Alice Stewart, Resident Fellow at Harvard University, Kennedy Institute of Politics joins us to debate Ellis Henican, New York Times bestselling author, and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, over the idea of regulating CEO pay in America.

Since the nation’s founding, the fabric of American society has been woven with deeply racist policies that directly harm Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. These policies have led to an unequal system where marginalized communities have been systematically locked out of opportunities in jobs, education, and housing.

Systemic Equality is a racial justice agenda that seeks to address America’s legacy of racism and systemic discrimination through advocacy efforts and legal strategies that aim to ensure equal access and opportunity for all.

At a party over the weekend I was introduced to a college professor, and fell into conversation with him about teaching and Covid. Then I asked about how wokeness affects his teaching. I had no idea of the man’s politics, but I would bet the farm that he is a liberal, given that his academic field skews heavily to the left.

He told me that there is a lot of stress on professors at his university regarding grading students of color. He said everyone is afraid of being accused of racism if a black student doesn’t like his grade. The anxiety around this is deep, he said.

In 2016, Erika Tebbens was living outside Seattle, one of the most expensive places in America, trying to feed a family of three on her husband’s enlisted sailor's salary of less than $25,000 a year. 

Tebbens said she did not qualify for Agriculture Department nutrition assistance because of a rule that military personnel include in their income any housing allowance they receive. That same rule was a big reason a Pentagon poverty assistance program that started in 2000 failed to help many servicemembers and was discontinued in 2016.

African American children are suffering long-term disadvantages as a result of vast and growing disparities in the wealth of US families, with Black families with kids having access to barely 1 cent for every dollar enjoyed by their white counterparts.

Staff shortages, widespread mismanagement and poor quality of care has caused medical negligence that has led to inmates dying in Connecticut's prisons, even well after medical workers have been alerted of their illnesses.

On July 8, state officials agreed to pay the family of 19-year-old Karon Nealy $1.65 million. An inmate in a Connecticut prison, Nealy died in July 2015 from complications from lupus.

In 1971, Derrick Bell, a forty-year-old civil-rights attorney, became the first Black professor to gain tenure at Harvard Law School. A soft-spoken and prolific scholar, with glasses and a short fro coming to a widow’s peak, Bell was a Pittsburgh native and Air Force veteran who, before his career in academia, had worked with Thurgood Marshall composing legal strategies against school segregation in the South, at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, and as the deputy director of civil rights at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire, is one of about 100 Black American women physicists, but she nearly left the field in her first semester in college. She isn't the only scientist of color who thought of giving up before her career began.

Let me be as provocative as I can. I want to talk about the power of narratives to shape racial politics in this country. As we all know George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin, who has been duly convicted of murder by a jury of his peers. The cop was white and his victim black. But I have a question: Was it a racial incident?

One of the cognitive curses of the human mind is the tendency to chop everything into two: black and white, rich and poor, men and women, North and South, and so on. By instinct, we tend to lump people together into clear and distinct categories, preferably just two. The world seems simpler that way.