How We Can Win
Race, History and Changing the Money Game That’s Rigged
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
‘So if I played four hundred rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for fifty years, every time that I played, if you didn’t like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood, how can you win? How can you win?’
When Kimberly Jones declared these words amid the protests spurred by George Floyd’s murder, she captured the world’s attention. Millions of people watched the video of her speech, riveted by her damning analysis of the enduring disparities Black Americans face.
In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions—promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than one hundred and fifty years. And, crucially, Jones delivers strategies for how we can all effect change in the fight against a system that is still rigged.
Kimberly Jones is an activist, a writer, a former bookseller and the host of the Well-Read Black Girl book club’s Atlanta chapter. She has directed feature films and a cutting-edge diverse web series and is also co-author of the bestselling young-adult novels I'm Not Dying with You Tonight (an NAACP Image Award finalist) and Why We Fly.
‘Kimberly Jones hits as hard as Serena Williams and has the intellectual range of Angela Davis. How We Can Win is genius—written with the cadence of hip-hop and the intellectual energy of jazz. Jones understands the relationship between America’s streets and its boardrooms, and she delivers her lessons with heart, nuance and a complexity that belie the simplicity of her prose. This book is both a praise song for Black life and a manual for humanity.’ Sisonke Msimang
‘Kimberly truly took my breath away the first time I heard her speak. Learning from all of her work continues to be such a privilege. No punches pulled, no opportunities for change missed, and no lies told. I am so grateful this generation has a voice like hers to guide us.’ Jameela Jamil
‘A fierce, poignant, poetic, and necessary examination of race, class, and what it means to be a Black female activist up against the colonial mindset of modern America.’ Maxine Beneba Clarke
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Activist and YA novelist Jones (I'm Not Dying with You Tonight) expands in this searing look at racial inequality on a 2020 viral video in which she compared the impact of slavery and white supremacy on Black Americans' socioeconomic status to a fixed Monopoly game. Jones recalls growing up on the South Side of Chicago during the height of the drug trade in the 1980s, hitting "rock bottom" as a single mother who couldn't afford to pay both the electric and the gas bills, and how protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray inspired her first book. Turning to her Monopoly analogy, Jones explains how redlining prevented Black people from owning real estate and building generational wealth; discusses the Tulsa massacre and other historical instances when whites destroyed Black wealth; notes that many prominent U.S. companies, including Brooks Brothers, "began and made their name during slavery"; and cites a study claiming that Black people own just 2.6 percent of the wealth in America. It's a succinct and persuasive argument, buttressed by Jones's detailed outline for "Reconstruction 2.0," which includes a "truth and reconciliation" commission and a federal agency modeled after the 19th-century Freedmen's Bureau. The result is an impassioned and actionable call for leveling the playing field in America.
