Race, Poverty, and Systemic Inequities in America

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and the principal investigator at The Eviction Lab, a research group that published the first-ever dataset of evictions in America, going back to 2000.  His Pulitzer-Prize-winner book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City quickly made Desmond one of America’s most important thinkers and activists. His new book, Poverty, By America, broadens the scope of his research, demonstrating how wealthy Americans keep poor people poor. On March 27, 2024, Matthew Desmond came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an on-stage conversation with Bernice Yeung, the managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. Her first book, In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.