Jim Freeman is a Civil Rights lawyer and organizer who served under President Obama as a Commissioner on the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. He is the director of the Social Movement Support Lab at the University of Denver. As he explains in this talk, after decades of hard struggle alongside communities of color throughout the US to change racist policies, it began to dawn on him that those communities were no better off because “for every injustice they thought they were solving, an equally nasty one would pop up to replace it.”

Through incisive studies of the education, criminal justice, and immigration systems, Freeman explains how policies that keep people of color less educated, policed at impossible rates, and in constant fear of deportation, have in large part been enacted and supported by America’s ultra-wealthy.

On this episode of Pirate TV, Jim Freeman is here to talk about his new book, "RICH THANKS TO RACISM: How the Ultra-Wealthy Profit from Racial Injustice" an in depth study of the financial data that tracks billions of dollars in donations from the Koch family, the Walton family, Bill Gates, and other billionaires that are at the root of the mass incarceration system, the vast immigrant detention system, and the dismantling of public schools within communities of color. It uncovers how Fortune 500 companies such as General Electric, Bank of America, and ExxonMobil use their economic and political clout to actively contribute to the perpetuation of racial inequities.