacy, the strategies to achieve these goals, and whose rights are being advocated for. For example, when activists discuss pregnancy-related policy issues, there is disagreement as to whether the term pregnant person or pregnant woman should be used. While some believe pregnant person affirms the existence of nonbinary people and trans men, others believe it erases women. These differences often appear to be simply about language, but they are, in fact, disagreements about worldviews, identities, and legitimacy.

One of the conflicts Saguy dives into is the issue of gender-neutral restrooms. She finds when interviewing different activists about what they thought of the topic that they initially repeated the familiar, mainstream polarized discourse. LGBTQ+ activists and mainstream feminists emphasized the importance of restroom access, especially for transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists emphasized women’s and girls’ vulnerability and need for privacy and safety in public restrooms. Across the political spectrum, activists spoke about how those on the “other side” were unwilling to engage in productive dialogue. However, Saguy also finds that activists on both sides recognized the complexity of the issue and agreed on the need for public bathrooms that provide everyone with greater safety and privacy. Activists across the spectrum showed enthusiasm for desegregated public restrooms that include an open space for sinks and mirrors—along with toilets with European style, floor-to-ceiling doors. Saguy advocates for engaging in dialogue about charged issues, such as gender-neutral bathrooms, in order to help identify workable solutions to seemingly intractable social problems.

Gender Flashpoints is a fascinating and comprehensive view of the deeply personal and divisive topic of gender that offers hope for finding common ground and a path forward.

“Normalizing Inequality offers a compelling and deeply insightful examination of how people living amid stark economic and racial disparities interpret and navigate the inequalities that shape their everyday lives. A beautifully written and groundbreaking contribution to the study of race, ethnicity, immigration, class, and political culture in the United States.”
—LORRIE FRASURE, Ralph J. Bunche Endowed Chair and professor of political science and African American studies, University of California, Los Angeles

“Normalizing Inequality is a timely and exceptional book that carefully unpacks how members of the precarious middle class make sense of inequality in their own lives and in the broader social world. Focusing on four racial groups in California, it offers new insights into how people understand the origins of inequality—particularly as it relates to class, race, and immigration— and how they perceive its consequences and explain its persistence. By identifying the interpretive strategies people use to downplay structural constraints while emphasizing agency and individualism, G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel show how everyday beliefs—shaped by enduring narratives of the American Dream—can normalize inequality and contribute to its reproduction. The result is a nuanced and powerful analysis of the cultural dimensions of stratification in contemporary America.”
—DINA OKAMOTO, Class of 1948 Herman B. Wells Professor, Department of Sociology, Indiana University 

“As an economist by training, I have long documented the widening inequality in America— and how that process has played out on steroids in my home state of California. In this brilliant book, two daughters of the Golden State bring both their own experience and an amazing wealth of interviews to take on a key question: how do those who are part of the ‘precarious middle’ make sense of their experience in an economy that seems to be foreclosing their mobility? G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel stress that people are not fooled: they are aware of the structural forces limiting their progress and they rely on individualist stories that offer the glimmer of an escape route. Noting that the belief that hard work can overcome hard luck is even more prevalent for Black and Latino residents facing multiple barriers, the authors bring complexity to a subject too important to be ignored. Elegantly written and analytically rich, Normalizing Inequality smartly offers extended stories and quotes in which they let those they study speak for themselves. A remarkable contribution to sociological practice, this volume is essential for those working to restore the promise of the American and California Dream.”
—MANUEL PASTOR, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change, University of Southern California

California has long been mythologized as the quintessential land of opportunity and reinvention—a place where anyone, regardless of origin, can forge a new life and realize their aspirations. Yet beneath this gilded narrative lies a starker reality: California ranks among the most unequal states in one of the world’s most unequal countries, where the middle class finds itself increasingly squeezed. Economic inequality is not an anomaly but part of a broader global phenomenon, as disparities deepen across the world. While we know a lot about its contours, its evolution over time, and its intersections with race and immigration, we understand far less about how ordinary people interpret and internalize it. In Normalizing Inequality, sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel illuminate how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept the inequalities that surround them.

Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys, Mora and Paschel uncover a profound paradox at the heart of middle-class consciousness. They find that Californians are keenly aware of the systemic causes of inequality—they recognize policies engineered to benefit the wealthy, and they acknowledge how structural racism makes it hard for some groups to get ahead—yet they consistently minimize these forces. Instead, they gravitate toward explanations rooted in individualism, moral character, and the idea that things are worse in other places. Racism and racial inequality in California become palatable when framed as “not as bad as the South.” Immigrant exploitation, however severe, transforms into evidence of the American Dream fulfilled simply upon arrival. Economic pressures that displace others become surmountable through personal industriousness and forbearance.

These beliefs about inequality grow more troubling still. Middleclass Californians sometimes blame disempowered people for their circumstances—acknowledging structural barriers facing homeless and undocumented populations while simultaneously faulting them for insufficient drive or criminal behavior that compounds their difficulties. When contemplating California’s future, interviewees envision economic prosperity propelled by technological innovation, yet remain curiously unconcerned with how present inequalities might shape that tomorrow. Their imagined future is one where White and Asian American populations thrive, while Black, Latino, and economically marginalized Californians either vanish through displacement or fade into irrelevance. As respondents use these interpretive frameworks to make sense of inequality, they lean heavily on California’s foundational narratives of opportunity, sanctuary, and multiracial promise.

Normalizing Inequality offers an incisive examination of how ordinary citizens make sense of inequality and, through that very process of sense-making, how they tolerate and passively reproduce the conditions they often claim to deplore.

“Inside Jobs is a landmark study of prison labor practices in the US, past and present. Instead of viewing penal labor in isolation, Adam Reich locates it on a broader field of ‘outside’ labor markets, production regimes, labor struggles, and social and political developments. The result is a distinctive and deeply rewarding account of prison labor, the conflicts that surround it, and how and why they have changed over time. Inside Jobs is carefully researched and beautifully written. It should appeal to undergraduate students and deserves to be widely read by scholars, advocates, and practitioners inside and outside of government.”
—JOE SOSS, Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

“With intellectual range, moral clarity, and a keen sociological eye, Adam Reich has produced a remarkable book. In Inside Jobs, he offers a compelling account of the long and changing relationship between prison labor and the American labor market. Refusing to treat prison as a world apart, he shows how ideas about work, discipline, freedom, and coercion have been produced through the prison and then carried beyond it. Ambitious in scope and clear in argument, this is an important book.”
—SANDRA SUSAN SMITH, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice and faculty chair for the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School

“Adam Reich has written a brilliant and inspiring book about prison labor in the United States. It’s beautifully written, full of stories, and a must-read for everyone who cares about the future of workers in the US. Inside Jobs digs deeply into the interconnections between the criminal punishment system, wage labor, and the development of American capitalism. It reminds us of how racism undergirds everything related to workers and the US economy. This book will be a great tool for organizing forward to create a more fair and just economy and a criminal justice system that is actually rooted in equity and justice.”
—MADELINE JANIS, ESQ., executive director, Jobs to Move America

From the stone quarries of Sing Sing that supplied marble for early New York City landmarks to twenty-first-century construction projects staffed by formerly incarcerated workers, Inside Jobs traces the relationship between prison work and the labor market over the past two hundred years. Sociologist Adam Reich demonstrates how prison labor has repeatedly been used to solve economic problems—disciplining workers, lowering labor costs, managing unemployment—revealing unexpected connections that challenge our assumptions about freedom, coercion, and labor itself.

Reich examines the history of work in prisons to understand how it has related to the free labor market. He finds that the organization of prison work, and debates over it, have changed dramatically over time. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, prisons helped shape the emerging factory system as the apprentice-based labor market gave way to industrial production. Labor unions opposed prison labor as immoral, and in the early to mid-twentieth century, the moral character of the workforce became central to economic life within the prison and without. Therapeutic professionals worked in prisons to rehabilitate the incarcerated and determine what motivated them to work. Following prison uprisings in the late twentieth century, prison work became a tool of population control. Yet, paradoxically, work programs were remodeled to mirror the free labor market, requiring applications and hiring processes.

Blending archival research, political economy, and sociological theory, Inside Jobs offers a powerful new framework for understanding mass incarceration and reentry today. Reich examines how the dynamics of mass incarceration have begun to shift. He explores how the “mark of a criminal record”—the stigma traditionally associated with felony convictions—has given way to a “market” for criminal records, as employers discover advantages in hiring disadvantaged, dependent, and disciplined workers recently released from prison. Looking toward the future, Reich focuses on promising efforts to transform this system.

Inside Jobs is an illuminating examination of prison work’s history, its relationship to work outside prison walls, and how the criminal justice system disempowers workers both behind bars and beyond.

A volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

“The future of our democracy depends on who learns to lead, and how. Veronica Terriquez’s inspiring and carefully researched book shows how youth organizations combine care, critical consciousness, and civic skills to enable a new generation to advance immigrant rights, racial justice, and social equity. By focusing on those who face some of the highest barriers in exercising their political voice, Learning to Lead advances our understanding of political socialization and provides actionable lessons for political change.”
—IRENE BLOEMRAAD, University of British Columbia

“In this remarkable volume, Veronica Terriquez draws upon decades of research and a lifetime of commitment to offer a definitive study of youth organizing for social justice. An organizer in her own younger days, Terriquez combines theoretical and empirical rigor with a rich suite of stories that give us a nuanced and real-world sense of what really drives youth to join groups and pursue change. In her capable hands, often overused terms like ‘intersectionality’ are made concrete as she illustrates how youth themselves connect various dimensions of oppression and experience to weave together common purpose. For those who wish to support young people on their journey to leadership, this volume offers key lessons, stressing that political socialization requires putting together supportive services, civic education, and the learning by doing that comes from policy engagement. There is no one who knows this landscape better than Veronica Terriquez—and it shows. Learning to Lead is a must-read for anyone interested in social movements, immigrant incorporation, and youth development.”
—MANUEL PASTOR, University of Southern California

Children of immigrants make up more than one in four people in the United States under the age of thirty. Amid today’s multipronged attacks on immigrant communities and growing threats to democratic participation, these young people often encounter significant barriers to political participation. Despite these challenges, some children of immigrants and refugees engage in nonpartisan grassroots campaigns, addressing issues such as education, health, environmental justice, immigrant rights, housing, and voting rights. In Learning to Lead, sociologist Veronica Terriquez examines how youth organizing groups facilitate the civic and political engagement of low-income, second-generation immigrant adolescents, enabling them to collectively exercise power alongside their non-immigrant peers and adult allies.

Drawing on extensive surveys, semi-structured interviews, and other data, Terriquez shows that nonprofit youth organizing groups strengthen adolescents’ capacity to address the systemic challenges facing their communities through political engagement. These groups generally share a commitment to supporting young people’s healthy development, offer a critical form of civics education, and provide extensive guidance on how to participate in civic life. They adapt their programming in response to local demographic and political dynamics.

Many adolescents who join grassroots organizing groups face overlapping stresses related to poverty, immigration status, neighbor-hood violence, and other hardships. In response, youth organizing groups create spaces that support emotional well-being while also encouraging academic success and job readiness. They help young people develop a critical understanding of social inequality, power, and public policy. This education often motivates immigrant and refugee youth to work with their non-immigrant Black and Indigenous peers and deepens their understanding of the historical, economic, and political roots of community problems, as well as potential policy solutions. Organizing groups also provide these youth with sustained, hands-on training in how to collectively exercise their voice in policy debates and government elections, effectively offering civic apprenticeships. Staff and experienced members mentor newer participants in basic civic skills such as public speaking, event planning, and community out-reach, while also coaching them on strategies for mobilizing peers and adult allies to contribute to nonpartisan campaigns.

Adolescents who participate in youth organizing during high school tend to remain highly active in civic life into early adulthood. Terriquez concludes that these groups offer important lessons for schools and other youth-serving institutions seeking to strengthen engagement in a multiracial democracy.

Learning to Lead offers a thorough examination of how young people acquire the capacities to become a meaningful political force.

"Prince George’s County is a Wakanda of sorts. Its majority-Black residents enjoy higher incomes, stronger homeownership, and longer life expectancy than residents in many places—indeed, more than those in many non-Black-majority areas. As a resident, I affectionately call it ‘Black bougie heaven,’ proudly celebrating its strengths. Angela Simms’s rigorous work shows, however, that as remarkable as PG County is, it could be even better in a world without racism. Fighting for a Foothold invites readers from all places to remove the drags of racism that throttle growth that would otherwise occur."
—ANDRE M. PERRY, senior fellow and director, Center for Community Uplift, Brookings Institution

"Fighting for a Foothold reveals the connection between a long legacy of racist policies in America and the struggle among local leadership in an iconic middle-class Black suburb to provide residents with the kinds of amenities that are taken for granted in neighboring middle-class White suburbs. In doing so, Angela Simms shows middle-class Black homeowners and their elected officials face an uphill battle as they attempt to reap the benefits of living in one of the most coveted spaces in the country—the suburbs."
—KARYN LACY, associate professor of sociology, University of Michigan

Prince George’s County, Maryland, is a suburban jurisdiction in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and is home to the highest concentration of Black middle-class residents in the United States. As such, it is well positioned to overcome White domination and anti-Black racism and their social and economic consequences. Yet Prince George’s does not raise tax revenue sufficient to provide consistent high-quality public goods and services. In Fighting for a Foothold, sociologist Angela Simms examines the factors contributing to Prince George’s financial troubles.

Simms draws on two years of observations of Prince George’s County’s budget and policy development processes, interviews with nearly 60 Prince George’s leaders and residents, and budget and policy analysis for Prince George’s County and its two Whiter, wealthier neighbors, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia. She argues legacy and ongoing government policies and business practices—such as federal mortgage insurance policy prior to 1968, local government reliance on property taxes, and private investment patterns—have resulted in disparities in wealth accumulation between Black and White Americans, not only for individuals and families but local jurisdictions as well. Prince George’s County has a lower cost of living than its Whiter, wealthier neighbors. As the most affordable county bordering D.C., it attracts a disproportionate share of the region’s core middle-class, lower middle-class, working class, and low-income residents, resulting in greater budget pressure.

Prince George’s uses the same strategies as majority-White jurisdictions to increase revenue, such as taxing at similar rates and vying for development opportunities but does not attain the same financial returns. Ultimately, Simms contends Prince George’s endures “relative regional burden” and that the county effectively subsidizes Whiter counties’ wealth accumulation. She offers policy recommendations for removing the constraints Prince George’s County and other majority-Black jurisdictions navigate, including increased federal and state taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations, which will enhance the capacity for government to distribute and redistribute resources equitably; increased state-level funding of public goods and services, which would decrease local jurisdictions’ reliance on locally-generated tax revenue; and the creation of equity funds to remediate harms inflicted upon Black Americans.

Fighting for a Foothold is an in-depth analysis of the fiscal challenges experienced by Prince George’s County and by the suburban Black middle-class and majority-Black jurisdictions, more broadly. The book reveals how race, class, and local jurisdiction boundaries in metropolitan areas interact to create different material living conditions for Americans.