Meet Tandreia Dixon
Over the next 6 weeks, we will introduce you to the seven individuals who are most central to our book.
The first time we met Tandreia Dixon, it was in a little Cuban joint in Marietta, Ga. It was the summer of 2021, and she was living nearby with her cousin, because the Atlanta area is so expensive. She made six figures in the technology industry, but she wanted to save money, not spend it. Tandreia was a generational break-through in her family’s wealth curve, and she didn’t want to squander that.
As we set off on our project to understand why the Black-white wealth gap is so large and so persistent, Tandreia’s interest and commitment to bringing up her family’s wealth was exciting to us. Despite growing up in a one-stop-light town in rural eastern North Carolina, she had attended college and graduate school. She had moved to a big city and began mixing with people with greater resources. She was an avid consumer of financial advice and a constant dreamer of ways to make money on her family’s land back home. There were many twists and turns ahead in what she would experience in the three years we followed her financial life. Though there were some positive developments, there were also disappointments. In one moment, when she felt she simply couldn’t win on the job front, she would tell us, “we are the modern-day sharecroppers.”
Upcoming Events:
Tandreia will be among the people from our book who will join us onstage on June 19 for a Juneteenth gathering at a theater in Times Square. We invite anyone in the New York City area looking for a special Juneteenth outing to register here to attend.
Our number one goal in our work on the Black-white wealth gap is to make 15 cents on the dollar a nationally-recognized statistic, so that conversations on societal topics will be better informed that typical Black families have 15 cents for every $1 of typical white family wealth. (You can read more about our goals here.)
To spread the word about this data, we have been holding racial wealth gap symposiums around the country. So far we have been to Kansas City, Mo., Orlando, Fl., Austin, Tx., Montgomery, Ala., and around the NYC area.
We have more stops coming, and we hope you’ll join us at one of these.
Thursday, May 23: Palo Alto, Ca. “Unjust: Race and Money in America.” A Symposium at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Sign up here.
Thursday, May 30: Boston, Ma. “Racial Wealth Gap Symposium in the Historically Black Roxbury Neighborhood.” Sign up here.
Wednesday, June 19: New York, NY. “Juneteenth Event in Times Square: The Black-White Wealth Gap: from the Civil War to the Present.” Sign up here.
Friday, June 21: Washington, D.C. “Financial Punishment: The Black-White Wealth Gap and the Justice System, co-hosted by The Marshall Project.” Sign up here (ticket includes a book purchase) or here (if you already bought one).
Saturday, June 22: Atlanta, Ga. “Is Atlanta Really a Black Mecca?” A symposium on the Black-white gap in Atlanta and nationally at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Sign up here.
Wednesday, June 26: Kansas City, Mo. “Ebony Reed Discusses Her New Book: Fifteen Cents on the Dollar.” Sign up here.
Thursday, June 27: Atlanta, Ga. “Capital B: Black Political Power Tour.” An event run by Capital B News. Sign up here.
More to come… Updates will be featured on our Events page.
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Our book comes out in just under six weeks, and we are grateful for the positive reception we have received from early readers. Here are some of their thoughts about the book:
More endorsements can be found here.
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Thank you for your Pre-Order
Have you pre-ordered? We are donating proceeds from the book. Here is one place you can purchase the book with all proceeds going to the Prison Journalism Project.
A couple dozen independent bookstores are already carrying our book, including some Black-owned bookstores. Here is a list of the stores we know about.
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Stay tuned..
We’ll be back soon with more to share from our book. We invite you to reply to this email with any thoughts or questions.
-Louise and Ebony