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I am a mixed-methods researcher, educator, and movement partner focused on deepening our collective understanding of racial and economic inequality, and our distrust of the stories this country tells about opportunity. I am currently Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at UCLA.
My work starts from a puzzle: Black unemployment rates have never been lower, so is it time to celebrate? To examine these dynamics, I center the experiences of Black jobseekers, Black workers and Black families to expose the economic and cultural factors that reproduce material injustice for Black Americans. In doing so, I’ve studied poverty, social mobility, the labor market, intra-racial class conflict, and the ideological underpinnings of racial capitalism displayed by institutions and online.
In my first book, Problem Solved: The Modern Making of Black Working Poverty (forthcoming in 2027), I show how the programs and policies built to fix Black unemployment, quietly keep it in place. I've also co-edited Inequality in the 21st Century with David Grusky, and I'm at the start of a new manuscript, Dying to Work, on the Black women and men who do the country's care and security work.
Alongside my academic work, I try to write, teach, and build tools that support movements to make change and shift public conversation on policy issues. I also occasionally share resources on getting into and surviving academia and blog, very infrequently, about stuff I’m doing.
You can reach me via email at [email protected]
