Alicea's research focuses on race and ethnicity, organizations, education, and urban issues. Alicea has also written publicly, with words in the Christian Science Monitor, the Imprint, EdSource, and the Conversation. Alicea is a former public school teacher, trained policy analyst, and former nonprofit board member. He is also a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.
In common parlance, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers regularly discuss the needs of “Black and Brown” communities. The intentions here are mostly positive: to call attention to the accumulation of disadvantages that people of Black and Latinx descent face in the U.S. context. This disadvantage crosses many avenues of policy, including education, criminal legal, housing, and health. By compiling this information, there have been many meaningful efforts to attend to these inequalities via research, professional practice, and policy making. The implications of the widespread use of the phrase, however, can be less positive. The use of the “and” too often serves the effort of obscuring the differences between groups of people who are racialized as Black and/or Latinx.
A narrative of Black and Brown inequality often combines the numbers of the two groups in a way that rhetorically links their lived experiences together. If those numbers are disaggregated, one is likely to find at least one additional layer of inequality that exists between Black and Latinx groups. Too infrequently does the policy discourse take this approach, instead seeking to situate Black and Brown populations on one side with White populations on the other and, at times, also including a monolithic representation of Asian Americans.
As part of a research team that examined the compounded inequality faced by Black youth in Los Angeles County and included data about other racialized groups as well, we were able to interrogate the different experiences of Black and Latinx youth. For example, if read from a comparative (rather than conflating) point of view, one could learn that when compared to Latinx students, Black students were ten percentage points more likely to fail standardized tests in math and English, six percentage points less likely to graduate high school, and seven percentage points less likely to qualify for admission to multiple state university systems in California. This data along with comparative insights in criminal legal, housing, and health policy reveal what is missed when we consider “Black and Brown” as one group in policy discourse.
Criminal Legal Policy and Mass Incarceration
Mass incarceration has significantly impacted the lives of Black, White, and Latinx Americans, albeit in distinct ways. Addressing these disparities requires recognizing the unique challenges faced by each group. In 2021, the Sentencing Project released a report entitled, “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons.” Among its key findings were that Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rates of White Americans while Latinx Americans were incarcerated at 1.3 times the rate of White Americans. Yes, it is true here that both of these figures are indicative of disparities when compared to Whites, but an overlooked story here is that Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly 3.6 times the rate of Latinxs! This is a classic example of the vastly different experiences Black and Latinx Americans have with the criminal legal system.
Housing Policy and Houselessness
When we turn our attention to examine the perils of houselessness, it would not be inaccurate to read this research article and write that Black and Latinx Americans make up 62% of all unhoused people in the United States. Such a statistic should alarm policy makers everywhere. Once again, however, disaggregating the data tells a different story. Looking more closely, we find that Black Americans make up 40% of the unhoused (compared to being 13% of the overall population) and Latinx Americans make up 22% of the unhoused (compared to being 18% of the overall population). Now we can see that Black Americans face much greater risk of becoming unhoused compared to Latinx Americans. Both populations need assistance with houselessness, but there is a significant disparity in the magnitude of need between the two groups.
Health Policy and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Another policy area to consider when disaggregating the data includes health policy. The COVID-19 pandemic was devastating to Americans across the country and continues its impact to this day. The latest numbers, as of a June 2023 report, suggest that approximately 1.1 million Americans have died from COVID. When we examine the crude mortality rate (calculated as the number of deaths per 100,000), the data reveals that Black Americans have one of the highest rates (1 in 265 have died) and Latinx Americans are among the lowest (1 in 358 have died).
The large disparity here between Black and Latinx Americans suggests a need to dig deeper into the different challenges that each community continues to face during this ongoing public health crisis. At the same time, Latinx Americans are the most likely of any racialized group to report experiencing long COVID. Researchers have observed a kind of domino effect with long COVID, noting associations with greater financial and food insecurity, as well as increased suffering of mental health hardship. Thus, there is a need for a multifaceted policy response to prevent the premature death of Black COVID patients and to mitigate the onset of long COVID among the Latinx patient population.
Next Steps for Scholars, Practitioners, and Policy Makers
The objective of this research brief is not to weaken relations between Black and Latinx populations, but rather to advocate for more thoughtful policy efforts around the needs of each community. Below are key policy takeaways for stakeholders to take into consideration.
- Adopt a “thick solidarity” mindset: Cross-racial solidarity is and has been an important element for furthering the project of racial justice in the United States. There are ways to do this work well and ways to do it not so well. In their article, scholars Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange offer the distinction between thin and thick solidarity. They note that the latter recognizes the difference in experiences and strives for complicated nuance over simplified conflations of experience. This mindset creates a foundation for coalition building and more targeted policy responses.
- Always disaggregate the data: Separating the data by different social indicators is a way to derive deeper and more actionable meaning. While it might feel more efficient or compelling to talk about Black and Latinx communities together, the end result will be messy policy options at best and misinterpreted diagnoses of the problem at worst. This includes finding ways to understand and address the needs of Afro-Latinx Americans, who experience greater poverty than non-Black Latinx Americans.
- Narrow the Focus to Deepen the Impact: Policies focusing on one particular racialized group will increase the likelihood of problem and solution clarity, leading to deeper impact. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the Los Angeles Unified School District partially defunded the district police department and created the Black Student Achievement Plan, a comprehensive plan to invest in Black student needs and supports. And even though not all of the funds have been used, significant impacts have been observed in key indicators like graduation rates and completion of courses required for admission to the state university systems.
Moving forward, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers must take note of how the framing of a policy problem foreclose avenues of greater understanding and deeper impact. While it is true that people of color continue to face myriad social inequities, those inequities must be examined carefully to discern what works, what doesn’t, and where disparities (new and old) persist, and the need to more critically consider the differences of experience within groups of color. In my forthcoming book project, I examine the origins of racial inequality between Black and Latinx students in a Latinx-serving high school with a social justice mission. Despite good intentions, a shared Black and Brown discourse got in the way, time and again, of more difficult conversations regarding the inequality (rather than the similarity) between the two groups. Attention to these kinds of disparities open up new avenues for policy intervention, especially in spaces where Whites do not make up a significant portion of the population.
This piece was originally published on the Scholars Strategy Network.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.