“If you’re like me, and you’re on food stamps or you’re low income, a lot of the way that you survive is, you have to know which stores to go to and what to buy where, and that option has now been taken away in the era of COVID. Anything that could help and provide food would be a huge boon,” Fox says.

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Jersey City’s poverty rate is 18 percent — that’s more than 47,000 people out of a population of around 265,549 (by comparison, the national average hovers at around 10.4 percent). About 32 percent of those living below the poverty line — around 14,751 people — are African American; another 17,000 people who identify as Hispanic live in poverty.

Google Maps’ distribution of grocery stores throughout Jersey City shows at least 160 places to buy food, many of which are concentrated around the busy, densely populated Journal Square, McGinley Square, and West Side neighborhoods. In areas like South Jersey City’s Greenville, where 53 percent of the population is African American, and Bergen-Lafayette, where that number jumps to 62 percent, the choices thin out considerably, especially if you don’t have access to a car.

That startling lack of food access was the impetus for a new initiative: In partnership with AeroFarms and the World Economic Forum, 10 vertical farms located in senior centers, schools, public housing complexes, and municipal buildings were slated to begin opening at the end of 2020. The pandemic slowed the project’s progress, but Stacey Flanagan, head of the Jersey City department of health and human services, still expects “the first two farms to be ready by the end of [March 2021].”

The farms will grow 19,000 pounds of leafy greens such as kale and arugula annually. Flanagan says the program’s initial rollout focuses on providing nutrient-dense greens to residents, with a wider variety of produce in the future.

The greens will be distributed to the public for free — all that’s required is that the participants register for the program. The three-year contract with AeroFarms will cost Jersey City $1 million — half of the money will go toward building the farms, while the other half will be dedicated to maintenance once the farms open.

On the surface, the program seems like it will be an asset to a city plagued by food inequality issues. Fox tells me that, as a high-risk person during the pandemic, she’s shopping at outdoor farmers markets much more often, despite the expense. She feels that any produce that would supplement her SNAP benefits would be a blessing — especially if the city could find a way to deliver her allotment.

Still, some Jersey City residents are skeptical.

There was immediate backlash to the implication in initial press releases announcing the initiative that participants would be required to take nutritional classes or even attend health screenings. That raised immediate concerns about participant privacy, as well as concerns that it could be condescending to users.

“If there’s a signup table with one person sitting in the corner saying, get a health screening here, that could benefit people who maybe don’t have the ability, or don’t have the time to go to a doctor, but we need to understand how the city is going to use [that data] and where that data is going to be stored and, and how it might potentially be shared,” says Leslie, a Jersey City resident of 13 years  who asked that her last name not be used.

Flanagan told me that residents will not be required to participate in any outside programs in exchange for their allotment of free produce. Instead, there might be what she calls a “point of education,” at the pick-up location, where participants might receive a recipe for a smoothie along with their produce, or an offer to check their cholesterol, through the city’s partnership with Quest Diagnostics. She added that every aspect of the program involving data collection will be conducted by a “city or medical professional,” and that it will be kept “completely confidential as per HIPPA laws.”

Tatiana Smith, a single mother, doula, and founder of the Westside Community Fridge, says she has to travel to other parts of the city for food but she’s still decidedly unenthusiastic about the vertical farming program. She says that the city should drop the education portion altogether, because it feels disconnected from the needs of many low-income communities.

“What would be engaging is to take a community member and have them come in and talk about a recipe from their culture and pass it on. But not to give out random recipes. People already know how to cook,” she says. In fact, nearby community gardens all over New Jersey and New York frequently host community potlucks —  some specifically aimed at the neighborhood’s international community —  in which residents are invited to share a favorite dish, meet each other, exchange recipes, seeds, and vegetables, and ultimately build bonds of closeness between neighbors.

Smith is still undecided if she’ll be signing up for the program herself. If she does, she says she’d ask city officials why they never consulted directly with community members about whether or not they even wanted a program like this.

“It’s typical of these types of initiatives that want to help but don’t bother to tap in into what the community is doing and how they live,” she says. “There is this idea that black and brown people seem to not care about their health, but black people have had a long history of food justice work, and now [the city is] saying, ‘We’re gonna introduce healthy eating to you.’ We’ve been eating like this for a long time, but because of systematic racism, low income people have had to resort to poor quality food.”

Like any curious 14-year-old, I asked, “Why they let you go?” She responded with an undertone of cynicism: “They said they need to downsize, so they let me go.”

“Mommy, what does downsize mean?”

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Since my overly expensive degree in Organizational Behavior from NYU, I’ve learned that not all downsizing is as bad as what happened to my mother.

According to the Harvard Business Review, proponents of downsizing argue that it is an effective strategy, with benefits such as increased performance and sales. Stepping out of Business 101 is decarceration, the downsizing of incarceration to reduce the scale and reach of the criminal justice system. It’s time to start now, especially as violent crime is down in most cities and lawmakers weigh the decriminalization of many offenses, such as drug possession/use and sex work.

Downsizing means police should not be mental health first responders. They need mental health treatment. They need help. Police officer suicides in 2018 were the highest ever, with 228 officers dying by suicide. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, believes the 228 number “is undoubtedly underreported.” Probation and parole officers are not substance abuse counselors or employment specialists.

And all of this is okay because we don’t need them to be. They just need to get themselves healthy, and rightsizing should be an option. We already have proficient social workers, mental health professionals, substance abuse counselors, and employment specialists who are not utilized enough or funded appropriately.

The criminal justice system is a discordant machine of more than 55,000 criminal justice-related agencies nationwide inclusive of police, courts, district attorney offices, jails, prisons, parole and probation boards, and ecarceration. I’m sure I’ve missed a few here, but the point is that America’s criminal justice reform intoxication should include more than reducing the number of people in prisons or the amount of lockups closed: It should mean fewer institutions of incarceration, too.

Downsizing in this context means relieving some institutions of their duties and giving them a severance package that will allow them to take care of their own house.

Our tax dollars pay the bill of more than $270 billion to keep the criminal justice system intact. If the criminal justice system were a country, it would be 41st on the GDP tally of 186 countries. We — and I mean “we,” because “We, the People” allow for this profane, ineffective, and inefficient use of resources — currently have open-air incarceration, where about 4.5 million people live under some form of community supervision, alongside the 2.3 million people in prisons. We spend $29 billion on the federal law enforcement budget (#99 on the GDP tally). We have 70 million people in the U.S., not incarcerated, but living freeish with a criminal conviction.

Amid this display of laissez-faire governance, there is progress to soberly consider. Bail reform in several states is decreasing the debtor’s prison construct. Restorative justice models are sprouting up across the country, effectively decreasing exposure to all points of the criminal punishment system. Progressive judges like Victoria Pratt “sentenced” people who came before her court to write essays, instead of lockup. Law enforcement administrators from across the country have been meeting as Executives Transforming Parole & Probation (EXiT) to operationalize the downsizing of their reach and their caseloads. In their “Statement on the Future of Probation & Parole in the United States,” they assert: “As people who run or have run community supervision throughout the country and others concerned with mass supervision, we call for probation and parole to be substantially downsized, less punitive, and more hopeful, equitable and restorative.”

Several years ago, when I was a violence interrupter for the Cure Violence program in Brooklyn, New York, I spoke at an intimate convening of community residents, police, and elected officials. During my comments, I said my job is to figure out ways to put myself out of work. My work was to reduce shootings in the area of Brooklyn where the violence interrupter program operated. Even then, I understood that any person or institution engaged in intervention work should hope that their interventions are no longer needed. The criminal justice system is an operation of interventions ostensibly created to deal with violations of the societal contract. Because of the disproportionate use of these interventions on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian Pacific Islander populations, we understand that we have a racialized system of control.

White supremacy aside for a moment (as if it is ever possible to put the ideology of white supremacy in timeout), the 55,000 agencies of the criminal punishment system, e.g., the courts, law enforcement, and community supervision, should keep a humbling view of themselves.  They should be working to put themselves out of business. They need to see downsizing as a means to community efficacy.

Since my mother’s untimely dismissal from her job, our family figured it out, like most working-class families. We pooled our resources together. My mother still has a few choice four-letter words in her Trinidadian accent to describe the process of being laid off. I assume the 55,000 criminal justice agencies will also have a vulgar reaction to real downsizing. But I am sure those of us in communities that are involuntarily cuffed to the criminal punishment system will also find a way to pool our resources together to create safe neighborhoods we all deserve.

“West of [interstate highway] 83 there is no viable business district, no economic engine or opportunities for young people,” says James Hamlin, the owner of a local bakery.

Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue was once a thriving cultural center for the city’s Black population during the era of segregation. Famous artists like Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington all arrived in the city to play at Baltimore’s Royal Theater.

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But the venue was demolished in the 1970s, and today most of the businesses that thrived during the era of segregation have closed. Most people who know the area think of the drug trade portrayed in the popular HBO show The Wire, or of the 2015 protests that erupted after police killed a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray. Further east on North Avenue, the paint is chipped off the storefronts and the nearby townhouses are boarded up. It’s impossible not to notice the history of economic neglect in these majority-Black neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, residents claim that the city only responds to service requests, calls to change streetlights, or pick up trash in areas of Baltimore where the majority of the population is white. Black neighborhoods, many of which are cut off from other parts of the city by highways and a lack of public transportation, are largely left to fend for themselves.

But an ambitious plan put forward by the President of Baltimore’s City Council, 35-year-old Brandon Scott, aims to change that by tasking government agencies with finding solutions to the deep structural racism that has plagued the city for decades.

In November last year, the city voted overwhelmingly in favor of establishing a permanent Equity Assistance Fund that would be used exclusively to support efforts that aim to reduce race, gender, and economic inequality. The charter amendment that establishes the fund is one of the first in the country that explicitly mentions structural and institutional racism. A separate bill also obligates each government agency to analyze how it can address structural inequalities and come up with an equity action plan.

Scott, who has been working in local government since he was just 27, said his personal experience growing up in Baltimore motivated him to address the city’s longstanding history of inequality.

“I lived in Lower Park Heights, so you have vacant homes, violence, of course, blight, lead paint in houses, and all of that stuff going on. And then right above me you had some of the most affluent areas in the city,” Scott said, describing a scenario that is typical for Baltimore City.

“The area right to the east of us, right across [highway] 83, is Roland Park, which is one of the most affluent neighborhoods. So when you grow up in the city and you are surrounded by what you see, and then you see the opposite not far away from you, it changes the way you look at the world,” Scott continued.

The differences between Baltimore’s neighborhoods even affect how long residents live. In Baltimore’s Greenmount East neighborhood, the average life expectancy is around 66 years. In Roland Park, in contrast, the average life expectancy is 84 years. The disparities mimic the difference in life expectancy between some of the world’s most and least developed countries.

This starkly unequal landscape was created largely through deliberate policies that aimed to separate the city’s white residents from the Black population. At the turn of the century, in 1910, Baltimore passed an extreme ordinance that prohibited Black and white populations from living in the same neighborhoods. Segregation allowed banks and the federal government to exclude majority-Black neighborhoods from their loan programs, making it nearly impossible for Black residents to become homeowners.

The 1910 ordinance didn’t last very long. The Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional in 1917. But many of the city’s residential neighborhoods remain segregated over a century later.

Researchers have described Baltimore as having an L-shaped corridor down the center of the city where the white population lives, and a majority-Black, butterfly-shaped area that surrounds either side of the city’s main artery. Today, predominantly white neighborhoods in Baltimore receive between two and four times as much capital investment as majority-Black neighborhoods, according to recent estimates.

With all of this in mind, advocates argue that only robust public policy like the kind proposed by Scott can address the problems caused by nearly a century of racist policies.

But one year after the city’s residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bills, the details are still nebulous. Agencies are currently working on their assessments and action plans, and the first agency budgets to be shaped through a lens of equity will be presented in the late spring and early summer.

Mara James, a legislative lead at Baltimore’s Bureau of the Budget and Management Research, noted that there is some concern about how to finance the Equity Assistance Fund.

“The legislation established the Fund but did not designate a funding source. At this point in time, no funding sources have been identified for the Fund,” James said. “We value the efforts of Council President Scott to put equity at the forefront of the City’s work, but our office is concerned about the impact that any dedicated fund may have on the City’s ability to respond to fiscal emergencies or large future costs and ensure we continue to provide core services to residents.”

One number often floated publicly is $15 million, or roughly 3 percent of the police department’s annual budget. But current Mayor Jack Young has also expressed some concern about where the extra money would come from and whether it would be possible to skim money from the police budget.

“The administration is not focused on that legislation. We’re focused on developing an equity framework,” James Bentley, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said about the Equity Assistance Fund.

Bentley argues that the city doesn’t have the ability to finance the Fund because of a state-mandated policy that will require millions of dollars be invested into public schools over the next decade. But the mayor’s office wants to use data and statistics to find new ways to ensure that the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods get as much attention as the wealthier ones, he says.

“When you look at the data it clearly showed a discrepancy, that some areas get more attention to the detriment of others. Mayor Young wants us to use data to show where there are disparities,” Bentley said.

Young has also suggested that tax incentives could be used to attract business to parts of the city that lack economic investment. But some experts argue that purely economic policies may not be enough to achieve sustainable racial and economic justice.

“I wish there was one policy that would solve the history of a lack of investment or neighborhoods being where they are. Tax incentives alone can’t be the answer to structural racism,” said Leon Andrews, a director of the National League of Cities. “It can complement other things that you want to do, but if you just have tax incentives without thinking about the inequities and what that means for the neighborhood, you can repeat displacement and gentrification as we’ve seen in other neighborhoods. Tax benefits for what purpose? Who benefits?”

For many of the youth living around Pennsylvania Avenue, the government’s plans — mayor’s or council’s — mean little if they aren’t implemented.

“We have assets but we don’t have infrastructure,” says Hamlin, the local bakery owner. “The ideas are good but something has to happen.”

Ride any train in the city and you’re bound to see the signs — wallpapered across stations and on the insides of trains — warning passengers that they’re better off paying the $2.75 fare than the $100 fine, and directing them to use turnstiles to enter and exit the tunnels, as opposed to gates, which can easily be held open and passed through without paying. If you ride in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens, you’re bound to see fare checks taking place, or to be subject to one yourself.

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Here’s how it happened to me: I approached one of the Metro Transit Authority (MTA) automated ticketing booths at LaGuardia Airport and purchased a fare card with something like 30 dollars on it. When I got on the bus, amidst a pretty typical New York crowd, I didn’t see anywhere to swipe my card. But people were cramming in behind me, so I shrugged it off. I could figure it out when I got off, or pay the same fare at the next stop, where I would have been using a receipt had this fare gone through. In any case, my money had transferred from my bank account over to the MTA — so good enough, right?

At the bus stop in Queens, we were greeted by two burly police officers in full cop regalia — guns and batons at hip, the whole show. There was no crowded shoving now; everyone stepped off single file, flashing a paper receipt to the cops before walking off. A paper receipt I didn’t have. I showed the officers my Metro card and explained the steps I’d taken to pay the MTA. One of them told me I had gone to the wrong machine. He pointed at the display of machines behind us. When I told him I used a machine like that, he replied that no I hadn’t, but the one that I used was almost the same. Almost the same, but not right. Then his partner demanded my ID card and fined me $100.

What happened to me in 2018 is part of a city-wide crackdown by the Metro Transit Authority (MTA) on fare evasion. The crackdown is supposedly aimed at preventing the MTA from hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars they say are lost to people skipping fares. In 2018, the MTA reported that loss at $225 million, but the Office of the Inspector General thinks that was an undercount, and loss estimates for 2019 are closer to $300 million. While subway fare evasions are certainly a major contributor to these financial losses, it’s bus routes that are taking the biggest hit, including Select Service routes used to connect subway systems, like the one I was riding from the airport.

But as my experience illustrates, the crackdown behaves like a Kafka-esque authoritarian overreach. In the best circumstances, authorities fine people for giving money to the MTA through the wrong slot, or for just being unfamiliar with the local nuances of the payment system, which is especially absurd in a city with as much tourism as New York. In the worst light, the fare evasion crackdown targets the city’s most vulnerable populations, criminalizing poverty and giving New York police another excuse to fine and jail Black and Brown people.

The NYPD has been reticent to reveal racial and ethnic demographic information about who is being fined, even resulting in a lawsuit in 2018. But data now available show summonses are being disproportionately distributed to Black and Hispanic (their language) populations. In the second quarter of 2019, 15,280 summonses were issued. Of those, 6,110 were Black, and 5,154 were Hispanic. In contrast, only 2,586 were issued to passengers identified as white, even though non-Hispanic whites comprise nearly half of New York City’s population. 712 summonses were issued to people under the age of 18.

Tickets aren’t the only consequence of fare enforcement stops. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance announced in 2017 that his office would stop prosecuting for “theft of services” on public transportation. The decriminalization of fare evasion in New York led to a sharp decline in arrests related to fare evasion, which saw nearly 10,000 people jailed in 2016.

But as the recent high profile arrest of nineteen-year-old Adrian Napier shows, arrests are still happening — and mostly to Black men. People with outstanding warrants are at particularly high risk of being arrested. But bystanders have been posting recordings on social media of violent subway arrests of “unruly” fare beaters. Reports from around the city are also catching officers stationed around transportation stops making arrests for reasons like unauthorized sales of candy and sweets. In the second quarter of 2019, NYPD reported 682 arrests related to fare evasion. Of those, 414 were Black. Only 76 were white. Ten were minors. The overwhelming majority of people arrested were identified as male, indicating that the new campaign is functioning as yet another excuse for the NYPD to jail men with black and brown skin.

While all this has been going on in the name of saving money, use of public transportation in New York has taken a sharp decline. Subway rides had seen an increase until 2016, when ridership dropped slightly. After 2017, both buses and subways saw a dramatic slope in their ridership stats, with bus ridership dropping by 5.1 percent. In 2018, subway and bus ridership dropped by 2.1 and 4.4 percent, respectively.

Fare evasion is not unique to New York City, but not every city views it as a priority police matter. In Seattle, where I grew up, King County Metro launched a new Fare Violation Program. When I was living in Seattle, prior to the beginning of 2018, bus savvy Seattle residents knew that travels taking place in North Seattle through Downtown would probably not be interrupted by fare enforcement agents. Travel South toward the airport, and you’d need to show proof of payment. This was very much delineated by racial lines. Neighborhoods in North Seattle are divided into affluent sections and very poor areas, but all of them are mostly white. Gentrification has begun to reshape the city, but the South-end has historically been a mostly Black and Latino area. Fare enforcement agents usually began entering just before the International District, which houses a mostly Asian population and several low-income housing complexes. All in all, Seattle’s fare enforcement protocols appeared as racially biased as those in New York. Now, Seattle seems to be trying to correct some of these issues by scaling back punitive measures against fare beaters.

Previously, fare evasion could result in a $124 fine that was handled in civil court, although riders would usually receive one or two warnings before getting the fine. Now, fines are $50, and if paid within 90 days they will be further reduced to $25. Riders also have the option to pay that $25 toward their own ORCA card (Seattle’s kitschy transit card that, yes, does have an orca whale on it). They can also perform two hours of community service or enroll in one of the reduced fare programs offered by the city. The program that serves the largest population is ORCA Lift — which I am still enrolled in because enrollment lasts five years — and is available to all Seattle residents who meet their low-income requirements. Indigent riders also have the option to appeal the citation, which may be overturned based on “extenuating circumstances.”

Seattle’s 2019 program comes on the heels of a similar program rolled out in Portland, Oregon, in 2018. In 2018, a Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge ruled that random fare checks on TriMet, Portland’s public buses, were unconstitutional. The lawsuit, spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was incited by an incident involving Ana Del Rocio, one of the only Latina members of the David Douglas school board. She was arrested after refusing to supply identification, which is her right under state law. The ruling means that TriMet will no longer be able to perform random fare checks, similar to the kind I was subject to in New York City. TriMet also began offering community service and enrollment in reduced fare programs in lieu of paying fines, as well as tiered fines. Repeat offenders will receive increased fines or community service hours before being banned from services for 90 days.

Washington, D.C., recently decriminalized fare evasion and reduced the whopping $300 fine to $100. This was after the Washington Lawyer’s Committee released findings from a data analysis that discovered 91 percent of fare evasion citations were issued to Black riders, even though just under half the population of D.C. is Black. 46 percent of citations were issued to passengers under the age of 25, and one was only seven years old.

But the most radical change comes out of Kansas City, Missouri, which is now poised to offer free city-wide public buses. In December 2019, the city council unanimously voted to pass a resolution that will make public transportation free, once the next fiscal year budget is approved and designs are put in place. The measure, called Zero Fare Transit, is estimated to cost $8 million. This will make it the first major U.S. city to offer free city-wide public transportation in the 21^st century, though a few other cities experimented with it unsuccessfully in the 20^th century. The smaller city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which has a population of approximately 60,000 and operates just 121 buses, has offered free public transit since 2002.

When I returned to New York in December 2019, the first thing I did was load my Metro Card. During a trip downtown to meet a friend for coffee, I swiped my card, but the turnstile wouldn’t budge. The machine directed me to swipe again at the same turnstile, but when I did — no budge. I continued to swipe my card and receive the same error message directing me to swipe again. Finally, exasperated, I moved on to another turnstile. This time it worked — but a swipe at the other turnstile had also been deducted.

Does that mean I can now send MTA a $100 summons?

None of those claims are exactly true, but the one that happened during his State of the Union address this year is what keeps me up at night. While making the case for his economic platform, Trump specifically touted low black unemployment, saying, “[It’s] something I’m very proud of, African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded.” Republicans cheered; Democrats grimaced. I rolled my eyes.

The average black unemployment rate since November 2017 is 6.5 percent — indeed the lowest it has been since the United States started recording unemployment for black workers back in 1972. But that does not mean all black Americans are in full economic health, as the president’s proclamation would suggest. More to the point, it is debatable whether Trump should get any credit for such low unemployment metrics or whether they are just a continuation of the Obama administration’s efforts.

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First of all, black unemployment is still nearly double white employment nationwide. (In 14 states and the District of Columbia, black unemployment rates are more than double white rates, and in South Carolina black unemployment is triple white rates.) If white unemployment levels were anywhere near this high, it would be considered a national crisis.

There were only 11 times in the past 50 years when the white unemployment rate has been higher than today’s black unemployment rate — and five of those were during the worst recession since the Great Depression. As a reminder, the government responded to that recession with a $831 billion stimulus to boost the economy and lower unemployment. Yet, Trump is praising the same unemployment rate for blacks today without a similar economic response.

What’s worse, the jobs that black workers and white workers get do not pay the same: Black workers earn less money and build less wealth than white workers.

The typical full-time black worker still earns about $12,000 less annually than a white worker. Gender pay gaps also compound this inequity. On average in 2017, black women earn 66 cents for every dollar earned by a white man. That has a serious impact on peoples’ lives: Roughly 20 percent of black and Hispanic people live in poverty compared to less than 9 percent of white people. This is, in part, because black workers are more likely to be trapped in low-wage work, and the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for nearly a decade. A yearly income at this rate is just over $15,000.

Structural racism contributes to pull black men, in particular, into low-wage work, especially for those with a criminal record. Black men are incarcerated at six times the rate of white men. With an estimated 87 percent of employers conducting criminal background checks, formerly incarcerated individuals are more likely to remain unemployed one year after their release and formerly incarcerated men are paid 40 percent less annually than non-incarcerated men.

In addition to wages, wealth disparities along racial lines are even more disturbing. Wealth, which is often held in the form of a person’s homes, savings, and investments, is a cushion that helps families pay for education or keep themselves afloat during periods of unemployment. In 2016, the median wealth of white Americans was $142,180 compared to $13,460 for black Americans.

This directly impacts black Americans’ social mobility. Racial gaps are identifiable with respect to college completion, homeownership, and criminalization. Black Americans hold college degrees at only 62 percent the rate of whites. Among black households, one-third fewer are homeowners compared to white households. Even when black Americans do become homeowners, if the neighborhood they reside is more than 50 percent black, their homes are valued at nearly half the price of similar homes in communities with no black residents. And, with a prison population of 487,300, black Americans account for one-third of America’s federal and state prison inmates, which is more than twice their share of the U.S. population.

Trump’s rosy economic picture is dangerously misleading for black workers in America. The unemployment rate may be lower for black Americans than in the past, but it is still high compared with white rates — and a web of discrimination, criminalization, and low wages is still holding people back. Glossing over those truths to focus on the statistic that suits the president’s talking points doesn’t make the reality of things any better. Black people should not be used as a convenient political prop — especially without meaningful investment in our communities to better our full economic outcomes.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the nature of employment statistics for formerly incarcerated individuals.