New Books in Public Policy

In this episode, Nick Caverly talks about his new book, Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures (Stanford UP, 2025). For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with city residents, demolition workers, and public officials, as well as analyses of administrative archives, Demolishing Detroit examines the causes, procedures, and consequences of empty-building demolitions in Detroit. Contrary to stated goals of equity, the book reveals how racism and intersecting inequities endured despite efforts to level them. As calls to dismantle racist systems have become increasingly urgent, this book provides cautionary tales of urban transformations meant to combat white supremacy that ultimately reinforced inequality. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Nick Caverly grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures. Nick Caverly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Elena Sobrino is Lecturer in the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Faith in the American Dream—the idea that anyone who works hard can achieve success—has waned in the 21st century. Decreases in economic mobility, increases in the wealth gap, and other economic shifts have undoubtedly influenced this decline. Politics, however, are an overlooked contributor to confidence, or lack of confidence, in the American Dream. In Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025), political scientist Elizabeth Suhay investigates how politics and political identity are intertwined with beliefs about the American Dream and the causes of inequality. Drawing on public opinion surveys spanning more than four decades, Suhay finds that Americans’ belief in the American Dream is strongly related to their political party affiliation. Democratic Party leaders have increasingly questioned the fairness of the American economy, and, in effect, have called into question whether the American Dream is “real.” Republican Party leaders, by contrast, have consistently defended the fairness of the economy and the American Dream. While it is true that Americans have become more skeptical of the American Dream overall, Suhay finds this skepticism is concentrated among Democratic members of the public. Despite the increasingly working-class make-up of the Republican coalition, most Republican members of the public continue to believe the American Dream is reality. Suhay finds that both Democrats and Republicans tend to adhere to their party’s economic narratives when identifying the causes of inequality between rich and poor, White and Black and Latino Americans, and men and women. Democrats and liberals often attribute inequality between these groups to societal causes, such as lack of access to education and jobs or discrimination. Republicans and conservatives, on the other hand, are more likely to blame individuals and lower income groups for their difficulties. However, Americans’ beliefs are less polarized when they consider socioeconomic inequalities rarely debated by politicians. For example, when asking Republicans and Democrats about the roots of rural-urban and White-Asian inequality, there is no clear unequal opportunity-individual responsibility partisan divide. Suhay argues that the availability of partisan “scripts” helps to explain differences in the public’s views on inequality between groups that have been politicized. These beliefs appear to bolster support for the two parties’ policy agendas among party supporters, driving a wedge between Democrats and Republicans in support for redistributive economic policy as well as the political candidates who support or oppose redistribution. Debating the American Dream provides fascinating insights into politics’ role in Americans’ beliefs and attitudes concerning inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him—the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves together three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story. With unflinching honesty he takes readers on a journey, from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to tracing the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors’ footsteps, to confronting the challenges of representing his people in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community.In A Thousand Ways to Die (St. Martin’s Press, 2025) Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola’s legacy. In this episode we discuss the work of Dana Tenille Weeks. You can hear her talk about the reimagination of future at Episode 22 of her podcast, The Rest of Us. Find Trymaine Lee at his website and on Instagram. Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Amid political repression and a deepening affordability crisis, Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities (Princeton UP, 2025) challenges everything you thought you knew about “dull” and daunting government budgets. It shows how the latter confuse and mislead the public by design, not accident. Arguing that they are moral documents that demand grassroots participation to truly work for everyone, the book reveals how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Celina Su proposes a new kind of democracy—in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as consumers or members of voting blocs. Su presents a series of “interludes” that vividly illustrate how budget justice plays out on the ground, including in-depth interviews with activists from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, Mississippi, and shares her own personal reflections on how changing social identities inform one’s activism.Essential reading to empower citizens, Budget Justice explains why public budgets reflect a crisis not so much in accounting as in democracy, and enables everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to imagine and enact people’s budgets and policies—from universal preschool to affordable housing—that will enable their communities to thrive. Celina Su is the inaugural Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies (with an appointment in Critical Social & Environmental Psychology) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as well as Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College. Her interests lie in civil society and the cultural politics of education and health policy. She is especially interested in how everyday citizens engage in policy-making—via deliberative democracy when inclusive institutions exist, and via protest and social movements when they do not. Celina received a Ph.D. in Urban Studies from MIT and a B.A. Honors from Wesleyan University. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the United States, local law enforcement agencies are legally and organizationally independent entities from federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ICE. While local police enforce local, state and federal laws, they are not required to enforce civil immigration laws. On the Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State (NYU Press, 2025) examines the role of local police as voluntary, auxiliary reinforcements for ICE, focusing on the police force in New Jersey. It argues that even police in sanctuary jurisdictions, which explicitly label themselves as immigrant-friendly, are nonetheless still informally multiplying ICE’s forces through voluntary cooperation. While to date, the ethnography of policing has been produced from participant observation with the police in “ride-alongs” during patrol work and in jails and the examination of official documents like police reports, this book employs a novel method of transcribing police body worn camera (BWC) video footage to provide immersive, ethnographic thick description narratives of instances of local police officers assisting ICE. It makes the case that BWC ethnographic methods are better able to capture realistic interactions between the police and those they stop than when participant observers are on the scene. The volume thus not only reveals the ways in which local police function to assist ICE in enforcing federal civil immigration law, but also demonstrates the significance of using BWC-based ethnographies to examine how police exercise power. From police footage, internal records, and other materials, On the Side of ICE renders intimate, on-the-ground ethnographic narratives that illuminate what policing immigration looks like in contemporary America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy