Backtalker; An American Memoir; Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, 2026

Overall, I’d say that in the 1960s most folks shared the belief that prejudice did play a significant role in racist conditions, and that there was hope that well intentioned people could actively diminish prejudice…Folks debated whether it was more important to just cut to the chase by creating the world that would have existed if anti-Blackness had not been a core set of ideas for so long in American History.

In fact, I was the one who was surprised when, on one occasion, the school (Heritage Christian, Canton Ohio) had the bright idea to reverse the bus route so that everyone could see where everyone lived. When we approached the homes of our rural neighbors, I was shocked to see ramshackle houses with abandoned vehicles strewn about, windows covered with plastic, and a tarp thrown over a partially covered roof. But this was nothing compared to what shocked my (white) fellow bus mates. They seemed far more curious about how my family had come to live in our home… (Her brother Mantel); “Oh, right–they think Mom is a live-in maid. So like, we couldn’t actually live here because Black people don’t live in anything white people would want! (A number of white families had moved out of the neighborhood when Kim’s family moved in.)

The Cherry-Market corridor was the center of Black Canton, the setting for virtually every event or story about us that was told by us–in living rooms, beauty parlors, barbershops, church pews, bars, social clubs–you name it.

Yet despite its centrality for us, despite the hopes and hard work and pride of ownership that so many had poured into their little piece of the American dream, nothing that flowed through the arteries of Black Canton prevented it from being slated for physical and psychological destruction. It was a destruction that began years before the bulldozers reduced it all to rubble. The process of draining this community of its blood before taking its life was done under a truly Orwellian misnomer: “urban renewal”…In the end, this long-term decapitalization-“misappropriation” would be more accurate–took such a toll on my mother’s real estate holdings that they were worth less in the 1970s than they had been when my grandfather purchased them in the 1930s.

It’s been estimated that between 1949 and 1973, 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 American cities were destroyed, dispossessing nearly one million people.

Two events, the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill hearings in 1991, and the O.J Simpson murder trial in 1994 where Simpson was acquitted led to Kim’s pioneering work on intersectionality.

I sought to articulate a both/and position; it was about race and it was about gender. Especially after the 1991 Thomas-Hill debacle; this was not  an unfamiliar position for me. But something new was emerging that hadn’t fully taken shape in that earlier spectacle. Colorblindness was becoming a shared point of departure among mainstream pundits, reporters, feminists, and others who collectively repudiated any concerns about racism as a potential factor in the investigation and at Simpson’s trial…In a sense, colorblindness itself was on trial…Put together, these two moments further convinced me that racial justice could not be sustained without a thorough rethinking of patriarchy…In absolute numbers, there were more white men who supported O.J. than there were African Americans in the entire country.

The freedom to think, to learn, to agitate, and to talk back are essential to a free society. Yet these freedoms have always been contested, especially when exercised by those at the margins. That our government can appropriate law to banish critiques of the status quo, changing the rules about which racial histories can be taught and which experiences can be acknowledged, is not a healthy feature of a robust democracy. It is a sign of a dying one.

In the same way that we must bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, legal education must grapple with the law’s role in creating the conditions that still hobble our efforts to stand together as a nation. It must equip future generations with the critical tools necessary to move us farther away from our troubled past, not doom us to repeat it.

But tension and contradiction abound throughout my life, reflecting a complex dance with the notion of “we”-of race, of gender, of nation, of humanity–that can never be complete, not ever fully abandoned.

America, U.S.A.; How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries: Eddie S. Glaude Jr. 2026

The Nation (March 21, 1872 and July 6, 1871) celebrated the death of Reconstruction and declared  that “the ‘negro’ will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him”. Black people would be banished, made invisible. They would not be imagined as Americans but, rather as problems that America had to address: either wards, victims, or mindless creatures destined to toil.

To be seen as a problem, to be approached as an object of charity, and to be managed by the state — this made of Black people empty vessels to be filled with the musings and terrors of those who lived among them but who did not really see or know them. And when the actual lives of Black people intruded upon the fantasies of white America — when the demands to be treated as human beings exposed the lies at the heart of the nation — the response, again, shifted from sentimentality to rage, one easily becoming the other. The whip of the whirlwind.

As those who had rebelled and lost used violence to regain control of the South, many of (Frederick) Douglass’s so-called white liberal friends now sought some kind of conciliation. Disremembering justified their capitulation to the violence. The purposeful forgetting of the reasons for the war and need for Reconstruction allowed them to blot out what the past revealed. Douglass understood that this disremembering made space for reunion Between Americans from the North and South struggling with a sense of national identity in the aftermath of a war that baptized the country in blood. But in the dismembering, Black people were cast aside and made the repositories of our national fears of the dark. Such a partition allowed for white Americans a retreat into the comfort of illusions — the storybook that affirmed the goodness of the country despite the evils right under our noses.

Douglass was speaking some eighty years later. Slavery was no more. The Civil War amendments had been ratified. That much was true. But the fever dream had spiked again, and Black people were subject to unimaginable violence as the nation turned its back and prepared to celebrate its freedom. Douglass had to refute and refuse the illusion.

He reached for words to encourage a different kind of refusal than the one Moses Gordon chose. We could not abdicate our responsibility to one another, no matter how much white Americans in the South raged or how passively others stood by and let them do it. He reached for the Revolution of 1776, not to celebrate or glorify its heroes, but to call out an analog to what Black people now faced as the country prepared a centennial celebration that would cast aside any pretense to racial justice.

“The fathers of this Republic, as I have said, had their trial ninety-nine years ago. The colored citizens of this Republic, are about about have their trial now. How we shall stand that trial, how we shall pass through it, how we shall come out of it, is to me a matter of great solemnity. The men of the Revolution went through the furnace, and came out pure gold. Shall we, the colored people, present a similar example?” …”We are the creatures of a conflict of social elements which we did but little to create. The white people of this county quarreled and came to blows, and it was our lot to be on the side of the victorious party…Men cannot, ought not and will not quarrel and fight forever.”

He understood what was happening: the (1876) centennial celebrations would tell a story of the nation that rejoiced in reunion, and that reunion required the erasure of Black people. The event would be a national affair in which the “silvery notes of peace and unity” from sacred places in our national history would render the true cause of the Civil War invisible in a national ritual of disremembering. The country would revel in its technological advancements, as capitalists celebrated America’s economic resolve despite the Panic of 1873, and as white people reasserted superiority of white Anglo-Saxon blood. An idea of America, alabaster white, would arise from the ashes of war and Reconstruction.

Douglass was clear: “Peace among the whites” means horrors for us. Politically, culturally, and existentially. This was not an abstract conclusion. The violence in the South, the active indifference to that violence in the North, and the dead bodies left in the wake made it real.

Philadelphia journalist J.W. Forney; “that the great show of the American peoples industry and independence will close with one link in the chain of its complete history left out. Although the chains of slavery have been broken…,the prejudice against him…have prevented him from taking any part or having a prominent part of this marvelous undertaking in celebration of one hundred years of American independence.”

Historian Eric Foner: “What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure…If racism contributed to the undoing of Reconstruction, by the same token Reconstruction’s demise and the emergence of blacks as a disenfranchised class of dependent laborers greatly facilitated racism’s further spread, until by the early twentieth century it had become more deeply embedded in the nation’s culture and politics than at an time since the beginning of the antislavery crusade and perhaps in our entire history.”

In 1975, white America was in full retreat from the gains and promises of the civil rights movement. Proponents of Black Power and activist groups had concluded that the country refused to change–that it could not change without revolution.

Bicentennial Blues by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson;

• America has got the blues and it’s a bicentennial edition
• America has got the blues
• It’s got the blues because of partial deification
• Of Partial accomplishments
• Over partial periods of time
• Halfway justice
• Halfway liberty
• Halfway equality
• It’s a half-ass year

Your country? Your history? No. It is ours. Our sweat and tears have shaped this land. You feel us in the music; our sound rolls off your tongue. Our presence fills your classic literature. Our wails and moans, our joys and laughter, make this place swing. Your country? No. The bars of music that begin each chapter of this book suggest otherwise. And no matter your efforts to make us invisible or to deny the history of the country that unravels your myths and legends, we know America would not be America without us.

The Blind Spot; How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy, Jeffrey Winters, 2026

For oligarchs, voting is meaningless compared to how their wealth influences politics and society literally all the time…They fund candidates that protect the rich, fund think tanks to produce ideas justifying oligarchic agendas, and buy up the media that pump those ideas into society…And, as we will see, there is no area where this power is more impactful than in the epic fight over progressive taxation–the primary tool that democracies around the world use as they try to stem rising inequality. Heavy taxes on the ultra-rich, both individually and on the corporations they own, are the last chance we get to keep extreme inequality in check…Forbes reports that the US was home to about 900 billionaires in 2025, with $6.8 trillion in combined net worth. Most of that had never been taxed.

A small cushion of wealth provides an elevating safety net to fall back on; it allows for choices, buys precious time in difficult moments, and is fortifying psychologically. It must be viewed as absolutely necessary for all human beings. The problem is that most people in the world have no access to this most basic form of security; while a few are mindlessly hoarding everything they can and gearing up for an oligarchic transfer of tens of trillions of dollars tax-free to their immediate heirs.

The Gini index is reported on a scale between 0 and 100, where 0 means prefect economic equality across the population and 100 means perfect inequality — that is, everything has somehow been grabbed by a single person. (The wealth Gini for the world is 88; Sweden is 87, the USA is 83, Europe is 81.)

For the years 2014 to 2018, the 25 wealthiest American families paid a mere 3.4 percent. Warren Buffet paid 0.1 percent, Jeff Bezos paid 0.98, and Michael Bloomberg paid 1.3. Across half a century, these relentless oligarchic victories over taxation have fueled an epidemic of inequality in America and the related descent into open political warfare.

Alexander Hamilton James Madison

The converging crisis of the mid 1870s taught the (Constitutional) convention (1787) delegates two kinds of lessons reflecting two kinds of fear. One was that too much democracy and empowerment of the people could produce policies unacceptable to oligarchs. The other was that too little democracy could result in mass protests that could become volatile. What was especially worrying about all the debt relief and paper money legislation was that so many state senates had failed the test of protecting the rich…Randolph argued that, at the state level, senates were too close to the masses and too easily intimidated by unrest. Control had to shifted upward within a steep pyramid of power.

The result of 1787 was the Constitution (less all the amendments) we have today with a national senate, a president with veto power, and a high court that can override federal laws.

In 2006 Congress passed a whistleblower law for revealing tax fraud that offered a reward of up to 30 percent of the funds the IRS collects. In 2007, Bradley Birkenfeld, a UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) employee, came forward with incrimination information. “Without Mr. Birkenfeld walking in the door of the Department of Justice in the summer of 2007,  I (Kevin Downing) doubt as of today this massive fraud scheme would have been discovered by the US government.”

Birkenfeld received $104 million but spent thirty months in prison for his efforts.

Charles P. Rettig, who was the IRS commissioner in 2023, said that the actual number was “about $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year.”..For perspective, the tax gap in 1974 was only $40 billion…With Rettig’s estimated $1 trillion in taxes going unpaid every year, it means the very rich are constantly adding hundreds of billions to their wealth through non-compliance and defeating the tax system.

We’ve arrived at a paradox where oligarchs are more visible than they’ve been in 150 years while their wealth is more invisible than ever…As we’ve seen, three of the most important weapons in the oligarchic arsenal are complexity, secrecy, and infiltration. Complexity, created deliberately be the Wealth Defense Industry, is deployed as a squid deploys ink. The secrecy that hides wealth and financial dealing is a core concession to oligarchs by governments–most evident in their reluctance to demand an answer to the most basic political-economic question: who owns an asset? And infiltration is the placement of oligarchic foot soldiers in strategic government offices to ensure key regulations tilt strongly in favor of the rich.

With multi tiered (20 or more) partnerships with half a million partners or more and pass throughs replacing corporations, driven entirely by tax advantages for oligarchs, tax collection is virtually impossible. Two Congressional efforts to reign in this chaos The Enablers Act and the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) both failed. 

The CTA had a very simple goal — to document “beneficial ownership.” By now, it is apparent that, in the hall of mirrors that is the world of assets, income, and ownership, there are scores of entities that range from actual people to creations on paper that can, at least financially, do everything an actual person can do except have a heartbeat. All of these constructed substitutes for persons–companies, shell corporations, shelf corporations, trusts, foundations, and so on — ultimately represent, somewhere, buried under multiple layers and tiers of concealment, real breathing persons who are the owners, the beneficiaries, the controllers and deciders, beyond whom there is nothing else. Sometimes there are so many hidden intermediaries that there is a need to refer to the “true” beneficial owners.

The CTA was the US government’s attempt to find out who owned what, their names, and where they were. Having that information makes it far easier to confront threatening groups or actors, discover how trillions of dollars in illicit funds are hidden, moved, and laundered, and sometimes intercept dangerous peoples before they can do great harm. On this occasion (the 2021 Defense Authorization Act), oligarchs were late to the game, in part because wealth defense specialist hadn’t been paying attention…It was a costly oversight… The CTA became law on 1 Jan 2021 with strong bipartisan support.

It was in March 2025 that the bombshell hit…the executive branch was now under the control of a new administration with no interest in corporate transparency…”All entities created in the United States — including those previously known as ‘domestic reporting companies’–and their beneficial owners are now exempt from the requirement to report beneficial ownership information.“..By executive fiat, over 99 percent of all companies that had been required to register no longer had to do so….The law was still there, but it had been completely gutted.

The politics of preparation

The second level of our challenge to oligarchy (after progressive taxation) is deeper, focusing on changes that become possible only during the politics of crisis, when oligarchs are at their weakest. During ruptures, the decision-makers oligarchs rely on face pressure to focus their priorities on stabilizing the society. That certainly can included default responses that shore up oligarchy itself, but that is not necessarily the case. It is in the nature of crises that those in charge become far more willing to consider policies and solutions that would be unthinkable during the politics of the ordinary. They can do this because emergencies often require extreme actions and because they are less afraid of the ways oligarchs can punish. After all, oligarchs themselves are in disarray during these ruptures and also want restabilization, even if that means significant concessions they would ordinarily oppose bitterly…When a rupture happens. two things matter most; how well organized citizens are to pursue their interests, and what major changes are prepared to be implemented. A high state of readiness in such moments enables change that is transformative and lasting.

Wealth inequality arises at two sites. The first is the labor market, where inequality unfolds at our places of employment. Many impactful things can be done there to constrain oligarchs–enacting laws that facilitate rather than block unionization, raising minimum wages, having employees own significant shares of their workplaces, and indexing compensation of employees to compensation for the highest levels of management and ownership, just to start.

The other site is after the dust has settled on these income, compensation, and wealth gains. This is where we address inequality through redistribution. Confronting political structures that uphold oligarchy– like unrepresentative lower houses, senates, supreme courts, and presidential vetoes–is unusually hard. Enacting policies for the redistribution via the tax system has not only been a realm of great success but one where the victories has been so substantial that oligarchs were forced to retreat into tax evasion as they fought to reduce the tax rates. There are two large lessons to draw from this; the progressive tax victories of the past must be won again and stronger, and the maneuvers of the Wealth Defense Industry has devised to subvert redistribution must be answered. That means dismantling the mazes of complexity the industry has built, forcing an end to ownership secrecy, and closing the industry’s revolving door with government.

There is no greater threat to oligarchy than transparency…This extreme secrecy can be defeated. In the US, enacting policies like the Enablers Act and Corporate Transparency Act will deal a major blow. We must also turn the Wealth Defense Industry against its creators by forcing its many branches to monitor and report suspicious financial activity–with stiff penalties including imprisonment for failing to do so.

Although it’s a tough sell, democratic populations around the world must support dramatically stronger tax agencies. Larger budgets, more auditors, and more technology will only hurt oligarchs.

In 1922, American oligarchs faced fifty-six brackets. After the Second World War, the highest bracket was over 90 percent. By 2026, there were just seven brackets with the highest rate being 37 percent. Having two or three dozen tax brackets, with the highest being over 80 percent is an important goal.

The immediate goal must be to impose two kinds of taxes on oligarchs–a true income tax on annual gains in the value of oligarchic fortunes, and wealth tax on the total current value of those riches.

Oligarchs enjoy substantial annual increases on their assets, but this income is rarely taxed unless it is “realized” by selling the assets. This is a pure concession to the rich that fuels inequality and serves no positive social purpose.

As I’ve mentioned, this agenda is only a start–there are many more reforms that could be attempted. Still, while achieving them would be great progress, they are not enough to end participatory inequality. That requires deeper and harder changes of a constitutional or semi-structural kind. This moves us into the realm of the politics of preparation. These proposals are grand in scale and significantly more impactful in making political power more equally shared. They are conceivable only under conditions of severe crisis.

Three of these ideas are a direct reversal of oligarchic safeguards created by the Philadelphia (1787) delegates. Such antidemocratic features have been replicated in many countries since, especially in presidential systems. The first one requires little elaboration. The veto powers of the executive branch should not exist. A single person should not be able to cancel the will of the people expressed through the legislature’s deliberations and votes. The purpose of an executive branch is the execution of laws and policies from the legislature not the making or blocking of policies from that powerful office. If there is a need to check or slow certain sensitive decisions, it would be fine to grant limited powers to the executive branch to delay implementation to allow for further national debate or to send a law back to the legislature for a confirming simple majority vote.

The second proposal concerns constitutional courts, which are everywhere made up of just a few judges whose primary function is to constrain democracies composed of millions of voting citizens, represented by many hundreds of legislators (or thousands if state or provincial legislatures are included). In the US, it takes just five judges to block the will of the people, even a super majority. Supreme courts and the constitutions they interpret have served to sustain oligarchy in the face of democracy. The only compelling justification for concentrating so much power in so few hands is to protect the the weak from the powerful. It certainly is good to prevent a “tyranny of the majority” when this means mostly actions taken democratically against the vulnerable, especially when those actions trample important principles of fairness and justice.

The problem is that in democracies dominated by oligarchs high courts have spent most of their time doing the opposite–defending the powerful few against the vulnerable many. The justification for constitutional courts collapses once it is recognized that their main obsession has been to support oligarchy against democracy.

One solution is to have our constitutional courts be much larger and more representative of average citizens.

Beyond the size of the court, it is important to change how justices are chosen. The current American system of presidential nomination and Senate confirmation was created in Philadelphia (1787) to preserve oligarchy. We can democratize that process using sortition. Half of the justices on the enlarged bench should be appointed by lottery from a pool of citizens who have a law degree, having served as a judge for at least three years at any level, and have a clean criminal record. Congress should vote on the remaining judges, but neither the legislature nor the executive  should be involved in those appointed through random selection. Sortition will ensure that the overall panel of judges on the Supreme Court has a broader diversity of views and is more representative of the wider public. If this remedy fails, ending judicial review completely remains an option.

The third structural proposal to roll back oligarchic protections is the elimination of all upper legislative chambers. The primary purpose of senates and houses of lords is to dampen the power of more democratic bodies below them. Several countries have transitioned from a bicameral to unicameral system by elimination their upper chambers. New Zealand erased the Legislative Council in 1950. Denmark removed the Landsting in 1953. Several provinces in Canada abolished their upper houses. As senates are removed, societies should design alternative checks that ensure fairness, defend freedom, and protect truly vulnerable minorities.

Additional steps along these lines would include dramatically increasing the number of seats in the people’s legislature so that districts are smaller…Smaller districts bring representatives closer to their constituents, complicate legislative lobbying by special interests, and make it harder for oligarchs to dominate campaign financing across so many races.

sortition replaces voting

None of these major reforms goes far enough in addressing the ability of oligarchs to dominate electoral democracy with money.  A bold proposal to neutralize the power of oligarchs in elections is to choose representative by lottery rather than voting.

In the US, over 150 million voters get to choose, but they do not get to choose their choices. The slate of candidates, and the narrow agenda they pursue, is overwhelmingly influenced by oligarchs. Camila Vergara calls this distortion of democracy “systemic corruption”, and she joins a growing chorus of others — most notably (John) McCormick himself, Helene Landemore, Gordon Alrlen — who argue this will never be fixed by tinkering at the margins.

Their startling conclusion is that in the face of centuries of resilient oligarchy, the only way to strengthen democracy so that it functions horizontally and vertically is by ending voting for representatives. In its place they propose sortition — selection of leaders by random lottery…We are represented not because we voted but because those making decisions are like us.

The closest example today is how juries are selected for trials from a random group of fellow citizens.

Amy Kapczynski’s Proposed Constitutional Amendment

Congress shall have the plenary power and duty to legislate a democratic political economy, in order to provide genuine political equality for all natural persons. This shall include the power and duty to remedy structural discrimination, to empower workers, to provide for the care and health of the people, and to ensure a sustainable environment. The judiciary shall defer to Congress with respect to legislation that pursues these ends, notwithstanding any other provision in the Constitution.

These words display a subtle appreciation of the problems at the heart of participatory inequality. Unlike the vague expressions in constitutions around the globe of popular values and goals societies should strive for, this proposal requires that they be pursued. A democratic political economy leaves no room for oligarchy. “Genuine political equality” refers to power shared equally in all its forms and only by natural persons, not corporations. And the courts are explicitly stripped of their power to impede this progressive agenda.