Wilkins Lecture

Wilkins Lecture offers a critical look at how to solve poverty in America

Shayla Brown — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 18:45:24 +0000

Wilkins Lecture offers a critical look at how to solve poverty in America Shayla Brown Wed, 09/27/2023 - 14:45

��AV’s annual Roger Wilkins Lecture is a tribute to the late Robinson Professor Emeritus of History and American Culture, and Wilkins’ daughter, Elizabeth, was on hand Tuesday, Sept. 26, at the Harris Theater to introduce this year’s guest speaker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond.

Pulitzer Prize winner Matthew Desmond, guest speaker for the 2023 Roger Wilkins Lecture in Harris Theater. Photo by Ron Aira/Office of University Branding.

“After reading both of [Desmond’s] books, I have come away with a sense of a person whose passion for justice and whose hatred for injustice paralleled that of my dad,” she said. “Both men have relentlessly centered people—real people, disempowered people, poor people—in their work. Neither of them will let us look away.”

The lecture, attended by about 325 people, featured Desmond’s latest book “Poverty, by America.” Desmond spoke about his personal experiences with poverty throughout his life, his encounters with others affected by social-economic injustices such as eviction, and implementable government policies that could greatly decrease the number of families and individuals living in poverty.

The lecture is sponsored by the Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) Program, a collaborative effort between the Schar School of Policy and Government and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The final portion of the evening consisted of a Q&A run by Wendi Manuel-Scott, professor of integrative studies and history, and a book signing by Desmond.

One audience member asked whether mission-focused nonprofits and co-ops that are not focused on maximizing profits could help solve the housing problem.

Desmond said that it’s possible but challenging, and it would require federal guidance for wide implementation. He gave the example of a tenant union in Minneapolis that was trying to turn their buildings into a co-op and asked the landlord to sell them the buildings. He set the asking price at $7 million. They countered with a fair market price.

“But [the landlord] got fed up because the tenants were also advocating, so he gave everyone an eviction notice. Everything came to a head—they were either going to be homeowners or homeless,” Desmond said. The tenants ultimately won and bought the buildings, and they are still a co-op today, he added.

Another audience member asked why the top 1% don’t pay their fair share of taxes, which would go toward $175 billion estimated need to end poverty?

“One is the worry that if you tax affluent Americans too much, they will leave the country, so instead of having a little tax from them, we’d have none,” Desmond said. He also pointed to fears of empowering the Internal Revenue Service, an already troubled institution. “Some propose a whole new federal agency, that would essentially be a ‘making sure rich people pay their taxes’ bureau, and if you make under a certain amount, the bottom 95%, they will have absolutely nothing to do with you.”

Desmond was also asked about the challenge of national rhetoric interfering with practical local problem-solving movements.

“I think that polarization is both very frustrating and encouraging,” Desmond said. “Surveys show that most Americans think that minimum wage is too low, the rich aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, and most Democrats and Republicans believe that poverty is the result of structural failing, not a moral failing. That’s encouraging.”

“The call for a robust antipoverty movement means we might disagree on gun rights or abortion, but we both want higher wages and fairer taxes,” he added. “That kind of movement is harder to make in America.”

“Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”
—Matthew Desmond

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Pulitzer winner, poverty researcher Matthew Desmond to deliver 2023 Roger Wilkins Lecture

Colleen Rich — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 15:59:42 +0000

Pulitzer winner, poverty researcher Matthew Desmond to deliver 2023 Roger Wilkins Lecture Colleen Rich Fri, 09/01/2023 - 11:59

Matthew Desmond says the Pulitzer Prize he won in 2017 for his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the America City came as a surprise. “I didn’t even know it was happening that day,” he said, still blushing a bit during a Zoom call from his home office in Princeton, New Jersey.

Matthew Desmond. Photo by Barron Bixler

Desmond, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, is the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab, which compiles data on the 3.6 million eviction cases a year in the United States; it’s an aspect of his heartfelt studies of poverty and public policy. Desmond is the guest lecturer for this year’s ��AV Roger Wilkins Lecture, taking place Tuesday, Sept. 26, at 4 p.m. in the Harris Theater on the Fairfax Campus. The free event is open to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and all members of the Mason community.

Desmond’s new book, Poverty, By America (Crown), is a deep and compassionate dive into the persistence of poverty in the U.S. and the policies that have been shown to be effective in abolishing it.

“Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to,” he writes in the book. “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”

Desmond has seen the effects of poverty—and the policies that change it—firsthand. The son of a preacher growing up in Winslow, Arizona—a desert town offering little else beyond a fabled street corner in a song by the Eagles—Desmond experienced “the humiliations of poverty—we got our gas shut off, for instance,” he said, and losing the family home to foreclosure.

But a public policy changed everything for young Desmond: Arizona students who finish high school in “the top 5 percent of your class, you get free tuition at a state school,” he recalled. “That was the lifesaver that helped me get to Arizona State University. If we’re going to point to one policy along the way that was the secret sauce, it was that tuition assistance policy I got when I was 18.”

He added that there are other policies can help eradicate poverty in addition to tuition assistance. Housing vouchers, for example, allow families to “go to the grocery store to buy more food because they don’t have to pay 50, 60, 70 percent of their income on rent. These things work for the lucky minority that benefit from them.” And lucky is the word: “They literally have won the lottery” when awarded vouchers, he said.

While he’s hopeful his Wilkins lecture will have an impact on those in the audience, “a fear of mine is people read my book or come to my talks and they say, ‘good book, good talk,’ and they go on with their lives,” he said. “I want us all to commit to this project of ‘poverty abolitionism,’ this conviction that we should have a zero-percent poverty rate and [understanding] that profiting from someone else’s pain corrupts all of us.”

The Wilkins Lecture is named for the late Wilkins who was a civil rights activist, the first Black U.S. assistant attorney general, and a Robinson Professor of History and American Culture at Mason for 20 years. The series was established as a tribute to Wilkins by his colleagues and is also sponsored by the undergraduate Philosophy, Politics and Economics program. Previous Wilkins lecturers include Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, and civil rights activist James Foreman Jr.

“Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”

~ Matthew Desmond

Learn about Roger Wilkins

Previous Wilkins Lecturers

Wilkins Lecture offers a critical look at how to solve poverty in America
September 27, 2023
Pulitzer winner, poverty researcher Matthew Desmond to deliver 2023 Roger Wilkins Lecture
September 6, 2023
NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie examines U.S. political inequality in annual Wilkins Lecture
April 6, 2022
NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie is the featured speaker at this year’s Roger Wilkins Lecture
March 30, 2022
Justice Elena Kagan is this year’s featured speaker at Roger Wilkins Lecture
November 11, 2019

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NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie examines U.S. political inequality in annual Wilkins Lecture

Colleen Rich — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 18:16:57 +0000

NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie examines U.S. political inequality in annual Wilkins Lecture Colleen Rich Wed, 04/06/2022 - 14:16

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie delivered a thought-provoking look at the U.S. political system as the featured speaker at Mason’s Roger Wilkins Lecture. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services

American Democracy is “severely lacking” in political equality, and the problem is only going to worsen unless steps are taken to help the nation fully realize our democratic aspirations, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie said Tuesday.

Bouie delivered a thought-provoking look at the U.S. political system as the featured speaker at ��AV’s Roger Wilkins Lecture, created in honor of the late Mason professor and civil rights leader.

Mason President Gregory Washington welcomed Bouie as “one of the most exciting political minds of our time.”

Speaking at the Fenwick Library on the Fairfax Campus to an audience that included inquisitive students, faculty and staff as well as members of the Wilkins family, Bouie gave his take on the current American political system in which the voices of every citizen are not treated equally.

“It is the moral promise of democracy and the reason why democracy holds any appeal in the first place,” he said. “If you don’t believe in a self-governing society with political equals, then, in a critical sense, you really don’t believe in democracy. You may believe in something else, but it’s not democracy.”

From left, Jamelle Bouie and Schar School professor Jennifer Victor with a Mason student following the lecture. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services

Bouie, a 2009 University of Virginia graduate who joined the New York Times in January 2019, cited the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College as institutions systemically hindering true political equality.

The U.S. Senate, he noted, empowers each of the nation’s 50 states equal representation with two votes apiece. Wyoming, the nation’s least populous state with roughly 600,000 residents, is on equal footing with California, the nation’s most populous state with nearly 40 million residents. That means that Wyoming residents have 67% more voting power than their counterparts in California.

That disparity will become each more pronounced over time as densely populated states like California, Texas, Florida and Georgia continue to see major population spikes, he said. By 2040, roughly half of the nation’s population is projected to live in just eight states, meaning that half the nation’s residents will get 16 votes in the U.S. Senate, while the other half of the population spread across the remaining 42 states will account for the remaining 84 votes in the nation’s highest legislative body.

“You can’t possibly say in that scenario that Americans have equal political representation,” Bouie said. “They simply do not.”

In noting that the Electoral College has five times awarded the presidency to candidates who lost the popular vote, Bouie pointed out that such a scenario was hardly an accident. The Founding Fathers, he said, intentionally designed a system where everyone was not treated equally so as to protect the hierarchy of the time, which favored wealthy white men.

Partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010 that allowed unlimited amounts of money into the political system, and the steps taken in some states to limit to access to voting have only further exacerbated the gap in true political equality for all, Bouie said.

Bouie, who is based in Charlottesville, Virginia, suggested a number of possible solutions. Chief among them was amending the U.S. Constitution to lower barriers to access and even the playing field for as many citizens as possible.

“We have spent nearly 250 years trying to shoehorn a democratic political system into a decidedly un-democratic document,” Bouie said. “There’s only so far you can go with that.”

Other possibilities he mentioned included enlarging the U.S. House of Representatives beyond its current 435 members, developing new political parties, removing U.S. Senate authority to propose national legislation and possibly introducing Australian-style compulsory voting.

Bouie’s youth and fresh perspective resonated with Mason student Bennett Freeze. The senior Government and International Politics major from Chicago said he came away impressed with what he’d heard.

“It was incredible,” he said. “I think Jamelle has a voice for a new generation of Americans who understand that the Constitution—as it currently stands—is inadequate to resolve the problems we now see.”

The Wilkins Lecture was presented by Mason’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program, the Schar School of Policy and Government, the African and African American Studies Program and the Scalia Law School.

Previous featured speakers at the Roger Wilkins Lecture have included Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Forman Jr. (2018) and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kegan (2019).

Wilkins was the nation’s first African American assistant U.S. attorney general, serving under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. An accomplished journalist, he was part of the team at the Washington Post that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973 with his editorials about the Watergate scandal.

Wilkins was a Robinson Professor of History and American Culture at Mason for nearly 20 years. The Johnson Center’s North Plaza was renamed in his honor in 2017.

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NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie is the featured speaker at this year’s Roger Wilkins Lecture

Colleen Rich — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 13:36:33 +0000

NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie is the featured speaker at this year’s Roger Wilkins Lecture Colleen Rich Wed, 03/30/2022 - 09:36

In This Story

Steven Pearlstein

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie will be the featured speaker at ��AV’s Roger Wilkins Lecture established in honor of the late Mason professor and civil rights leader.

“What’s the Matter with American Democracy” will begin at 4:30 p.m. on April 5 in the Main Reading Room of the Fenwick Library on the Fairfax Campus.

The free event, which is open to students, faculty, staff, alumni and all members of the Mason community, is presented by Mason’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program, the Schar School of Policy and Government, the African and African American Studies Program and the Scalia Law School.

Charlottesville, Virginia-based Bouie joined the New York Times in January 2019 after making a national name for himself during previous stops at The Daily Beast and Slate magazine with his extensive writings on racial politics, including the 2014 Ferguson unrest, the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shootings, and the Black Lives Matter movement, among other issues. He’s been a political analyst for CBS News since 2015 and frequently appears on the network’s Sunday morning show “Face the Nation.”

Bouie, a 2009 University of Virginia graduate, said he’s looking forward to speaking with the Mason community about specific problems within U.S. political institutions and their possible remedies.

“Americans don’t really have political equality,” he said. “Some Americans’ votes are worth more than that of other Americans. My talk will sort of be a walkthrough of this problem. What does it all mean and why should we care about it?”

Introducing Bouie will be Mason’s new Distinguished Visiting Professor in Criminology and former Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney.

Following his talk, Bouie will take questions from the audience, with the Schar School’s Jennifer Victor moderating the discussion.

Steven Pearlstein, the Robinson Professor of Public Affairs and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, knew Wilkins and helped establish the lecture series in his honor.

He said he reached out to Bouie about becoming this year’s speaker after noticing that Bouie “had a keen interest in and knowledge of history and constitutional law.”

“For this series, I try to find speakers Roger would have wanted us to hear from,” Pearlstein said.

Previous featured speakers at the Roger Wilkins Lecture have included Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Forman Jr. (2018) and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kegan (2019).

Wilkins was the nation’s first African American assistant U.S. attorney general, serving under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. An accomplished journalist, he was part of the team at The Washington Post that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973 with his editorials about the Watergate scandal.

Wilkins was a Robinson Professor of History and American Culture at Mason for nearly 20 years. The Johnson Center’s North Plaza was renamed in his honor in 2017.