Expert Focus: The intersection of community and inequality

Daina Ramey Berry

University of Texas at Austin

Daina Ramey Berry (opens in a new tab) is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and the incoming chair of the department. Berry’s research focuses on the history of gender and slavery in the United States and Black women’s history. She contributed a key chapter on the role of the slave trade and slave labor in capital and wealth accumulation in the pre-Civil War era in After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, an interdisciplinary commentary on economic debates spurred by Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century. Her most recent publication, A Black Women’s History of the United States (opens in a new tab), co-authored with Kali Nicole Gross, is an empowering testament (opens in a new tab) to Black women’s ability to build communities while oppressed and Black women’s continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Watch Berry discuss her research (opens in a new tab) on enslaved people at a virtual Economics for Inclusive Property event last month.

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Jasmine Hill

Stanford University

Jasmine Hill is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Stanford University and a Washington Center for Equitable Growth grantee. She is a self-described “mixed-methods researcher, educator, and scholar-activist” focused on improving the economic conditions of people of color in the United States. Her current work aims to shed light on mechanisms creating and prohibiting social mobility, particularly for low-income communities of color. Hill is co-editor of Inequality in the 21st Century (opens in a new tab) with Equitable Growth grantee David Grusky. Additionally, she regularly designs and evaluates diversity and inclusion initiatives for organizations and corporations to help foster equity and equality in workplace communities.

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Marlene Kim

University of Massachusetts Boston

Marlene Kim (opens in a new tab) is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston and specializes in race, gender, and class discrimination, especially their intersection (opens in a new tab), in employment. She is the editor of Race and Economic Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century (opens in a new tab), a book that explores the economic and social environments that shape economic outcomes and help explain the persistence of racial disparities. She was the first recipient of the Rhonda Williams Prize for her work on race and gender discrimination. Kim currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Feminist Economics, The Review of Radical Political Economy, and Panoeconomics. Her research challenges the invisibility of Asian Americans in discussions of race in the United States, focuses on the compounded burden of discrimination faced by women of color, and looks at disparities between different racial and ethnic communities.

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Manuel Pastor

University of Southern California

Manuel Pastor (opens in a new tab) is a distinguished professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Research Advisory Board. His research focuses on the economic, environmental, and social conditions facing low-income urban communities, and the social movements seeking to change those realities. His book, Equity, Growth, and Community: What the Nation Can Learn from America’s Metro Areas (opens in a new tab), argues that inequality stunts economic growth and suggests that bringing together equity and growth requires concerted local action. And his book, State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future (opens in a new tab), explores the role of social movement organizing in terms of shifting the political calculus to move toward racial and economic justice. He is director of the Equity Research Institute (opens in a new tab) at USC, which recently collaborated with PolicyLink to release the National Equity Atlas (opens in a new tab), a first-of-its-kind data and policy tool containing data on demographic change, racial and economic inclusion, and the potential economic gains from racial equity for the largest 100 cities, largest 150 regions, all 50 states, and aggregate data for the United States as a whole (excluding territories). Additionally, his developing work on solidarity economics (opens in a new tab) argues that caring for others leads to better outcomes (opens in a new tab).

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Patrick Sharkey

Princeton University

Patrick Sharkey is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. His work focuses on the connection between criminal justice, economic mobility, and inequality. His most recent book, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (opens in a new tab), was published in 2018 after the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. He recently authored an op-ed (opens in a new tab) calling for long-term investments in community-based public safety institutions and alternatives to law enforcement, and he testified before the Joint Economic Committee (opens in a new tab) in 2019 on how to build stronger communities and spoke on the intersection of community and inequality. Additionally, his current work with Crime Lab New York (opens in a new tab) looks at how the decline of violent crime affects urban inequality.

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