How We Can Win

‘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.