Heather Ann Thompson

It's that you've got these poor welfare queen, underclass criminal thugs who don't want to work.

And that messaging, while completely inaccurate, was real.

really powerful.

And we've inherited that times 10.

Deliberate policy.

So you're talking about, for example, in the South Bronx where the four teenagers that I write about come from,

You're talking about a public housing complex that when white folks lived there after World War II, it is supported.

There's funding.

The playgrounds are kept up.

People have jobs in the public sector.

You know, you get to work for the city, you get to work for the state.

You get to send your kids for free to the community college system in New York, to the city college system of New York.

You have a leg up and you have a leg forward.

And then we get to 1981 with the first Reagan tax cuts, and then we just double down on it ever since.

And it's literally stripped.

All these budgets are literally stripped.

And so, for example, teenage kids that could get

Some were jobs through a program called CETA.

Those jobs just disappear.

And these were jobs that allowed people to intern in my city of Detroit for like Ford Motor Company or, you know, in the city of New York, you could work for all kinds of really interesting companies.