IMAGINE THIS. AT A LARGE family reunion, someone’s beloved toddler wanders off from the picnic area and falls down a well. Everyone rushes over and—terrified—peers down the dark shaft. The little girl is down there. She’s hurt and crying, but she’s alive.
Though crazed with worry, a number of relatives start to point fingers. The Republicans in the family blame the Democrats for being too lenient and not teaching the child to obey instructions. The Democrats in their ranks in turn blame the Republican family members for being too stingy and not helping to pay for the childcare the parents have needed.
The argument rages back and forth, at a higher and higher pitch. Finally, the child’s desperate parents just ask, “Please—can you all please just help us get our baby out of the well?”
It turns out one of the Republicans has a strong truck but no rope to lower down the well. A Democrat has a long garden hose in the back of his car, but his fuel-efficient hybrid isn’t designed for pulling.
So the feud starts back up again. Why would anyone buy a sissy car like that? Why would you buy a truck that pollutes the earth? Why is your trunk full of crappy groceries from corporations? Why do you think that growing hippie food makes you better than everyone?
As the insults fly back and forth, the parents throw up their hands and decide to take action on their own. They attach the Democrat’s hose to the back of the Republican’s truck, lower the improvised lifeline down into the pit, and manage to lift the baby to freedom.
In an emergency, our worst family members always turn on each other. But our best family members always turn to each other. They put aside their differences, come together, and focus on solving the problem at hand. Half the time, it turns out that the differences within the family emerge as sources of strength.
I think you likely know where I’m going with this: Today, our nation faces a series of national emergencies—any one of which should bring us all together. But our national leaders seem to be standing around every well, screaming at each other. It’s like a giant food fight. Republicans throw meat, and the Democrats throw vegetables. Each attack becomes another occasion to rally one’s side—and heave another volley at the opposition. Both sides yell out their slogans and generate mayhem. And, honestly, I don’t think they are going to stop anytime soon.
In the meantime, no matter which side of the family you identify with, each individual American must decide: Do you want to be one of the bickering in-laws? Or do you want to be one of the parents?
Here, I write for the parents and want to call your attention to some of the pressing emergencies to which we might turn our collective attention. Each involves areas where conservatives and progressives have complementary values and skill sets. My hope is that by finding a few areas of common purpose, we can bring out the best in both sides. And maybe begin to come together, in a new way.
MATTERS OF LIFE and death tend to bring out our best—like when a baby falls down a well. Perhaps we should start our search for unity where Americans are actually dying. Where are the death rates unacceptably high? Where are American families gathering in graveyards, too soon and too often?
The data is clear. Americans are dying in Appalachia. They are dying in Chicago. Dying at the U.S.–Mexico border. Dying on Native American reservations. Dying in Flint, Michigan. There are hundreds of similar centers of pain in our country, some less famous than others.
What’s the common denominator with the high death rates? Sometimes it’s poverty. Sometimes it’s addiction. Often it’s a broken criminal-justice system. Those scourges are as present in West Virginia as they are in South Central Los Angeles. The races of the community members may differ; they may speak English with different accents, or no English at all. But they share the same pain.
In a healthy society, common pain should lead to common purpose. Common purpose should lead to common projects. And common projects should bring back common sense.
For those of us who want to act like parents in this situation, I propose some common projects we can work on together.
The last place in America you would expect to find common ground is a prison cell. But with our prison population ballooning, liberals and conservatives are finding common cause in fixing the criminal-justice system.
The reason is simple—and shameful: The United States, a beacon of liberty for so many, is now the number one incarcerator of human beings in the world. We jail more of our own citizens than China, which is several times larger in population. We have only 5 percent of the world’s population but a whopping 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. That means one out of every four humans locked up anywhere on earth is imprisoned here, in the “land of the free.” Whether you care about protecting individual liberty from an intrusive government or are committed to social justice for all, you should be greatly alarmed by our broken criminal-justice system. Consider this:
Right now, instead of taking care of their families or contributing to their communities or our economy, nearly one in every hundred Americans is behind bars. In forty years, the total number of people in prison or jail in America has grown by nearly 500 percent, far outpacing population growth. The federal-prison population has grown 800 percent in thirty years, with nearly half of the people there for drug-related offenses.
We have created a ravenous system that must be fed—at a cost of 80 billion taxpayer dollars a year in prison expenditures alone. In California, it costs more to house a prisoner for a year than it does to cover the entire cost—tuition, books, room, board, and a sweet social life—of a year at Harvard University. When factoring in lost economic productivity and social costs, the total cost reaches upward of one trillion dollars per year. One American child out of every twenty-eight—that’s 2.8 million American children—has a parent in jail or prison. Approximately five million children will have experienced parental incarceration at some point in their lives.
The nightmare doesn’t end after people have served their time. More than 70 million Americans have a criminal record, which essentially prohibits them from accessing basic employment, housing, or financial support for continued education or job-skill development. In many states, voter laws prohibit people with felony convictions from participating in our democracy. An estimated 6.1 million Americans who live in our communities and work in our economy are denied the right to vote solely based on a past felony conviction. Americans who care about redemption and second chances have a reason to be heartbroken.
Whatever your political persuasion, these numbers should not numb you. They should motivate you. One of the few things that a growing number of liberals and conservatives agree upon today is this: The United States locks up too many people, for too long, at too high a cost, often for unjustifiable reasons and with indefensible results. Our broken criminal-justice system is a fundamental threat to our safety, our security, and our democracy. The entire system is deep down in the well, and it is up to us to pull it out.
The good news? We can.
When ordinary Americans take action on the issues that most affect their lives, inspiring change is possible. Take Jessica Jackson, for example.
Jessica and her first husband were a young, middle-class white couple living in Georgia. They owned a home, and Jessica was pregnant with their first child, a daughter. Like a growing number of white rural Americans, her husband struggled with addiction. Shortly after their daughter was born, her husband was arrested. At first, Jessica was almost relieved—she hoped that he would get the help he so desperately needed to overcome his addiction. Instead, he was slapped with a sentence of fifteen years in prison.
Jessica was blindsided by the sentence, but she wasn’t about to watch her life go down the drain. The gross injustice facing her family lit a fire in her. Despite the circumstances, she fought tooth and nail, while working and raising her daughter, to earn her college degree and eventually a law degree. When I met her at a 2012 Marin County campaign event to reelect Obama, she was a human-rights attorney representing death-penalty clients in California. Her first words to me were a direct personal challenge: “What are you doing to help the people locked in cages?”
My focus was green jobs at that point, but I still had some good war stories. I told her of my years of criminal-justice work in Oakland—my efforts to disrupt the “school to jail” pipeline by founding the Ella Baker Center For Human Rights shortly after law school; my unsuccessful fight to defeat a California ballot measure called Prop 21, which put sixteen-year-olds in adult prisons; my prolonged and successful battle to stop Oakland’s “super jail” for youth. She was unimpressed.
“That was ten years ago,” she said. “What are you doing now?”
Like so many young activists who threw their hearts and souls into the fight against the prison system, working to fix the criminal-justice system had taken a personal toll on me. It’s heartbreaking, exhausting work, with a human face for every tragedy or setback. I have nothing but respect for those who devote their lives to it. I had dedicated nearly fifteen years of my life to the work before I finally—I thought—limped away for good. And yet here was this young woman on a personal crusade. I could not refuse her request for help, if only to pass along some key lessons. Since I first met her, and through the force of her genius and will, Jessica has built her personal mission into a national movement for bipartisan justice reform.
Jessica’s focus and dedication in the face of her family’s ordeal pulled me back into the fight to reform the justice system. Early in her career, Jessica was also frustrated and exhausted. Death-row legal work is brutal. You hope a judge or a clerk will read your pages of legal work and fact-finding before your client is killed, but most cases end in defeat of the most lasting kind. Instead of giving up, Jessica recognized that death-row issues were only a symptom of a much greater problem. So she took on the entire beast.
Eventually, Jessica introduced me to a young Stanford Law School grad named Matt Haney. Matt had recently been elected to the San Francisco school board and was interested in tackling the school-to-prison pipeline. Matt is super smart, personable, and charismatic. A veteran of the 2008 Obama campaign, he seems to know everyone, everywhere, and is beloved by all. Yet beneath his easy charm is a steadfast, relentless fighter against racism.
He learned early the weight of his white privilege, when he and a close friend named Kevin were arrested at a house party the evening before Matt was set to leave for college. Matt was treated fairly and with respect by the police officers, while the police did everything in their power to pin the incident on Kevin, who was African American. As a juvenile, Kevin had spent time in jail, where he was scarred and victimized by being locked up with men nearly twice his age. Not long after the house-party incident, Kevin tragically took his own life.
Each of us had had our own heartbreaking exposure to the criminal-injustice system. Together, Jessica, Matt, and I saw unprecedented opportunity to roll back mass incarceration. So we founded #cut50 in July 2014, as a national initiative to cut by 50 percent the crime rate and the U.S. prison population.
It’s important to remember the state of politics in 2014. The Tea Party was still a major force. Whatever Obama proposed, the Tea Party–backed Republicans blocked; whatever the Tea Party tried to pass, Obama vetoed. This tribal gridlock in D.C. consumed large chunks of people’s time. To get anything done, progressives needed to figure out a way to work with Republicans on common-ground issues.
And what miracle strategist and passionate Republican politician did I know who could help us get the job done? Newt Gingrich, or course. At first, Jessica was hesitant. After all, she had lived in Georgia—Newt’s home state—and she thought he was an unlikely bedfellow indeed. But she understood the potential of our collaboration.
When Newt suggested we pull together a bipartisan summit, Jessica worked tirelessly to build support around the idea. It was Jessica who raised our goal from one hundred people for one hour to eight hundred for a whole day. She and Matt were whizzing proposals and invitations in every direction. Oh yeah, and Jessica had just given birth to her second child. In fact, on the day of one of the press events leading up to the summit, she had gone into labor. She was still making calls, shooting off directions, and advising on final decisions from the hospital! She didn’t even tell anyone where she was.
Before March 2015, the idea of “bipartisan criminal-justice reform” was an oxymoron. Soon afterward, the idea would become so widely accepted as to become cliché.
Among the eight hundred summit attendees were eighty-four featured speakers, including Eric Holder, then–attorney general, plus Newt Gingrich in a conversation with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. Nathan Deal, the Republican governor of Georgia, was our luncheon keynote speaker. President Barack Obama sent us a video featuring an intimate sit-down with David Simon, the creator of the HBO series The Wire, tacitly endorsing our efforts. The conservative former California assemblyman Pat Nolan, who served prison time himself, was a speaker; so was the legendary Democratic Party strategist Donna Brazile. We had more than a dozen sponsors from both the left and the right, including the ACLU and Koch Industries. One of the speakers, #cut50’s own Shaka Senghor, had served nineteen years in prison for second-degree homicide and spoke from that crushing experience. (A happy update: Shaka went on to publish the New York Times–bestselling memoir Writing My Wrongs.) If you closed your eyes, you couldn’t tell, listening to people talk, which speakers were the Republicans and which ones were the Democrats.
Three bipartisan federal bills were announced at the summit: The Comprehensive Justice and Mental Health Act, the reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, and the Police CAMERA Act. Several more were announced shortly thereafter. One of those bills, the Comprehensive Justice and Mental Health Act—which was led by an unlikely cast of Republicans and Democrats, including Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and Congressman Doug Collins of Georgia—would be signed into law by President Barack Obama. The bill became an integral portion of a last-minute package of bills to address mental-health and opioid-addiction treatment in the waning days of his administration. We helped make it completely safe and possible to collaborate on a tough issue—in a town where two sides are hunkered down with a “no-man’s-land” in the middle. We decided to walk out into that middle ground and plant a flag in the soil—not to start a war, but to end one. Lots of people marched with us. And the work continues.
By the way, Jessica is now the mayor of Mill Valley, California, on top of overseeing #cut50. Of course.
As Jessica’s personal story suggests, no one in our country—black, brown, or white, rural or urban—is immune to the viral threat our broken justice system presents. The astronomical rates of incarceration and the billions of dollars we pour into prisons affect us all. There is no question that race is a factor in this broken system. Many prisons that I’ve visited look like slave ships on dry land. Black men make up about 6.5 percent of the U.S. population but 40.2 percent of the prison population. They’re imprisoned at much higher rates than white men, even if they commit similar crimes. Latino men and black women also face disproportionately high imprisonment rates. Unconstitutional programs like “stop and frisk” criminalize black and brown youth and wreak havoc on communities. African Americans and whites do illegal drugs at roughly the same rates, and yet African Americans are incarcerated at six times the rates of whites for identical drug-related offenses.
But mass incarceration isn’t just a race issue. The New York Times reported on Dearborn County, Indiana, a county that proudly sends to jail more people per capita than any other county in the United States. One in every ten adults is either in prison, jail, or on probation. The kicker? Dearborn County is 97 percent white. While black and brown communities have borne the brunt of our exploding incarceration industry, it’s now impacting white rural communities worse than ever before.
As a result, leaders of all colors, classes, and creeds have renewed personal incentives to take a much harder look at America’s prison problem. But making much-needed progress on our broken justice system is not a slam dunk, by any means. Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, seems to be hell-bent on reinvigorating the war on drugs with harsh sentencing and prosecutorial charging policies that are out of step with both the data and his own party on this issue. Others are leading in a smarter direction. U.S. senator Rand Paul (Republican of Kentucky) has introduced or co-sponsored more than twenty-five bills on criminal justice. Tea Party favorite U.S. senator Mike Lee (Republican of Utah) sponsored the Smarter Sentencing Act, to curtail draconian sentencing. “I support this bill not in spite of the fact that I want public safety but because of it,” Lee said. “Separating a potentially productive person from his or her family and support network, and branding him a felon for life, less likely to find or keep a job, is counterproductive to society’s interests.” Instead of building prisons, Texas governor Rick Perry oversaw a transformation of Texas’s criminal-justice system by shifting funds into alternatives like drug courts, treatment programs, and jobs. From 2007 to 2015, the rate of incarceration in Texas dropped by 14 percent; crime rates fell by 29 percent, beating the national average. The state closed three prisons. He left Texas with its lowest crime rate since 1968, and recidivism is 7 percent less than it was before the 2007 reform effort. Perry’s work became the model for conservative-led justice-reform efforts, championed by powerful and well-respected organizations like Right on Crime, FreedomWorks, and the American Conservative Union Foundation, which have spurred dozens of other governors and state legislatures to take action.
To those on the left who may cringe at my celebration of these conservative prison reformers, I will repeat what Jessica told the audience at the bipartisan summit: “When it was my husband who was incarcerated, I didn’t care if it was a law introduced by a Republican or by a Democrat that brought him home. I just wanted him to come home.” The people who are most impacted don’t much care about partisan infighting. They want and need change. The strongest lock keeping them imprisoned is gridlock. Only bipartisan solutions can set them free.
Let’s implement some.
Here is a list of ten things that both conservatives and liberals agree will help fix our prison system and minimize its devastating impact on communities. Conservative leaders have incorporated these ideas into laws and actions in their cities and states. You can find more details of individual efforts and groups from both the left and the right leading the fight in the appendixes.
For too many young people, schools aren’t just places for learning or education—they are a primer for involvement in the justice system. As with our prisons and jails, it’s students of color who are disproportionately impacted by failing schools, overly harsh discipline policies, and police roaming the hallways. The solution is simple and has already been implemented. In San Francisco, school-board member and #cut50 co-founder Matt Haney introduced sweeping reforms to the district’s discipline and suspension policies. The “Safe and Supportive Schools” policy is based on the concept that it’s better to keep kids in school rather than suspend or expel them for minor infractions. The result: a dramatic reduction in suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, especially for students of color.
Underfunded courts and police departments across the country are on the hunt for new revenue. Their solution has been to target the poorest and most vulnerable with a bevy of fees and fines associated with almost every point of interaction in the criminal-justice system—going so far as to even charge juveniles for the time they spend in detention. The problem has gotten so bad that about ten million people owe a total of 50 billion dollars in debt to court and prison systems across the country. To fix this, we should fund our criminal-justice system through ordinary budgetary processes rather than relying on cash-register justice on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable. Courts should also start considering whether individuals can actually pay the fee or fine that’s being imposed and, if not, offer alternatives like community service, which contributes to the public good rather than leaving people debt-burdened indefinitely. When organizations on polar opposites of the political spectrum—from ALEC to the ACLU—agree, there’s no excuse for not fixing this.
Often, freedom comes down to how much money is in your wallet and not whether you’re guilty or innocent. Four hundred thousand people, about six out of every ten adults sitting in jail right now, have not yet been convicted of a crime. Their only reason for incarceration? They can’t afford freedom. We shouldn’t have a two-tiered system of justice like this. Fortunately, there is a growing movement to eliminate the system of money bail as we know it. It is not without opposition. Prison profiteers are screaming bloody murder and spending big lobbying dollars in a desperate attempt to keep the corrupt bail-bonds industry alive. Dozens of states and localities, including Kentucky, Connecticut, and Illinois, have made sweeping changes to their pretrial detention practices. New Jersey, under Governor Chris Christie’s leadership, has basically eliminated the use of money bail, instead opting for a risk-based assessment of individual defendants. Six months after passing these key reforms in early 2017, the state’s jail population was reduced by 30 percent, to the benefit of mostly black, brown, and poor people.
Tom Dart runs the largest mental-healthcare and drug-treatment facility in the country: the Cook County Jail system in Chicago. In nearly every state across the country, jails and prisons hold 1,000 percent more individuals with mental illness than do hospitals. Our prisons and jails have become de facto warehouses for people suffering from mental illness and drug addiction. One out of every three people behind bars suffers from severe mental illness, and rates of addiction and substance-use disorder are extraordinarily high. A cell is no place for someone suffering from mental illness or addiction—this isn’t working, and it’s not keeping us safe. For that reason, numerous states have set up drug courts, mental-health courts, and veterans courts, and even law-enforcement-assisted diversion programs, which route people away from incarceration and courts and into treatment and other supportive programming.
We shouldn’t be putting people in prison for low-level crimes, often perpetrated as a result of drug addiction or financial necessity. In 2014, California voters passed a historic ballot initiative that drew the support of allies as unlikely as Newt Gingrich and Jay-Z. Proposition 47 reduced low-level felony crimes—like petty theft and drug possession—and reinvested the savings into community-based treatments that do far more to benefit public safety than sending a bike thief to prison. Two years later, in another election, deep-red Oklahoma passed similar reforms. Research shows that opting for treatment and community programming instead of prison sentences actually makes people less likely to commit future crimes. Over the past decade, dozens of states—both red and blue—have found ways to reduce the number of minor felony crimes, keeping more people out of prison without increasing crime rates.
Mandatory minimums are laws that require a specific length of time in prison for a specific crime or possession of a certain quantity of drugs. They began as an attempt to equalize racial disparities in prison sentences but have backfired catastrophically. The problem with mandatory minimums is that sentences are triggered solely by the offense or the quantity of drugs rather than by the actual role or culpability of the individual. Mandatory minimum sentencing handcuffs judges, leaving them unable to recommend appropriate sentences to individual defendants; this has resulted in the unjust and lengthy incarceration of tens of thousands of individuals. A better approach would be to “let judges judge” by restoring evidence-based discretion. In 2017, as part of a far-reaching package of reforms aimed at removing Louisiana’s dubious distinction of being the nation’s leading incarcerator, Governor John Bel Edwards signed a bill that repealed most of Louisiana’s mandatory-minimum drug-sentencing laws. Dozens of other states have made minor reforms to their mandatory-minimum sentencing practices, but much more must be done, especially in the federal system, where nearly half of individuals sentenced to prison are serving time for drug offenses.
On any given day, nearly one hundred thousand people are locked alone in tiny cells for twenty-three and sometimes twenty-four hours, with little to no human contact. Solitary confinement shouldn’t be allowed in any prison or jail in America, yet we turn our heads and let the inhumane practice carry on. Some leaders have taken action. President Obama issued a historic executive order to limit the use of solitary confinement in federal prisons, banning the practice for juveniles and setting strict limits on the amount of time individuals can be placed in solitary for disciplinary infractions. Nearly a dozen states have curtailed the practice, but it is still far too common.
The most effective way to prepare individuals for a successful return to their communities is to ensure that our prisons have strong education programming and a deep commitment to family visitation. These two simple tools have been shown to dramatically enhance an individual’s success and stability post-prison. I have had the pleasure of visiting one of the most programmed prisons in the country, San Quentin, located just thirty minutes outside of San Francisco. With access to volunteers, family members, and some of the best programming in the country, incarcerated men in San Quentin are among the most emotionally and spiritually intelligent people I have come across. If we must have prisons in this country, we need more of them to emulate the positive features of San Quentin.
Some 70 million to 100 million people in the United States—more than a quarter of all adults—have a criminal record, and every year an additional six hundred thousand men and women return home from prison. Upon their return home, many are denied the right to vote, barred from business licensing, stripped of parental rights, and face discrimination in employment, housing, and access to finance. It is tragic but not surprising that 60 to 75 percent of all people who return home from prison end up incarcerated again within five years. When someone leaves physical prison, it is cruel and foolish to keep them locked in an economic and social prison. We all have a vested interest in ensuring that people who have served their time are able to successfully find meaningful work and careers, stable housing, and participate in full economic, social, and civic life. To do so, we will need corporations to take the injustice head on—making a commitment to hiring and a second chance. Companies like Dave’s Killer Bread, the number one organic-bread brand in the United States, have embedded second-chance employment into their DNA. Now owned by Flowers Foods, one of the most conservative companies in America, Dave’s Killer Bread and its foundation have doubled down on their investment, working with other business leaders to highlight best practices and build a robust community of companies invested in the success of returning citizens.
The pernicious effects of over-incarceration may be most egregious and damaging when we examine the impact on our democracy. In dozens of states across the country, a felony conviction can lead to a lengthy and sometimes lifetime ban from voting or running for political office. At this writing, three key states—Florida, Iowa, and Virginia—bar individuals with felony convictions from voting for life. In Florida, nearly 10 percent of the adult population cannot vote because of a prior felony conviction. And while the fight to restore voting rights has been overwhelmingly supported by Democrats and objectively roadblocked by Republicans in nearly every state in the union, there is a bipartisan movement in Florida, led by a formerly homeless black organizer named Desmond Meade and a white conservative named Neil Volz, to overturn the state’s lifetime ban on voting for people with felony convictions via a ballot initiative in the 2018 election.
In late January 2017, I flew to Charleston, West Virginia, to gather stories for a special report on coal miners in a post-Trump-victory era that would air on both Anderson Cooper 360° and The Messy Truth.
I’ve been to West Virginia countless times, so the gray geometry of used-up land you see when you approach from the sky—quarries and denuded mountains—isn’t a surprise to me. This time, however, I got a wake-up call on my way from the airport to the city. My cabdriver that day was a young white guy, taking online university classes when he wasn’t driving. He had a lot to say.
As we wound around curves and jerked to stops, we could see the city of Charleston on the horizon. There was the capitol building, the Kanawha River, rolling hills, and bare trees. The cab rumbled over potholes and bumps. The driver and I were in the middle of talking about one of his classes on political theory, when he got suddenly serious.
“You know how they say that religion is the opiate of the masses? Well, not around here.” He paused, letting out a dry chuckle. “Opioids are the opiates of the masses. They done cut Jesus clean out of the picture. They’re about to put Jesus out of business. They want their heaven right here on earth! Or they want to go to heaven right now. And some of ’em don’t care which.” He held my gaze in the rearview mirror, challenging me, it seemed, to report on that.
WEST VIRGINIA HAS been hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic. In late 2016, The Washington Post embarked on a series of reports about “opiate orphans” and the high cost of these drugs on the poor and disenfranchised in West Virginia. One of these kids was seventeen-year-old Zaine. Zaine and his sisters woke one morning to a quiet house, the door to their parents’ bedroom door locked. He would eventually bust down the door and tumble over his father’s cold body. His mother’s was nearby. They were too far gone for CPR.
Unfortunately, this has become a familiar story.
The Los Angeles Times reported that in 2016, the small town of Huntington, West Virginia (population 50,000), suffered twenty-six overdoses in just a few hours. First responders came across the bodies of seven people overdosed on heroin in one house. Dispatcher orders blared all day, sending police officers and firefighters rappelling across the city, coming across overdosed men and women in gas-station bathrooms, Family Dollar stores, Burger King parking lots, and slumped across steering wheels in traffic. Only a few made it to hospitals. The rest went straight to the morgue.
Opioid addiction has become a nationwide epidemic, with both rural and urban poor white communities among the hardest hit. As New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie stated in his 2017 State of the State address, “Our friends are dying, our neighbors are dying. Our co-workers are dying. Our children are dying, every day, in numbers we can no longer afford to ignore.”
Opioid addiction has nothing to do with an emotional or moral weakness. Many people get addicted to painkillers first through legitimate doctor’s orders. They eventually switch to heroin when the prescription runs out. Heroin, it turns out, is cheaper to buy and easier to acquire than prescription drugs. Indeed, the initial addiction to painkillers often has nothing to do with a back-alley drug deal. The same white coat who prescribes amoxicillin for your daughter’s ear infection could fill a scrip for any number of opioids.
That’s how it went down for the older brother of one of the guys on whom I based Bryce Shoemaker, the struggling conservative I described earlier in this book. Let’s call him “Big Bill” Shoemaker. His knees are shot from the combination of his halcyon days as a teenaged athlete and then from his lifetime of factory work. Every few steps forward feel like walking across broken glass. That’s how he describes it over beers to anyone who will listen. Most of his life has been spent in various degrees of pain. Alcohol helps dull the ache, but he’s no alcoholic. He went to the doctor and came home with a prescription for hydrocodone. That did more than dull the pain—bliss!
Beyond the temporary relief, however, Bill feels nauseous and vomits nearly every day. He now has a lumbering gait, not because of his bad knees but because of his distended gut. He jokes with pals that his body has no problem puking but he has trouble in the bathroom. He has trouble breathing, too—he’s always short of breath. He doesn’t remember names as well as he used to. He has violent mood swings. He vaguely remembers pushing somebody. A stranger? A loved one? Still, the pills give him something he’s never had before: pain relief.
The opioid problem in America is pervasive and has reached a fever pitch. Accidental drug overdoses now outpace car accidents as the number one cause of accidental death in the United States. Doctors recklessly prescribe opioids, whether it’s for a concussion or a herniated disc, a twisted ankle or surgery recovery. They are overprescribed.
People get hooked either due to chronic pain and not having any other option or because leftover pills taken recreationally or to treat minor pain have led to chemical dependence. Opioids chemically alter the brain and make people physiologically vulnerable and dependent on the drug. And while biological predispositions account for nearly half of one’s likelihood of addiction, addiction does not discriminate along socioeconomic lines. Indeed, it was ultimately determined that fentanyl, an opioid one hundred times more powerful than heroin, was what killed Prince.
Over the last few months, I have returned to Appalachia to learn more and report for CNN. The sprawling fields showed tufts of life creeping up from the earth. The drives through town remind me of that cab ride. On the country horizon, I imagined the overdose number ticking up a digit with no end in sight. I know from family experience that addiction and poverty are not choices. Whether someone faces death in the Family Dollar of suburbia or on Lenox Avenue in New York, whether from a bad batch of heroin or from years of painkiller dependency, whether by one fatal dose or from countless years of substance use, we need good solutions to these devastating problems.
After Prince died, I cast around looking for ways that I could help, things I could do that would honor my friend’s memory and do good in the world in a way that I know he would have approved of. In 2017, I joined forces with Newt Gingrich and Patrick Kennedy to create an advocacy group called Advocates for Opioid Recovery. As unlikely as our alliance might seem on paper, all three of us are fired by a personal passion to find solutions. I do this work for Prince. Kennedy himself is in recovery from a substance-abuse disorder. Gingrich has had addiction issues touch his family. And, even more improbable, we are funded in part by pharmaceutical entrepreneurs who want to shake up the pain-research establishment and find safer, smarter products that help people overcome addiction and get off drugs.
So what can be done? How do we save one another? Here are some solutions:
Here’s an ever-increasing cycle: People go into detox, get a little bit better, then they come out and inevitably turn back to the drugs. But because the drugs have been out of their system for a long-enough time, their tolerance has dropped and the dosage that their bodies had become accustomed to often kills them. People who are addicted need better solutions, and their survival depends on doctors seeing and treating opioid addiction as a chronic brain disease. One of those solutions is medication-assisted treatment (MAT), which is a drug-treatment regimen that can help fend off the physiological dependencies associated with opioid addiction and give the brain a chance to heal itself. MAT is a proven method toward recovery, with low relapse rates. It’s what nearly every medical expert and drug-policy researcher who examines this problem recommends. The evidence shows that MAT is safer, less expensive, and less socially and economically damning than abstinence-only programs, therapy alone, or cold-turkey detox treatments.
Multiple studies have shown that medication-assisted treatments are essential to effective long-term recovery, by reducing cravings and the risk of fatal overdose and increasing abstinence and time in treatment. A multicenter clinical trial published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that buprenorphine reduced the craving to use an opiate by roughly 50 percent and increased the odds of not taking an opiate by about 3.5 times. Fewer people die if they have MAT behind them. If we want to end opioid addiction, we must get healthcare providers, medical professionals, politicians, and the law to treat addiction like the disease it is.
There is a short-term fix to the growing wave of accidental-overdose deaths that must be made widely available to anyone who needs it. Naloxone is an injection or nasal spray that immediately blocks the effects of the drug and literally stops an overdose in its tracks. In the hands of a friend, first responder, or community health worker, it can be lifesaving. Communities across the country are implementing programs to distribute naloxone and preventing thousands of deaths.
Thanks to the disastrous war on drugs, our jails, prisons, and courtrooms are full of individuals who are incarcerated or under correctional supervision as a result of their addiction to drugs. Too many prosecutors, judges, and prison wardens are still under the misconception that drug abuse is a moral, behavioral flaw, as opposed to a serious disease requiring medical treatment. We need to rid the criminal-justice system of anti-scientific harmful biases against those struggling with substance-use disorders. Currently, only 11 percent of all inmates with substance-use disorders receive any form of treatment during their incarceration, despite the high potential of treatment with medicine to reduce both recidivism and criminal-justice costs. Offering incarcerated individuals and those who are on probation, parole, or drug-court programs pharmacological treatment and counseling for opiate dependence decreases the likelihood of relapse, overdose, future crime, and even HIV infection. It also dramatically increases the likelihood of remaining in long-term drug treatment after release.
Insurance companies should pay for effective treatment. They should enforce mental-health and addiction parity across all healthcare coverage and break down insurance barriers to covering addiction treatment that actually works. Insurance companies can do this by requiring adequate provider networks and treatment coverage. They can offer incentives to plans that comply with parity laws and those with improved treatment outcomes. In October 2016, the New York attorney general’s office pushed Cigna to make a national decision to totally eliminate preauthorization for medication-assisted treatment. We need more of that kind of action. It is unacceptable to discourage an effective treatment that can save lives.
We need to train more doctors and nurse practitioners to deal with this crisis. Only 8 percent of the medical schools in America have mandatory addiction-medicine training, and only 36 percent even offer it as an elective. All medical students and currently licensed professionals should be trained in medication-assisted treatment.
If dealing with a crisis this big doesn’t bring us together, shame on us. But also shame on us if we stop with opioid addiction only. Earlier heroin-addiction crises in the 1970s and the crack cocaine–addiction crises during the 1980s and ’90s did not result in sane or wise policy. Instead, we tried to arrest our way out of those problems. The face of those crises was black. We now are faced with this bizarre situation where Attorney General Sessions wants to double down on incarceration as an answer for the epidemic while Trump and others are suggesting a more clinical and compassionate approach to opioids. It’s hard to see this double standard as anything other than racially biased. Compassion and medical treatment are absolutely the right response to the disease of addiction—but they must not be reserved only for white victims. Funerals are funerals. Addiction is addiction. We cannot work to save white rural communities while continuing the destruction of black urban ones. We should all work together to use this moment to change the way that we deal with addiction overall.
We spend most of our time in politics arguing about which party has picked the right set of bad guys to rail against. The Democrats want more oversight and controls on Wall Street; the Republicans believe the Washington establishment is stymieing employment with too many business rules and corporate taxes. No matter which side wins, Americans might still lose—because both sides are missing the larger threat. Neither D.C. nor Wall Street poses the most serious danger to American workers, despite what you might be led to believe. That peril actually comes from an entirely different set of elites—in Silicon Valley.
Technology is great for consumers. But it can be bad for workers, who can find their entire industry disrupted by an app, their entire skill set rendered irrelevant by a robot, or their entire profession replaced by computers using artificial intelligence. This happened on a small scale to my co-workers and friends at The Jackson Sun when we got our new printing press. In the age of the robot, an almost inconceivable number of jobs soon will become obsolete. The rise of machines has eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs in the United States over the past decades, and middle-class service workers in finance, retail, food, and transportation may be next.
As new technologies upend and disrupt more industries, all American communities are facing a serious job-creation challenge—in red states and in blue states, in big cities and small towns. Preparing all workers for the coming turbulence is a brutally difficult challenge. Workers and students who are female, or those who are nonwhite and non-Asian, are most at risk of being left behind.* Neither party has all the answers; few politicians seem to even have their heads around the issue. If we want to prevent widespread poverty far beyond what we face today, the time to act is now.
My own involvement in trying to open up the tech sector to all people, not only the Silicon Valley elite, was initiated in an unusual manner: A rock star made me do it.
I was with Prince at his home in Minneapolis shortly after a jury exonerated the neighborhood vigilante who shot to death seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Everyone gathered there was upset; it was a watershed moment in the movement for black lives.
Prince said, “Why is it that when someone sees a black kid wearing a hoodie, they automatically think, ‘There goes a thug.’ But if they see a white kid wearing a hoodie? That could be Mark Zuckerberg.” He looked around at all of us in the room that night. “Why is that?”
Prince didn’t do small talk. He was the kind of person who always cut to the chase and spoke directly to the heart of the matter. So many great things in my life came out of talking with Prince. When Prince posed the question about the significance of Trayvon’s hoodie, I gave the only answer that came to my mind: “It’s racism,” I said.
“Maybe you’re right, Van,” he said. “Or maybe we just haven’t created enough black Mark Zuckerbergs. Maybe we should focus on that.”
His answer blew me away. Prince wasn’t red or blue: He was purple. He had the magical ability to dream up songs that everyone could dance to. People dance to his hits at Republican weddings and Democratic weddings, too. People of all races and ages love his music. The same mind that created musical performances also created social programs. Again and again, he would leap beyond traditional partisan thinking to entirely fresh solutions. That night, out of talking about Trayvon, we essentially came up with the seeds for #YesWeCode.
As I mentioned earlier, Prince helped launch #YesWeCode at the 2014 Essence Festival in New Orleans at a concert attended by fifty thousand people. My co-founders—Amy Henderson and Cheryl Contee—and I took the ball from there and ran with it. Among other things, #YesWeCode sponsored hackathons across the country. The idea was to let urban youth experiment with using technology to solve their everyday problems. We went on the road to test out Prince’s thought experiment: What might happen for teens and children in hoodies—or whatever the urban uniform would be next—if we trained them in computer science?
According to the Department of Labor, by 2020 there will be more than 1.4 million computer-science jobs in the tech sector. In that time, only four hundred thousand students are expected to graduate from a four-year university or college with a STEM (science, technology, engineering, or math) degree. That could leave an astounding one million jobs unfilled in the next few years. #YesWeCode set out to try to put a dent in those numbers. We saw an opportunity to change the odds for success in STEM by encouraging students from disadvantaged or nontraditional backgrounds to learn coding. Major tech giants jumped in to help, including Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Qeyno Labs, Hidden Genius Project, Black Girls Code, Ford STEAM Lab, Detroit Labs, and more.
But how was I going to get the kids on board? With any audience, a new issue must be framed properly. I soon came up with an idea for getting the attention of African American youth. It would be slightly risky, but I decided to try out my pitch when I spoke to an auditorium of mostly black students in New Orleans.
As I stood at the podium, I could feel the room buzzing with teen restlessness. Without saying a word, I held up my cellphone, high over my head. The room quieted down, and I said, “I only have three questions. But they just might change your life.
“Number one: How many of you have one of these?” Meaning a smartphone. Every kid in the room raised a hand. Some even raised their own devices.
“Number two: How many of you have ever downloaded an app?” Everyone raised a hand again. By now some of them were snickering. Where’s this old guy going with this?
“Number three: How many of you have ever uploaded an app?” Not a single hand went up. “I mean, seriously. How many of you have ever built your own app? And then uploaded it?” Nothing. Silence from the students.
“You know why?” I said. “Because you’re suckers. That’s why.” I let that sink in for a few seconds. Glancing around, I noticed some teachers frowning, looking skeptical. Did this guy show up to berate their kids about always being glued to their phones? They didn’t know where I was going with this, either.
I kept going. “Every time you move your thumbs around on one of those smart screens, you’re making someone else tons of money. Someone you don’t even know. Someone who doesn’t care about you.” I paused for effect. “Black people using their fingers to make money for other people? We used to call that picking cotton.”
By that point I had everyone’s attention, but the adults in the room looked like they were on the verge of a coronary.
“That’s right. Picking cotton,” I said. “But I don’t want you to be digital cotton-pickers in the information age. I don’t want you sitting here all day, creating billions of dollars of economic value for people who see you only as clicks or eyeballs—not even as full human beings. We already went through that. I want you to be the makers, the owners, the builders of this new century.” By now the restlessness had transformed into nods and the low hum of whispered excitement. I had them.
“I want you to write your own code. I want you to build your own apps and upload them. Who wants to learn how to do that?”
Every single hand in that room flew up. Even the adults, who’d looked skeptical a few moments ago, were smiling now.
I gave dozens of speeches like that one all over the country to promote #YesWeCode. We got teens to sign up, and we quickly learned that students from nontraditional backgrounds had a profound hunger to learn computer science.
#YesWeCode now runs the biggest scholarship fund in the United States to help people from low-opportunity backgrounds gain access to computer-science education. And we are not alone. Fortunately, there are charitable organizations, companies, and cities working hard to close the gap. There are numerous other nonprofits making a difference; I list many in Appendix 2.
Through #YesWeCode, I’ve gotten a chance to work with Silicon Valley’s top firms. None are perfect. But all are responding to the need for change, and I applaud their growing commitment to inclusion and diversity. Here are some examples of the strides they’re making:
Google recently partnered with Howard University, one of the nation’s most prominent historically black universities, to immerse young black computer-science majors in the company.
HP Inc. has created one of the most diverse boards in corporate America while diversifying its workforce and increasing the number of women at the executive level. Among other things, it created a powerful media campaign called “We’ll Be in Touch,” to raise awareness around ingrained biases within the tech hiring process.
Facebook understands that diversity is imperative for its future growth. As their Global Director of Diversity, Maxine Williams, stated: “If we don’t get it right, we risk losing relevance in an incredibly diverse world.” Facebook has increased efforts to recruit more underrepresented minorities through initiatives like Facebook University, an internship program for college freshmen interested in computer science, and Facebook Academy, a summer-internship program for Bay Area high school students from underserved communities.
To address and eliminate gender discrimination, Salesforce has conducted salary assessments in the company to focus on pay parity at all levels on an ongoing basis. They’ve implemented nonprofit partnerships in order to drive more STEM trainees of color to Salesforce and have successfully launched new apprenticeship models for low-opportunity youth.
In addition to the beautiful work done in the tech business sector, I’ve been encouraged by sweeping efforts in cities across America that echo our mission at #YesWeCode. In Chicago, a city often in the news for its high levels of violent crime, we have the first public school district in the nation to identify computer science as a core graduation requirement. Recognizing Chicago’s success and forward thinking, the Obama White House launched a national Computer Science For All (CS4All) initiative in 2016. New York City set a goal to ensure that all New Yorkers, regardless of income, have access to reliable broadband Internet by 2025. Under the leadership of the city’s new chief technology officer, Miguel Gamino, New York now has more than one million subscribers to their LinkNYC program, the world’s largest and fastest free public Wi-Fi network. Pittsburgh is vying to become the “Silicon Valley of the East,” and that includes a “Roadmap for Inclusive Innovation,” which focuses on addressing the digital divide, using open data to improve the quality of life for city residents, advancing clean technologies, and investments in immigrant- and minority-owned tech businesses.
Smaller cities in red states, like New Orleans and Austin, are creating tech initiatives that are cognizant of including their cities’ cultural heritages and community involvement. Louisiana’s Digital Interactive Media and Software Development tax incentive reflects the growing number of companies claiming the credits and growing the state’s tech environment, increasing from $377,000 in 2009 to $15 million in 2014. Current New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu launched the Digital Equity Challenge to come up with ways to connect underserved New Orleanians—including low-income, minority, elderly, and disabled residents—to technology. The city is advocating for community leaders and tech companies to propose innovative ideas to solve the technology-opportunity gap and make New Orleans the next great tech city. Much like New Orleans, Austin is driving its tech boom through smart government incentives. With its vibrant arts culture and university-rich workforce, Austin was ranked the number one tech destination in 2017 as a more affordable, talent-rich alternative to San Francisco.
How can we come together to spread the education and training that Americans need to succeed in the emerging digital economy? First, parents and neighbors need to encourage the youth, unemployed people, and underemployed people in our lives—especially those who would have nontraditional backgrounds for tech—to try STEM plus arts education and stick with it. Second, voters should support candidates who are dedicated to increasing STEM plus arts education in our public schools and universities. Third, investors should back would-be tech entrepreneurs who are female, nonwhite, or based in small towns or rural areas. Their firms may well spot a different set of problems, creating value in unexpected places.
But the biggest game changer of all is one we have yet to discuss: high-quality “bootcamp” training programs to rapidly accelerate the education of would-be computer coders.
We need to think beyond college as we imagine an American workforce that can thrive in the twenty-first century. Yes, college is important. But graduation rates are not moving fast enough to keep up with economic demand in the United States. The most prominent example of this is in the tech sector; the demand for developers is growing exponentially. But the one area that tech has fallen into traditional ways is by relying on college graduates to supply its workforce. As a result, the pool of available coders doesn’t have enough people—and the people don’t have enough diversity when it comes to race and gender. The way to both deepen and broaden the pool is to accelerate access to a new kind of educational opportunity: bootcamp training programs.
A form of nontraditional workforce development, coding bootcamps are full-time intensive programs. They ideally take those who are new to coding and transform them into employable software developers. These training programs produce qualified coders in fewer than six months. There were more than two thousand coding-bootcamp graduates in 2013. In 2016, we saw a 725 percent growth in bootcamp graduates, to 17,966. The bootcamp industry is primed to close the unfilled jobs in the tech industry with amazing effectiveness and efficiency.
Despite the efficiency and the effectiveness of the coding-bootcamp model, it’s not perfect. Good ones don’t exist everywhere. With a price tag of fifteen thousand dollars to attend a coding bootcamp, many can’t afford the entry fee. Also, bootcamp staffing generally reflects the current demographics of the tech sector. As a result, the learning environments there sometimes mirror the STEM learning environments, which can feel unwelcoming to women of all colors and men of color. The key is for bootcamps to teach in more-creative inclusive ways and to engage with multicultural communities. Coding bootcamps still have a great opportunity to get it right. Details of coding bootcamps can be found in Appendix 2.
WHEN I MET Collette, she was a stay-at-home mom. She was a self-taught coder who loved the craft, like someone passionate about learning a new language and culture. Collette had been studying on her own for two years, using free tutorials she’d found online. She had basic skills but lacked the level of expertise for a career in tech. To her, coding was a hobby. She didn’t know how to move forward. Through #YesWeCode, Collette got an opportunity to attend a coding academy near her home, and we helped to offset the cost of her childcare while she was in classes. Bootcamp is called that for a reason—it’s an intense and often grueling experience. #YesWeCode’s staff provided community support, advice, and advocacy for her when the going got tough.
As a part of the #YesWeCode Coding Corps, Collette will be the first to tell you that attending the bootcamp not only expanded her coding skills exponentially but also broadened her professional network, something that’s invaluable in the tech sector. After graduating, Collette found a full-time position in a medium-sized tech company. In fewer than nine months, her life was transformed: She went from being a full-time mom (a hard job, and one that’s unpaid) to making ninety-five thousand dollars annually. Best of all, Collette’s self-confidence has gone through the roof.
For the first time in decades, technology has allowed for Americans to jump directly out of poverty and into a growing profession, with the chance to earn a good living and even to become an entrepreneur. There is employable talent out there in our youth and minority communities, as yet untapped. To soar, people just need financial support, a community that they can rely on, and a professional network that they can activate. The tech industry needs leaders like Collette, and #YesWeCode and our allies are working to create more opportunities for nontraditional techies like her. With #YesWeCode, it’s not a pipe dream. I know what’s possible; I have seen it with my own eyes.
All of this hope and help grew out of one conversation with Prince, on a night when supporters of Trayvon Martin’s family were deep in mourning. Rather than give in to bitterness, Prince helped transform a community’s pain into purpose. My hope is that everyone will follow his example—and search within for solutions that unify and heal.
In April of 2013, I found myself in St. Louis, Missouri. Thousands of people were gathered to protest outside the headquarters of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company. The United Mine Workers of America had planned the demonstration and had invited me to be one of the speakers at the rally. Everywhere you looked you saw coal miners—some still active and some gray-haired retirees—and their families. Most of them wore caps to shield their faces from the sun and white T-shirts that said “Peabody Promised, Peabody Lied.” Joining them, but wearing red shirts, were members of the Communications Workers of America. Other unions came, as well, in a great show of solidarity. Over the loudspeaker, the classic American union song “Which Side Are You On?” rang out. Poignantly, the lyrics ask: “Tell me what you gonna do?/ When there’s one law for the rulers/And one law for the ruled.”
Six years earlier and facing a corporate financial crisis, Peabody Energy had created a spin-off company called the Patriot Coal Corporation. Peabody then off-loaded most of its worker pensions and health-insurance plans—dumping them into the new, undercapitalized company. When Patriot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the coal miners saw it as failure by design: Peabody wanted Patriot to fail so the company could renege on the promises it made to its loyal workers. The printed signs that some of the workers carried summed it up perfectly: PEABODY CREATED PATRIOT TO FAIL. PATRIOT’S GREED KILLS. ARE YOU NEXT? Others held up signs they had made themselves. One particularly heartbreaking sign displayed a photo of an elderly couple and a list of the couple’s ailments: CANCER, BRAIN ANEURYSM, DIABETES, HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE.
The miners and workers surrounding me were part of a long and noble tradition. And I very much supported their cause. As a former Obama official and a prominent environmentalist, I was there to help shame Peabody and Patriot—and stand up for the workers as best I could. I was, however, one of only a few black men there. And in a crowd of working-class white folks wearing jeans and T-shirts, I stuck out like a sore thumb in my blue blazer and red tie. When it came to the ballot box, I probably wasn’t on their side. Regardless, on that day and in that context, I knew which side I was on—theirs. One hundred percent.
But why was I the only Democrat with a national platform there to support the miners? We liberals claim to fight for downtrodden Americans, but it didn’t look like it that day in St. Louis. In my view, it is unconscionable to ask people to go down into dark, dangerous holes every day, risking their lungs and lives to keep our lights turned on, and then ignore their needs. I hope we decide to leave more coal in the ground, but regardless we have to honor the promises we made to the people who put their bodies on the line when we were busy taking it out.
The rally drew to a close and the time of the march neared. We bowed our heads in prayer, then moved like a strong, slow-flowing river toward our destination, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. People held up more signs: WE ONLY WANT WHAT WE WORKED FOR, PEABODY! SHAME ON YOU, PATRIOT! BROKEN PROMISES THREATEN PEOPLE’S LIVES. This all felt familiar to me. I felt good about being here.
One thing bothered me, though. Everyone was so damn quiet. I knew they were angry and wounded. And they had every right to make themselves heard. Hurt people holler. So how come they weren’t getting loud?
I figured they probably just needed a little nudge. My voice is loud, and I don’t mind using it. I’ve been the hype man at plenty of protests, so I rose to the occasion—shouting one of my old-school chants from Oakland:
“Ain’t no power like the power of the people, ’cause the power of the people don’t stop! Say what?”
I waited for people to join in, to reply to my call, but no one did. They didn’t make a sound. In fact, they barely seemed to notice.
Maybe they were just shy or needed another nudge. I shouted even louder this time, cupping my hands around my mouth:
“Ain’t no power like the power of the people, ’cause the power of the people don’t stop! Say what?”
Crickets.
I was starting to feel a little stupid. Confused. Why weren’t they responding? Didn’t they want me here?
I felt someone next to me and turned. It was the wife of one of the miners, a small woman. She touched my elbow and motioned me closer. I leaned down toward her.
“Don’t be offended,” she said. “They can’t.”
“They can’t what?”
She gently tapped the center of her chest.
The penny dropped for me. I got it.
They couldn’t shout. They couldn’t chant.
After years of breathing bad air down in the bowels of the earth, their lungs wouldn’t let them. Serious respiratory ailments, including black lung disease, made it a struggle for some of the men just to walk down the street. A few were pulling small oxygen tanks along with them.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the lesson I learned in that moment. I had flown in to support a cause I knew was important. I wanted badly to help, and I thought I understood the issues. But I didn’t fully get it. These men and their wives were fighting for their lives. Many of them were desperately ill—and they had gotten sick working in Peabody’s mines. They had taken home modest paychecks in exchange for a promise of secure pensions and lifetime healthcare. Peabody had swindled them out of those pensions and even placed their medical coverage at risk. Without access to top-notch doctors, many of the men who were marching right next to me would die. Plain and simple. But Peabody—a mega-profitable energy company—didn’t give a damn. To save a few bucks, the executives in charge were perfectly willing to abandon these men to their fates. I realized that the fight to protect sick and retired miners, along with their wives and widows, was a life-or-death struggle. It was as serious and consequential as any battle I had ever taken on in urban America.
The coal-mining industry is a target of progressive activism because the burning of fossil fuels disrupts earth’s climate. But we all must acknowledge that we have personally benefitted from the labor of those miners whose courage and skill have undergirded America’s economy for generations. A changing economy need not leave these workers behind. We need programs to train active miners, giving them the skills needed in new industries. We need a just transition, a responsible evolution.
The good news is this: It’s possible. We can help heal the bodies of the coal miners. We can work to save their pensions. We can help heal the land. And we can create a new, clean energy economy that is better for the people and the planet.
In fact, the Dream Corps worked in solidarity with a broad-based coalition and won the battle to secure healthcare benefits for twenty thousand coal miners in spring of 2017. We are now engaged in the battle to save their pensions, too. We can also redeem and save the land, which has suffered due to our addiction to fossil fuels.
There is a model we can follow. When big changes hit, America’s government has a long history of stepping up with “transition assistance.” In 1944, the GI Bill helped veterans transition home from World War II. Starting in the late 1980s, the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process helped communities absorb the shock when military bases were closed. Over the years, America’s government has offered “trade adjustment assistance” to help workers affected by the outsourcing of jobs overseas. The transition away from a predominantly fossil-fuel economy to a cleaner mix of energy sources is also monumental. It will require adequate investment to protect and respect the workers who powered our nation to this point.
WHILE I AM new to the front lines in coal country, the issues involved in the transition to a cleaner, greener economy are not new to me. In 2009, during my brief tenure as the special adviser for green jobs at the White House, the Democrats in Congress had passed an emergency stimulus bill amounting to 787 billion dollars. Eighty billion dollars of that was earmarked for green and clean solutions. That would translate to billions of dollars for solar panels, energy-efficient retrofits of buildings, smart batteries, wind turbines, and more. It was my job to help coordinate the efforts of the dozen departments and agencies that would receive parts of this 80 billion dollars. I was tasked with making sure the money was spent efficiently and effectively. But in the back of my mind, I was worried. Unless we planned properly, a transition to solar and wind power, and away from fossil fuels like coal, might decimate entire towns and counties.
I asked my superiors for a meeting and revealed to them my secret desire to flood Appalachia with green investments. I argued that it was morally right, economically feasible, and politically smart to make sure we were investing more than we were taking in a region that had already given so much to America. After all, in some ways Appalachia has long been a sacrifice zone, asked to blow up its mountains and to poison its streams with the runoff from coal mining. I saw the opportunity to turn a center of local suffering into a showcase for global solutions. Why not spare mountaintops slated for removal and outfit them with wind turbines? Why not reclaim the land that had been ruined by mining activities, returning it to its natural state or redeveloping it for other commercial uses that would reinvigorate local economies?
I was fired up and ready to go, but it was less than delicately pointed out to me that we had no clear statutory authority to launch a green crusade against Appalachian poverty. Congress had not passed any such law, and it would be illegal to play favorites with stimulus dollars, no matter how poor or deserving the region. I argued, however, that there was nothing to stop the administration from taking steps to ensure that dollars already headed for the region were well spent. I pointed out that there was an organization already on the books to help Appalachia—the Appalachian Regional Commission. Founded in 1965, the ARC had a mandate to look for ways to help people in the region move out of poverty. I proposed that we consult with the ARC when considering ways to spend the 80 billion dollars.
My argument prevailed, and I was granted permission to work with the ARC, among other regional entities. Soon after, we held a meeting with the head of the ARC and officials from numerous departments and agencies in positions to dispense funds. As we went around the table and everyone explained their ideas for spending in ways that would benefit the country but also Appalachia, the ARC director looked more and more pleased. We had everything we needed to make a tremendous difference for people who had been forgotten for too long. Unfortunately, I resigned my position within two weeks of that meeting, so I never got to bring that vision to life. But my ideas lived on through others in the Obama administration: In 2016, it put forward the POWER+ Plan. The proposal—an acronym for Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization—would have specifically sent help to Appalachian communities that were getting left behind because of the rapidly changing energy market. The Republican Congress never funded the idea, though.
That said, dreams die hard. I continue to fight for a future in which well-paid work to heal the land can also have a healing effect on people and our economy. The global demand for coal is slowing, and coal from Wyoming costs a fraction of the coal from Appalachia. It’s time to focus on creating twenty-first-century opportunities in coal country.
OUR MINERS AREN’T the only ones who need help transitioning to a clean-energy economy. Poor black and brown communities live on the front lines of some of the worst pollution in America. They have always been hit first and worst by the pollution-based economy; they shouldn’t benefit last and least as we shift to greener and cleaner solutions.
Take Flint, Michigan, much in the news for lead in its drinking water.
Because the city ran into budget troubles in 2013, Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, appointed a special emergency-management council to take over the city. One of the initiatives that the council instituted to cut costs was to switch the Flint water supply from Detroit’s system to the local Flint River.
But the water from the Flint River was toxic. How toxic? It rusted engine parts at a local GM plant. After just four months, the plant decided to switch back to the Detroit system for its water. But the residents of Flint had no such option. The women, men, and children of Flint—42 percent of whom live below the poverty line and most of whom are black—had to drink, cook with, and bathe in water that could corrode metal.
Denettra Brown and her now-four-year-old son, Dana Brock, are representative of the problems. Among other health issues, little Dana has had five severe seizures this year alone, swollen and infected tonsils, tooth decay, and breathing problems. A sleep specialist informed Denettra that Dana’s breathing had stopped eighty-three times in a single hour of monitoring. But it’s not just drinking the water that has impacted Dana; it’s bathing in it, as well. Once Denettra gave Dana a shower after he wet his pants. Within two minutes of being exposed to the toxic water in that shower, his delicate skin started to crack and blister and bleed. It’s no surprise that a sample of the water from Denettra’s bathtub was found to contain sixteen parts per billion (ppb) of lead. Understand this: For federal regulators, fifteen ppb is a threshold, the point at which a water system must take action to protect public health.
Or let’s talk about Nakiya Wakes and her family. Optimistic about making a new start in life, Nakiya and her two children moved to Flint right when the water source was switched: 2014. Soon thereafter, she became pregnant. Five weeks into her pregnancy, however, she miscarried. But while being checked at the hospital, her doctors detected another heartbeat. She had actually been pregnant with twins! Confident that this one was going to make it, Nakiya began to buy clothes and supplies. But at the beginning of her second trimester, Nakiya miscarried again. Waiting in her mail when she came home from the hospital that second time was a notice from the city of Flint, warning residents of something they had understood for months: It was unsafe for pregnant women to drink the water.
It should go without saying that all women should have access to water that does not cause them to miscarry. This idea is one that can and should unite environmentalist liberals and pro-life conservatives. That’s a coalition waiting to happen. We can’t be so eager to cut costs or so panicked about “job-killing regulations” that we enact child-killing deregulation.
I asked Michigan Democrat congressman Dan Kildee, “If ISIS came up with a strategy to poison ten thousand American children, what would happen?”
He said, “Congress would act within twenty-four hours.” But to this day, precious little has been done by the government at any level. Instead, it’s local citizens who are showing us the way.
This tragedy has brought the best out in many people—including the mostly white guys in some of Michigan’s labor unions. Volunteers from plumbers’ unions—mostly Flint’s United Association Local 370, but also others from around the state—have risen to the challenge, visiting more than forty-five hundred homes in Flint and totaling more than ten thousand hours of work at no cost to local residents. Other unions in Michigan worked with the American Red Cross to deliver bottled water. The work of the Flint Rising Coalition has been crucial in terms of grassroots coordination. Of these efforts to help people in need, Ben Ranger, the Michigan Pipe Trades Association’s executive director, said, “This should be all hands on deck. This is our state.” As Ed Schroeder, financial secretary of UAW Local 3000, said of Flint’s residents: “They need a human response, not another failed politician to offer a handful of nothing.”
Of course, it’s not just the people of Flint who are offered a handful of nothing. People all over this country pay the price for our overreliance on fossil fuels and disregard for public health. Kamita Grey, for instance, lives in Brandywine, Maryland, a majority black community that has three power plants nearby and two more that have been approved for development. On top of that, there is a coal-ash dump that makes it so difficult to breathe when the wind blows that she cannot go outside. Blanca Hernandez grew up in Richmond, California, near a Chevron oil refinery and several other polluting facilities. For Blanca, it’s normal to hear the sound of an alarm bell ringing through the city, telling people to go inside their homes and close all the doors and windows because the air outside can kill you. Oil leaks and gas explosions are also common.
The truth is, if you’re black or brown or poor in the United States, you’re more likely to be in this kind of situation. Sixty-eight percent of African Americans in the United States live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant, and 80 percent of Latinos live in areas that don’t meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for air quality.
In April 2016, three Lakota Sioux teenagers convened on the north end of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation (just off the Dakota Access route) to establish a small prayer camp in protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline, part of the Keystone XL Pipeline that would start from Canada and bisect from North Dakota down through Texas. It would move half a million barrels of oil a day underneath the Missouri River, from which the Standing Rock Sioux source their drinking water. Over six months, the prayer group grew from a group of teens and their elders to a nationwide resistance encampment, where everyone from American Indian groups to conservative farmers united in protest. Pipeline backers promised it would create thousands of jobs, but these jobs would only last through the phase of more than one thousand miles of construction—after which the pipeline would yield only about thirty-five permanent jobs. Not only is this an economic red herring, but the pipeline would also move some of the most dangerous, carbon-intensive, and dirtiest oil in the world—called tar-sand crude. Tar-sand crude had already leaked into the Missouri River, and that eighty-four gallons’ worth of oil was considered small, routine, and negligible by DAPL employees. That negligible judgment affects the drinking water of millions of people who rely on the Missouri River—including the Sioux and other towns and counties dependent on the river’s resources.
On December 4, 2016, President Obama’s U.S. Army Corps of Engineers halted the pipeline, as it had done earlier in the face of protests over the Keystone Pipeline. Sadly, four days into his presidency, Donald Trump signed an executive order to begin clearing the way for both DAPL and the Keystone XL Pipeline. The entire Keystone Pipeline operation will create fewer than fifty permanent jobs, despite the millions who would be in harm’s way in the event of a serious leak.
Shoving leaky pipelines down indigenous people’s throats is not a smart or honest way to do economic development. There are more than one million Native Americans living on reservations in the United States, and around 14 percent of these families have no access to electricity. That figure is ten times more than the rest of the nation. What if we came together with the tribes to fix this? South Dakota is one of the nation’s windiest states, already getting 25 percent of its power from wind. Imagine the jobs and opportunities that Native American–owned wind and solar farms could create.
Of course it would be wonderful if we were able to fix all of these environmental problems and create new jobs and economic opportunities in the process. But that would cost billions of dollars—if not more. Where can we find the cash to fund and finance the cleaning up and greening up of an entire country?
One woman has a powerful idea that is already making a tremendous difference in California—and could do the same across America. Her name is Vien Truong, the director of Green For All and the CEO of the Dream Corps. She and her network of advocates have already implemented policy ideas that took a billion dollars from polluters and invested that money to uplift the poorest and most polluted communities in the state.
Vien is a young woman with a remarkable story, one that has made her the ideal champion for using clean-energy solutions to help ordinary people earn a living and save money. Vien is the youngest of eleven children. In the 1970s, her family escaped war-ravaged Vietnam by boat, and Vien was born in a refugee camp. When the Truong family eventually landed in the United States, they settled in Oregon and became migrant farm workers, picking strawberries and snow peas. They later moved down to Oakland, California, where the only jobs available to Vien’s parents and older siblings were in manufacturing sweatshops. Vien was the first person in her family to attend college. For her, the definition of success wasn’t simply to escape poverty but to figure out how to eradicate it.
In 2012, Vien (then working with the Greenlining Institute) co-led a coalition with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Coalition for Clean Air, NAACP, and Natural Resources Defense Council. They wound up making history and moving billions of dollars to address green-energy solutions. Due to their advocacy, the state of California set up an “equitable carbon pricing” program, where the big polluters were being held accountable: Either these companies had to radically reduce the amount of pollution they were pumping into the air, and do it fast, or else they were subject to large fines. In other words, they had to clean up or pay up.
California’s carbon-pricing program has led to three billion dollars to fight pollution in “California Climate Investments.” These funds have paid for things like transit programs, waste programs, dairy-digester research and development, biofuels, state water projects, affordable housing, and much more.
Vien’s coalition partners endorsed and helped to pass a law to ensure that at least 25 percent of the funds from California’s carbon-pricing program goes directly to the state’s most vulnerable communities, places with the highest levels of poverty and pollution. The fund has already created more than 900 million dollars in investments to these communities, for things like solar panels, energy-efficient improvements, affordable-housing developments, trees for concrete jungles, composting programs, and more.
These dollars are making a positive difference in real people’s lives. Vien shared a story with me about Maria Zavala, a woman in Fresno, the city that ranks number one in pollution for the state of California. Thanks to the state’s carbon-pricing program, Maria was able to receive free solar panels. She saw her monthly energy bill go down from two hundred dollars to $1.50, because she no longer had to crank up the heat in the winter and the AC in the brutal California summers.
Vien’s problem-solving and advocacy led to the Transformative Climate Communities Program, which leverages 140 million dollars from the carbon-pricing program with private capital (in partnership with financial institutions, foundations, public agencies, and other groups) to transform whole communities at a time.
As Vien’s example shows, one of the best ways we can open the doors of economic opportunity is to connect our economic vision to our environmental agenda. This means we have to develop practical solutions that help combat pollution and poverty at the same time. People want to breathe clean air and work good jobs; we really can have both.
When it comes to creating jobs, we know that clean energy works. In 2016, the number of jobs in solar grew 25 percent from the year prior, according to figures from the nonprofit Solar Foundation, while jobs in the rest of the economy had less than 2 percent growth. There are almost three million people working in the wind and solar industries alone. Renewable energy companies now create jobs twelve times faster than the rest of the economy. This is a fact we cannot ignore. Our future depends upon finding solutions to heal the land that will work for coal country and the rest of struggling America.
IRONICALLY, IT IS at the margins of society that one discovers the moral center. And that is where we must begin to rebuild a politics of possibility. I am not suggesting that we seek a watered-down political centrism. There is nothing in the middle of the road these days but a yellow stripe and dead possums. In fact, the quest for political “moderation” gave us the terrible policies of the 1990s and early 2000s, which just blew up in our faces.
I am interested in the moral center, not the political center. I am searching for common ground, not the “middle ground.” I know that common ground can be discovered in surprising places—like in a prison cell, or at a detox center, or on a march with coal miners.
We must go where the pain and peril are greatest and the quest for real solutions is the most desperate. That is where we will be humbled by the limitations of our slogans and our certainties. That is where we will learn to respect the gifts of those with different backgrounds and polar-opposite worldviews—the people with whom we might otherwise and ordinarily disagree but without whom we can’t solve the real problems.
Many babies have fallen down many wells. Over the din of the political shouting matches, we all hear their cries. Enough. Let’s go rescue them. All of them. In red states and in blue states. And in so doing, we will generate the capacity to rescue each other, ourselves, and our country.
* According to a 2016 Gizmodo survey that used 2015 diversity data, only 5 percent of hires at major tech companies were non-Asian people of color (Hispanic, black, two or more races) and 16 percent of hires at these same companies were women. This resulted despite big tech companies dedicating millions of dollars to diversity efforts.